Displaying items by tag: permanent collection

Officials at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. announced that the museum’s East Building will undergo a $30 million renovation, adding over 12,260-square-feet of exhibition space and a rooftop sculpture garden to the structure. Designed by famed architect I.M. Pei (b. 1917) and opened in 1978, the East Building houses the museum’s collection of modern paintings, drawings, sculptures, and prints as well as study and research centers and offices.

The East Building galleries will gradually close beginning in July and ending in December 2013; they will remain shuttered for approximately three years once renovations begin in January 2014. The project will create two sky-lit Tower Galleries within the East Building, which will be adjoined by an outdoor sculpture terrace. The East Building will continue to house the museum’s modern art collection and may see the addition of a room dedicated to the work of Mark Rothko (1903-1970). Museum officials hope that the additional exhibition space will inspire future donations to the National Gallery’s permanent collection.

The East Building project is part a Master Facilities Plan, which started in the museum’s West Building in 1999 and involved bolstering the building’s infrastructure and renovating its main floor and sculpture galleries. A number of established Washington-based philanthropists are donating $30 million for the East Building project; it is one of the largest gifts the museum has received from private donors in a decade.

Thanks to the keen eyes of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s curators, the institution snapped up an important Old Master drawing at an auction at Swann Galleries for $840 (with premium). The auction, which took place on January 29, 2013, was part of the highly anticipated Old Masters Week in New York.

The drawing was described in the auction catalogue as being from the early 19^th century and of French origin. An illustration in brush, black ink, and gray wash of Socrates dying, the drawing was said to be modeled after Jacques-Louis David’s (1748-1825) painting The Death of Socrates, a work that resides in the Met’s permanent collection. The original painting by David was acquired by the museum in 1931 and is among the artist’s greatest works.

As it turns out, the alleged copy, which was given an estimated selling price of $500-$700, was a previously unrecorded preliminary compositional study for David’s painting. Along with the painting, the Met owns a well-developed chalk drawing of The Death of Socrates, which helped the Met’s curators to authenticate the compositional drawing despite differences in setting, positions, and gestures of the figures featured in the painting.

The drawing was acquired by the museum via Katrin Bellinger, a frequent agent for the institution.

For the first time in its 187-year history, the New York-based National Academy will welcome photographers, video artists, and performance artists to its organization. A community of artists, students, museum-goers, and supporters of the arts, the National Academy had previously only allowed painters, sculptors, printmakers, and architects to be voted into membership. Known as National Academicians, each year since 1825 a select group of the country’s most celebrated artists are elected to become members of the Academy.

This year’s inductees include the video and performance artist Joan Jonas (b. 1936), photographer Cindy Sherman (b. 1954), and video artist Bill Viola (b. 1951). Twenty other newly elected visual artists and architects will join the Academy’s 300+ active members this year. After being inducted, each Academician presents the Academy Museum with a selection from their oeuvre. The National Academy Museum’s permanent collection currently includes over 7,000 works. Past and present National Academicians include Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009), Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959), and Frank Gehry (b. 1929).

The National Academy also includes the Academy School, which offers studio-based classes. Over 30 faculty members lead courses and workshops in painting, drawing, sculpture, new media, video and photography, printmaking, mixed media, and art theory.

On January 21, 2013, the Cleveland Museum of Art opened Gallery One, an interactive gallery that brings together art and technology to enhance as well as personalize each museum visitor’s experience. Gallery One features the largest multi-touch screen in the United States, which displays images of over 3,500 objects from the institution’s permanent collection. Known as the Collection Wall, the touchscreen spans 40 feet and helps patrons create their own tactile tour of the museum while rotating works according to theme, time period, and technique.

Gallery One, which includes works by Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Auguste Rodin (1840-1917), and Chuck Close (b. 1940), employs different hands-on activities to engage visitors using the power of technology. For example, one game asks viewers to recreate the poses of sculptures in the museum’s collection; the ArtLens ipad application illustrates how works of art were made, where they came from, and what inspired their creation. The ArtLens application uses image recognition software and allows visitors to scan objects and access additional multimedia content such as audio tours and educational information for up to 9 hours after their visit.

