Why Art Museums?

Why Art Museums?

Author: Sarah Ganz Blythe

Publisher: National Geographic Books

Published: 2018-09-25

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 0262039141

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Alexander Dorner's radical ideas about the purpose of museums and art, examined through his tenure as Director of the RISD Museum. Alexander Dorner (1893–1957) became Director of the Rhode Island School of Design Museum in 1938, and immediately began a radical makeover of the galleries, drawing on theories he had developed in collaboration with modernist artists during his directorship of the Provinzialmuseum in Hanover, Germany. Dorner's saturated environments sought to inspire wonderment and awe, immersing the museum visitor in the look and feel of a given period. Music, literature, and gallery talks (offered through a pioneering audio system) attempted to recreate the complex worlds in which the objects once operated. Why Art Museums? considers Dorner's legacy and influence in art history, education, and museum practice. It includes the first publication of a 1938 speech made by Dorner at Harvard as well as galleys of Dorner's unpublished manuscript, “Why Have Art Museums?,” both of which explore the meaning and purpose of museums and art in society. In Germany, Dorner formed close relationships with the Bauhaus artists and made some of the first acquisitions of works by Lázló Moholy-Nagy, Kazimir Malevich, El Lissitzky, and others. The Nazi regime actively opposed Dorner's work, and he fled Germany for the United States. At the RISD Museum, Dorner clashed with RISD officials and Providence society and contended with wartime anti-German bias. His tenure at RISD was brief but highly influential. The essays and unpublished material in Why Art Museums? make clear the relevance of Dorner's ideas about progressive education, public access to art and design, and the shaping of environments for experience and learning. Copublished with the RISD Museum


The Art Museum in Modern Times

The Art Museum in Modern Times

Author: Charles Saumarez Smith

Publisher: National Geographic Books

Published: 2021-04-13

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 0500022437

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A compelling examination of the art museum from a renowned director, this sweeping book explores how architecture, vision, and funding have transformed art museums around the world over the past eighty years. How have art museums changed in the past century? Where are they headed in the future? Charles Saumarez Smith is uniquely qualified to answer these questions, having been at the helm of three major institutions over the course of his distinguished career. For The Art Museum in Modern Times, Saumarez Smith has undertaken an odyssey, visiting art museums across the globe and examining how the experience of art is shaped by the buildings that house it. His story starts with the Museum of Modern Art in New York, one of the first museums to focus squarely on the art of the present rather than the past. When it opened in 1939, MoMA’s boldly modernist building represented a stark riposte to the neoclassicism of most earlier art museums. From there, Saumarez Smith investigates dozens of other museums, including the Tate Modern in London, the Getty Center in Los Angeles, the West Bund Museum in Shanghai, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. He explores our shifting reasons for visiting museums, changes to the way exhibits are organized and displayed, and the spectacular new architectural landmarks that have become destinations in their own right. Global in scope yet full of personal insight, this fully illustrated celebration of the modern art museum will appeal to art lovers, museum professionals, and museum goers alike.


The First Modern Museums of Art

The First Modern Museums of Art

Author: Carole Paul

Publisher: Getty Publications

Published: 2012-11-16

Total Pages: 372

ISBN-13: 1606061208

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In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the first modern, public museums of art—civic, state, or national—appeared throughout Europe, setting a standard for the nature of such institutions that has made its influence felt to the present day. Although the emergence of these museums was an international development, their shared history has not been systematically explored until now. Taking up that project, this volume includes chapters on fifteen of the earliest and still major examples, from the Capitoline Museum in Rome, opened in 1734, to the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, opened in 1836. These essays consider a number of issues, such as the nature, display, and growth of the museums’ collections and the role of the institutions in educating the public. The introductory chapters by art historian Carole Paul, the volume’s editor, lay out the relationship among the various museums and discuss their evolution from private noble and royal collections to public institutions. In concert, the accounts of the individual museums give a comprehensive overview, providing a basis for understanding how the collective emergence of public art museums is indicative of the cultural, social, and political shifts that mark the transformation from the early-modern to the modern world. The fourteen distinguished contributors to the book include Robert G. W. Anderson, former director of the British Museum in London; Paula Findlen, Ubaldo Pierotti Professor of Italian History at Stanford University; Thomas Gaehtgens, director of the Getty Research Institute; and Andrew McClellan, dean of academic affairs and professor of art history at Tufts University. Show more Show less


The Art Museum

The Art Museum

Author: Phaidon Press

Publisher: Phaidon Press

Published: 2011-10-17

Total Pages: 992

ISBN-13: 9780714856520

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The Art Museum is the finest art collection ever assembled between two covers. This revolutionary and unprecedented virtual art museum in a book, features 1,000 oversized pages of over 2,500 works of art. It is the most comprehensive and visually spectacular history of world art ever published. Ten years in the making, this unique book was created with a global team of 100 specialists in art history, who have collected together important works as they might be displayed in the ideal museum for the art lover. Unrestricted by the constraints of physical space, this volume contains an unprecedented wealth of masterworks spanning three millennia and culled from 650 museums, galleries and private collections from 60 countries to tell the history of world art. It is organized by innovative color-coded, galleries, rooms, corridors and special exhibitions, which display the paintings, sculptures, frescos, photographs, tapestries, friezes, installations, performances, videos, woodblock prints, folding screens, ceramics and manuscripts that tell the history of world art. This is the only museum to house Leonardo's Mona Lisa, a collection of Rembrandt's finest self portraits, Velázquez's Las Meninas and Picasso's Guernica, as well as ceramics from China, Hokusai's woodblock prints, gold artefacts from Peru, and works by Jackson Pollock in one place. With intelligent in-depth text throughout, explanatory lels for each artwork, a comprehensive glossary and detailed location maps, The Art Museum, is accessible for everyone from casual art fans to experts in the field.


