Exhibit is Nasher's chance to shine

DURHAM -- The Nasher Museum of Art tried in vain to get a member of Spain's royal family to visit for its first blockbuster exhibition, "El Greco to Velazquez: Art During the Reign of Philip III."

Now it has a far greater concern: how to attract 99,999 other people to the 12-week show.

That's how many visitors the Duke University museum expects it will need to raise the remaining half of the $2 million it spent to mount the landmark exhibition, which opens Thursday.

"El Greco to Velazquez" is the major art event of the fall in North Carolina, likely in the entire Southeast. It features the largest assembly of Spanish art ever seen in this part of the country, much of which has never before traveled to the United States.

The 52 paintings and altarpieces, as well as glass and ceramics, were loaned by major museums and private collectors from around the world, the result of a 20-year quest by a local curator who explored a little-known period in Spanish history.

El Greco, born in Crete about 1541, painted in a fantastically pigmented style that puzzled his contemporaries but influenced 20th-century expressionists and cubists. Velazquez lived from 1599 to 1660.

There are high hopes that the exhibition will bolster Durham's and Duke's cultural credentials.

That's why the Nasher museum, which opened in 2005 near the Sarah P. Duke Gardens, is counting on big numbers. The exhibition is a co-production with the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, which hosted it from April to July and drew 140,000 visitors.

Larry Wheeler, director of the N.C. Museum of Art in Raleigh -- which has presented numerous shows of this magnitude -- says he's confident the Nasher can succeed. The Raleigh museum's 2006 blockbuster "Monet in Normandy" had an attendance of almost 215,000 -- 40,000 more than it had expected.

"The audience is here," says Wheeler, who advised the Nasher on marketing the show and contributed an NCMA-owned painting by Pedro Orrente to it. "We've proven that on several occasions."

Compared to Monet attendance, the Nasher's goal is modest. But in light of Nasher's entire attendance for the fiscal year ending in June -- just over 85,000 -- it's a tall order.

Nonmembers must pay

Adding to the challenge, this will also be the first Nasher exhibition with assigned visiting hours and a substantial admission charge for nonmembers -- $15 -- although students, youngsters, NCMA members and the Duke community get discounts, and small children and Nasher members get in free.

The museum had sold just over 1,800 tickets by midweek. "Monet in Normandy" sold more than 18,000 tickets before it opened.

"I'm not worried," exhibition co-curator Sarah Schroth said of the attendance goal. "I think we're going to have problems with crowd management. But we'll figure that out."

High hopes abound for this show. The Nasher staff hopes it will be the tipping point for local culture vultures who talk about checking out the new museum but never get around to it. Durham boosters hope it will add to the city's growing reputation as a visual arts hotbed. And Duke hopes it will help improve the school's cultural reputation, luring more high-caliber professors and students.

"When you have an event like the Nasher exhibition, something as prominent as this, it shows all of us that the arts can achieve a hugely prominent role on campus," says Scott A. Lindroth, who was hired last year as Duke's first vice provost for the arts.

Of high-profile events such as the exhibition, he says: "We begin to think of ourselves differently as a consequence -- that an arts department has equal footing with the achievements of the athletic teams or a scientific breakthrough that might come out of the medical center. Now the arts are part of that image that Duke is fashioning for itself."