y outside Italy, than the designs and fashions. A notable aspect of the exhibition, which was also seen in Milan and Wolfsburg, Germany, was the way in which the duality of Italian modern art was expressed in its modern form, frequently relying on images from past artistic history, events, myths, or recollections.
The main summer exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London was devoted to the history of the Wedgwood factory and the English stoneware produced by Josiah Wedgwood and his colleagues. The show, "The Genius of Wedgwood," commemorated the 200th anniversary of his death and included important items on loan from the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, notably dinner pieces from the Frog Service, which was made for Catherine the Great. It was only the second time (the other was in 1909) that the Frog Service had been shown in England since it was commissioned in 1773. The wares in the exhibition were limited to those produced by Wedgwood’s factory before his death in 1795.
The bicentenary of Wedgwood’s death also was marked by an exhibition at the City Museum and Art Gallery in Stoke-on-Trent, England. "Josiah Wedgwood: The Man and his Mark" featured 195 pieces of Wedgwood drawn from public and private collections as well as works by Wedgwood’s competitors and contemporaries. In Melbourne, the National Gallery of Victoria displayed "Three Centuries of Wedgwood."
The marking of 100 years of trade between Japan and Brazil was recognized in an exhibition at the Fuji Art Museum in Tokyo. The show consisted of a collection of paintings on loan from the Museum of Art in São Paolo, Brazil, and included works by El Greco, Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin, and Vincent van Gogh.
In Ljubljana, Slovenia, a large show, which opened in three separate venues in May, gathered the important examples of Gothic art from 1250 to 1450. Paintings, sculptures, and manuscripts were shown in the National Art Gallery, the minor arts were housed in the National Museum, and conservation techniques and materials and architecture appeared at the Cekinov Grad. The show covered cultural links with Italy and northern Europe, social history, and patronage.
At the Hermitage, "Hidden Treasures Revealed" showed 74 works, including ones by Picasso and Edgar Degas, that had been removed from Germany at the end of World War II and since hidden in the museum. (See Sidebar.)
The purchase in 1995 of the huge Bettmann Archive by software billionaire Bill Gates underscored a potentially revolutionary trend taking place in museums, archives, and libraries: the conversion of visual images to digitized form for electronic storage, access, and distribution. Gates’s privately owned company, Corbis Corp., also had acquired electronic rights to 500,000 images, including work from individual photographers and art from the National Gallery of London, the Philadelphia Museum, and the Barnes Foundation. The Bettmann Archive--established in the 1930s by Otto L. Bettmann, who fled to New York from Hitler’s Germany with $5 in cash and two steamer trunks of images on 35-mm film--now housed some 16 million images that, taken together, constituted an unmatched visual chronicle of the 20th century. The acquisition of this collection placed Gates at the forefront of photographic image digitization for use by new electronic imaging and communications technologies.
An exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, Calif., "Vision in Motion: The Photographs of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy," celebrated the centennial of the birth of this protean photographer, painter, filmmaker, and designer, who had powerfully influenced modern art in Europe and the United States between World Wars I and II. Some 50 vintage photograms (camera images and photographic collages made in Germany between 1923 and 1930) displayed his dynamic structures disciplined by elegant formalism.
"An American Century of Photography from Dry Point to Digital" traveled to several venues and surveyed a familiar field but gave an unusually fresh and lively historical look at American photography from the mid 1880s to the earl