Best of
Museums

2009

Gerhard Richter: Panorama


Gerhard RichterCamille Morineau - 2009
    Where previous monographs have focused on a single genre within the artist's vast output, this stunningly illustrated survey encompasses his entire oeuvre, now stretching across more than a half-century of activity, including photo-paintings, abstracts, landscapes and seascapes, portraits, glass and mirror works, sculptures, drawings and photographs. It therefore stands as the definitive portrait of Richter's colossal accomplishment to date. Alongside his celebrated abstractions, early black-and-white paintings and the photorealist depictions of candles, skulls and clouds that have become indisputable icons of modern painting, Panorama includes nearly 30 new paintings made over the past ten years, extensive comparative works, studio photographs, archival images and a substantial interview with the artist conducted by Nicholas Serota. This landmark publication is a fitting tribute to one of the world's most celebrated living artists. Born in Dresden, East Germany, in 1932, Gerhard Richter migrated to West Germany in 1961, settling in Dusseldorf, where he studied at the Dusseldorf Academy, and where he held his first solo exhibition in 1963. Over the course of that decade, Richter helped to liberate painting from the legacy of Socialist Realism (in Eastern Germany) and Abstract Expressionism (in Western Germany and throughout Europe). He has exhibited internationally for the last five decades, with retrospectives in New York, Paris and Dusseldorf. He lives and works in Cologne.

Museums in a Digital Age


Ross Parry - 2009
    Today museums are reliant on new technology to manage their collections. They collect digital as well as material things. New media is embedded within their exhibition spaces. And their activity online is as important as their physical presence on site.However, 'digital heritage' (as an area of practice and as a subject of study) does not exist in one single place. Its evidence base is complex, diverse and distributed, and its content is available through multiple channels, on varied media, in myriad locations, and different genres of writing.It is this diaspora of material and practice that this Reader is intended to address. With over forty chapters (by some fifty authors and co-authors), from around the world, spanning over twenty years of museum practice and research, this volume acts as an aggregator drawing selectively from a notoriously distributed network of content. Divided into seven parts (on information, space, access, interpretation, objects, production and futures), the book presents a series of cross-sections through the body of digital heritage literature, each revealing how a different aspect of curatorship and museum provision has been informed, shaped or challenged by computing.Museums in a Digital Age is a provocative and inspiring guide for any student or practitioner of digital heritage.

Invisible Women: Forgotten Artists Of Florence (English And Italian Edition)


Jane Fortune - 2009
    Indiana Jane strikes again: another painting has been salvaged from centuries of decay; another woman artist rescued from oblivion. From the lofty halls of the Uffizi to the attic storerooms of the Pitti Palace, Jane Fortune leads the reader on a quest whose aim is the restoration, recuperation and rediscovery of famous or unknown works by women artists in Florence s museums. In a city of indisputable masters, Fortune opens a window on the trials and triumphs of remarkable women whose lives and works remain an unfamiliar but fascinating part of Florence s cultural heritage. With historical episodes and modern-day milestones, Invisible Women is a celebration of creativity, a protest against indifference, a race against time and a daring dream for the future.

Adorable Adele: A Modern Fairy Tale


Peter Stephan Jungk - 2009
    The painting was confiscated by the Nazis when Ferdinand Bloch, by then a widower, fled Austria in 1939. After spending many years in a Viennese museum, it was finally reclaimed by Bloch-Bauer's niece, Maria, who parted with it in 2006, knowing that she wanted this long-lost masterpiece to be seen by as many people as possible. It is now one of the most important pieces in the collection of New York's renowned Neue Galerie. Illustrated with all of the pattern, color and gilt of fin-de-siècle Vienna, this sophisticated story book is a delight for children and adults alike.

FAKING ANCIENT MESOAMERICA


Karen O. Bruhns - 2009
    Fakes and forgeries run rampant in the Mesoamerican art collections of international museums and private individuals. Authors Nancy Kelker and Karen Bruhns examine the phenomenon in this eye-opening volume. They discuss the most commonly forged classes and styles of artifacts, many of which were being duplicated as early as the 19th century. More important, they describe the system whereby these objects get made, purchased, authenticated, and placed in major museums as well as the complicity of forgers, dealers, curators, and collectors in this system. Unique to this volume are biographies of several of the forgers, who describe their craft and how they are able to effectively fool connoisseurs and specialists. An important, accessible introduction to pre-Columbian art fraud for archaeologists, art historians, and museum professionals alike. A parallel volume by the same authors discusses fakes in Andean archaeology.

A Closer Look: Deceptions and Discoveries


Marjorie E. Wieseman - 2009
    Through a series of intriguing examples and clearly explained processes, this new addition to the National Gallery’s popular Closer Look series will draw the reader into the complex issues—not all of them fully resolved—confronted by gallery professionals.

