Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
The Museum of Fine Arts is an art museum in Houston that opened in 1924 . It is the largest art museum in the state of Texas . The Museum of Fine Arts collection includes 62,000 objects from around the world, from ancient to modern art . The museum, which also has the largest art library in the US Southwest, the Hirsch Library, is visited by over 3.6 million people annually (as of 2011).
history
The museum dates back to the Houston Public School Art League , which was founded in 1900 to empower art and culture in the public school system, and opened as the Museum of Fine Arts in 1924. The building, designed by William Ward Watkin , was the first museum building in Texas and the third in the southern United States. Two years later, the building was completed with the addition of two wings. In 1930 the Garden Club of Houston took over the maintenance of the museum grounds.
The collection was expanded in the following years through large donations. The collection of Ima Hogg, including works of Indian art, paintings by Frederic Remington and avant-garde European art, became the property of the museum in 1939.In 1944, Edith and Percy Straus donated 87 sculptures, pictures and graphics, including masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance, to the museum , and in 1947 the museum received a gift from Sarah Campbell Blaffers , including pictures by Edgar Degas and Paul Cézanne .
In 1953 the Robert Lee Blaffer Memorial Wing, designed by Kenneth Franzheim , was opened. Also presented Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in front of a 25-year plan for the museum. Four years later, in 1957, Ima Hogg handed over her Bayou Bend house with 14 acres of garden and her collection of American paintings and decorative arts. The following year, the Cullinan Hall, designed by Mies van der Rohe and supported by Nina Cullinan , opened. The 1960s were marked by further donations and acquisitions, especially modern works of art, so that by 1970 the museum owned 12,000 objects. In addition, the Bayou Bend collection and the associated garden were opened to the public in 1966.
The Glassell School of Art opened in 1979. The Lillie and Hugh Roy Cullen Sculpture Garden , designed by Isamu Noguchi , opened in 1986. Five years later, Harris Masterson III donated. and his wife, Carroll Sterling Masterson, their 4.5 acres of land and the museum that houses the European Decorative Arts Department. In 1992 the Rosine Building was inaugurated, which houses the archives, depots and rooms for the restoration of the works of art. In addition, this year the Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation announced that it would make 400 works of art available to the Museum of Fine Arts as permanent loans. In 1997 the museum received the National Award for Museum Service for the institution's community engagement. The 2000s are characterized by particularly brisk exhibition activity and other large donations and acquisitions. An example of this is the donation of 800 pre-Columbian gold works of art from the ancient cultures of Mexico and Central and South America by Alfred C. Glassell Jr. Museum director has been Gary Tinterow since January 2012 .
architecture
Located in central Houston , the museum consists of two museum buildings, two art schools , two decorative arts centers, and a sculpture garden. The Caroline Wiess Law Building is the main building of the museum. It consists of the original neoclassical museum building designed by William Ward Watkin , supplemented with two wings designed by Mies van der Rohe : the Cullinan Hall in 1958 and the Brown Pavilion in 1974.
The Audrey Jones Beck Building, designed by Rafael Moneo , opened in March 2000 and is named after the collector and patron Audrey Jones Beck . It was the first major museum project in the United States for Moneo. Particularly characteristic are the series of lanterns on the roof, which let natural light fall into the exhibition rooms. Two Bronze - reliefs by Joseph Havel , entitled Curtain flank the entrance to the building.
collection
The collection includes 56,000 objects, covering the departments of African Art , American Painting and Sculpture, Ancient Times , Asian Art, Bayou Bend Collection, Decorative Arts, European Painting and Sculpture, Impressionism and Late Impressionism , Latin American Art, Modern and Contemporary Art , Native American Art , Oceanic Art, Photography, Pre-Columbian Art, Prints and Drawings, Rienzi Collection, as well as textiles and costumes.
Thanks mainly to the donations and legacies of important sponsors, the Museum of Fine Arts has objects in its collection that are of importance far beyond the region. The Glassell Collection, for example, with its gold works of art from Africa, Indonesia and pre-Columbian America, is one of the most important collections of its kind worldwide. The highlights of the collection of European paintings are paintings by Rogier van der Weyden , Frans Hals , Giovanni di Paolo and Giovanni Antonio Canal , Francisco de Goya , Camille Corot and William Turner .
Modernism can be seen with works by important artists such as Claude Monet , Pierre-Auguste Renoir , Paul Cézanne , Edgar Degas , Pablo Picasso , Camille Pissarro , Henri Matisse , Jackson Pollock , Andy Warhol and Donald Judd . Many important paintings came to the museum here as gifts and from private collections. The collection of John A. and Audrey Jones Beck , which is exhibited together, is of particular importance . The exhibits in this collection include, for example, the painting The Orange Trees by Gustave Caillebotte . The collection of photographs includes works by important artists such as Alvin Langdon Coburn , László Moholy-Nagy , and Man Ray , as well as many other American, German, English, French and Soviet photographers.
Special exhibitions
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To date, over 2000 exhibitions have taken place. Around 50 exhibitions are presented to visitors every year. The themes of the exhibition shown range from the work of individual artists to private collections and collections of other museums to the treatment of larger topics such as certain genres, the art of a region or a country or an era. Various genres of art are also presented.
Examples of such exhibitions are Oudry's Painted Menagerie: Portraits of Exotic Animals in Eighteenth-Century Europe , which featured the work of the painter Jean-Baptiste Oudry with his animal motifs, and Pompeii: Tales from an Eruption , in which works of art from the ancient Pompeii were on display in 2008. The 2005 exhibition Sports Photography from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston , on the other hand, is an example of the diverse exhibitions on this art form that this museum shows. An exhibition in which the works of another museum were presented was, for example, Old Masters, Impressionists, and Moderns: French Masterworks from the State Pushkin Museum, Moscow in 2002, in which pictures from the possession of the Pushkin Museum were shown.
literature
- Janet Landay: The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston: Visitor Guide . Scala Books, 2008. ISBN 1-85759-231-X
- Alison De Lima Greene: Texas 150 Works from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston . Museum of Fine Arts Houston, 2000. ISBN 0-89090-095-7
- Peter C. Marzio: The Lillie and Hugh Roy Cullen Sculpture Garden of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston . Museum of Fine Arts Houston, 1996. ISBN 0-89090-079-5
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston: Annual Report 2010–2011 ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF, accessed on November 5, 2012; 3.7 MB).
Coordinates: 29 ° 43 ′ 32.5 " N , 95 ° 23 ′ 25.5" W.