Contemporary Art Museums Around the World

September 6, 2008

This is an overview of the centers, institutes and museums around the world that specialize in contemporary art.

EUROPEAN CONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUMS

Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London (England)
Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead (England)
Nykytaiteen museo Kiasma (Museum of Contemporary Art), Helsinki (Finland)
Rooseum Center for Contemporary Art, Malmö (Sweden)
Malmö Konsthall (Sweden)
Bildmuseet, Umeå (museum of contemporary art and visual culture) (Sweden)
Museet for Samtidskunst (Museum of Contemporary Art), Roskilde (Denmark)
Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw (Poland)
218ac Galleria d’Arte Contemporanea, Piacenza (Italy)
Castello di Rivoli: Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Turin (Italy)
Galleria Comunale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Rome (Italy)
The Foundation and the Center for Contemporary Art, Prague (Czech Republic)
De Pont Stichting voor Hedendaagse Kunst (Foundation for Contemporary Art), Tilburg (Netherlands)
Musée des Arts Contemporains (MAC), Hornu (Belgium)
Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (Spain)
The Rodriquez-Amat Foundation for Contemporary Art and Culture, Les Olives, Catalonia (Spain)

AMERICAN CONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUMS

New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (USA)
P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York (USA)
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (USA)
Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago (USA)
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (USA)
Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (USA)
The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (USA)
Mass MOCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art), North Adams (USA)
The Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati (USA)
Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland (USA)
Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City (USA)
Center of Contemporary Arts (COCA), St. Louis (USA)
Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston (USA)
ArtPace: A Foundation for Contemporary Art, San Antonio (USA)
The Chinati Foundation, a contemporary art museum near Marfa, Texas, based upon the ideas of its founder, Donald Judd (USA)
Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (USA)
Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans (USA)
Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami (USA)
Center for Contemporary Art, Seattle (USA)
Institute for Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania (USA)
The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield (USA)
Real Art Ways: a center for contemporary culture, Hartford (USA)
Contemporary Art museum, Raleigh (USA)
Centre for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockport (USA)
The Mattress Factory, Museum of Contemporary Art, Pittsburgh (USA)
Pirate: A Contemporary Art Oasis, Denver (USA)
Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (USA)
Contemporary Art of Center of Virginia, Virginia Beach (USA)
The Contemporary: Atlanta Contemporary Art Center (USA)
Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts, Grand Rapids (USA)
Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem (USA)
Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art (PBICA) (USA)

CONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUMS IN OTHER PARTS OF THE WORLD

Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (Canada)
The Power Plant: Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto (Canada)
Museo de Arte y Diseño Contemporáneo, Costa Rica
Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo (Brazil)
Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Niterói, (Brazil)
Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (MAC), Universidad de Chile, Santiago (Chile)
Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (Australia)
Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, (Australia)
Judith Wright Centre for Contemporary Arts, Brisbane (Australia)
Centre for Contemporary Photography, Fitzroy, Victoria (Australia)
Centre of Contemporary Art, Christchurch (New Zealand)
Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art (Iran)
The Contemporary Art Centre, Skopje (Macedonia)
National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul (Korea)
Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (Japan)
Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (Japan)

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Timeline of Art History: United States & Canada, 1900 ad – present

September 5, 2008

List of significant American art, artistic events and influences that mark the last century of American art.

ARCHITECTURE
1900 In the design of the Ward W. Willitts House in Highland Park, Illinois, Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) creates the “Prairie Style,” a modernist aesthetic for architecture and design that complements the Midwestern landscape.

DANCE
1903 San Francisco–born expatriate Isadora Duncan (1878–1927) delivers a lecture in Berlin entitled “The Dance of the Future” and is soon hailed in the U.S. and Europe as the founder of modern dance.

ART PHOTOGRAPHY
1908 Lewis Hine (1874–1940) becomes staff photographer for the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC), traveling through the United States documenting child labor in various industries. Designed to evoke the sympathy of viewers and mobilize activism, Hine’s images are circulated by the NCLC via exhibitions and pamphlets. His last large-scale documentary project will be a record of the construction of the Empire State Building in New York (1930–31), in which workers and labor itself share the spotlight with the awe-inspiring structure.

