Art Gallery of Hamilton
The Art Gallery of Hamilton ( AGH for short ) is an art museum in the Canadian city of Hamilton . The main building is in the city center on King Street West, with a branch office on James Street North. The city museum was founded in 1914 with a collection of 29 paintings by the Canadian painter William Blair Bruce and today has more than 10,000 works of art from the fields of European and Canadian art, as well as works by contemporary artists and exhibits from Africa. Museum director has been Shelley Falconer since 2014 .
history
The museum was established on January 31, 1914 as the Municipal Gallery of Hamilton ( Hamilton Municipal Gallery) . The city had previously received 29 paintings by the Hamilton-born painter William Blair Bruce as gifts from his widow Carolina Benedicks-Bruce and other family members. This was linked to the condition that this Bruce Collection be exhibited in a suitable location. The art gallery first found its premises in the Hamilton Public Library building on James Street South in downtown Hamilton. In this Victorian building , the city museum made five rooms available on the first floor. On June 28, 1914, the gallery opened with an exhibition of the works of William Blair Bruce. The museum stayed in this location for the next 33 years. The rooms, which were not very attractive for visitors, and a very small budget hampered further expansion of the museum in the early years. Only a few works could be acquired and donors hardly played a role during this time.
Only after overcoming the global economic crisis of the 1930s and the Second World War did the actual development of the museum begin. In 1947, Thomas Reid MacDonald came to the museum as the first paid employee. He took over the management of the house as director and also acted as curator . He expanded the collection considerably, placing an emphasis on Canadian artists. His first acquisitions were, for example, the contemporary work Horse and Train by Alex Colville from 1954. The Women's Volunteer Committee also played a major role in the further development of the museum . This support group of committed women not only supported the museum ideally, but the members above all collected money for the purchase of works of art. With the support of the Women's Volunteer Committee, more than 100 works of art were acquired between 1954 and 1975. This initiative has been called the Gender Neutral Volunteer Committee since the late 1970s and is open to all supporters.
In the early 1950s , the Women's Volunteer Committee raised US $ 200,000 for the construction of a new art museum and was thus able to make an important contribution to the implementation of the project. A plot of land on the grounds of the Royal Botanical Gardens near McMaster University in the West Hamilton suburb was selected as the location . The result was a building in the late Art Deco style , which opened on December 12, 1953 as the Art Gallery of Hamilton. With an exhibition area of 10,000 square feet (around 930 m²), the new building offered considerably more space than before and, for the first time, adequate possibilities for presenting the collection. But by the end of the 1960s, there was no longer enough space in this building. The idea arose, as part of a reurbanization of downtown Hamilton, to relocate the art museum as well as a theater and conference center. In 1969, Trevor Garwood-Jones , who lives in Hamilton, was selected as the architect for the new Art Gallery on King Street West . He created a modern building that was inaugurated in October 1977 and is still used today for the presentation of the collection. Under the direction of director Glen E. Cumming , who has been in office since 1973, the permanent collection continued to grow, particularly in the field of contemporary art. In addition, an extensive educational program was created. From 1998, Louise Dompierre headed the Art Gallery of Hamilton. She further expanded the educational program, organized exhibitions primarily on contemporary art and, together with the Hamilton architect Bruce Kuwabara, planned the renovation and conversion of the museum, which took place from 1999 to 2005.
The important donors of the museum include Joey and Toby Tanenbaum. In 2003 they gave the museum more than 200 works of 19th century European art and in 2010 they gave the museum their collection of African art. The museum has also had its own purchasing budget since 2011. In 2012, the AGH Annex branch opened on busy James Street North. This second location serves as a creative center and has event rooms and a small cinema. Shelley Falconer has headed the Art Gallery of Hamilton since 2014. In the same year, the museum celebrated its centenary, with exhibitions on William Blair Bruce and the still lifes of Paul Cézanne , for example .
collection
The foundation for the museum collection was laid in 1914 by the Bruce Collection with 29 paintings by the Hamilton painter William Blair Bruce. These include, for example, the winter scene The Phantom Hunter from 1888. Other works by Canadian artists of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century include Logging in Winter, Beaupre by Maurice Cullen , Forbidden Fruit by George Agnew Reid , The Vaughan Sisters by William Brymner and Yan QCI by Emily Carr . There are also pictures such as Femmes de Caughnawaga by Marc-Aurèle de Foy Suzor-Coté or Icebergs and Mountains, Greenland by Lawren Harris , an artist from the Group of Seven . The Horse and Train by Alex Colville from 1954 is also one of the well-known works in the collection .
In the field of international art there is a larger collection of works by European painters. One of the older works here is the Portrait of a Man by Jan Baptist Weenix , while the majority include works by French artists of the 19th century. There is, for example, the portrait of Le jeune Fitz-James by Henri Fantin-Latour , the Trouville harbor view . Le port by Eugène Boudin or the girl portrait Croquet by James Tissot . The works Portrait de Mlle Durand by Jean-Léon Gérôme , The Triumph of Christianity over Paganism by Gustave Doré and the Portrait of a Woman by Marie Bashkirtseff came from the Tannenbaum Collection . The museum also owns the Stein and Press paintings by the American John French Sloan and Esquisse, Composition Polychrome by Fernand Léger . In the sculpture collection there is a double portrait of Frère et soeur by Auguste Rodin .
Another focus of the museum collection are works by contemporary artists. For example, there is a work in acrylic on wood entitled Clown d'Amsterdam by the Dutch artist Karel Appel , or complex installations such as Redifice by the Canadian Michael Snow . One of the most recent acquisitions is a glass rocking horse created in 2010 with the title Lucky, Lucky, Lucky by Canadian Tim Whiten . The collection also includes video works by various artists and a larger inventory of photographs.
literature
- Tobi Bruce: Lasting Impressions: Celebrated Works from the Art Gallery of Hamilton . Giles, London 2014, ISBN 978-1-907804-54-0 .
- Alison McQueen: Nineteenth-century art, highlights from the Tanenbaum Collection at the Art Gallery of Hamilton . Giles, London 2015, ISBN 978-1-907804-50-2 .
Web links
Coordinates: 43 ° 15 ′ 26.5 " N , 79 ° 52 ′ 20.7" W.