Source: CCTV.com

03-06-2008 09:46

Complaints about the homogenized experience of museums, everywhere, are commonplace. Walk through the doors of a museum most anywhere in the world, and you find the "one by each" presentation of canonized art history. The same stories are repeated many times, in many places, each offering greater or lesser examples to make their case.

The exhibit represents an eclectic group of styles, subjects and approaches to art.

The exhibition of private collections offers a chance to break the pattern. There's a preliminary showing in Beijing of an exhibition with the long name of - "From Academia to Impressionism - Masterpieces of the 19th Century European Paintings from the Perez Simon Collection". The showing at Beijing's World Art Museum offers a brisk, idiosyncratic run - through a century of Western painting.

The exhibition is ostensibly about the history and development of European modern art. What the viewer experiences strolling through the show, however, is the good taste of a single collector.

The collector in question, Mexican business magnate Juan Anotonio Perez Simon has been amassing art since the early 1990's for his social service foundation, Juntos Actuandos.

The 100 works chosen for display represent the highlights of more than a thousand Simon holdings. The exhibit represents an eclectic group of styles, subjects and approaches to art. There are fine examples of the Italian, German, Dutch, English, Flemish, Spanish and French schools.

Among them are the 1871 work "Greek Girls Picking up Pebbles by Sea" by English painter and sculptor Frederick Leighton. There's "The Rose of Heliogabalus" by Dutch painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema. Heliogabalus was a late Roman emperor, infamous for attempting to suffocate his dinner guests with rose petals.