Displaying items by tag: permanent collection

Masterpieces by Vincent Van Gogh, Andy Warhol, Claude Monet and Henri Matisse will be among the 300 artworks to be loaned from French museums to the Louvre Abu Dhabi for its December 2015 opening.

The £400m museum will feature paintings and sculptures from 13 French cultural institutions, including Leonardo da Vinci’s "Portrait of an Unknown Woman," Claude Monet’s "Saint Lazare Station" and Andy Warhol’s "Big Electric Chair" as well as ancient statues, vases and masks from across Asia and Africa.

The loaned works will join the permanent collection of Louvre Abu Dhabi, which will be the first universal museum to open in the Arab world.

Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art opened in 2011 in Wal-Mart's hometown, Bentonville, Arkansas, with a respectable collection of work by famous artists from Norman Rockwell's "Rosie the Riveter" to a George Washington portrait by Gilbert Stuart.

But the museum has just opened a massive exhibition of contemporary art called "State of the Art" that could be a game-changer. The museum is sometimes mocked by critics from outside the region for its location and Wal-Mart connections — its permanent collection was funded by Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton — but the new show represents a serious effort to introduce contemporary art to a mainstream audience far from the rarefied galleries of hipster neighborhoods and urban centers.

Brooklyn Museum Director Arnold L. Lehman announced yesterday at the fall meeting of the Board of Trustees that he will retire in mid-2015.

Lehman, who turned 70 in July, joined the Brooklyn Museum as its director in September 1997.

Under his leadership, the Brooklyn Museum- one of the oldest and largest museums in the country- has undergone nearly two decades of sustained growth, more than doubling its audience and its endowment, refocusing attention on the visitor, expanding and significantly enhancing its landmark building, re-envisioning and re-installing much of its permanent collection, developing a dynamic exhibition program for its Brooklyn site as well as for its national traveling exhibitions, pioneering new technology and, overall, renewing the commitment of a world-renowned institution to its metropolitan area community of artists, families and young people.

"East of the Wallace Line: Monumental Art from Indonesia and New Guinea" explores the cultural characteristics of eastern Indonesia and coastal western New Guinea. Taking as its jumping-off point the “Wallace Line,” an ecological demarcation first recognized by British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace that runs through Indonesia between Bali and Lombok and between Borneo and Sulawesi, the exhibition presents intricately decorated, large-scale sculptures and textiles, as well as more intimate personal and domestic objects. With more than 120 works from the 17th to 19th century, the exhibition features highlights from the Gallery’s permanent collection and select loans, many either too large or too fragile to be regularly displayed.

Alfred Russel Wallace, who together with Charles Darwin developed the theory of evolution, first identified the division that bears his name on a trip to Bali and Lombok in 1859, during an eight- year stay in the East Indies. Wallace discovered significant faunal differences between Bali and the lands to the west of the Lombok Strait and Lombok and the islands to the east.

Morocco is due to get its first major national museum since gaining independence from France more than 50 years ago. The Mohammed VI Musée National d’Art Moderne et Contemporaine will open officially on 25 September. Located in the heart of the capital city Rabat, the three-level 22,350 sq. m building will consist of 4,921 sq. m for a permanent collection and 2,558 sq. m for temporary exhibits, conservation laboratories, an auditorium, education center, a multimedia library and a café. The ministry of culture and the Fonds Hassan II for Economic and Social Development funded the 73m Dh ($9m) building and Abdelazzi Idrissi, an archaeologist and conservator, has been appointed its director. The museum was scheduled to open at the end of May, although many thought the date somewhat optimistic.

Conceived in 1999 and under construction since 2004, the museum has been controversial.

A Napoleonic medal cabinet has been saved from export from the UK after a successful fundraising campaign to buy it for the permanent collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London.

In January, on the recommendation of a reviewing committee administered by Arts Council England, the British government decided to defer granting an export license for the cabinet until July, allowing the V&A time to raise the required sum of £534,000.

The Frick Collection announced the launch of a new mobile app, which provides instant access to content related to every work of art in the Frick’s permanent collection. Via this new platform, users can browse for information about particular objects and search the collection by artist, genre, gallery location, and audio stop number. Works of art can be saved as favorites to enjoy offline or share via email, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Google+. The app connects to The Frick Collection’s database (collections.frick.org) to provide continually updated information.

Also available to users is audio commentary (in English) for select works of art, as well as audio guides to the galleries in six languages (English, Spanish, German, French, Italian, and Japanese). Visitors can listen to audio content, with headphones, on their own smartphones. Access to free Wi-Fi is available in the museum. Additionally, an interactive map allows app users to navigate the galleries and a comprehensive, up-to-date events calendar lists upcoming gallery talks, lectures, and special events.

As “Birth of a Museum”, the preview show of the Louvre Abu Dhabi's collections, ends today, 28 July, at the Musée du Louvre in Paris, Manuel Rabaté, the chief executive of Agence France-Muséums, which manages relations between the planned satellite in the Gulf and its French partner institutions, has told Le Figaro that 300 loans from 13 French museum partners – including the Musée du Louvre, Musée d'Orsay and Centre Pompidou will be announced “by the end of this year”. He also revealed the terms of the loan agreement.

Rabaté, who is based in Abu Dhabi, said the loans will be rotated over a ten-year period, with each work remaining in the Gulf for around a year at a time, and displayed alongside the “500 acquisitions making up the permanent collection.”

Artists can be eccentric, but the quirks of the Italian Renaissance master Piero di Cosimo are legendary. He is said to have been terrified of thunderstorms and so pyrophobic that he rarely cooked his food, subsisting mostly on hard-boiled eggs that he prepared 50 at a time while heating glue for his art. He didn’t clean his studio. He didn’t trim the trees in his orchard. Giorgio Vasari, the Renaissance biographer, described Piero as living “more like a beast than a man.”

He was a versatile artist, however. Painting mostly on panel in impeccable detail, he depicted religious subjects as well as mythological scenes. Many of his works remain in the churches for which they were painted in central Italy; others, made for prominent families in Renaissance Florence, are now in the permanent collections of American museums.

Even an art novice would recognize the names of such masters as Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol.

This summer, they’ll get a chance to see some of the best works of art of these masters and more assembled in one exhibit at Buffalo’s Albright-Knox Art Gallery.

"Sincerely Yours: Treasures of the Queen City" opens Saturday with a free community event and runs through mid-September. It offers visitors a rare opportunity to see 70 master works from such famed painters as van Gogh, Picasso and Warhol along with Giacomo Balla, Salvador Dali, Paul Gauguin, Frida Kahlo, Roy Lichtenstein, Henri Matisse, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko - all of them part of the Albright-Knox permanent collection.