FINE ART PAINTING
1908 A group of eight realist painters of urban life, later known as the Ashcan School or “The Eight,” including William Glackens (1870–1938), Robert Henri (1865–1929), George Luks (1867–1933), and John Sloan (1871–1951), organize an exhibition at Macbeth Gallery in New York.

WRITING
1909 Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) publishes Three Lives, a character study of three women. A native of Pennsylvania, Stein is for many years a prominent member of avant-garde artistic and expatriate circles in Paris.

ART ENVIRONMENT
1910s Greenwich Village in lower Manhattan emerges as an enclave of bohemian and radical culture, home to irreverent small presses, avant-garde art galleries and studios, and experimental theater groups.

ART ENVIRONMENT
1912 New Mexico and Arizona become the forty-seventh and forty-eighth states of the U.S. The unique landscape and culture of the American Southwest will attract many artists, including Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986), who will travel to New Mexico for the first time in 1929 and reside there permanently from 1949.

Farbstudie Quadrate, c.1913

Wassily Kandinsky

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ART MOVEMENT
1913 The International Exposition of Modern Art (the “Armory Show”) is held at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York and introduces Americans to the modernist work of Matisse, Kandinsky, Brancusi, Picasso, Braque, and others on a large scale. Nude Descending a Staircase, a Cubist canvas by Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968), creates a public sensation. Theodore Roosevelt labels the Futurist and Cubist artists in the exhibition “the lunatic fringe.” Smaller versions of the show subsequently travel to Chicago and Boston.

CONTROVERSIONAL ART
1917 Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) exhibits his first readymade, Fountain, an upturned and signed urinal, at the Society of Independent Artists in New York. This work questions what it means to be an artist and what constitutes a work of art.

ART MOVEMENT
1920s–early 1930s Literary, visual, and performing arts flourish in Harlem, the African-American enclave of New York City, spurred by the mass migration of blacks from rural areas to northern cities. Poets, novelists, painters, and musicians of the “New Negro Movement“—later called the Harlem Renaissance—search for new forms of expression to convey their racial experiences and celebrate African-American cultural identity. Major figures of the Harlem Renaissance include poets Langston Hughes (1902–1967) and Countee Cullen (1903–1946), novelist and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960), jazz composer Duke Ellington (1899–1974), political activists W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) and Marcus Garvey (1887–1940), photographer James Van Der Zee (1886–1983), and artists Aaron Douglas (1899–1979) and Archibald Motley (1891–1981).

ART SCHOOL
1928–41 The Cranbrook Academy of Art is designed and constructed in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, by Finnish-American modernist Eliel Saarinen (1873–1950), who also serves as president of the Academy.

ART MUSEUM
1929 The Museum of Modern Art, New York, opens.

ART MOVEMENT
1930s The Regionalist movement is embodied in the paintings of Grant Wood (1892–1942), John Steuart Curry (1897–1946), and Thomas Hart Benton (1889–1975). Rejecting the tenets of modernist art and theory, the Regionalists depict indigenous American subjects in a realist mode, often in murals commissioned for post offices, schools, libraries, and other public buildings under the auspices of the Federal Art Project, a Depression-era government program.

ART MOVEMENT
1932 The International Style exhibition opens at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Curated by architect Philip Johnson (born 1906) and art historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock (1903–1987), it introduces an American audience to recent developments in European modernist architecture.

ART PHOTOGRAPHY / ART MOVEMENT
1932 Eleven West Coast photographers, including Ansel Adams (1902–1984), Imogen Cunningham (1883–1976), and Edward Weston (1886–1958), hold an exhibition in San Francisco at which they announce the formation of Group f/64, dedicated to a “pure” photography that captures the world “as it is,” and opposed to the aesthetic manipulations of Pictorialism.

ART SCHOOL
1933 A liberal arts college is founded in Black Mountain, North Carolina, and becomes a locus for the dissemination of Bauhaus ideas through its European émigré teaching staff, including the German Josef Albers (1888–1976). Black Mountain College remains a site for the production of experimental multimedia work until it closes in 1957.