The Invention of the American Art Museum

The Invention of the American Art Museum

Author: Kathleen Curran

Publisher: Getty Publications

Published: 2016-07-01

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 1606064789

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American art museums share a mission and format that differ from those of their European counterparts, which often have origins in aristocratic collections. This groundbreaking work recounts the fascinating story of the invention of the modern American art museum, starting with its roots in the 1870s in the craft museum type, which was based on London’s South Kensington (now the Victoria and Albert) Museum. At the turn of the twentieth century, American planners grew enthusiastic about a new type of museum and presentation that was developed in Northern Europe, particularly in Germany, Switzerland, and Scandinavia. Called Kulturgeschichte (cultural history) museums, they were evocative displays of regional history. American trustees, museum directors, and curators found that the Kulturgeschichte approach offered a variety of transformational options in planning museums, classifying and displaying objects, and broadening collecting categories, including American art and the decorative arts. Leading institutions, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, adopted and developed crucial aspects of the Kulturgeschichte model. By the 1930s, such museum plans and exhibition techniques had become standard practice at museums across the country.


Multiculturalism in Art Museums Today

Multiculturalism in Art Museums Today

Author: Joni Boyd Acuff

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2014-07-08

Total Pages: 381

ISBN-13: 0759124116

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Aimed at museum educators, Multiculturalism in Art Museums Today seeks to marry museum and multicultural education theories. It reveals how the union of these theories yields more equitable educational practices and guides museum educators to address misrepresentation, exclusivity, accessibility, and educational inequality. This contemporary text is directive; it encourages museum educators to consider the critical multicultural education theoretical framework in their day-to-day functions in order to illuminate and combat shortcomings at the crux of museum education: Museum Educators as Change Agents Inclusion versus Exclusion Collaboration with Diverse Audiences Responsive Pedagogy This book adopts a broad definition of multiculturalism, which names not only race and ethnicity as concerns, but also gender, sexual orientation, religion, ability, age, and class. While focusing on these various facets of identity, the authors demonstrate how museums are social systems that should offer comprehensive, diverse educational experiences not only through exhibitions but through other educational activities. The authors pull from their own research and practical experiences which exemplify how museums have been and can be attentive to these areas of identity. Multiculturalism in Art Museums Today is hopeful and inspiring, as it identifies and commends the positive and effective practices that some museum educators have enacted in an effort to be inclusive. Museum educators are at the front-line interacting with the public on a daily basis. Thus, these educators can be the real vanguard of change, modeling critical multicultural behavior and practices.


Art Museums Plus

Art Museums Plus

Author: Traute M. Marshall

Publisher: UPNE

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 9781584656210

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An engaging guide to over 150 art museums and more throughout New England


America's Art Museums

America's Art Museums

Author: Suzanne Loebl

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 434

ISBN-13: 9780393320060

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A tour of America's most notable museums is also a history of the nation's art that highlights each location's top works while discussing the backgrounds of each building and featured piece of art.


An Atlas of Rare & Familiar Colour

An Atlas of Rare & Familiar Colour

Author:

Publisher:

Published: 2018-01-16

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 9780997593570

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The Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies at the Harvard Art Museums possesses over 2500 of the world¿s rarest pigments. Visually and anthropologically excavating the extraordinary collection,Atelier Editions¿ monograph examines the contained artefacts¿ providence, composition, symbology and application. Whilst simultaneously exploringthe larger field of chromatics, utilising a variety of theoretical frameworks to interpret the collection anew. An introduction to the monograph is authored by Straus Center Director, Dr. Narayan Khandekar.


Art Museums of Latin America

Art Museums of Latin America

Author: Michele Greet

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-03-08

Total Pages: 333

ISBN-13: 1351777904

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Since the late nineteenth century, art museums have played crucial social, political, and economic roles throughout Latin America because of the ways that they structure representation. By means of their architecture, collections, exhibitions, and curatorial practices, Latin American art museums have crafted representations of communities, including nation states, and promoted particular group ideologies. This collection of essays, arranged in thematic sections, will examine the varying and complex functions of art museums in Latin America: as nation-building institutions and instruments of state cultural politics; as foci for the promotion of Latin American modernities and modernisms; as sites of mediation between local and international, private and public interests; as organizations that negotiate cultural construction within the Latin American diaspora and shape constructs of Latin America and its nations; and as venues for the contestation of elitist and Eurocentric notions of culture and the realization of cultural diversity rooted in multiethnic environments.