Introduction

The museum is said to be undergoing a ‘renaissance’. In Britain, new museums are being set up at the rate of one a fortnight. In France, the government museum-building programme initiated with the Pompidou Centre has included the Musée d’Orsay, an imaginative restoration and re-use of one of Paris’s grandest railway stations, and the La Villette complex, an ‘urban park’ enclosing the ‘world’s largest science museum’. In West Germany, the Frankfurt city council is creating eleven museums along the River Maine by 1990. In Japan and the USA, the museum boom is on an even bigger scale. Attendance is likewise on the increase, symbolized by the queues for ‘blockbuster’ exhibitions such as the Vienna one at the Pompidou Centre, which was kept open until 2 am because of the demand.