It was a promising idea to devote an exhibition to the art dealer and promoter Samuel Bing. In histories of art nouveau he is noted as the founder of the Paris gallery L'Art Nouveau, which showed the new style and gave it its most commonly used name. The exhibition enables us to see exactly what it was that Bing exhibited and this in itself is a revealing exercise: Bing showed a surprisingly wide selection of contemporary pieces, by no means confined to what we now think of as art nouveau, and he later refined his interests, fostering very particular aspects of the new style. Perhaps the most interesting thing about Bing was his international role as a patron and publicist as well as a dealer; the exhibition with its catalogue makes an important contribution to the history of taste as much as to the history of art.

It is a pity then that the catalogue is so bitty in its treatment of Bing's career. A more unified account would have been better than twelve essays on separate topics: they overlap in coverage and vary in quality. They also leave some questions unanswered: I would like to have known more about Bing's interest in sculpture and about when and why it was that art nouveau, rather than any of the other sobriquets, was adopted as the name of the style. Fuller descriptions of at least the principal items in the exhibition would have been preferable to a checklist. Nevertheless, the catalogue is beautifully produced with luxurious illustrations. Of the essays, the best are the closing summary by Rudiger Joppien, and the contributions from Gabriel Weisberg, who, with Edwin Becker and Evelyn Posseme, has jointly curated the exhibition.

The great achievement of this show is to have traced and assembled over 400 works of art with a Bing provenance (the only exceptions in the exhibition are multiples such as prints and bronzes and a few chairs, where it has not been possible to identify which example passed through Bing's hands). Before he became involved in art nouveau, Bing was a dealer in Asian art, chiefly Japanese. It is evident that his role as an importer and dealer in Japanese art was at least as important as his promotion of art nouveau. He sold to connoisseurs and museums, and also to penniless artists: Van Gogh bought numerous Japanese prints from him (a selection is on display in the museum's print room to accompany the Bing exhibition). Bing's reputation as a Japanese specialist continued even after he had begun to sell modern art. The Japanese objects in the exhibition are of superb quality and it is a pity that so little information is given about them either on the labels or in the catalogue: many of them are described simply as 'Japanese 19th century'. Bing also produced a magazine about Japanese art, published in French, German and English, rented a floor of the Fine Art Society to sell Japanese wares in London and organised exhibitions of Japanese art in America. These were typical of the entrepreneurial and proselytising methods he then applied to the art of his time.

Bing opened his new gallery L'Art Nouveau in December 1895. The first two shows were mixed exhibitions, including furniture by Van de Velde, glass by Daum and Tiffany, jewellery by Lalique, metalwork by W.A.S. Benson, sculpture by Rodin and Bourdelle and paintings by Symbolist, Pointilliste and Nabis artists. Bing subsequently sold Morris wallpapers and fabrics, organised a show of modern book design that included work by Max Klinger, Aubrey Beardsley and Charles Ricketts and held solo exhibitions by Munch, Signac, Meunier, Carriere and Raffaelli.

Apart from Lalique, Signac and Raffaelli, all the artists and makers named above are represented in the present exhibition. Judging from the works selected here, Bing's gallery promoted newness rather than any unifying aesthetic. He chose sculpture, jewellery, ceramics and glass of outstanding quality but the paintings are disappointing. Is this because it is no longer possible to identify which paintings Bing showed, or because owners refused to lend, or is it an indication of a failure in Bing himself where painting was concerned? Signac reported that Bing did not know what he himself or his clients wanted. He never showed innovators such as Cezanne or Degas and his commissions went to decorative painters such as Brangwyn, Besnard and de Feure. It is significant that he relied on Meier Graefe as a consultant and had to be persuaded by the latter to show the controversial work of Munch.

A powerful feature of the installation at the Van Gogh Museum is a montage of life-size sepia enlargements of photographs of Bing's gallery. Taken from various angles, they give a strong sense of place and enable us to reconstruct the experience of visiting the gallery, with its exterior friezes and patterns made from stencils designed by Brangwyn, its domed and galleried central hall, its staircases, balconies and split levels leading to various exhibition spaces, some of them conventional art galleries with pictures on the walls and objects in glass cases, others furnished as complete rooms, including several by Van der Velde. It combined elements of an art gallery, a department store and a private house. The Van der Velde connection is significant, for Bing's ideas were not original: the new gallery was recognised by contemporaries as being inspired by Picart's Maison d'Art in Brussels, with its ideal of unifying art and craft, promoted by Van der Velde and deriving from Ruskin and Morris.