The Top 10 Museum Exhibitions of 2023 Were Led By Rothko, Vermeer
Museums large and small (mostly large) managed to put on some of the best shows in recent memory.
The Manet/Degas show remains on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York through Jan. 7.
Photographer: Anna-Marie KellenThe best museum exhibitions of 2023 spanned more than 400 years of material, with virtually every artistic medium—painting, sculpture and photography—included. (Sorry, video.) The best news? Eight of the 10 shows are still open if you haven’t seen them yet.
At the Rijksmuseum, the Netherlands
This was the rare art exhibition to blanket international headlines. Not only did the show, which ran from Feb. 10 to June 4, sell out in days, but when additional tickets were released, eager visitors crashed the museum’s website. So was the exhibition of 28 works by the 17th century Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer any good? Short answer: Yes. Slightly longer answer? This was a very old-fashioned exhibition, insofar as it didn’t try to do anything more than put paintings on walls and let the public pour in. The effort of getting all these masterpieces in one place was, the organizers seemed to wager, more than enough.