Volume 34, Number 19 · December 3, 1987
The Artist and the Museum
By Francis Haskell
We have, during the last twenty or thirty years, spent so much time discussing what we think of the artists of the nineteenth century (Were the Impressionists as good as we once believed and were the pompiers as bad? Was Paris as important as used to be claimed and Düsseldorf and St. Petersburg as marginal?) that we have not often bothered to ask ourselves what the artists of the nineteenth century might have thought of us had they been given the chance. Would Pissarro, the anarchist, and Van Gogh, the lay preacher, have been pleased or dismayed to find their works moving among Japanese insurance companies, Swiss bank vaults, and Fifth Avenue apartments? Would Mary Cassatt have welcomed her sudden apotheosis as a 'great woman artist'? Would the pre-Raphaelites have relished our investigations into the complexities of their private lives? And how would Whistler or Segantini have reacted to hefty catalogues raisonnés of their etchings or to students' theses on their developing styles? But, above all, what would the artists of the nineteenth century have thought of their permanent incarceration in a state museum—those painters and sculptors so much more familiar to us by their frequentation of the café, the bar, the brothel, and through their ringing declarations of independence?
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