‘Manet to Picasso’ draws few South Islanders

Press, 18 May 1989, Page 14

‘Manet to Picasso’ draws few South Islanders

More than 100,000 people had visited the Reader’s Digest “Manet to Picasso” exhibition at Auckland City Art Gallery by the time it closed on May 7 after opening six weeks earlier, reports Anabright Hay. The director of the gallery, Christopher Johnstone, believes fewer South Islanders visited this .exhibition than saw the "Claude Monet, Painter of Light” exhibition shown at the gallery in 1985. Visitor numbers generally for that exhibition were particularly high with queues stretching up Wellesley Street most days. He says the

Monet exhibition was more a phenomenon than an exhibition being the first such exhibition to be shown in New Zealand. “New Zealand was on the real crest of the pre crash wave,” he says. Times are different now and a bus strike in Auckland coincided with the later weeks of the exhibition. While conceding that a one-artist exhibition is perhaps easier to package and market, he believes New Zealanders are not bored or blase about international art exhibitions.

The exhibition of 42 paintings, drawings and sculptures included oils by Chagell, Renoir, Manet,

Van Gogh, Cezanne, Gauguin, Matisse, Bonnard and Seurat; three works by Monet, one of which is from his water lilies series, two pastels by Degas and sculptures by Picasso, Lachaise and Giacometti.

The works were chosen from the Reader’s Digest Collection of more than 4000 begun in the 1940 s by Lila Wallace who, with her husband, DeWitt Wallace, , founded Reader’s Digest in 1922. The works are housed at the Reader’s Digest headquarters in New York where they are exhibited for the enjoyment of staff and guests.