Museum exhibition review?

I might start trying to do these? It will add a new dimension to the content of this blog. It seems a bit more difficult to write museum exhibition reviews since it's not as common to see other examples of for reference. I'm not entirely sure what kinds of things are typically touched upon in such reviews.

This attempt at a review is about the Impressionist painting exhibit that is currently on view in the National Gallery of Art, west building. It is available until 19 January 2025 and I intend to go see it again at least once. 

It contains primarily Impressionist paintings, although a decent portion of the paintings are not strictly impressionist. Those are include for contrast, demonstrating the more conventional style of the time. I didn't find these as interesting. There are also some works in other mediums, like etchings, watercolor, pastels. 

The exhibition is pretty dense and contains a substantial amount of artwork. It took 2 hours for me to look at the entire thing, perusing most of the artwork pretty closely. The time spent in this exhibition depends on how long you want to contemplate each work, and how many you just look at very briefly. 

On the whole, it was a lot for me to process, taking it all in. By the time I finished looking at this exhibition, I felt I had more or less reached my threshold for the amount of artwork I had the ability to process in-depth for the day. 

Representative artwork (even if it is loose and impressionistic) entails a different way of thinking about it than conceptual artwork does. I don't know if I have a higher threshold for the amount of conceptual artwork I can process per day. 

It was also pretty crowded in the exhibition because it was very popular. There was a line at the entrance, but the wait wasn't too long (on a Wednesday, shortly after the museum opened). There were a lot of old people viewing the artwork at the time I was there. But I suppose that's the primary demographic of people who have free time in the middle of a Wednesday to go to museums. 

The entire NGA is pretty expansive, and there were many gallery rooms of the permanent collection that I did not get a chance to look at. I don't think it's possible to thoroughly look at everything in the museum in a single day. It might take closer to a week or something like that.