It's a Backwater Town

One critic who gave the Manet show highest marks was the New York Times's John Canaday, who then went on to blast New York as a "cultural backwater" because the show would not be seen at any of its museums.

The Manet show will be seen only at the Art Institute of Chicago before being disassembled and sent back to the lenders. Among other major exhibitions slated to bypass New York is Chicago's "Treasures from Poland," on loan from the Polish government, which will go only to Philadelphia and Ottawa. "The Age of Rembrandt," which includes paintings from major Netherlands museums that may never again be allowed abroad, will be seen only in San Francisco, Toledo and Boston. Equally rare is Cleveland's "Treasures from Medieval Art," which includes a host of objects never seen outside France before.

"As far as the important art exhibitions are concerned," wrote Canaday, "New York is becoming a cultural backwater. Our smug conviction that we are the art center of the country has only the weakest justification: we are only the center where the most buying and selling of art goes on, and we are not really much interested in art except as a sales product, whether the sales pitch is in dollars and cents or in the race to" be first with esthetic novelties."

Concluded Canaday: "With four of our museums--the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim, the Whitney and the Jewish Museum--giving us shoddier and shoddier exhibitions as they compete with one another in the contemporary field, where there is not enough legitimate material to go around, and with the Metropolitan Museum half comatose in the field of temporary exhibitions, and with the excellent Morgan Library and Asia House too small (and too specialized) to accommodate most major exhibitions, New York is no longer in a position to pat itself on the back."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.