Displaying items by tag: gardens

The Museum of Modern Art is planning its biggest masterpiece yet, not that you’ll get it.

The museum is moving ahead with plans for an estimated $93 million expansion at the former home of the American Folk Art Museum, according to an application filed with the New York City Department of Buildings Tuesday.

The plans for an adjacent lot, at 45 West 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues, call for 32,842 square feet of new space, which will include theaters, a library/lounge, classrooms, exhibit space and gardens, the application indicates.

The national garden movement and, in particular, artists’ interest in gardens, has deep roots in Philadelphia, beginning with William Penn’s founding of his green and pleasant town in the seventeenth century and John Bartram’s establishing his botanical garden in 1728. In the early nineteenth century, artist Charles Wilson Peale retired to the cultivation of his garden at Belfield, and the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society was founded (in 1827), two years later hosting its first flower show. Interest gained momentum with the Colonial Revival movement, itself an outcome of Philadelphia’s 1876 Centennial Exhibition, and continued into the twentieth century.1 In her popular 1901 Colonial Revival-inspired publication Old Time Gardens, Alice Morse Earle wrote of Philadelphia: “There floriculture reached by the time of the Revolution a very high point, and many exquisite gardens bore ample testimony to the ‘pride of life,’ as well as to the good taste and love of flowers of Philadelphia Friends.” 2

Horticultural obsession also permeated the Philadelphia art scene. One of the most iconic conjunctions of art and the garden is the commissioning from Maxfield Parrish and Tiffany Studios of the fabulous Dream Garden (1913–1915, installed 1916) for the Curtis Building. The work was commissioned by Edward W. Bok (1863–1930), the head of Curtis Publishing, the influential publisher of Ladies Home Journal for the company’s new headquarters in Philadelphia.

Visit InCollect.com to read more about American Impressionism and the Garden Movement.

Of all the design arts, those dealing with elaborate gardens are the most ephemeral -- dependent as they are on the changing seasons and the boom-and-bust cycles of the economy.

From the Colonial era to present day, New England's great gardens always have been linked to the value of the land from which they spring. Over the years, many have been subdivided for building and housing developments or paved over for parking lots.

The region's rich garden-design history is the subject of "Lost Gardens of New England," a traveling exhibition from the nonprofit Historic New England preservation organization. The exhibit opened Sunday, March 1, (and runs through July 31) at the Lyman Allyn Art Museum in New London.

Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture presents a once-in-a-lifetime exhibition of Japanese art, "Splendors of Shiga: Treasures from Japan." This major display, exclusive to Meijer Gardens, opened to the public on January 30th and features more than 75 iconic works of art, most of which have never been seen outside of Japan.

Timed to anticipate and coincide with the opening of The Richard & Helen DeVos Japanese Garden, this exhibition features exceptional hand-painted scrolls and screen paintings, centuries-old Buddhist statuary and devotional objects, meticulously designed ancient and contemporary kimonos, meaningful tea ceremony objects and exceptional varieties of famed Shigaraki and Shiga-area pottery.

Gardens have been formative playgrounds for great artists at least since Michelangelo spent his teenage years poring over antiquities in the Medici gardens in Florence. But few artists have made gardens as central to their work as Isamu Noguchi, whose museum and sculpture garden in Long Island City, Queens, turns 30 this year.

“When the time came for me to work with larger spaces,” Noguchi (1904-88) once said, “I conceived them as gardens, not as sites with objects but as relationships to a whole.”

The Contemporary Art Evening auction at Phillips on February 12 features works by many art world heavyweights including Andy Warhol, Allen Jones, Julian Schnabel, and Antony Gormley, but the star that is likely to steal the show is undoubtedly Ai Weiwei's sculpture "Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads." This group of 12 gold-plated sculptures, portraying the signs of the Chinese zodiac, is offered as Lot 8 with a pre-sale estimate of £2-£3m.

Created in 2010 the zodiac heads are inspired by those which once comprised a water clock-fountain at the Old Summer Palace, the complex of palaces and gardens in Beijing built between 1750 and 1764 by Emperor Qianlong of the Qing dynasty.

On Friday keynote speaker Diane Keaton, the "Father of the Bride" and "Annie Hall" actress and style icon, will open the 2015 Antiques & Garden Show of Nashville. Keaton has authored two books on residential design and a recently published best-seller, "Let's Just Say It Wasn't Pretty." The Antiques & Garden Show will be held Jan. 30-Feb. 1 at Music City Center in downtown Nashville.

Also featured in this 25^th anniversary year are celebrated interior and horticultural designers; five interactive, specially designed gardens; and more than 150 sought-after antique, art and horticultural dealers from the U.S. and Europe. Their on-site booths offer visitors a one-stop, one-of-a-kind shopping opportunity for everything from fine paintings, furniture and jewelry to unique garden urns, fountains, and repurposed vintage pieces.

The Smithsonian Institution has announced the details of a new $2 billion plan to renovate the area of museums and gardens in its South Mall campus, including a “revitalization” of the Castle, its administrative headquarters.

Under the design by the Danish architect Bjarke Ingels, new entrances will be installed and connections made between the museums and gardens along Independence Avenue, SW, from Seventh to 12th Streets.

Whether a sacred sanctuary, a place for scientific study, a haven for the solitary thinker or a space for pure enjoyment and delight, gardens are where mankind and nature meet. A new exhibition at The Queen's Gallery, Buckingham Palace will explore the many ways in which the garden has been celebrated in art through over 150 paintings, drawings, books, manuscripts and decorative arts from the Royal Collection, including some of the earliest and rarest surviving records of gardens and plants.

From spectacular paintings of epic royal landscapes to jewel-like manuscripts and delicate botanical studies, "Painting Paradise: The Art of the Garden" reveals the changing character of the garden and its enduring appeal for artists from the 16th to the early 20th century, including Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt van Rijn and Carl Fabergé.

The Domaine de Chantilly in France is honoring the prized collections of the Condé Museum with a special exhibition of 14th and 15th century Italian paintings. The exhibit, “Fra Angelico, Botticelli…Rediscovered Masterpieces” is on view through January 4, 2015. One of the highlights of the exhibition is the reunion of five of the six paintings that comprise the Fra Angelico Thebaïde. But, one is still missing…

Twenty miles north of Paris, the Domaine de Chantilly houses the Condé Museum with a painting collection that makes it second only to the world famous Louvre Museum for ancient paintings (prior to 1850) . Along with a significant art collection, the chateau features magnificent gardens, grand stables and a world-class hippodrome (horse race course).