CONTROVERSIAL ART
1933 Mexican muralist Diego Rivera (1886–1957) is commissioned by Nelson Rockefeller (1908–1979) to create a mural for the RCA Building in New York’s Rockefeller Center. Because the painting, entitled Man at the Crossroads, contains a portrait of Lenin, Rivera is prevented from completing it, and Rockefeller later has it destroyed. The leftist politics and social content of Rivera’s work, along with that of his compatriots José Clemente Orozco (1883–1949) and David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896–1975), who also spend time in the U.S. during the 1930s executing various public commissions, influence many American artists employed in government-sponsored New Deal projects during the Depression.

ART SUPPORT
1935 The federal government launches the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which, like other New Deal programs, provides employment for artists. Ben Shahn (1898–1969), Stuart Davis (1892–1964), and Jackson Pollock (1912–1956), among thousands of other artists, produce murals, sculptures, posters, and other graphic materials for public buildings and for exhibitions held in dozens of community art centers established across the country by the Federal Art Project. Photographers document the living and working conditions of Americans during the Depression with the support of the Resettlement Administration (later called the Farm Security Administration). Among the photographers is Dorothea Lange (1895–1965), whose images of the Dust Bowl exodus become symbols of the migrant experience.

CONTROVERSIAL ART - ART PHOTOGRAPHY
1936 The Photo League, committed to a documentary photography allied to progressive political and social movements, establishes a school in New York under the directorship of Sid Grossman (1913–1955) and begins publication of its provocative journal Photo Notes. Among the League’s projects is Harlem Document, supervised by Aaron Siskind (1903–1991), which records life in New York’s African-American community. In the late 1940s, the League is declared a “subversive” organization by the U.S. Attorney General and many of its members are blacklisted.

LANDMARK ART
1942 Edward Hopper (1882–1967) paints Nighthawks (Art Institute, Chicago), an iconic depiction of loneliness and isolation in contemporary American life. Hopper maintains allegiance to a harsh realist mode throughout his life, creating stark urban and rural scenes scored by bright artificial light and deep shadows.

ART MUSEUM
1942 Peggy Guggenheim (1898–1979) opens the gallery Art of This Century in New York. Romanian-Austrian architect Frederick Kiesler (1890–1965) designed the interiors that were intended to complement the Surrealist and abstract art on display.

ART & DESIGN
1944 The American Society of Industrial Designers is founded to advocate high-quality design of industrial products, a larger concern at mid-century. Among the most advanced designers of the period is Norman Bel Geddes (1893–1958), whose work encompasses the practical design of everyday commodities such as typewriters and radios, and large-scale visionary projects such as the Futurama exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair.

ART MOVEMENT/ ART GENRES
1945 The conclusion of World War II begins a prolonged period of economic expansion in the U.S. Among the postwar American art movements that receive popular and critical attention worldwide is Abstract Expressionism, which includes two subgenres: action or gesture painting, associated with the work of Jackson Pollock (1912–1956), Lee Krasner (1908–1984), Willem de Kooning (1904–1997), Franz Kline (1910–1962), and others, and color field painting, represented by the work of Mark Rothko (1903–1970), Barnett Newman (1905–1970), and Ad Reinhardt (1913–1967). Although Abstract Expressionism is mostly thought of as a movement in painting, it has some correlation to the sculpture of David Smith (1906–1965).

PRINT MAKING
1957 Tatyana Grosman (1904–1982) establishes Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE), a printmaking workshop, in West Islip, New York. ULAE sets the standards for a postwar printmaking renaissance in the United States.

ART MUSEUM
1958 The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959), opens in New York. Wright had begun working on the commission for a building to house the Guggenheim’s collection of modernist art in 1943. The museum represents a sculpturally and spatially rich use of concrete.

ART HAPPENING
1959 The first public “happening” is produced by Allan Kaprow (born 1927) at the Reuben Gallery in New York. Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg are among the performers. Influenced by Jackson Pollock’s process of action painting, the teachings of John Cage on chance and indeterminacy in art, and ultimately Dadaism, Kaprow defines a happening as a choreographed event that facilitates spontaneous interactions between objects—which include performers—and visitors.

