Displaying items by tag: donation

The Denver Art Museum announced on Monday, January 13 that it has received 22 Impressionist masterpieces by artists including Vincent van Gogh, Claude Monet, Paul Cezanne, Edouard Manet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. It is the museum’s most significant gift  of paintings to date.

The donation comes from the collection of Frederic C. Hamilton, an oil and gas magnate who has been the museum’s chief benefactor for decades. In addition to European paintings, the gift includes works by American Impressionists such as Childe Hassam and William Merritt Chase.

The paintings, which elevate the Denver Art Museum’s collection of Impressionism into one of the finest in the American west, will go on view in the Frederic C. Hamilton Building, which opened in 2006. Hamilton led the fundraising effort for the $110 million expansion project that gave the museum an additional 146,000 square feet of gallery space.

Keith L. Sachs, the former chief executive of Saxco International, a packaging distribution company, and his wife, Katherine, have been longtime supporters of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The institution announced this week that it will receive 97 works from the couple’s collection of contemporary paintings, sculptures and drawings. The gift, which is estimated to be worth nearly $70 million, includes works by Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly and Gerhard Richter.

In honor of the Sachs’ generous donation, the museum will name its modern and contemporary art galleries the Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Galleries. An exhibition of the collection is slated for the summer of 2016. 

The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. has unveiled a permanent and public home for a glass and stone mosaic designed by Marc Chagall. ‘Orphée,’ which was donated to the museum by the late collector Evelyn Stefansson Nef, will reside in the National Gallery’s Sculpture Garden.

The mosaic, which was a special gift from Chagall to Nef and her husband, John, spent over 40 years in the couple’s garden in Georgetown. The work was donated to the museum in 2009 as part of a major bequest of over 100 works from the Nef’s collection of 19th- and 20th-century artworks. Measuring around 10’ x 17’, the mosaic depicts various figures from Greek mythology.    

The work was one of the first large-scale outdoor Chagall mosaics to be installed in the United States and during the spring of 2010, a team of conservators, curators, art handlers, designers and masons spent five weeks removing the mosaic from the Nef’s garden wall. Over the next three and a half years, conservators, gallery masons, designers and Italian mosaic experts cleaned the glass and stone, repaired the mosaic’s structural reinforcement, and painstakingly re-installed the work in the National Gallery’s Sculpture Garden.

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art has received a $1.8 million gift from Oman; it is the largest donation in the institution’s history. The bequest will fund a series of programs called “Connecting the Gems of the Indian Ocean: From Oman to East Africa,” which will focus on Omani art and the connections between cultures in East and North Africa and the Middle East.

The National Museum of African Art, which was founded in 1964, holds about 9,000 works, making it the largest publicly held collection of African Art in the United States. The museum’s holdings include musical instruments, sculpture, jewelry, textiles, photographs, and pottery.

Over two dozen sculptures by Fernando Botero are being restored in the artist’s hometown of Medellin, Colombia. The 27 works, which are situated in public places such as parks and streets, are beginning to show signs of weather damage and vandalism. Chewing gum, graffiti, dents and scratches mar the bronze figurative works’ once-radiant patina.

Maria Adelaida Bohorquez, a restorer at the Museum de Antioquia, the institution that owns most of the sculptures, believes that many of the unsightly damages can be fixed thanks to a labor-intensive restoration effort that is schedule to reach completion by the end of the year. Bohorquez added, “The sculptures will have the tone they did originally.”

Botero, who gave the project his blessing, has donated approximately 200 paintings and sculptures to Medellin as well as many others to the Botero Museum in Bogota.

The Dallas Museum of Art announced an anonymous gift of $9 million to be spread out over the course of three years. The donation was made to ensure free general admission to the museum and enable the institution to digitize and ultimately publish its entire collection online.

The Dallas Museum of Art is the largest museum in the region and provides access to its collection as well as educational and public programming for the community. In January 2013, the institution implemented a free general admission policy in order to reflect its dedication to ever-increasing accessibility. The digitization of its entire collection will help the Dallas Museum further this particular goal. The images and data will be available to students, teachers and scholars under Open Access licenses for free personal and educational use.

