Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art
The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art is an art museum in Bentonville , Arkansas, USA . It goes back to a foundation of the Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton and shows American art from colonial times to the present.
About the creation of the museum
The founding of an art museum in Bentonville goes back to Alice Walton, the daughter of the company founder of the retail chain Wal-Mart. The co-heiress of the family fortune came up with the idea of establishing a museum for American art at Wal-Mart's headquarters and made an endowment of 800 million US dollars available for this purpose. A 300-hectare wooded area served as the building site, in the valley of which the stream of the Crystal Spring flowing through was dammed. On both sides of the water, a museum building consisting of several pavilions was built according to plans by the architect Mosche Safdie , whereby two gallery wings spanning the stream gave the museum its name. After five years of planning and construction, the museum opened to the public on November 11, 2011.
collection
With the systematic development of an art collection, Alice Walton only started planning the museum in parallel. A collection of American art from the colonial era to the present was created in just five years. Here it was possible to acquire some top works, such as the painting Kindred Spirits by Asher Brown Durand or War News from Mexico by Richard Caton Woodville . Kindred Spirits , this major Hudson River School work , was previously owned by the New York Public Library , which sold the painting for $ 35 million. At the opening, the museum has a collection of 600 paintings, drawings and sculptures.
The collection includes paintings and portraits of the first President George Washington by both Charles Willson Peale and Gilbert Stuart from the time the United States was founded . Another example of early American portraiture is Mrs. Theodore Atkinson, Jr. (Frances Deering Wentworth) by John Singleton Copley . By Charles Bird King , the museum displays the Indian Portrait Ottoe Half Chief, Husband of Eagle of Delight , while with Winter Scene in Brooklyn by Francis Guy one of the early landscape paintings can be seen in the collection.
Gilbert Stuart:
George Washington
Asher Brown Durand:
Kindred Spirits
Richard Caton Woodville:
War News from Mexico
John Singer Sargent:
Robert Louis Stevenson and His Wife
Thomas Eakins:
The Art Student (James Wright)
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Works from the second half of the 19th century include paintings such as The Life of a Hunter: A Tight Fix by Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait , Valley of the Catawissa in Autumn by Thomas Moran , The Indian and the Lily by George de Forest Brush or Cattleya Orchid, Two Hummingbirds and a Beetle by Martin Johnson Heade . Examples of portrait art from the late 19th century are Robert Louis Stevenson and His Wife by John Singer Sargent or Professor Benjamin Howard Rand and The Art Student (James Wright) by Thomas Eakins . Typical representatives of American Impressionism are Dennis Miller Bunker , of whom the museum owns the picture Anne Page , or William Merritt Chase , whose painting Worthington Whittredge hangs in the collection.
The paintings Excavation at Night by George Wesley Bellows and Jessica Penn in Black with White Plumes by Robert Henri were already created in the 20th century . The museum owns the picture Schlossgasse from 1915 by Lyonel Feininger , who worked in Germany. The collection includes Composition (Still Life) by Arshile Gorky and Still Life with Flowers by Stuart Davis from the period between the two world wars . The museum also shows Rosie the Riveter by Norman Rockwell and Amoskeag Mills # 2 by Charles Sheeler . Examples of American Pop Art are the sculpture Standing Explosion (Red) by Roy Lichtenstein or the portrait Dolly Parton by Andy Warhol . Another sculpture in the collection is Alphabet / Good Humor by Claes Oldenburg . Contemporary artists in the museum are Jenny Holzer with her work Venice Installation: Gallery D (Second Antechamber) from 1990, or the 21st century works The Island by Walton Ford and Soundsuit by Nick Cave .
literature
- Christopher B. Crosman, Emily D. Shapiro: Celebrating the American Spirit: Masterworks from Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art . Hudson Hills Press, Mancherst (Vermont) 2011, ISBN 1-55595-371-9 .
Web links
- Official website (English)
- Jordan Mejias: The Nation's New School in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung from November 7, 2011
Coordinates: 36 ° 22 ′ 57 ″ N , 94 ° 12 ′ 13 ″ W.