Whatever else it may or may not have been, the 1972 Tutankhamun Exhibition in London was undeniably the first of the international blockbusters. We have become so used since to those lumbering monsters of exhibitions that permit people to tick Goya or Renoir or Vermeer off their list of must-sees – been there, done that, got the T-shirt to prove it – that we forget that there was ever a time when exhibitions were likely to be small and parochial, and unlikely to travel the world with a lot of attendant hoopla.

But before Tutankhamun that was very much the case. If an exhibition appeared at, say, the British Museum, as Tutankhamun did, it almost certainly originated there; and, however fascinating its contents to the public at large, its presentation was likely to be pretty academic, as of a scholar speaking to other scholars.

Tutankhamun changed all that. It was an international creation and began its triumphantly successful progress in Paris, whence it came to London, then crossed the Atlantic on a course to be followed by many subsequent blockbusters. The very word “blockbuster” implies something else: the art exhibition had started to become, for the first time, part of show business. The idea that major travelling exhibitions could represent big money for the presenters, and that ticketing could be controlled by a timing system of staggered admissions, was quite new. Indeed, the idea only gradually took hold: initially the appearance of queues around the block for an exhibition, of all things, took the world by surprise.

It was not, of course, totally new: wiseacres answering doubts about how the unexpected hordes who turned out for Tutankhamun could be managed insisted that anyone who remembered the great Chinese Exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1936 would be aware how such things worked – or, for some of the gloomier rememberers, didn’t.

Either way, the enormous numbers of would-be visitors posed a lot of new problems: first of all, how to manage those who did come, and second, how to go on attracting similar numbers once the pattern of such shows had been set.

This second consideration is where show business know-how came in.

What, exactly, had it been about the first Tutankhamun exhibition that brought in the crowds? Probably not its skills in display, for the layout was quite straightforward and, well, scholarly. But all that gold and brilliant colour, and much publicised computations of the sheer monetary value of the things on show, brought in – to much head-shaking in museum circles – a different kind of visitor with little or no academic interest in the subject, just to gawp at so much treasure in one place at one time.

“Treasure”, needless to say, was the operative word. It came to be regarded as a talisman: work it somehow into your title and you were set to receive the multitudes. In reality things were not so simple.

As the later British Museum blockbuster devoted to the Vikings proved, it was not enough to put on display half a ton of gold if it was not interestingly and even, dare one say, artistically employed.

And while the Vikings show may have gained on sex and violence, it disappointingly set out to make the point that seeing the Vikings as universal rapists and spoilers was far from the whole truth, and was quite possibly not even true at all. Who wanted to be told that?

The great success of the first Tutankhamun exhibition resided in the sheer beauty and splendour of its contents, which triumphed over rather lacklustre presentation. That was a hard lesson to learn. Not all possible subjects would be so immediately beguiling. More could, however, be done on the side of presentation.

Dramatic display techniques were rather despised in this country, being regarded at first as a dubious American device for luring in the ignorant. But eventually they achieved legitimacy, mainly through the intervention of a new generation of exhibition directors with less academic ideas. I remember remarking once to Norman Rosenthal, the Royal Academy’s exhibition supremo, that their big Murillo show looked infinitely better at the Academy than it had at the Prado. He replied: “That’s simple. We are in the business of making great exhibitions; they are just in the business of being the Prado.”

These days, when all claims that the blockbuster was a thing of the past (too expensive, too risky to expect great works to travel) have proved premature, and the British Museum itself, the National Gallery and the V&A have understood that effective design is a vital part of performing their proper functions, we can safely expect every blockbuster exhibition that comes here to be efficiently organised and tellingly shown (witness the current Chinese exhibition at the BM). We can also safely say that without the first Tutankhamun show it would never have happened.

Exhibitions that shook the art world

PostImpressionist exhibition (1910)

Roger Fry has been the pride and the bugbear of British art appreciation for almost a century, thanks to the first PostImpressionist exhibition that he organised at the Grafton Galleries, London. Virginia Woolf was so carried away by it that she claimed a change had come about in human nature “in or about December 1910”. Well, she would, wouldn’t she, situated as she was in the heart of Bloomsbury alongside Fry himself.

But there is no doubting that this exhibition not only introduced PostImpressionists such as Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse, Bonnard and Vuillard to the British public, but even invented the concept and the term itself. Fry’s propaganda on these artists’ behalf was certainly effective, and meant that, despite the determined opposition of many contemporary grandees such as Robert Ross and William Blake Richmond, they were rapidly accepted by even such arch-conservatives as Arnold Bennett and passed easily into the British canon.

The problem is that, because of Fry, the British have been inclined ever since to believe that anything in art that did not happen in France did not happen at all.

Sensation (1997)

If any one thing started wide public interest in contemporary British art, it was Sensation at the Royal Academy. As a result of it names such as Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and Jake and Dinos Chapman became celebrities in their own right, as immediately recognisable by the popular press and its readers as rock stars or Hollywood favourites.

This was largely because of the finely honed publicity skills of the works’ owner, Charles Saatchi. The title of the show was Saatchi’s idea, and so was the urging of the public to feel that the exhibits themselves lived up to it.

How could they not, when the Royal Academy posted a disclaimer at the entrance asserting: “There will be works of art on display in the Sensation exhibition which some people may find distasteful. Parents should exercise their judgment in bringing their children to the exhibition. One gallery will not be open to those under the age of 18.”

It was also Saatchi’s idea to suggest in advance that a portrait of the Moors murderer Myra Hindley made up of children’s handprints could be regarded as viciously insensitive, when without this warning people might have seen it as tragically compassionate. Still, scandal worked, and it is undeniable that the show created a turning point in British attitudes to advanced art.

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