These days, it feels as if not a yr goes by with out a vital mass of museums celebrating the anniversary of the start or the demise of some well-known artist. Often, the artist is male. Usually, he’s white. This autumn, the person of the hour is Robert Rauschenberg, the prolific American polymath who blurred the boundary between portray, efficiency, set up and sculpture. He was born 100 years in the past this month.
To mark the event, almost 100 organisations around the globe are pulling Rauschenberg’s work out of storage and placing it on show. Greater than 30 of them have developed devoted exhibitions, conservation initiatives and programming. They vary from the Menil Assortment in Houston, which is presenting the primary survey of Rauschenberg’s use of cloth (till 1 March 2026), to the Gray Artwork Museum in New York, which brings collectively prints by the artist that have interaction with the environmental artwork motion (till 11 April 2026).
This type of broad tribute isn’t uncommon. In 2024, 15 exhibitions throughout Belgium marked the seventy fifth anniversary of the demise of the Belgian expressionist painter James Ensor. The yr earlier than that, we obtained a double anniversary whammy: the centennial of Ellsworth Kelly’s start (celebrated with exhibitions at Glenstone in Maryland, the Museum of Trendy Artwork in New York and elsewhere) and the fiftieth anniversary of Pablo Picasso’s demise (commemorated by 50 exhibitions throughout Europe and North America).
To provide you with a novel tackle somebody as omnipresent as Picasso, museums needed to get extremely inventive and very particular. MoMA devoted a complete present to only one summer season of the artist’s profession, when he rented a villa in Fontainebleau, France in 1921. You may thank Picasso’s death-iversary for It’s Pablo-matic, the broadly panned Brooklyn Museum exhibition curated by the comic Hannah Gadsby. The Metropolitan Museum of Artwork mounted a present exploring an unrealised fee Picasso developed for a little-known collector and critic named Hamilton Easter Discipline. In a press launch, the Met’s director, Max Hollein, trumpeted it as “the first-ever exhibition” to deal with the topic. I can’t think about why no person thought to pursue it earlier.
Set up view of James Ensor: Impressed by Brussels on the Royal Library of Belgium, 2024 © Royal Library of Belgium, Brussels
We frequently take these sorts of exhibitions as a right, in the identical manner that we don’t query the five-day workweek or the expectation that girls put on make-up. However like every cultural norm, the concept we should rejoice an already well-known artist just because they have been born or died a spherical variety of years in the past is not only arbitrary. It reinforces the established order for a brand new technology. The anniversary exhibition feels analogous to legacy admissions, the apply of universities favouring college students whose kinfolk attended the identical faculty. (Though the US Supreme Courtroom banned affirmative motion in 2023, citing the unequal therapy of candidates, there isn’t a federal prohibition on legacy admissions.)
I perceive why these types of exhibits occur. Museums have a worry of lacking out—they need to be a part of a cultural second. I’ve been advised that board members, particularly those that accumulate work by the artist being fêted, are particularly supportive of this type of programming. On this period of tight exhibition budgets, these programmes are additionally economical: they typically draw from the everlasting assortment and include alternatives for added monetary and logistics assist. The 2023 Picasso bonanza was sponsored by the cultural ministries of Spain and France, that are deeply invested within the Picasso financial system; the Robert Rauschenberg Basis funded anniversary initiatives with grants starting from a number of thousand {dollars} to a couple hundred-thousand {dollars}.
I don’t blame artist foundations for this development. They’re simply doing their job. In actual fact, the Rauschenberg Basis leads the best way in pondering expansively about easy methods to honour an artist’s legacy with out funding hagiography. It repeatedly helps small and midsize arts organisations that share Rauschenberg’s dedication to contrarian and experimental programming; grantees are as assorted as New York Metropolis’s Chinatown Tenants Union and the Bomazeen Land Belief, which is run by Indigenous leaders in Maine.
Courtney J. Martin, who turned director of the Rauschenberg Basis in mid-2024, notes that for her, the centenary is an exception fairly than the rule. She has no plans to assist this type of intensive international celebration once more throughout her tenure. “You solely flip 100 as soon as,” she says.
Set up view of Caspar David Friedrich: Artwork for a New Age at Hamburger Kunsthalle, Germany, 2023 Picture: Fred Dott, courtesy Hamburger Kunsthalle
The perfect-case situation is when an anniversary merely serves as a pretext for a present {that a} curator already wished to do, or lends urgency to a mission which may in any other case be deprioritised. And, maybe counterintuitively, some landmark exhibitions—just like the Met’s Caspar David Friedrich present earlier this yr—are solely attainable due to arbitrary anniversary celebrations occurring elsewhere. The New York museum was capable of get key loans for the primary main exhibition of Friedrich within the US as a result of many German establishments have been biking their masterpieces off view concurrently after celebrating Friedrich’s 250th birthday in 2024.
Terence Washington, a Philadelphia-based author and curator, has expressed his personal frustration with the anniversary-exhibition phenomenon. Once I known as him to debate it, he identified that the artist Mavis Pusey, who was born three years after Rauschenberg, is having her first main museum survey on the Institute of Modern Artwork, Philadelphia (till 7 December). The late Jamaican American artist, who made a major contribution to American abstraction, died in 2019. “The calendar doesn’t work the identical manner for everybody,” Washington says.
Many components decide a museum’s exhibition schedule past novelty and art-historical significance—board assist, attendance projections and budgetary limitations amongst them. Nonetheless, I might fairly have a curator determine what to drag out of storage primarily based on their very own pursuits and understanding of their viewers fairly than on somebody’s upcoming birthday. I believe the general public would profit extra, too.
There shall be loads of alternatives to check my speculation. I might guess good cash that museums are already planning a rip-roaring celebration of Picasso’s a hundred and fiftieth birthday in 2031. That’s simply six years away.
