In the 1990s the Smithsonian Institution conducted a comprehensive survey of visitors to exhibitions in the United States and concluded that the majority of viewers, while retaining impressions of individual objects, are unlikely to take much note of an exhibition’s theme. That came as a surprise to art gallery and museum professionals, who had recently put much effort into didactic displays, with a proliferation of wall texts and increasingly sophisticated methods of thematic presentation. It should have come as no surprise. The objects we see assembled in exhibitions were produced separately. The co-opting of works of art in an exhibition is in a critical sense different from the organisation of parts within a book or film, for example.

Yet exhibitions play a role in creating an appropriate ambience for appreciating works of art. The best exhibitions in my experience have been those where the theme has loomed in work after work. In Monet & Japan (NGA, 2001) the art of two cultures was interleaved to enlightening effect. Recently, the National Gallery of Victoria complemented the clubbishness of British modern art with stylishly written wall texts, whereas the NGA’s current exhibition Turner to Monet: The Triumph of Landscape Painting is memorable for almost the opposite qualities, its open-air theme being matched by the exposure of certain art-historical conventions. It tells the story of a no-holds-barred romance with nature, taking up the story of European landscape painting in 1800, with opposing perceptions of landscape as elemental and civilised, and leaving off in 1900 with the abstraction and disciplining of subjective perceptions.