Sometimes, it pays to be last.
Jackson was the final stop for a much-anticipated exhibition featuring some of Europe’s most celebrated past masters.
“Van Gogh, Monet, Degas and Their Times” was slated to run April 4 to September 27 at the Mississippi Museum of Art (MMA).
But like everything else this spring, the opening was postponed as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak.
Museum officials are now hoping to get an extension, so the exhibition can hang in their galleries longer.
Executive Director Betsy Bradley said an extension would be nearly impossible if the exhibit was slated to appear somewhere else.
However, once it leaves Jackson, the collection is returning home, to the Virginia Museum of Fine Art.
“We are working with the Virginia museum now to keep it as long as we can,” she said. “They want to accommodate that for us, and we are certainly asking them.”
Bradley likely has an ally at the Richmond-based museum in Director and CEO Alex Nyerges.
Prior to leaving for his current position, he served as executive director of the museum here.
“He hired me as an employee in the late 1980s. He is still close to us and is a good friend and is friends with a lot of people in the community,” Bradley said. “He is working really hard to help mitigate the challenges the virus left us.”
The event was expected to bring some 70,000 visitors to the museum, as well as hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenues to the museum and its gift shop. For its part, the gift shop has already stocked up on scarves, books and other memorabilia related to the exhibit.
“We were budgeting for significant admissions revenue and we had several events on the books where clients were renting the museum during the exhibition,” Bradley said. “Those have all been canceled or postponed. That does take a hit to our bottom line.”
Bradley said numerous tickets had already been sold in advance. “We’ll honor all of those tickets and accommodate everyone who is looking forward to it as soon as we can,” she said.
In addition to seeking an extension, Bradley said the museum is looking at other ways to accommodate visitors, such as offering extended museum hours or timed tickets.
The exhibition includes 74 pieces, including works by Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Cezanne, Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, Henri Rousseau and others.
The art previously was on display at Palazzo Zabarella, in Padova, Italy. Works were crated and shipped to Jackson shortly before the European nation was put on lockdown in response to the coronavirus outbreak.
“It arrived in early March, and we let it sit in isolation and get climatized. Every time we receive works of art, we let them sit in their crates anywhere from 24 hours to a week or two,” said Bradley. “We don’t want a swift change in temperature or humidity to affect the paint.”
The art was hung in mid-March. Even with the museum closed, staffers check on the art daily, while humidity and temperature levels can be monitored remotely. MMA is protected by 24-hour, seven-day-a-week security.
The showing is part of the Annie Laurie Swaim Hearin Memorial Exhibition Series, a bi-yearly series sponsored by the Robert M. Hearin Support Foundation.
Bradley said Hearin exhibits cost anywhere from $1 million to $2 million to put on, with the majority of the costs being covered by the foundation itself.
Costs include exhibition marketing, as well as fees for shipping art and insuring it.
“When we opened the new building, we had a show of paintings from Italy. We shipped in works from 40 different Italian collections, which made it really expensive,” she said. “Art for this exhibition is part of a single collection, meaning it could be shipped together.
“However, because of the kind of art and the popularity of it, there was a rather large participation fee.”
The participation fee is what MMA paid the Virginia Museum of Fine art to exhibit it.
Costs not covered by the foundation are funded with proceeds from special events, such as opening night receptions. Art Party 2020, the event marking the opening of the Van Gogh exhibit, was originally scheduled for April 3. That event has now been postponed until June 12.
The Annie Laurie Swaim Hearin Memorial Exhibition Series is named after the late Hearin, who was a volunteer at the museum years ago. The series was established in 1989 as a way to honor Hearin’s memory.
The first Hearin exhibition was held in 1992 and featured Dutch and Flemish paintings from the 17th Century.
