Of course, the irony of blockbusters – and this is no exception – is that they draw crowds by offering many more pictures than any visitor can realistically expect to look at within the time they’re likely to spend in the gallery. So the completeness is rather notional.I think it’s connected to something else: reproduction. Where do you normally find the top masterpieces of 17th-century Dutch art – or of the Renaissance, impressionism, or any other of art’s big packages – all together in the same place? In illustrated books, of course That’s where this completeness normally exists. But sometimes an exhibition comes along which illustrates the illustrations with their originals. That’s what this show is: the show of the picture book.But that needn’t always be a bad thing; quite the contrary. A few minutes down the road at the Van Gogh Museum, you can see some interesting public behaviour.

The museum has many visitors, and almost every one of them is a sort of expert. They know the pictures they’ve come to see pretty well already from reproduction. And they know lots of them, because with Van Gogh it’s not just one or two works but a sizeable chunk of his oeuvre that’s repro-famous.Yet this repro-familiarity isn’t a barrier to looking. No, it seems to make people see better, gets them noticing the things that didn’t show in the copy, and attending closely also to those paintings in the museum that aren’t known from copies.

The visitors here aren’t looking in vacant fascination at things that cost phenomenal amounts of money. They’re looking at art on something like equal terms: that is, non-idolatrously Sure, most of the credit here must go to Vincent himself. I’m certain there’ll be nothing of that atmosphere in the Rijksmuseum’s glory-show (it is precisely what’s being discouraged). But if art-viewing generally went more like this – well, it’s the only decent argument against iconoclasm. The Glory of the Golden Age, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam Every day, to 17 Sept Booking: Global Tickets, 020-7734 4555. Property and cash approaching £1bn at modern values were systematically and “savagely” stripped from French Jews during the Second World War, an official inquiry reported yesterday. Property and cash approaching £1bn at modern values were systematically and “savagely” stripped from French Jews during the Second World War, an official inquiry reported yesterday.
The French state apparatus and leading financial institutions, such as banks, took part enthusiastically in “a persecution whose ultimate goal was extermination”, the report said.Most of the property was restored to owners, or their relatives, after the war, but many valuables and much money are still missing.The inquiry recommends that, as an act of contrition, the French state and financial institutions give £230m to a proposed foundation to promote recollection and understanding of the Holocaust in France.