“If you turn over a rock, there’s a whole world underneath.” That pretty much sums up the work of a museum courier. Last week, I accompanied our painting by Balthus, The Living Room, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I was the last courier to arrive. This is good, because it means that all the artworks in the show have been installed, and I get to see the show before it opens. If you’re the first courier to arrive for a show, well, you get to wander through a lot of empty rooms.
A major loan exhibition is a rather unwieldy beast to manage at times, what with negotiating loans, coordinating insurance and shipping logistics, designing layouts and preparing gallery spaces, and of course, writing labels. Whew! But how does all that artwork from all over the world actually arrive?
Well, there’s a whole fleet of people looking out for that single object’s safety: security guards, registrars, preparators, curators, customs brokers,and shipping agents. But there is one person that gets to accompany the artwork from departure to arrival, and that’s the courier. We make sure the crates aren’t jostled, that straps are tightly fastened, and keep an eye out for the overenthusiastic forklift operator. We are polite, well-mannered, eagle-eyed curators and registrarial staff.
Preparators preparing to hang a painting.
After supervising the uncrating of the painting—it’s like Christmas in Art History Land!—I worked with a conservator to painstakingly go over every square centimeter of the object to ensure nothing happened in transit. Then the wizards otherwise known as art preparators took lots of measurements and very carefully hoisted our nice, big painting onto the wall. Then we (the exhibition designer, the show curator, various curatorial and registrarial staff, and whoever else wants to have an opinion) all stand back and critique.
After a day of waiting for temperature and humidity control, the Living Room is uncrated and installed. All we need is a label.
The exhibition, “Balthus, Cats and Girls: Paintings and Provocations,” opens this week and runs through January 12, 2014. The show is gorgeous, proof positive that life imitates art. Walk through these galleries, and you’ll swear the Internet has sprung a leak. Balthus was obsessively painting his two favorite topics—cats and teen girls—decades before Tumblr came along. It’s exciting to see the MIA’s The Living Room, which Balthus started in 1941, installed with the second version, painted the following year. In the MIA work, you can follow the artist’s thought process, since all of his changes are visible through the thinly applied paint. I should note, with a hint of jealousy, that he added a cat to the second version.