Brooklyn's Lehman Addresses the Problem of Permanent Collections

Back to my lunch with Arnold Lehman, director of the Brooklyn Museum,* which ensued after I noted here that on a recent visit the special-exhibition galleries were full but the permanent collection galleries were empty.

This is a problem of museums' own making. Over the years, they, aided by media coverage, have trained people to come for the special shows and nevermind the treasures they actually own. Now, with many museums cutting back on traveling shows because of financial woes, the problem is growing.

Brooklyn, it turns out, recently held a retreat on the subject. One obvious answer, hardly unique to Brooklyn, has curators devising "special" shows from their permanent collections -- AKA "shopping in your closet." In October, for example, Brooklyn will open James Tissot: "The Life of Christ" -- an exhibition of 124 watercolors drawn from 350 that were acquired by the museum in 1900, at the urging of John Singer Sargent.

None of these watercolors (that is a detail from Jesus Goes Up Alone onto a Mountain to Pray, 1886−94, above) has been on view in at least 20 years; some haven't been seen since the 1930s. They were first shown in Paris in 1894, and then went on the road to London, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and -- Brooklyn. Lehman plans to peddle the show to four other museums, earning fees from them that will pay for conservation.

In a similar vein, To Live Forever: Egyptian Treasures from the Brooklyn Museum, which has been traveling for about a year and is going to about a dozen museums, will return to Brooklyn in mid-stream (next Feb. 12 through May 2) for a visit. By then, the museum will have readied a special gallery for several mummies in its permanent collection (which has 11 humans and several animals, all told) that are not in the traveling show; it will focus on the after-life. That's a mummy of Hor at left, entering the CT scanner at North Shore Hospital.

All of this makes sense, and none is controversial. But it doesn't address the problem squarely. There's more.