Girl with a Pearl Earring is one of those iconic pieces that draws visitors in their hordes. Some institutions rely on such pieces as vital sources of revenue – via admission fees, or spends in the cafés and gift shops, where many of these famed artworks are the subject for ‘merch’.
So what happens when those famed paintings, aka your Mona Lisa by da Vinci, Edvard Munch’s The Scream or Van Gogh’s The Starry Night, needs to take a break from display for conservation and maintenance or to go on tour?
Johannes Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring (1665), housed at the Mauritshuis Museum in The Hague, Netherlands has recently faced this problem. It has been taken off the wall and is making its way to Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum for the largest Vermeer exhibition to date (10 February – 4 June).
It is estimated that 1.5 million people visit the Mauritshuis to view the painting each year. So the museum was faced with the question of: how to keep people engaged?
Its curators have dealt with their missing star by inviting artists from all over the world to submit their own interpretation of the painting, which was made ever-more popular and famous as the subject of director Peter Webber’s 2003 film of the same title.
Submissions were posted on the project’s own Instagram account, with the hashtag #mygirlwithapearl attracting around 6465 posts (and #girlwithapearl an extra 3000 posts), within the tight time-frame of just a week.
Read: Is social media the new curators’ portfolio?
Now, a selection of those works will hold the original painting’s spot in the museum during the portrait’s five-month visit to Amsterdam. The ‘jury’ is currently in deliberations on which submissions will be hung, with the chosen My Girl with a Pearl images being unveiled on 6 February. The ‘stand-ins’ will be viewed on a digital frame and rotate during the period.
Here’s a teaser of those submissions:
Blue Poles
Australia’s National Gallery had to face a similar challenge what when its most famed work, Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles (1952) was scheduled to undergo a comprehensive conservation audit and clean in 2020.
Read: How social media is changing the way we experience art
With the work rarely off display since the National Gallery opened in 1982, the Gallery’s closure during the COVID-19 pandemic offered the perfect moment to rethink and re-engage. But rather than relegating the job to the conservation lab, the NGA chose to bring a pop-up lab into the gallery to complete the work. Turning to social media to bring visitors along on the conservation journey, the gallery also accompanied the audit with an online archive portal for the painting and a project called Action/Reaction.
These projects and digital strategies are proving extremely successful for museums to bring new and old audiences and supporters together, while solving the tricky issue of what to do when their most famous audience magnets go on sabbatical.
