Click at Smithsonian

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On not finding Louise Bourgeois at The Walters Art Museum

The Walters Art Museum has an extensive listing of resources for past exhibits. Unfortunately, many of the older links lead to an error page, and many (not quite all) of the newer ones have just a brief description of the exhibit.  The earliest exhibit that I found with a good link and good resources was for Courbet and the Modern Landscape, held at the end of 2006. As for the other exhibits, you'll just have to click through the links to find one that works and leads to good resources, but that's part of the fun of the web. A word of warning: The error message on pages that don't work looks like some sort of server error but since it's been the same for months, I'm guessing that the pages just never existed, or have been taken down.

As for Courbet, I described two versions of the show back in June 2009, and this time around I discovered that the Museum does Works of Art quite well.  They can be browsed by a variety of means. One word of warning, doing a search can lead to some odd results. After using the search term "Canada" and getting works that had nothing to do with Canada, I found that restricting my search terms was a wise choice, although, again, it was fun to browse through art objects that I wouldn't have found otherwise.

I was originally looking for the page for the exhibit 'Femme' by Louise Bourgeois, put on by this museum and the Contemporary Art Museum of Baltimore, which evidently suspended "operations at the end of May 2012". Most of that museum's webpages seem to still be active, including the one for past exhibitions, so there is a little information there about the Bourgeois exhibit.

The Walters link was broken, but I did find a New York Times review from 2006, which had a very good description, not always complimentary, of the exhibit. About.com's Art History page for the exhibit has a short description with eleven images, which can be very nicely magnified. MOMA's artist page for Louise Bourgeois has 1326 images of her works including this one.  So About.com had the best set of images, and the whole experience left me feeling grumpy about the ability of some museum sites to provide useful information and very happy about those like MOMA which take the issue of providing access to artworks seriously.