Museums aren't generally the specific focus of my travel plans - for instance, I wouldn't go to Bilbao just to see a branch of the Guggenheim, no matter how shiny it may be (although The Lightning Field, of course, would be another story...) - but I am always curious to see what local collections have to offer, whether I am in Big Sur or Brussels.
To wit, I enjoyed this provocative passage in The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell:
If I had absolute control of American museums - God forbid! - my first, emergency act would be to install Charles Egan or Clement Greenberg to choose all the works to be shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art; and my second, long-range act would be to redistribute all the great artists, so that each museum, according to its importance, place, and scale would have a preponderance - preferably all - of the works in American public collections of specific artists. I would love to go to San Francico, say, to see all the Matisses, to Cambridge for the Sassetas (if there are that many), to Chicago for the Goyas, to New York for the Rembrandts, to Merion for Renoirs, to Washington for Titians, to Philadelphia for cubism, to Boston for Greek pots; or to any small town to see all of a minor artist, say, Boudin or Marin or Guardi or Constantin Guys. And how incredibly less dull would travel be in America if, say, in Falmouth one could see all the Homer watercolors; in Cicero, Sullivan's architectural renderings; in Gettysburg, all the Matthew Bradys (instead of Charlie Weavers and Dwight Eisenhowers); in Oxford, Audubon; in Fargo, Frederic Remington; in New Orleans, Degas pastels - as on can, for example, in Colorado Springs see all the Santos statues. Just the other day, for example, for the first time in my life I had a desire to visit Wilmington, because I learned that there is a pre-Raphaelite collection. Byst as the general situation is, everywhere in America one sees the same Main Street, same Woolworths, same Coca-Cola, same chain drugstore, same movie, same motel, same fried shrimps, and the same local museum reflecting in the same lesser way the same big museum. O sameness! Bolton Landing, N.Y. is to me one of the great places in America because of David Smith's metal sculptures strewn across his acres, and in his house and studios; otherwise, it is a banal resort on Lake George, where I suppose the main place to eat is at Howard Johnson's...
In some ways, it seems that he isn't railing against the provincial, miscellaneous nature of many museums, but overall the homogeneity of American culture. And yet, conversely, he's arguing for less diversity in individual collections. Two museums that are devoted to specific artists that spring immediately to mind are the Musee Picasso and Musee Rodin in Paris. What's your take? Do you agree with Motherwell? Or disagree? And, of course, the big question is: where would his work go?
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