A museumgoer at the MIA show (Star Tribune photo by Tom Wallace). Below, a Rembrandt self-portrait from the National Gallery of Art.
“Rembrandt in America” closes Sunday at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, but the final tickets were sold Friday morning.
Demand is so hot that a scalper buttonholed the MIA’s director, Kaywin Feldman, as she returned from lunch Friday, asking if she wanted to buy a ticket.
if you haven’t seen this terrific assemblage of treasures, your best bet to snag a ticket -- aside from hanging outside the museum looking for that stray ticket Feldman didn’t need -- is to purchase a MIA membership. A few passes were being reserved for members.
As of Friday, ticket sales for the show had passed the 100,000 mark and were likely to end up somewhere between 104,000 and 107,000, which would make it No. 8 on the MIA’s all-time attendance list, and the biggest show in nearly a decade. (Update: The final number was 107,090.)
During the past two weeks the museum has kept its doors open late into the evening to accomodate the crush of gallery-goers trying to see what is the largest collection of Rembrandts ever gathered in the United States. After 8 p.m. Sunday, those works will be dispersed to the dozens of museums and private collectors that loaned them for this exhibition, which was staged in Raleigh, N.C., and Cleveland before ending its run in Minneapolis.
Here are the top 25 MIA shows as ranked by attendance:
1. “The Vikings” (1981) – 212,9562. “Impressionism: Selections from Five American Museums” (1990) – 155,1983. “Star Wars: The Magic of Myth” (2000) – 128,7254. “Monet at Vétheuil” (1998) – 124,3165. “Degas & America” (2001) – 118,1376. “Eternal Egypt” (2003) – 114,0687. “Dale Chihuly: Installations 1964-1997” (1997) – 112,1978. “Rembrandt in America” (2012) – 107,0909. “Visions of the People: A Pictorial History of Plains Indians” (1993) – 101,30910. “The Louvre and the Masterpiece” (2010) – 95,02711. “Illuminating the Word: The Saint John’s Bible” (2005) – 68,20312. “American Impressionism” (2001) – 64,73213. “Georgia O’Keeffe: Circling Around Abstraction” (2008) – 62,51714. “Two Lives: Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz” (1994) – 61,10515. “Caribbean Festival Arts” (1991) – 54,30216. “Titian and the Golden Age of Venetian Painting” (2011) – 54,15917. “Minnesota Celebrates Matisse” (1994) – 53,56618. “Imperial Silks of the Ch’ing Dynasty” (1991 ) – 51,13219. “Marc Chagall” (2000) – 48,72220. “Crossing the Channel: British and French Painting in the Age of Romanticism” (2004) – 48,62821. “In Our Time: The World as Seen by Magnum Photographers” (1990) – 44,48422. “Made in America: Ten Centuries of American Art” (1995) – 40,92123. “A Mirror of Nature: Nordic Landscape Painting” (2008) – 38,45324. “American Sublime: Epic Landscapes of Our Nation” (2003) – 37,84525. “Richard Avedon: Evidence 1944-1994” (1996) – 36,141
