Take your time... Tate launches ‘slow looking’ sessions for show
TATE Modern is to introduce “slow looking” sessions for visitors, encouraging them to spend up to half an hour staring at one painting instead of rushing through an exhibition and failing to notice the finer details.
The museum is staging the first major Pierre Bonnard exhibition in 20 years, bringing together 100 of the French painter’s colourful works.
They are pictures that “reward careful scrutiny”, with details only gradually revealing themselves. But persuading visitors to take their time is “a challenge in this day and age”, according to Matthew Gale, the exhibition curator.
“We are planning some ‘slow looking’ events to meet that challenge, to encourage people to be with the paintings and to discuss them over some time – time to explore the imagery, the structure, the way he made the paintings by turning his paintbrush around and scraping the surface, by adding pencil marks,” said Mr Gale, pointing to Bonnard’s Window open onto the Seine, painted in 1911-12.
The viewer’s eye is drawn to the view through the open window; it takes a few moments to notice that the painting also features a person standing in the doorway. Tate is planning ticketed evening events, complementing the main show, which are likely to involve “looking at two or three things, rather than in an hour seeing the whole exhibition, which is usually what an exhibition tour is like,” Mr Gale said, adding that the concept will be rolled out to other shows if it proves popular.
In 2016, researchers who studied a group of visitors at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art found that the mean time spent looking at a work was 28.63 seconds. Visitors to the main Bonnard show will also be encouraged into slower ways of viewing, said Frances Morris, director of Tate Modern.
She said: “We will give ample room to each painting, meaning audiences will be able to spend as much time as they like. And we will endeavour to make our labels a little bit bigger.
“It’s the biggest complaint that we have from members of the public: that they can’t read the labels and it disrupts the looking.”
Pierre Bonnard: The Colour of Memory opens on January 23 next year.