Show me the Monet, van Gogh ...
`Van Gogh, Monet, Degas' may be art museum's most visited exhibit in five years
Long before it came on view in one of the sprawling galleries at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, Vincent van Gogh's 1888 painting “Daisies, Arles” was exhibited in a much less formal place. A bathroom.
“Paul Mellon mentioned in his memoirs that they often hung the works themselves ... and they would be next to drawings by their children or grandchildren,” said OKC Museum of Art Assistant Curator Jessica Provencher.
“Their collection' s very personal ... and I think that also makes the exhibition very re lat able. Everybody kind of understands buying things that you like, and these works hung on the walls in their house. And one of the van Goghs hung above the bathtub.”
With more than 70 works — mostly paintings, but al so eight bronze sculptures— t he exhibition “Van Gogh, Monet, Degas: The Mellon Collection of French Art f rom the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts” celebrates Paul and Rachel Mellon's gift of 19th and early 20th-century French art to the Virginia museum.
Featuring the works of iconic masters like Reno ir, Gauguin and Rousseau, the approach able exhibit has been a blockbuster for the OKC Museum of Art, where it closes Sept. 22.
“There's just so many big names. ... Of course, you have van Gogh, Monet, Renoir. But you have Géricault, Delacroix from Romanticism, and Ma net, Mori sot, several Fauvists. We have Matisse, we have Vlaminck ... and we have examples of Cubism, so we have a Picasso in there,” Provencher said.
“It is literally all of the names that you study. They are in the art history books.”
The Oklahoma City museum is the exclusive Southwest U.S. venue for the traveling exhibit.
“This is a big deal for them to even travel this collection,” said Becky Weintz, the OKC museum's marketing and communications director. “The only reason they're doing this is because they're renovating the area that they're normally housed in.”
Since “Van Gogh, Monet, Degas” opened to the public in June, almost 40,000 people have visited the OKC museum's galleries. Visitors have traveled there from 45 states and the District of Columbia.
Weintz said the numbers are tracking ahead of the 2016 special exhibition “Matisse in His Time: Masterworks of Modernism from the Centre Pompidou, Paris” to make “Van Gogh, Monet, Degas” the most visited exhibit at the museum in the last five years.
As with “Matisse in His Time ,” the OKC museum staff is using timed ticketing to manage large crowds. The museum is selling tickets in 15-minute increments daily for “Van Gogh, Monet, Degas,” and she said booking online in advance is encouraged.
Due to popular demand, t he museum has extended hours to the final weekends of “Van Gogh, Monet, Degas” and added new public tours. Sunday sin September, the museum is opening two hours early — at 10 a.m. — to accommodate as many visitors as possible before the exhibition closes Sept. 22. Weintz said more than 250 people took advantage of the early opening the first Sunday with extra hours, and by closing time that day, more than 1,000 people had visited the museum.
In addition, more than 1,000 Oklahoma students have visited or are expected to visit the exhibit as part of the museum's program offering free tours for pre-kindergarten through 12 th-grade schools.
Approachable opportunity
A string of small bronze horses is gathered under a large glass case, while other equine race rs strut across canvas es displayed on the walls. Another section of “Van Gogh, Monet, Degas” showcases colorful depictions of flowers bursting out of pots, vases and jugs, while a third spotlights the portraiture of masters like Renoir, Cezanne and Toulouse-Lautrec.
The exhibit is organized in eight thematic sections, and Provencher said that structure may make it more approachable for people who don't often visit museums.
“To see it while it's traveling is really the only way to see it like this and kind of get more information, more background about the collection and why we're seeing the types of works we're seeing,” she said.
Paul Mellon began to collect 19th-century French art in the 1940s with his second wife, Rachel “Bunny” Lambert Mellon, and unlike many collectors, they only acquired works that appealed to them.
“What they were doing at the time was considered
pretty radical, because mainly they were collecting works that appealed to their sensibilities, things that reflected their interests — like horses and gardening — or recalled happy memories,” Provencher said. “Neither one of them bought a work of art because it was considered a good investment or an important work. ... There is something very intimate and personal about the exhibition in that way.”