The Tut show at the Franklin is tops in world

Tut is tops.

And not just any Tut, but the Franklin Institute's blockbuster 2007 show of boy-king antiquities.

According to figures published in the March issue of the Art Newspaper for shows that concluded in 2007, "Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs," which spent February through September at the Franklin, had the highest total attendance of any temporary exhibition of art or antiquities in the world.

About 1.29 million visitors attended the traveling show during its Philadelphia sojourn. Tut's stop at the Field Museum in Chicago from May 2006 to January 2007 drew 1.04 million, making it No. 3 worldwide, according to the newspaper. No. 2 was "Manet to Picasso," which drew 1.11 million to London's National Gallery from September 2006 to May 2007.

The next-largest U.S. exhibit was the Museum of Modern Art's "Richard Serra Sculpture: 40 Years," which drew 737,074 between June and September.

The show with the largest average daily attendance - by far - was "The Mind of Leonardo" at the Tokyo National Museum from March to June. An average 10,071 visited the exhibit each day - all to see a single painting, Leonardo da Vinci's Annunciation (1472-75), on loan from the Uffizi Galleries in Florence. The Art Newspaper said the Leonardo daily figure represented a record for the decade or so during which the newspaper has parsed such numbers.

By the measure of daily average attendance, the Franklin's "Tut" still did well, drawing 5,375 visitors per day, ninth on the list.

Helen Stoilas, editorial manager for the Art Newspaper in New York City, said the Tokyo National Museum seems to do well every year.

"Tokyo in general seems to get enormous attendance figures," she said. "We think it is groups, school groups. They seem to pull in a lot of them."

One other Philadelphia exhibition did well by the international measure: the exhibition of Thomas Eakins' The Gross Clinic at the Philadelphia Museum of Art from January to March of last year. Some 42,913 visited the painting after the Art Museum and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts jointly acquired it, the climax of a highly public purchasing effort.

The Art Newspaper said an average of 846 visited the Eakins exhibit daily, placing it eighth worldwide in average daily attendance at exhibits of 19th-century work.

Tut at the Franklin Institute was the number-one show of antiquities worldwide.

"We're very happy," said Lynda Bramble, an institute spokeswoman.

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