ART MOVEMENT
1960 The Minimalist movement begins and maintains an important place in the art world for about a decade. Practitioners include Carl Andre (born 1935), Robert Morris (born 1931), Dan Flavin (1933–1996), Brice Marden (born 1938), Robert Ryman (born 1930), and others.

ART MOVEMENT
1961 The phrase “concept art” is first used by Henry Flynt (born 1940). It comes to have a more general application to the work of artists Sol LeWitt (born 1928), Joseph Kosuth (born 1945), and others. During the following decade, Conceptual and performance art demonstrate the possibilities of making art without producing saleable objects.

ART MOVEMENT
1962 Andy Warhol (1928–1987) paints Campbell’s Soup Cans, a key work of the Pop Art movement. Warhol and other artists associated with the movement, including Claes Oldenburg (born 1929) and Roy Lichtenstein (1923–1997), satirize Americans’ voracious consumption of manufactured products in the postwar period.

ART STYLE / MOVEMENT
1962 Yale University’s Art and Architecture Building, designed by Paul Rudolph (1918–1997), opens. It is an important monument of New Brutalism, a style that—in contrast to the trim and sleek aesthetic of 1920s modernism—emphasizes the tactility and roughness of its materials, often poured-in-place concrete.

ART MOVEMENT
1964 The term “optical art” is coined in Time magazine to describe painting and sculpture that makes use of optical effects to evoke physiological responses in the viewer. Proponents of Op Art include Bridget Riley (born 1931), Larry Poons (born 1937), and long-time practitioner Victor Vasarely (1908–1997).

ART MOVEMENT
1969 A group exhibition devoted to Conceptual art, entitled January 1–31: 0 Objects, 0 Paintings, 0 Sculptures, is mounted by New York dealer Seth Siegelaub and features the work of four artists: Joseph Kosuth (born 1945), Lawrence Weiner (born 1940), Robert Barry (born 1936), and Douglas Huebler (1924–1997). As a movement, Conceptualism critiques the political and economic structures that sustain Western art forms, and Conceptual artists produce works intended to convey ideas—often through the use of text alone—rather than to be appreciated as precious commodities.

ART MOVEMENT
1970 Environmental awareness spawns earthworks, sculptural projects on the scale of the landscape itself. Perhaps the best-known example is Robert Smithson’s (1938–1973) large-scale Spiral Jetty, built out of rock and earth in the Great Salt Lake in Utah.

ART MOVEMENT
1971 The term “Post-Minimalism” is used by critic Robert Pincus-Witten (born 1935) to describe the contemporary work of Richard Serra (born 1939) and Eva Hesse (1936–1970).

LANDMARK ART
1976 The avant-garde opera Einstein on the Beach, by Robert Wilson (born 1941) and composer Philip Glass (born 1937), premieres.

ART INSTALLATION
1977 Walter De Maria (born 1935) installs The Lightning Field near Quemada, New Mexico. In the same year, he re-creates his 1968 Earth Room, a gallery filled with dirt, at the Heiner Friedrich Gallery in New York. With the latter work, De Maria becomes prominently associated with the earthworks movement.

CONTROVERSIAL ART
1979 Artist Sherrie Levine (born 1947) rephotographs images by Walker Evans as a means of making art that questions the notion of originality. Over the next decade, Levine, Dana Birnbaum (born 1946), Barbara Kruger (born 1945), and others will become prominent in the Appropriation Art movement.

ART MUSEUM
1985 The Los Angeles County Museum of Art organizes an exhibition of works by Barbara Kruger (born 1945), which combine found photography and succinct, humorous slogans deconstructing the representations of power inherent in mass-media imagery. Kruger is one of many artists of the 1980s, sometimes dubbed the “pictures generation,” who explore the coercive and seductive dynamics of the media.

ART MOVEMENT
1991 The “grunge” style, originating in Seattle, Washington, becomes nationally fashionable and has an impact on popular music and clothing.

source:
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/ht/11/na/ht11na.htm

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Los Angeles Contemporary Art Museum Shows Broad Collection

July 7, 2008

Through September 2008, BCAM at LACMA will show its inaugural installation.

