Visitors to the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna more than doubled to 1.8 million thanks to its blockbusting Bruegel show marking the 450th anniversary of the artist’s death. Seen by 408,000 people (3,923 visitors a day), the exhibition broke the museum’s previous record: a 2005 display on the Spanish painter Francisco Goya (3,460). The Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium capitalised on having the world’s second largest collection of Bruegel paintings by offering a series of initiatives to coincide with the anniversary, including digital experiences and a “Bruegel trail” throughout the Brussels museum. These projects, along with the museum’s record-breaking Dalí and Magritte exhibition that finished in 2020, and so will feature in our next survey, contributed to an impressive 60% increase in the museum’s attendance (1.1 million).
Museums in the Netherlands and beyond went all out to mark the 350th anniversary of Rembrandt’s death. The Rijksmuseum’s dusting-off of all works by the Dutch master in its collection contributed to a record year: 2.7 million visited the Amsterdam museum, including 455,000 (3,922 a day) who went to All the Rembrandts. The Museo Nacional del Prado chose to honour Rembrandt with a show that compared the Leiden-born artist’s work with that of fellow 17th-century heavyweights Velázquez and Vermeer (4,553). But despite being the most attended show in Spain and coinciding with the Prado’s 200th anniversary, the Madrid museum still managed to fall shy of its 2018 record attendance, of nearly 3.7 million, by 175,000 visitors.
Last year was a stellar time for lunar-themed art, with museums honouring the 50th anniversary of the Apollo Moon landing with a surprising array of exhibitions. The Apollo’s Muse photography show at the Met was seen by 3,038 a day, while Denmark’s Louisiana Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition—which asked visitors “to join the Louisana on a trip to the Moon” with its eclectic display of everything from Norman Foster’s 3D-printed Moon base designs to space suits by the designer and professor Neri Oxman—was seen by 2,524 visitors a day. In total, nearly 780,000 punters flew to the Moon—a figure that would rise if we factored in shows that closed in 2020.
Top museums © The Art Newspaper; image cc
The Musée du Louvre once again tops our survey in terms of overall attendance with 9.6 million visitors, 600,000 less than its all-time record set in 2018 but impressive nonetheless. Ongoing protests throughout the city likely contributed to four of Paris’s five most popular museums experiencing drops last year except for the city’s second most visited, the Musée d’Orsay, which had nearly 3.7 million—an 11% increase on 2018.
The National Museum of China in Beijing retains second position overall with 7.4 million visitors, followed by the Vatican Museums (6.9 million), which places third for the first time. It swapped places with the Metropolitan Museum of Art (6.5 million), which is down from the nearly seven million who graced its halls in 2018 when it hosted its blockbusting Costume Institute show Heavenly Bodies (1.7 million; 10,919 daily) at both its Fifth Avenue and Cloisters locations.
With 6.2 million visitors, 400,000 up from the previous year, the British Museum (BM) reclaims its title as the UK’s most visited museum after being ousted from the top spot by Tate Modern in 2018. Its most attended show of 2019 was Manga (1,920), which was more popular than a free show of the BM’s collection of Rembrandt drawings (1,823).
But it is Tate Modern and Tate Britain that have the most cause to celebrate as both had a record year. Tate Modern welcomed 6.1 million visitors—230,000 more than in 2018—despite none of its shows ranking as high as its 2018 Picasso exhibition (2,802 visitors a day); its top two exhibitions of 2019 were its Pierre Bonnard display (2,388) and Christian Marclay’s The Clock (1,890), which attracted more visitors in London than it did at its 2012 showing at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (1,547). Around 1.8 million headed to Tate Britain: it had a 536,000 uptick in visitors—422,000 of whom turned up for the popular Van Gogh and Britain exhibition.
Last year’s 35-day government shutdown in Washington, DC had a significant impact on visits to the city’s publicly funded museums, which closed for most of January. Overall visitorship to both the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery, which share a building, was down by 604,000. The Renwick Gallery was down by 500,000 and the National Gallery of Art by 330,000. The Hirshhorn, however, bucked the trend to welcome 891,000 visitors—nearly 10,000 more than in 2018.
The Art Newspaper has published its annual attendance survey in some form for more than two decades. While the data collected for this year’s report reflects the usual fluctuations in visitor numbers across museums worldwide, the period covered predates the widespread effects of the Covid-19 (coronavirus) pandemic. It is worth noting, too, that some museums in Asia and Italy were not able to take part in the survey as they were closed during our research period. We would like to thank the press officers at museums worldwide for their assistance. The outbreak, combined with an increased awareness within the art world of the scale of the climate crisis, are leading to a change in thinking about the role of museums and exhibition-going. Next year we may find that Art’s Most Popular is measured more by digital engagement than footfall.
Methodology
All of the data used was supplied by the institutions concerned.
Some institutions offer a number of exhibitions for a single ticket: these are shown as one entry.
Exhibitions that were free to visit—ie, neither the museum nor the show had an entry fee— are indicated with an asterisk (*).
The daily figures are calculated automatically by our database, which computes the number of days for which an exhibition was open using the following formula: total number of days between start date and end date, divided by seven, multiplied by the number of days a week the institution is open, minus exceptional closures.
