Caillebotte's A Draw in Brooklyn, But What About the Rest of the Museum?

Over the weekend, I visited the Brooklyn Museum, specifically to see Gustave Caillebotte: Impressionist Paintings from Paris to the Sea but also to check in on the museum as a whole. I left with several impressions:

• The Caillebotte (seen here in his 1892 self-portrait, from the Musee d'Orsay) show reveals definitively one of the best things about his work: his wonderfully unusual perspective. Whether he paints from inside the boat of his rowers, at the head of the table where his mother and brother are eating, a balcony overlooking a Parisian intersection and so on, the angles give his works a marvelous newness, a freshness.
• His many other talents, as well as his well-known wealthy background, "distracted" him from painting and, possibly, from becoming a greater artist. His yacht models, on view in Brooklyn, are sleek and modern, perhaps more so than his paintings.
• Still, what's clear from the show is that he's an experimenter.
• While his best paintings are not in this show, sadly, it's still a worthy effort.
• For people who read labels to see who owns what, it's noticeable that the vast majority of the works in Brooklyn are drawn from private collections. 

A final not-so-positive observation: on a Sunday afternoon, prime time for museums, the Caillebotte show was nicely crowded, which is to say that you could still see the pictures, but the galleries were far from empty.

That did not seem to be the case for the rest of the museum. The permanent collection galleries, while not empty, had few visitors.

And that, I think, is a problem, not just at Brooklyn, but at many museums. They simply should be doing more, much more, to engage people's interests in their permanent collections.

For more about the show, here's a link to the Brooklyn Museum exhibition, which includes several pictures; for more about Caillebotte, here's a website with many of his works (though the reproduction quality there leaves much to be desired).