The Light at the Back of a Sequence of Rooms

Peter Campbell

  • Pieter De Hooch 1629-84 by Peter Sutton
    Yale, 183 pp, £30.00, September 1998, ISBN 0 300 07757 2
  • On Reflection by Jonathan Miller
    National Gallery, 224 pp, £25.00, September 1998, ISBN 1 85709 236 8

Some good places for looking at pictures retain the feel of the private houses they once were (the Phillips Collection in Washington, or Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge), but there are no rules – re-hangings at the Tate gave new life to pictures which seemed to have lost heart, just by putting them in the right company. In places where they are happy, you can look at paintings you know and still have the sense that it is a first encounter. But mechanical reproduction has seen to it that real first encounters are now gifts which come half-unwrapped. The best reason for going to exhibitions is to see what cannot be reproduced. The job of the curator is to contrive the kinds of meeting in which pictures can say what they have to say. It is not easy, as two exhibitions currently running in London bear out, and requires a measure of tact.

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