Philadelphia Museum Logs in
As 56th in Annual Attendance
By Richard Carreno
Junto Staff Writer Bio
The Philadelphia Museum of Art, in a compilation of attendance at all major art museums worldwide, ranks 56th in a tally of about 150 museums, according to the London-based Art Newspaper.
The authoritative listing states that the PMA's total 2009 gate was 812,479, putting it way behind No. 1 place-holder, the Louvre, at 8,500,000; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, at No. 3, at 4,890,450.
The stats were reported in the just-released April edition of the newspaper, the most definitive business journal of the arts and the museum world in English.
The figures for the PMA and other museums do not compare current attendance records with previous years, nor do they indicate what income was derived from the the attendance. The figures include member attendance, paid attendance, and attendance by free-will offering.
The Philadelphia Museum is often ranked as the fifth largest encyclopedic museum in the United States. At least, in terms of attendance, its 56th-place ranking seemingly holds claim to that title. After the Met, the PMA follows the National Gallery of Art (4,605,606); and the Art Institute of Chicago (1,846,889); and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (926,545).
Specialized museums like the Museum of Modern Art showed attendance at 2,672,761 and the Whitney, also in New York, at a surprisingly low 322,152.
The Barnes Foundation, always plagued by attendance woes, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts were not ranked.
PAFA did show up in the newspaper's ranking of attendance at individual exhibitions, with a daily attendance of 1,307; and a total of 21,486, for its '108th Annual Student Exhibition,' held last year from 8 May to 31 May.
The Philadelphia Museum's 'Cezanne and Beyond,' from 26 February to 31 May, scored 2,699 on a daily average and a total of 220,137, according to the newspaper.