Phillip Levine: Myth, Memory, & Image: Sculpture and Drawings


Norman Lundin - 2009
    It includes a valuable autobiographical essay by the sculptor. Contributions by fellow sculptor Tom Jay and Norman Lundin, painter and professor of art at the University of Washington, offer an intimate perspective on the artist's enduring creative endeavor and accomplishment.Levine has lived, taught, and maintained a studio in Seattle since he arrived in the city in 1959. His sculpture Dancer With Flat Hat has greeted generations of students at the University of Washington. All those who have found beauty and delight in Levine's vision will enjoy the comprehensive portfolio of illustrations at the heart of the book, which covers the full span of his career. This fresh look into the artist's life work reveals his deep interest in the figure in movement, and the unexpected way the use of bronze, with its density and strength, opened the door to an artistic world of timeless lightness and grace.

Art Museums PLUS: Cultural Excursions in New England


Traute M. Marshall - 2009
    From the Colby College Museum of Art to the Museum of Russian Icons and the National Museum of American Illustration, the cradle of American art is home to a dazzling abundance of cultural opportunities. Traute M. Marshall has written this smart and engagingly personal guidebook for curious travelers, bringing to light the wealth of small and large art museums in the six New England states, ranging from world-class encyclopedic collections to more modest and specialized venues. While providing the information found in a traditional guidebook—addresses, websites, opening times, directions, and so forth—Marshall also offers readers informed and intimate introductions to the museums and their histories, holdings, traditions, and architecture. This guide also explains exhibition practices, the presentation of the permanent collection versus the attraction of temporary shows, the different educational activities offered, and the special relationship between a town or city and its art museum. Each entry concludes with a special “PLUS” section designed to further enrich any visit. This might point you to other types of museums nearby, an architecturally distinctive building in the neighborhood, the home of a famous local artist, or other sites such as artist colonies or distinguished galleries, historic inns or restaurants, or even movies with some connection to the locale. Useful as both a resource for planning your next road trip and an essential glove- compartment companion, Art Museums PLUS is a must-have for New England natives and tourists alike.

Museum Materialities: Objects, Engagements, Interpretations


Sandra H. Dudley - 2009
    It addresses fundamental issues of human sensory, emotional and aesthetic experience of objects. The chapters explore ways and contexts in which things and people mutually interact, and raise questions about how objects carry meaning and feeling, the distinctions between objects and persons, particular qualities of the museum as context for person-object engagements, and the active and embodied role of the museum visitor.Museum Materialities is divided into three sections - Objects, Engagements and Interpretations - and includes a foreword by Susan Pearce and an afterword by Howard Morphy. It examines materiality and other perceptual and ontological qualities of objects themselves; embodied sensory and cognitive engagements - both personal and across a wider audience spread - with particular objects or object types in a museum or gallery setting; notions of aesthetics, affect and wellbeing in museum contexts; and creative and innovative artistic and museum practices that seek to illuminate or critique museum objects and interpretations.Phenomenological and other approaches to embodied experience in an emphatically material world are current in a number of academic areas, most particularly strands of material culture studies within anthropology and cognate disciplines. Thus far, however, there has been no concerted application of this kind of approach to museum collections and interactions with them by museum visitors, curators, artists and researchers. Bringing together essays by scholars and practitioners from a wide disciplinary and international base, Museum Materialities seeks to make just such a contribution. In so doing it makes a valuable and original addition to the literature of both material culture studies and museum studies.

Mandala


Martin Brauen - 2009
    Numerous digital models of the mandala describe it structurally and elucidate this complex form of Tantric practice in understandable terms.

A Museum of One's Own: Private Collecting, Public Gift


Anne Higonnet - 2009
    By 1850 many "repossessed" treasures had come to rest in a new institution, the public museum, where they were assigned educational tasks. Anne Higonnet's book begins at this turning point in the history of art, but it looks instead at another new institution, the collection museum. Emerging in London with the Wallace Collection, the collection museum spread rapidly in Gilded Age America. To the discontent of many Europeans, cash-flush Americans like J.P. Morgan and Henry Clay Frick went on collecting campaigns that netted masterpiece after masterpiece, along with the furniture and fittings of dozens of aristocratic residences. From the outset, these collectors planned to present their trophies to the public as museums in which they could dictate each and every detail of the arrangements. Drawing on a decade of research, Higonnet weaves letters, auction records, and photographs into an engrossing account of the founding of both renowned and obscure collection museums. She also explores how these collectors stoked the tremendous values accorded paintings by Raphael, Titian, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Velazquez, Gainsborough, and Reynolds.

Seeing Out Louder: Art Criticism 2003-2009


Jerry Saltz - 2009
    In this volume, he looks at the most recent extravagances at the nexus of art and money, and asks, now that the money is gone, how might art and the art world put their house in order?