David Franklin, the Cleveland Museum’s Sarah S. and Alexander M. Cutler Director, said, “Gallery One offers an unparalleled experience for visitors of all ages. The space connects art and people, art and ideas, and people with people…we are especially proud to lead the way internationally in using technology to enhance and customize the art museum experience.”

Treasures of the Alfred Stieglitz Center: Photographs from the Permanent Collection opened on December 22 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Drawing from the institution’s impressive permanent collection, the exhibition features rarely seen works by William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877), Gustave Le Gray (1820-1884), and Charles Aubry (1803-1883). The show includes a selection of modern and contemporary works including pieces by Robert Frank (b. 1954) and Diane Arbus (1923-1971), visually tracing the history of photography and its evolution as a medium. There are also a number of recent acquisitions on view.

The core of the exhibition is a collection of works by Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946), one of the foremost figures in twentieth-century American art, and his protégé, Dorothy Norman (1905-1997). The featured works were created during the years of their creative exchange, which spanned from 1929 until Stieglitz’s death in 1946. As a result of her close relationship with Stieglitz, Norman helped found the Alfred Stieglitz Center at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1968 when she donated her vast art collection to the institution.

Treasures of the Alfred Stieglitz Center will be on view through April 7, 2013.

On December 22, American Legends: From Calder to O’Keeffe opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. The exhibition features works by defining artists of the first half of the twentieth century including Charles Burchfield (1893-1967), Alexander Calder (1898-1976), Stuart Davis (1892-1964), Arthur Dove (1880-1946), Marsden Hartley (1877-1943) , Edward Hopper (1882-1967), Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986), and Elie Nadelman (1880-1946).

Drawing from the Whitney’s impressive permanent collection, the yearlong show is organized into small-scale retrospectives for each artist and includes iconic and lesser-known works across a range of mediums. While, many of the works have not been on view in years, the show also includes some of the Whitney’s best-known holdings including Edward Hopper’s A Woman in the Sun (1961), Jacob Lawrence’s War Series 1946), and Georgia O’Keeffe’s Summer Days (1936).  

Curated by Barbara Haskell, the exhibition will undergo a rotation in May 2013 so that other artists’ works can be installed. Including realist and modernist masterpieces, American Legends illustrates the dynamic and varied nature of American art during the early twentieth century.  

Thanks to a generous gift from longtime museum donors, Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art added 37 new pieces, including vessel forms and sculpture, to their permanent glass collection. The acquisition includes works by notable glass artists such as Michael Glancy (b. 1950), Klaus Moje (b. 1936), Ann Warff Wolff (b. 1937), and Richard Marquis (b. 1945).

LACMA’s glass art collection, which focuses on studio glass from the mid-1960s to the late 1990s, contains more than 100 objects, most of which came from Greenberg and Steinhauser who started donating to the institution in 1984. The museum’s relationship with the couple is so strong that earlier this year Greenberg and Steinhauser invited LACMA officials to handpick works from their personal collection for the museum. Besides their substantial glass gift, Greenberg and Steinhauser made a monetary donation to LACMA to go towards educational programs about glass.

Greenberg and Steinhauser’s collection boasts 400 to 500 works and is considered among the top five studio glass collections in the United States. The couple began avidly collecting in the mid-1970s and slowed down around the mid-1990s when sculpture and nontraditional forms became more prominent than the vessel art they adored. The duo has since taken to collecting contemporary photography.

In celebration of the studio glass movement’s 50^th anniversary, Greenberg and Steinhauser decided to disperse most of their collection to a number of institutions across the country. The couple will keep 15 to 20 sentimental pieces for themselves and the rest of their works will go to LACMA, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts, and the Corning Museum of Glass. Greenberg also hopes to donate works to the Smithsonian, New York’s Museum of Arts and Design, the Mint Museum, the Contemporary Museum in Honolulu, and the Racine Art Museum, although arrangements with those institutions still need to be made.

