Fogg Art Museum

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The Fogg Art Museum

The Fogg Art Museum is an art museum in Cambridge , Massachusetts . Opened in 1895, the museum is Harvard University's oldest . The Fogg Art Museum's collection includes European art from the Middle Ages to the present day. It was redesigned according to plans by Renzo Piano so that it can show the holdings of all three art museums of the university. The Fogg Art Museum, the Busch-Reisinger Museum and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum have since reopened after being closed for six years together to form the Harvard Art Museums .

history

The museum opened in 1895 as the first art museum at Harvard University , which subsequently used it as a study collection. It was housed in a building constructed between 1893 and 1895 according to plans by Richard Morris Hunt in the style of the Italian Renaissance . This building was demolished and replaced with a new one, modeled on the Georgian architecture by architects Coolidge, Shepley, Bulfinch, and Abbott . It was opened to the public in 1925.

collection

The collection includes works of art from the Middle Ages to the present day. It contains 60,000 prints by artists such as Giovanni Antonio Canal , Giovanni Battista Piranesi , Rembrandt van Rijn , Honoré Daumier , Albrecht Dürer , James McNeill Whistler , Kara Walker and the artists of German Expressionism . The museum also owns 13,000 drawings, including by Michelangelo , Giovanni Battista Tiepolo , Peter Paul Rubens , Pieter Brueghel the Elder , Alfred Barye , Rembrandt van Rijn, Edgar Degas , Henri Matisse , Nicolas Poussin , Francisco de Goya , Eugène Delacroix and Picasso .

The American Painting, Sculpture, and Decorative Arts Department was only established in 2002 and includes 3,000 works of art. The colonial painting is through significant works by John Singleton Copley and Gilbert Stuart . Of the 19th century artists, John Singer Sargent and James McNeill Whistler are well represented in the museum's collection. It also includes important works by Charles Willson Peale , William M. Harnett , Thomas Eakins and Winslow Homer . Visitors can also see works of neoclassical sculpture by Randolph Rogers and Edmonia Lewis , as well as later sculptures by Daniel Chester French and Augustus Saint-Gaudens . The important silver collection includes colonial works by John Coney of Boston and Myer Myers , as well as works by the Arts and Crafts movement. The American Art Department is also home to 1,500 portraits and busts from the 17th century to the present day.

The department for European art has 1,100 paintings, 1,400 sculptures and 2,100 works of decorative art. The collection of European paintings is considered one of the best university collections of its kind in the United States. The focus is on works of the Italian Renaissance , Dutch Baroque painting and French and British painting of the 19th century. The sculpture collection includes works by artists such as Auguste Rodin and Antoine-Louis Barye , as well as an important group of Roman terracotta studies from the 17th century, by Gian Lorenzo Bernini , among others . The decorative art is represented, among other things, with silver objects from the British Isles and Wedgwood ceramics .

Special exhibitions

The museum shows special exhibitions on various topics. They deal with art genres, art directions and regions, as well as the work of individual artists. Examples are Paintings by Max Beckmann from the Pinakothek der Moderne , Munich in 2007 or The Western Tradition: Art since the Renaissance from 2008. The exhibition Modern Art, 1865-1965 , which ran from 2006 to 2008 , instead focused on a specific section of art history. In addition, exhibitions were shown that deal with Asian art not in the collection of the Fogg Art Museum. For example A Compelling Legacy: Masterworks of East Asian Painting from 2004/2005 and various exhibitions on Asian sculptures.

literature

  • Kathryn Brush: Vastly More Than Brick & Mortar: Reinventing the Fogg Art Museum in the 1920s . Yale University Press, 2003. ISBN 0-3001-0176-7
  • James B. Cuno: Harvard's Art Museums: 100 Years of Collecting . Fogg Art Museum, 1996. ISBN 0-9167-2487-5

Web links

Commons : Fogg Art Museum  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files


Coordinates: 42 ° 22 '30.3 "  N , 71 ° 6' 52.3"  W.