The newly opened Broad Contemporary Art Museum at LACMA holds some of the most iconic artworks from the last four decades—most from the famed Broad Collections. Reflecting Eli and Edythe Broad’s practice of collecting artists in depth, BCAM’s 60,000 sq ft gallery space (about twice the size of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City) is primarily devoted to groupings of works by single artists.

BCAM provides rich representations of some of the most important artists of the last forty years, including Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Ed Ruscha, Andy Warhol, Ellsworth Kelly, Cindy Sherman, Jean-Michel Basquiat, John Baldessari, Jeff Koons, Chris Burden, Mike Kelley, and Richard Serra.

The New York Times, reported “Underscoring the Broads’ profound commitment to public museums and to the city of Los Angeles, Eli and Edythe Broad and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in 2003 announced the Broads’ $60 million donation to create the Broad Contemporary Art Museum (BCAM) at LACMA.”

“For years Eli Broad, the billionaire philanthropist whose influence seems to waft into so many corners of this city’s cultural scene, has promised that Los Angeles will take its place among the world’s great arts capitals. So the art world was taken aback last month when, on the eve of the opening of the Broad Contemporary Art Museum, a $56 million addition to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for which he chose the architect and paid the bill, Mr. Broad abruptly seemed to undermine his own cause.”

Completely unexpected, Mr. Broad decided instead to keep the artwork in his private foundation for the time being. He argued that it would be better to lend his collection of 2,000+ works to various museums around the world, than to relegate most to storage in the Los Angeles museum.” This decision has given the art world the sense that perhaps Los Angeles was not up to rivaling New York and London as the center of contemporary art, in his opinion. However, Mr. Broad disagrees.

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Famous Vogel Collection of 2500 artworks to be gifted in 2008/2009

May 1, 2008

A dream is coming through for 50 art institutions around the nation, as the renowned Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection of 2500 works of contemporary art is gifted and distributed among America’s 50 states, art museums around the country are getting excited.

The Dorothy & Herbert Vogel Collection’s focus of the collection is on conceptual and minimalist art. They were ahead of their time and selected artists who were lesser known (before they were well-known) for their collection. They bought directly from the artists, and often developed a relationship of ongoing support of the artists.

The first 10 art institutions to receive 50 artworks each of the collection as art gift were announced in April. They are: Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas (Texas), Delaware Art Museum (Delaware), Harvard University Art Museum (Massachusetts), High Museum of Art, Atlanta (Georgia), Indianapolis Museum of Art (Indianapolis), Montclair Art Museum (New Jersey), Museum of Contemporary Art ~ LA (California), New Orleans Museum of Art (New Orleans), Seattle Art Museum (Washington), and Speed Art Museum (Kentucky).

Twenty more institutions will receive gifts in 2008, and the another twenty art institutions will receive theirs in 2009.

There are works by 170 artists in the collection. Some of the artists in the collection: Lynda Benglis, Sol LeWitt, Michael Lucero, Robert Mangold, Edda Renouf, Richard Tuttle and Tony Smith.

Dorothy & Herbert Vogel have the refreshingly different professional profile of librarian and postal worker ~ abolishing all stereotypes around who art collectors are. Their impeccable and discerning taste led them to buy ‘bargains’ which will soon bejewel 50 museums and other art institutions in America.

The Vogels began collecting art in the ’60s. They went for drawings, smaller paintings & sculptures, prints, photographs, and illustrated books ~ all sized to befit their apartment.

For more information about the Vogel Art Gift http://vogel5050.org/vogel/index.htm

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National Gallery Vision 2100

April 7, 2008

For today’s audiences, 20th-century art is old and 19th-century art - ancient. Can galleries overcome this challenge? questioned Michael Archer in ‘How modern art became history’, an article published in The Guardian on March 28.

He applauds the policy of Nicholas Penny, the newly appointed director of the National Gallery in London, UK, to move towards ‘less attention to blockbuster temporary exhibitions and more emphasis on presenting the collection sympathetically’.