Maxwell L. Anderson, the museum’s Eugene McDermott Director, said, “This is an exciting moment in the Museum’s history, and we are deeply grateful to our donor for the exceeding generosity and the significance of this gift. With this donation, the DMA will become one of the world’s most open and accessible museums. This opportunity reinforces our deep commitment to serve as an important educational resource for our local and regional community, as well as for our growing online audiences worldwide.”

After donating 78 Cubist masterpieces to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in April, philanthropist and cosmetics mogul Leonard A. Lauder will add Fernard Léger’s The Village to the bequest. Lauder has been interested in the painting for several years and provided the Met with the funds necessary to acquire the work. The painting went on display in the museum’s Lila Acheson Wallace Wing for Modern and Contemporary Art this week, where it will remain on view through the end of the year.

Painted by Léger in 1914, The Village depicts a church and neighboring buildings surrounded by trees. The country scene differs from most of the French artist’s paintings, which tend to capture more urban environments. The Village was in a private collection for nearly a century and was not publicly exhibited during that time. Thomas P. Campbell, the Met’s director and CEO, said, “Leonard Lauder is dedicated to creating the greatest collection of Cubist art in the world and to ensuring that these works will be accessible to the millions of people who visit the Met. Léger’s Village certainly demonstrates that unparalleled commitment.  It is a rare and beautiful painting, in pristine condition.”

Lauder’s original gift, which is estimated to be worth around $1 billion, includes works by Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Juan Gris. Together, these works tell the story of a movement that transformed the landscape of modern art. Cubism departed from the traditional interpretations of art, challenged conventional perceptions of space, time, and perspective, and paved the way for abstraction, a concept that dominated the art world for much of the 20^th century.

The entire Leonard A. Lauder Cubist Collection will go on view at the Met on October 20, 2014. The exhibition will remain open to the public through February 16, 2015.  

Los Angeles’ Hammer Museum will receive a $2-million gift from the Anthony and Jeanne Pritzker Family Foundation, which will be used to fund educational programs for families and children. Anthony Pritzker, a museum board member, will make the cash donation over a period of time.

Ann Philbin, director of the Hammer Museum, said, “This gift is a tremendously thoughtful investment in building and nurturing the next generation of arts audiences, advocates, and creative minds, which are essential to our community.” The Pritzker gift will allow the Hammer to expand its high school outreach program as well as its Family Day and Classroom-in-Residence initiatives, among other endeavors.

The Pritzkers’ donation is the largest to date in support of the museum’s educational programming.

Washington’s Tacoma Art Museum broke ground Thursday, September 5, 2013 on a $15.5 million expansion that will include new galleries. The 16,000-square-foot wing will house 280 works of Western art donated to the museum by German billionaires Erivan and Helga Haub. The collection, which ranks as one of the finest groupings of Western American art in the world, was accompanied by a $20 million gift from the Haubs.

The Tacoma Art Museum’s expansion, which is helmed by the Seattle-based architect Tom Kundig of Olson Kundig Architects, is slated to reach completion by fall 2014. The institution will boast the most significant public holding of Western artworks in the Pacific Northwest. The Haubs’ bequest includes landscapes by Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran, sculptures by Frederic Remington and works by modernist painters including Georgia O’Keeffe. The pieces range from the 1820s to the present and span various Western art genres.

Collectors Charles and Irene Hamm have donated $1 million and 165 works from their collection of coastal art to the New Britain Museum of American Art in New Britain, CT. The collection includes oil paintings by Robert Henri, Thomas Hart Benton and Rockwell Kent as well as watercolors by Fairfield Porter and William Trost Richards. The generous monetary gift will help fund the construction of an 18,000-square-foot New Wing, which will include a Charles and Irene Hamm Gallery. The bequest will also increase the museum’s endowments for operations and acquisitions.

John R. Rathgeber, Chairman of the museum’s Board of Trustees, said, “With the donation of Charles and Irene Hamm, the New Britain Museum will have one of the most outstanding collections of coastal art in the country.” The museum plans to hold thematic exhibitions drawn from the Hamm’s holdings. A number of the significant works will be loaned to other institutions throughout the country and, in the future, the New Britain Museum plans to organize a traveling exhibition of highlights from the Hamm Collection.

Charles Hamm, a successful advertising and financial mogul, and his wife Irene, an educator, have been collecting for several decades. Charles’ affinity for maritime scenes was spurred by his love of sailing.

Construction is expected to begin on the New Britain Museum’s New Wing in 2014.