Don't take the Pissarro: but take the Monet and run! or Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter

Abstract

Costly, heavy in weight, though less often in scholarship and intellectual meat, the sophisticated techniques of colour reproduction within and without promise a particular brand of visual pleasure. We know we should all see the originals; and nowadays there is an annual feast of megashows giving us direct access to paintings in remote or private collections. Tim Hilton in the Guardian Weekly (16.9.90) called Monet in the 90s (London Royal Academy) the 'show that will not be repeated in our lifetime'. But such exhibition viewing only serves to remind us of our merely spectatorial relations to other people's property. The art book, often these days the permanent monument to these displays of private or corporate wealth, offers the pleasure of vicarious proximities and indirect possession of art which, through luscious colour replication and the frequency of details, is brought close to us and into our own homes for the most delicious moments of