Tokyo National Museum Breaks Attendance Records

LONDON—The Tokyo National Museum attracted 10,071 visitors a day to last year's "The Mind of Leonardo," an exhibition featuring Leonardo da Vinci's Annunciation (1472-75), according to The Art Newspaper's annual attendance survey. The figure is the highest recorded average daily attendance for an exhibition since the newspaper started doing the survey in 1997. The Uffizi drew criticism and protests for its decision to loan the work, which had left the museum only three times prior, the last time during World War II, when it was removed for safekeeping. High-profile protests—over 300 prominent Italians signed a letter of protest, and Senator Paolo Amato chained himself to the Uffizi's gates—provided extra publicity for the show.

The Tokyo museum tops the list for highest exhibition attendance for the fourth year in a row, thanks to its generous exhibition spaces, high-profile exhibitions, and the Japanese enthusiasm for Western artworks, Italian works in particular.

For the first time this year, museums were asked to submit total attendance figures for the calendar year. Topping the list was the Louvre with 8.3 million, distantly followed by the Centre Pompidou with 5.5 million, the Tate Modern, the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington. The Tokyo National Museum, despite its sky-high exhibition numbers, ranked 17th. Notable changes from last year included a dramatic increase for the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow, which more than doubled last year's number of 955,671 to 2.23 million, and the Centre Pompidou's overtaking of Tate Modern as the most visited modern art museum.

Top temporary exhibitions were tallied by category, with Monet at the National Art Center Tokyo heading the Impressionist and modern list, Richard Serra at New York's Museum of Modern Art topping the contemporary list, and the traveling Tutankhamun show occupying the top two spots on the antiquities list, for its stops at Philadelphia's Franklin Institute and Chicago's Field Museum.