Blockbusters are perhaps not where it’s at. However, temporary exhibits can be used to relate and say something about the permanent collection in very meaningful ways. Temporary exhibits get the best-looking collateral and tv commercials. When related, the benefits of temporary exhibits can have a spillover to the permanent collection. So, by and large, I’d agree with Penny with his choice.

It is the responsibility of a gallery director to protect the value of the collection. In addition, his role is to leverage its intrinsic artistic value and show it to the gallery audience, through various modern forms of communication and showcasing. I love for example how the National Gallery showcases and teaches about Degas’ famous painting ‘Miss La La’ in its interactive online ‘Painting of the Month’.

Penny’s plan is to concentrate on pre-20th century work. This does sound rather ‘boring’ to me. I have my favorites from all times. And, yesterday is as much part of history as a day two centuries ago. I am not clear on the true motivation for this. ‘Concentrate’ seems an ill-chosen word as most of history happened pre-20th century. I feel that museums should not only look at the artwork they already have on hand, to make the strategic decision on what to feature in the upcoming decades. Surely, there has to be a vision regarding showcasing the voice of art, as it has emerged and as is emerging.

In a prior interview, Penny stated “I think that a major gallery should be prepared to introduce people to something they know nothing about.” I wholeheartedly disagree. I think the purpose of an art gallery should be to show people something that helps them contemplate their own reality. Usually, that involves bringing them something they are already familiar with and presenting it in an entirely new way, and/or in more detail.

The good news is that Penny has a lot more experience in running a world-league art museum than I’ll ever have, so I have good faith. Time will tell if we need to bring in a whole new breed of curators and museum directors… Because, after all, we’re moving towards 2100.

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America’s Top Museums & Art Galleries L-Z

February 24, 2008

J. Paul Getty museum, Los Angeles
Museum of Modern Art, New York City
Museum of Fine Arts Boston
Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts houses and preserves preeminent collections and aspires to serve a wide variety of people through direct encounters with works of art. The museum display the art from many cultures and from different times: from ancient Greek sculptures, Egyptian mummies to contemporary American artwork.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

Philadelphia Museum of Art , Philadelphia
Rockland Center for the Arts
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco
St. Louis Art Museum
Smart Museum of Art, Chicago

Also see America’s Top Museums & Art Galleries A-K

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America’s Top Museums & Art Galleries A-K

February 23, 2008

My list of US-based art museums and public galleries, in alphabetical order.

Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh
Housed in a renovated seven-floor warehouse building, the Andy Warhol museum displays more than 500 works of art in film, paintings, prints, and drawings, offering a comprehensive presentation of the development of Warhol’s work. The artworks displayed are drawn from its extensive collections of works by Andy Warhol as well as from its huge archives and a collection of works by other artists. An ever-changing gallery.
Art Institute of Chicago
This art school has 2 art galleries: Betty Rymer Gallery, which provides a provocative, stimulating forum for the exchange of ideas and discourse on contemporary work in the visual arts, featuring faculty, student, Chicago-based, national and international artists. Gallery 2 and Project Space exhibits innovative and experimental curated works by advanced students.

Oriental Poppies, 1928

Georgia O’Keeffe

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California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco
Large museum with many highest-quality artworks. First, it’s works on paper collection is one of the largest in the US: 74,000 prints, drawings& illustrated books span six centuries (Dürer, Gauguin, Rembrandt, Kandinsky, and O’Keeffe, Japanese prints, Indian miniatures). Includes the Logan Collection of Illustrated artists’ books. Second, its large collection of 750 European masterwork paintings (14-20th century) incld works from Fra Angelico, El Greco, Rubens, Rembrandt, Watteau, Gainsborough, Monet, Bouguereau, Matisse, and Picasso. Third, it holds 8000 objects of European Decorative Art, e.g. furniture, sculpture, other. Last, the Legion of Honor holds 1300 antiquities (pottery, sculpture and metalwork) from the ancient Mediterranea & Near East, including Greece, Rome, Egypt, Assyria, and Mesopotamia.
Center for Photographic Art, Carmel, California
The Center presents six exhibitions annually, featuring both established and emerging artists who represent a diversity in technique and style. Small, contemporary center.
Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland

