Hokusai makes a big splash

MOVE over, Tut, and stand back, Vincent. Hokusai -- the 18th and 19th century Japanese artist best known for his woodblock print views of frothing waves and Mt. Fuji -- drew the biggest day-by-day art museum crowds in the world last year, the Art Newspaper reports.

A Hokusai show at the Tokyo National Museum drew 9,426 visitors daily, the largest such figure since the newspaper started comparing museum-reported visitors-per-day counts in 1996. (Hokusai is now at the Smithsonian’s Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington, D.C., through May 14.)

The Tokyo exhibition was one of five in Japan to crowd a global top 10 list that was otherwise heavy with Impressionists; works by Van Gogh, Cezanne, Pissarro and Monet turned up among the most popular shows. The top-drawing U.S. show was “Vincent van Gogh: The Drawings,” which lured 6,571 visitors a day to the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

But the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s “Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs” did sneak onto the hit list at No. 9.

That show, a traveling enterprise from Egypt that alighted at LACMA from June through November, drew 5,934 visitors a day, then went on to three other U.S. stops in the Midwest and East. To see it, LACMA visitors paid the highest prices ever charged by an American art museum, as much as $30 per adult on weekends.

The bottom of the popularity list revealed Des Moines and Barcelona, Spain, in uncharacteristic and uncomfortable proximity. While the Des Moines Art Center Downtown was drawing 36 winter visitors per day to see the post-1960 selections in “California Dreamin’: Some Sun, Some Fun, and a Couple of Puns,” the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona was attracting even slimmer interest for an exhibition on the early work of American poet-turned-performance-artist Vito Acconci. Acconci attendance was estimated at 23 people a day.

Christopher Reynolds