d text. After the Michael C. Carlos Museum of Emory University, Atlanta, Ga., developed a "virtual museum" on the Internet, larger numbers of patrons were able to "visit" by using home-based computer technology.
Art created on computers was a popular subject of discussion. Though such art appeared mostly in private galleries rather than in public museums, the tide was shifting as new opportunities offered by digital technology intrigued artists, curators, and visitors. The Institute of Contemporary Arts in London held a series of shows and talks devoted to computer art entitled "Access All Areas: Visions of the Future."
In September at the Serpentine Gallery in London, an exhibition entitled "The Maybe" offered fuel for the perennial debate "What is art?" Enormous publicity brought more than 20,000 people in one week to the show, which featured possessions of famous personalities from the past and a Sleeping Beauty-like display. Artist Cornelia Parker and actress Tilda Swinton collaborated on the exhibit, which showcased Swinton lying in repose in a glass box for eight hours per day. This display attracted far more attention than such inanimate objects as a 50-year-old cigar that had belonged to Winston Churchill, a quill pen that had been used by Charles Dickens, or ice skates that had been owned by the late Duchess of Windsor. The show demonstrated how performance art--though lacking in paint, canvas, design, colour, or line--could stimulate emotional response as thoroughly as conventional visual art. But many asked nonetheless if it was art.
Conventional shows proliferated, especially those devoted to the Impressionists and dealing with familiar themes. Paul Cézanne was the subject of a comprehensive exhibition, the first large show of his work in 60 years, on view at the Grand Palais in Paris and then at the Tate Gallery in London. In 1996 the exhibit would travel to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The London show included nearly 100 of about 800 known paintings by Cézanne as well as about 60 watercolours and drawings borrowed from public and private collections worldwide. Two of the three paintings from his "Bathers" series were on loan from the National Gallery in London and the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the third canvas, belonging to the Barnes Foundation, Merion, Pa., was not part of the exhibition. Although smaller shows mounted in the 1970s and ’80s explored specific aspects of Cézanne’s work, this was the largest show to allow a full study of his influence, genius, and evolution as an artist.
"Impressionism in Britain," an exhibition at the Barbican Art Gallery in London and later mounted in Dublin, included more than 200 works by 100 artists and covered works painted in Britain by visiting French artists and Impressionist paintings created by British artists. Such French artists as Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley, and Camille and Lucien Pissarro were represented. Works by English painters influenced by Impressionism formed a less coherent stylistic group. The works of Wilson Steer and Laura Knight were featured, along with a section devoted to American painter James McNeill Whistler and his followers.
An exhibition entitled "Landscapes of France: Impressionism and Its Rivals" was mounted at the Hayward Gallery in London and later traveled to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. The show illustrated styles ranging from the academic mode of the 1860s to the more abstract and colourful Pont-Aven school of the 1880s. Many of the works, which were on loan from French regional museums, showed the wide divergence between officially sanctioned art and that of the more avant garde. The Impressionists were represented by such artists as Sisley, Berthe Morisot, Monet, and eventually Cézanne.
A major Monet exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago was the most comprehensive retrospective ever held of the artist’s work and drew record crowds to the museum during its stay (July 22-November 26). The assemblage included 161 masterpieces drawn from private and public collections around the globe.
One of the lesser-known Impressi