“We are having an absolute Ophelia run at the moment and are quite surprised and happy about it,” museum spokeswoman Susanne Hirschmann told The Guardian. “It’s been a shock, to be honest. We have a colleague who has a friend who is a Swift fan and she noticed the video’s opening scene had a similarity [with the Heyser painting] and we thought, ‘wow, what a coincidence—that’s exciting.’” The painting, dated to around 1900, attracted nearly 500 people in one weekend, according to the museum. “It’s a lot more teens than we usually see. […] We have a wonderful art nouveau collection. Many of our guests want to see Alphonse Mucha; they want to see Hector Guimard. But this is the first time we’ve really had a run on a painting.”
“It’s really lovely for us that suddenly everybody is talking about art too, thanks to a global star like Taylor Swift,” she said. “It’s wild.”
The spokeswoman even imagines the pop star making a detour to the museum between two dates of her German concerts last summer while crisscrossing the globe on her Eras tour: “That would be truly insane!” Hirschmann said. “We did ask ourselves: how did this come about? Did she pick the painting out? Has she seen it for herself? Was it a member of her team? I think if Taylor Swift came here, even incognito, we would have noticed.”
Riding the wave of this unexpected popularity, the institution has organized a themed event on November 2, which is already sold out. According to the program, “Taylor Swift fans and art lovers will enjoy a short guided tour around the work, which links Taylor Swift’s song and the story of the character Ophelia. Visitors are cordially invited to come to the museum in a ‘Swiftie’ look or dressed as Ophelia, the tragic beauty.”
Originally published in Vanity Fair France.
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