Why Are So Many Once-in-a-Lifetime Art Exhibitions Happening in Our Lifetime?
Rafael. Donatello. Leonardo. And now Vermeer. So many huge retrospective exhibitions of the West’s most important artists are happening at museums seemingly all at once.
Girl With a Pearl Earring, one of 28 Vermeers on view at Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum.
Source: Bequest of Arnoldus Andries Des Tombe/The Hague
Johannes Vermeer’s output was so scant that for the past 350 years it’s been almost impossible to exhibit his work at any scale: Each of his about 37 known paintings was thought to be too valuable, too fragile—and, ever since The Concert was stolen in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist in 1990, too jealously guarded by its owners—to travel much. Instead, the Dutch baroque master’s exhibitions tend to be padded with work by other artists. This results in shows that Taco Dibbits, general director of Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, calls “Vermeer ands”: “Vermeer and the Delft School, Vermeer and letter writing.”
But this month, for the first time in its history, the Rijksmuseum opened a show without any qualifications. Running from Feb. 10 to June 4 and titled simply “Vermeer,” its 28 paintings are the largest gathering ever showcased, with loans from around the world. “Museums realized that something like this would never happen again,” Dibbits says.