Seattle Art Museum
The Seattle Art Museum is an art museum in Seattle . It was founded in 1931 and opened in its first museum building in 1933. The collection started with works of art in 1926, the number of which rose to around 23,000 today through acquisitions and donations. It includes works of art from Europe , America , Asia , Africa , Australia and Oceania , covering a period from ancient times to the present. In addition to paintings and sculptures, ceramics , textiles and other handicrafts can also be seen. In 1991 the Seattle Art Museum moved into its current museum building in downtown Seattle. In 2007, the Olympic Sculpture Park , managed by the museum, opened directly on the coast.
history
In 1931, the Seattle Fine Arts Society founded the museum under the direction of Richard Fuller . Fuller and his mother Margaret McTavish Fuller offered the city $ 250,000 to build a museum building. They commissioned the architect Carl F. Gould with the planning , who designed the building together with Charles Bebb in the Art Deco style. In 1933, the Seattle Art Museum opened with a collection of 1926 artwork. In the first six months alone, 300,000 people visited the museum. During the Second World War , 650 important works from the collection were evacuated to Denver in 1941 and 1942 in order to protect them from possible war damage and losses. After the war ended, they returned to Seattle. In 1944, still during the war, the Seattle Art Museum hosted its first major traveling exhibition under the title "India: Its Achievements of the Past and of the Present" .
Sherman E. Lee , an art historian with a focus on Asian art, became vice director of the museum in 1948 and mainly expanded the Asian section of the collection. However, he was also responsible for purchasing the Kress Foundation's collection , which included European painting. In the course of the 1962 World's Fair , the museum became more well known. Two years later, two World's Fair pavilions were combined and converted into a branch of the Seattle Art Museum for temporary exhibitions. In 1973 Richard Fuller resigned from the position of director after 40 years. In 1975, as a result of increasing exhibition activity in the field of contemporary art, a separate department was set up for this. As part of Museum Week 1976, Andy Warhol visited the Seattle Art Museum , among others . As a result of the great success of the “Treasures of Tutankhamun” exhibition in the museum's branch, in 1978 first considerations arose to build a new museum building in downtown Seattle. In 1981 the collection grew to include works of African art from the collection of Katherine C. White , which were acquired with the support of Boeing .
In 1991, the new downtown building designed by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown opened. The old Art Deco building has housed the Seattle Asian Art Museum since 1994 . A sponsor of the museum, John Hauberg , gave him works of Indian art from the north-west coast in 1991, thereby adding a new area to the collection. The Seattle Art Museum's largest project in recent years is the Olympic Sculpture Park , which is located right on the coast. In 1999, $ 17 million in donations were raised for him to finance construction. It was opened in 2007, as was the expanded museum building.
collection
The collection comprises a total of 23,000 works of art from Oceania and Australia , African art , Asian art, American and European art, as well as Islamic art . It includes paintings, sculptures, decorative arts and crafts objects, and textiles . It thus covers artistic epochs from antiquity to modern and contemporary art .
American art is represented in the collection through works by Thomas Eakins , John Singer Sargent , Mark Tobey and Georgia O'Keeffe , among others . Examples of European art include The Judgment of Paris by Lucas Cranach the Elder , Banquet Still Life by Abraham van Beyeren , Head of an African by Jean-Paul Flandrin and the bronze The Lamentation of the Death of Jesus by Massimiliano Soldani . The antiquity is in the museum about by mummy portraits , reliefs representing and statues. The collection of Asian art consists of ceramic objects , Buddha figures and ink drawings . Africa is represented, for example, by ceremonial masks and ivory objects .
Exhibitions
The Seattle Art Museum has repeatedly hosted major temporary and traveling exhibitions. This development continues in the present. The first major traveling exhibition that the Seattle Art Museum housed was "India: Its Achievements of the Past" in 1944. In 1953, an exhibition of Japanese works of art took place, which was used as a gesture of goodwill after the Second World War to form friendly contacts with the US should contribute. With the exhibition “Paintings and Drawings by Vincent van Gogh ” in 1959, the museum set a new visitor record. 126,110 people saw the works from the collection of nephew Vincent Willem van Gogh . That same year, the Seattle Art Museum organized a retrospective for local painter Mark Tobey , which was subsequently shown in Portland , Colorado Springs , Pasadena, and San Francisco . 1978 visited 1.3 million people, the exhibition "Treasures of Tutankhamun " , which made her the most successful exhibition of the museum. In 1997, 236,000 visitors saw “Leonardo Lives: The Codex Leicester and Leonardo da Vinci's Legacy of Art and Science” , in which the only privately owned manuscript by Leonardo da Vinci could be seen.
literature
- Chiyo Ishikawa: A Community of Collectors: 75 Anniversary Gifts to the Seattle Art Museum . Seattle Art Museum, 2008. ISBN 0932216609
- Chiyo Ishikawa: The Samuel H. Kress Collection at the Seattle Art Museum . Seattle Art Museum, 1997. ISBN 0932216471
- Bunkazai Hogo Iinkai: Exhibition of Japanese painting and sculpture sponsored by the Government of Japan. National Gallery of Art, Washington; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Art Institute of Chicago; Seattle Art Museum, Seattle. National Gallery of Art, 1953.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Information on the museum website , accessed on January 17, 2010 ( Memento of the original from February 1, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
Coordinates: 47 ° 36 '26.5 " N , 122 ° 20' 17.7" W.