ABSTRACT
In Asiatic eyes, the museum may be a place of learning and teaching, but considered as anything else it is no more than an absurd concert in which contradictory themes are mingled and confused in an endless succession. A museum without walls has been opened to us, and it will carry infinitely farther that limited revelation of the world of art which the real museums offer us within their walls: in answer to their appeal, the plastic arts have produced their printing press. The visitor to the Louvre knows that it contains no significant representation of either Goya or of the great English artists, of Piero della Francesca or of Grunewald, of the paintings of Michelangelo or even those of Vermeer. In the art knowledge of those days there existed an area of ambiguity: comparison of a picture in the Louvre with another in Madrid, in Florence, or in Rome was comparison of a present vision with a memory.
