Philadelphia Museum of Art

I wondered, as I wandered through the many galleries of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, how long will we have this kind of encyclopedic, time-specific museum? Or more to the point, how long will we have them outside New York and a few other world capitals? You have to remember that the encyclopedic museum (EM) is a relatively new phenomenon. Europe had its royal collections–showy accumulations of wealth–but EMs for the people don’t date back much more than a century and a half. For the most part, too, they reflect the taste from scores of years ago, when objects from the past were the status symbols  that they aren’t today. For example, our generation inherited, but somewhat haltingly, our parents’ veneration of antique furniture: Chippendale, Queen Anne, and all that. Our daughter’s generation, not at all. Think of all the gold-ground Madonnas that were avidly sought by clients of Berenson and Duveen. Where is that market today? As for my favorite field of 19th-century American painting, Bruce Robertson mentioned that the pipeline of Ph.D.s to curators has gone dry. Museums today are responding to the siren call of Contemporary Art: that is where their donors are collecting and gifting. The big museum expansions of recent times, such as in Minneapolis and Chicago, have been for wings of Modern and Contemporary Art. (The National Gallery in Washington, of course, did this a long time ago with its East Wing.) There is a limit to expansion, and when something has to be cut, you know what it will be: all the galleries of furniture, pottery, draperies that visitors raced through in Philadelphia without stopping, and then the art that came before Impressionism. OK, keep some major pieces of silver, but will there be room for shelves showing examples of a dozen different Colonial silversmiths?