Guggenheim , New York City
Harvard University art Museums, Boston

Also see:
America’s top museums & art galleries L-Z

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Who Needs TV When You Can Watch a Painting? -2

January 27, 2008

Continuation of part 1 of the article by :

Sometimes a painting really draws you in. Growing up, being fascinated by the Civil War and looking at illustrated histories of it, there was always a specialness to the naval battle scenes. I could spend hours looking at the pictures and playing the scene in my head, famous scenes such as the Monitor and the Merrimack. I could see the smoke, hear the distant resounding shots of the guns, the splashes of the missed shells, the crackle of the grapeshot, and the orders of the officers on both sides, sometimes within earshot as a maniacal maneuver such as a pointblank broadside goes under way. Such excitement!

The painting I speak of is by Edouard Manet, the Impressionist who did a lot of marine scenes, leading to such exhibits as “Manet and the Sea” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The painting depicts a sea battle off the coast of Cherbourg, France, in 1864 in which a Confederate Sloop of War, the CSS Alabama was sunk by the USS Kearsarge, a Federal Sloop of War dispatched to rendezvous with the enemy ship to stop the havoc she had been causing to commercial trade to and from Europe. Manet did the work quickly, responding to the current event after hearing or reading about it just as it happened.

As you look at the painting, which depicts the scene from a bit of a distance, it keeps the viewer at neutrality to the sides (with a slight slant sympathizing towards the sinking Confederates). It shows the Deerhound, a private yacht, in the foreground rescuing survivors from the water. In the distance the Alabama sinks steadily by her stern with plumes of smoke emitting as a result of the direct hit to her engines scored by the Kearsarge. The story has it that five of the 100 Union shots fired were after the Southern vessel struck its colors. The painting further shows the Union ship, almost covered from view firing a volley at the doomed floor-bound Alabama. The primary color in the masterpiece is of course that of the ocean, which is vivid Viridian green and blue, and you can make out the civilians on the yacht, in their hats and sailor clothes attempting to rescue what looks to be two sailors clinging to a piece of wreckage.

There’s nothing like a good painting that you can just watch for an hour. I can do this with Thomas Eakins’ masterpiece, “The Gross Clinic.” Professor Samuel Gross stands in the middle of the beam of sun coming from the skylight teaching his famous bone marrow operation to a group of Jefferson students. Scalpel in hand, he instructs while he and assistants perform the leg operation, with the boy’s mother cringing behind. The detail is superb, from the looks on their faces to the little drops of blood on the one assistant’s cuff.

Another favorite artist of mine has you watching the canvas for long periods of time almost expecting surprises. Henri Rousseau is one to leave you in awe, not just from the greatness of his work, but from the mystery he brings to the table. He’s what you may call a surrealist, maybe a symbolist, but one thing is for sure, you can’t call him ordinary. As a self-taught artist, he has a style all to his own.

Probably my favorite painting in the whole Philadelphia Art Museum would have to be Rousseau’s “Carnival Evening.” Another chilly winter scene but this time its very mystifying. While his paintings may not be perplexing as a Dali landscape, Rousseau would give you just enough elements to leave you a little bewildered. “Carnival Evening” shows a forest, middle of winter, completely bare trees at night with a bright full moon above. Only thing is, the forest is strangely in darkness. A couple stand in the center on their way to the carnival, dressed in costumes, the man smoking a cigarette, both seeming to be illuminated from within, not from the moon. Off to the left is a cottage with a mask or face on it, and an unexplained street lamp looms nearby.

I recommend looking up any of these paintings on your browser and look at the images. You’ll quickly see that the detail and the stories can be much more interactive than a TV show or movie. So check them out, and visit your local art museum. Adventure awaits!

Thanks for reading. If you have any comments or questions regarding this article, or would like to read more visit http://www.vincesear.com

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Art Patron William Bowmore, who gifted $17+ million to museums, died.

