It varies from city to city, museum to museum, of course, but at the Seattle Art Museum, Picasso has punched out both van Gogh and Impressionism.
You’ll recall that the museum has been on shaky grounds in this recession, and era of high finance, and it needed to do well, very well, with its Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musée National Picasso, Paris show (which included the luscious 1937 Portrait of Dora Maar at left).
It did: the museum reported yesterday (very timely, thank you — many museums say they can’t disclose exhibition attendance for weeks after a show closes) that Picasso drew more visitors than any previous exhibit: more than 400,000. Even better, membership has reached an all-time high of 48,000 (a sum that may rise higher as paperwork is completed). The exhibit ran from October 8, 2010 through January 17.
The previous record-holder for SAM was Impressionism: Paintings Collected by European Museums, which attracted 316,000 attendees between June 12 and August 29, 1999.
But it was van Gogh, in 2004-05, who had attracted membership to the previous high, 40,000, according to an article last fall in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that laid out the museum’s financial troubles.
Seattle, it seems, made the most of the exhibit, which was expensive. Good for the museum, but I would love a better window on the economics.
UPDATE, 4/30/11: According to an economic impact report released by SAM, the Picasso exhibit generated $66 million in economic activity for Washington State.
The Picasso exhibit, which is touring to seven cities, now moves to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, where hopes are also riding high. Director Alex Nyerges calls it “without a doubt a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the American public.”