Opening on Sunday, December 16 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Portrait of Spain: Masterpieces from the Prado, will present over 100 masterpieces from one of the world’s most renowned collections of European paintings. Spanning from the 16^th century through the 19^th century, the exhibit explores the evolution of painting in Spain through the works of artists such as Francisco de Goya (1746-1828), El Greco (1541-1614), and Diego Velázquez (1599-1660). There will also be works on view by non-Spanish artists who influenced the country’s artistic development including Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo (1727-1804), and Titian (circa 1488-1576).

The exhibition marks the first time that Madrid’s Museo Nacional del Prado has lent such a considerable selection from their permanent collection to a museum in the United States. The loan is part of a new initiative by the museum to broaden access to its illustrious holdings.

The works, which include both paintings and works on paper, are mainly courtly and spiritual paintings that explore the realms of society, culture, politics, and religion in Spain. The exhibit was previously on view at the Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane, Australia, but ended its run last month. Portrait of Spain will be on view at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston through March 31.

100 years after the seminal Armory Show in New York City, The Heckscher Museum of Art presents Modernizing America: Artists of the Armory Show. On view through April 14, 2013, the exhibition features works from the museum’s permanent collection and explores the show that changed the country’s perception of modern art.

Organized by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors, the Armory Show, officially titled the International Exhibition of Modern Art, took place at the 69^th Regiment Armory and introduced radical works of art to the public; a far cry from the realistic art they were accustomed to. Artists, critics, and patrons were presented with European works that boasted avant-garde sensibilities and spanned genres like Futurism, Cubism, and Fauvism. The show transformed the landscape of modern art and inspired an unmatched growth and progression in American art.

Works on view include paintings by Marguerite Zorach (1877-1968) and Arthur B. Carles (1882-1952); works on paper by Joseph Stella (1877-1946), Oscar Bluemner (1867-1938), and Charles Sheeler (1883-1965); and sculptures by artists such as Walter Kuhn (1877-1949).

The Heckscher Museum of Art was founded in 1920 by August Heckscher in Huntington, New York. The museum boasts over 2,000 works and focuses mainly on American landscape paintings as well as American and European modernism and photography.

Patrons who are familiar with the permanent collection at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts might become befuddled upon their next visit to the institution. Some of the museum’s finest works including Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Dance at Bougival, the pivotal Claude Monet painting, La Japonaise: Camille Monet in a Japanese Costume, five works by Paul Cézanne, five more by Edouard Manet, and two of the masterpieces by Vincent Van Gogh are nowhere to be found.

While some of the works have been lent to museums in the United States, Japan, and Europe to enhance exhibitions, others have been rented to for-profit organizations. Loans between institutions are common practice, but compounded with the large number of works currently out on rent by the MFA, the museum’s own collection appears to be lacking. Currently, 26 of the MFA’s paintings are involved in exhibitions in Italy, which the institution received a hefty yet undisclosed fee for. Some of the works now on view in Italy are two paintings by John Singleton Copley and two Rembrandt portraits as well as single works by Eugène Delacroix, Paolo Veronese, Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, Paul Gauguin, Alberto Giacometti, and Pablo Picasso.

While the MFA is excited to be raising revenues, the act of charging fees for lending works has been a source of controversy. One of the main duties of public institutions, including art museums, is to share their collections with the public. Many objectors find the practice of lending works for profit to be in direct opposition to this goal.

Other major holdings that are not presently at the MFA are Diego Velázquez’s Luis de Gongora, two works by El Greco, two more by Gustave Courbet, the museum’s only painting by Edvard Munch, and arguably its greatest work by Edgar Degas, Edmondo and Therese Morbilli. While MFA officials argue that they are bolstering the museum’s international reputation, critics feel the institution is suffering for it.