January 10, 2008

William Bowmore was a life-long art patron and one of Australia’s most generous philanthropists. He died at age 98 on January 9. Bowmore’s fine art gifts to the Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA) and other Australian museums such as the Newcastle Region Art Gallery have been valued to be in excess of $17 million.

Following his heart and lifelong passion for art, Bowman started collecting Australian art. In the late ’60s, he began traveling to London. There he made the connections at auction houses and beyond enabling him to purchase international paintings from old masters, and other such works.

After almost half a century of collecting, Bowmore began donating works of art in 1990. Among his most noted contributions to the AGSA are sculptures by Rodin, Roman antiquities and Islamic arts. In 1995 Bowmore facilitated its acquisition of his renowned Rodin sculpture collection.

In 2004 his donation of 45 rare early Middle-Eastern ceramics was key in establishing the first and still only dedicated Islamic gallery in an Australian art museum. Among his other gifts are important works in the British, French, Italian and Dutch collections, two fine Roman sculptures dating from the first and second centuries AD, and the rare seventeenth century Yakob ‘Polonaise’ Islamic carpet.

Mr Bowmore’s gifts to the Newcastle Region Art Gallery included works by Australian artists Sidney Nolan (famed for his Ned Kelly art ~ see illustration), William Dobell, Conrad Martens.

It also included international artists Auguste Rodin, Max Ernst and Jacob Epstein as well as ceramics by Japan’s major artists including Shoji Hamada.

Bowmore has received many awards and honors. The AGSA named the William Bowmore Gallery in his honor in 1997 and has presented three exhibitions of his collections. Born in Dalby, Queensland in 1909, Bowmore taught cello at the Newcastle Conservatorium. He was also a businessman who operated hospitals and hotels.

Mr Bowmore was well respected throughout Australia for his generosity and relentless energy and love for the arts.

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Abstract Art Defined

December 31, 2007

The article below is really about defining abstract art. It is not an easy definition, however the article does provide an introductory guide to this art genre.

The Beauty of an Abstract Painting

“Have you ever been to an art museum and looked at an abstract painting? Did you find yourself asking what was this artist thinking when he created this abstract painting? What on earth is an abstract painting? Maybe you are just wondering where the art of abstract painting came from. If you find yourself asking these questions then perhaps it is time you learn about the beauty of an abstract paining.

The art of abstract painting began a very long time ago. Artists began this art several hundred years ago. In fact, you have probably seen some of the more famous abstract paintings before. You may recall a famous abstract painting created by Van Gogh. Picasso also had an abstract painting or two as well. Modigliani is also known for his abstract painting work. Because of these artists, and many others, the art of abstract painting has gained popularity in the modern world.

Now what exactly is an abstract painting? An abstract painting is defined in many ways. First off, an abstract painting does not depict reality like traditional paintings. In the beginning, most art was depicting a photographic or realistic expression of someone or something. But an abstract painting does not do this. The definition of an abstract painting is that an abstract painting does not depict objects in the natural world. Rather, an abstract painting uses colors and shapes in a non-representing and nonobjective manner. It can be of anyone, anything, or just nothing at all.

You can easily see this when you look at an abstract painting. An abstract painting has bold, bright, and vivid colors. An abstract painting also has many biometric shapes that are used with the bold colors to make the artwork stand out. It is both strange and beautiful to look at an abstract painting.

In the 1940’s a movement called “Abstract Expressionism” was started. This movement was started to show the freedom of an artist’s expression and to push the art of abstract painting. It was started in New York in a school that also called it “Action Painting.” This school was one of the first American schools that declared its independence from the European style of artwork. They liked to think of their art as a form of spiritual and intellectual art. This then further pushed the art of abstract painting.

Now that you know the history of the art of abstract painting you may come to understand it better. It is important to appreciate all forms of art, including the odd art of an abstract painting. You may find yourself wanting to get a piece of this artwork for yourself. It is truly an interesting thing to look at.”

About the Author

Jay Moncliff is the founder of http://www.forex-web.info a blog focusing on the latest Forex signal, resources and articles. This site provides detailed information on forex market.

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