Visiting rites

The slowest and most expensive museum refurbishment in world history must be that of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. It is taking longer and costing more than it took and cost to build it in the first place. Let us hope that the result will be magnificent, with all the interactive features that any modern child could desire.

For those who cannot wait for the re-opening, however, there is always the branch Rijksmuseum at Schipol Airport. This was an inspired idea, a tranquil space in the middle of the busy airport where the Rijksmuseum displays a changing selection of minor works from the Golden Age. At Schipol recently with a few hours to kill, I visited the branch museum. There was a pleasant little exhibition there, but its pleasures were quickly exhausted and so I turned instead, as I often do at exhibitions, to the visitors’ book.

It seems to me that exhibition visitors’ books are a neglected source of information about contemporary culture and human psychology. There is a little French book on visitors’ comments at Auschwitz, but I know of no other. I became interested in visitors’ comments when I noticed what someone had written in the book at Freud’s house in Maresfield Gardens: ‘I am glad he was not my father.’

One of the most illuminating pair of comments that I ever found in a visitors’ book was in that attached to an exhibition in Birmingham of the portrayal of black people in 18th- and 19th-century British art. I had expected the exhibition to be a festival of political correctness, but in fact it was beautifully and sensitively curated. On one page in the visitors’ book I found these successive -comments: