The National Gallery has just staged its most popular charge exhibition ever, not at its London home but in China.
Botticelli to Van Gogh: Masterpieces from the National GalleryLondon closed at the Shanghai Museum on May 7, attracting more than 420,000 visitors over its 15 weeks, or more than 4,300 a day, who each paid 100 yuan ($14) to see the show.
Until then, the National Gallery’s most successful recharge exhibition had been Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milanwhich drew 3,680 people per day to the museum in 2011-12, for a total attendance of 323,827.
International tour
From Botticelli to Van Gogh was conceived as a concise history of Western painting and includes 52 loans from the National Gallery’s permanent collection, including works by Raphael, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Constable, Turner and Monet. It is now on display at National Museum of Korea in Seoul (until October 9) then goes to its final location, the Hong Kong Palace Museum (November 15-March 4, 2024).
The decision to send a selection of paintings to Asia was made by the National Gallery’s board of trustees as the museum’s closure approached. Sainsbury Wing set for £35million refurbishment. In September 2022, the board approved the contract for From Botticelli to Van Goghof the international tour after “carefully considering” the issues involved, the gallery said.
“The National Gallery has an important role to play in promoting the UK’s globally recognized position as a center of culture and the arts, and we remain passionately committed to international cultural exchange,” said its director, Gabriele Finaldi, during the announcement of the exhibition.
The museum won’t disclose its earnings for its Asian loans, but the National Gallery’s board was likely aware of the huge appetite for Western art in China when they approved them: in 2018, the Shanghai Museum hosted Tate’s most visited exhibition, Landscapes of the Mind: Masterpieces from Tate Britain (1700-1980)which was seen by 615,000 visitors in 14 weeks, or more than 6,000 per day.
As London’s major museums struggle to regain visitors following the pandemic and the concomitant reduction in international tourism – last year the National Gallery welcomed 2.7million visitors, a drop of 55 percent from its 2019 figure of 6 million — administrators will likely continue to seek new overseas business opportunities, with Chinese museums topping the list of lucrative international partners.
The Pompidou Museum in Paris, the Victoria & Albert Museum and the Tate in London all have longstanding collaborations in China, while the Uffizi Museums in Florence recently signed a €6 million deal send ten exhibitions to the Bund One Art Museum in Shanghai in five years (Botticelli and the Renaissance, a loan exhibition of 48 paintings from the Uffizi Gallery, is currently on view there until August 27). All of these institutions have been silent on the issue of China’s human rights record; his crackdown on protest in Hong Kong; his detention of around 1 million Uyghurs and other Turkish Muslims in the Xinjiang region, and on the ethics of partnering with state-run museums and organizations in the country.
Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei previously told The Art Newspaper that it rejects the claims of Western museums to promote the values of tolerance and freedom of expression with their Chinese collaborations. “Most of them are in China purely for self-development strategies, trying to get away from the struggles facing Western institutions,” he said, adding that “if you don’t put off question Chinese power, you become an accomplice”.
Sir Geoffrey Nice, who chaired a 2021 independent tribunal on the Chinese persecution of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang which determined that China is guilty of genocide, challenged all organizations that “substantially interact [with China] including… education and arts institutions [to] now recognize that they are interacting with a criminal state.
In a statement, the National Gallery said: “In line with many museums, cultural, educational and scientific organizations in the UK, [we] collaborate with a range of international partners. The gallery works with them to reach a wider audience on the basis that it firmly believes that art is accessible to everyone. Such collaborations are not endorsements of any international government policy, and the gallery condemns any violation of human rights.
