Art museum
An art museum, or art gallery, is an organization, usually with buildings or spaces for the display of art from the museum's own collection. It might be in public or private ownership, be accessible to all, or have restrictions in place. Although primarily concerned with visual art, art museums are often used as a venue for other cultural exchanges and artistic activities, such as lectures, jewelry, performance arts, music concerts, or poetry readings. Art museums also frequently host themed temporary exhibitions, which often include items on loan from other collections.
Terminology
An institution dedicated to the display of art can be called an art museum or an art gallery, and the two terms may be used interchangeably. This is reflected in the names of institutions around the world, some of which are considered art galleries, such as the National Gallery in London and Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, and some of which are considered museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo.The phrase "art gallery" is also sometimes used to describe businesses which display art for sale, but these are not art museums.
History
Private collections
Throughout history, large and expensive works of art have generally been commissioned by religious institutions or political leaders and been displayed in temples, churches, and palaces. Although these collections of art were not open to the general public, they were often made available for viewing for a section of the public. In classical times, religious institutions began to function as an early form of art gallery. Wealthy Roman collectors of engraved gems and other precious objects, such as Julius Caesar, often donated their collections to temples. It is unclear how easy it was in practice for the public to view these items.In Europe, from the Late Medieval period onwards, areas in royal palaces, castles, and large country houses of the social elite were often made partially accessible to sections of the public, where art collections could be viewed. At the Palace of Versailles, entrance was restricted to people of certain social classes who were required to wear the proper apparel, which typically included the appropriate accessories, silver shoe buckles and a sword, could be hired from shops outside. The treasuries of cathedrals and large churches, or parts of them, were often set out for public display and veneration. Many of the grander English country houses could be toured by the respectable for a tip to the housekeeper, during the long periods when the family were not in residence.
Special arrangements were made to allow the public to see many royal or private collections placed in galleries, as with most of the paintings of the Orleans Collection, which were housed in a wing of the Palais-Royal in Paris and could be visited for most of the 18th century. In Italy, the art tourism of the Grand Tour became a major industry from the 18th century onwards, and cities made efforts to make their key works accessible. The Capitoline Museums began in 1471 with a donation of classical sculpture to the city of Rome by the Papacy, while the Vatican Museums, whose collections are still owned by the Pope, trace their foundation to 1506, when the recently discovered Laocoön and His Sons was put on public display. A series of museums on different subjects were opened over subsequent centuries, and many of the buildings of the Vatican were purpose-built as galleries. An early royal treasury opened to the public was the Green Vault of the Kingdom of Saxony in the 1720s.
Privately funded museums open to the public began to be established from the 17th century onwards, often based around a collection of the cabinet of curiosities type. The first such museum was the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, opened in 1683 to house and display the artefacts of Elias Ashmole that were given to Oxford University in a bequest.
Public museums
The Kunstmuseum Basel, through its lineage which extends back to the Amerbach Cabinet, which included a collection of works by Hans Holbein the Younger and purchased by the city of Basel in 1661, is considered to be the first museum of art open to the public in the world.In the second half of the 18th century, many private collections of art were opened to the public, and during and after the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, many royal collections were nationalized, even where the monarchy remained in place, as in Spain and Bavaria.
In 1753, the British Museum was established and the Old Royal Library collection of manuscripts was donated to it for public viewing. In 1777, a proposal to the British government was put forward by MP John Wilkes to buy the art collection of the late Sir Robert Walpole, who had amassed one of the greatest such collections in Europe, and house it in a specially built wing of the British Museum for public viewing. After much debate, the idea was eventually abandoned due to the great expense, and twenty years later, the collection was bought by Tsaritsa Catherine the Great of Russia and housed in the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg.
The Bavarian royal collection was opened to the public in 1779 and the Medici collection in Florence around 1789. The opening of the Musée du Louvre during the French Revolution in 1793 as a public museum for much of the former French royal collection marked an important stage in the development of public access to art by transferring the ownership to a republican state; but it was a continuation of trends already well established.
The building now occupied by the Prado in Madrid was built before the French Revolution for the public display of parts of the royal art collection, and similar royal galleries were opened to the public in Vienna, Munich and other capitals. In Great Britain, however, the corresponding Royal Collection remained in the private hands of the monarch, and the first purpose-built national art galleries were the Dulwich Picture Gallery, founded in 1814 and the National Gallery, London opened to the public a decade later in 1824. Similarly, the National Gallery in Prague was not formed by opening an existing royal or princely art collection to the public, but was created from scratch as a joint project of some Czech aristocrats in 1796.
The Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. is generally considered to have been the first art museum in the United States. It was originally housed in the Renwick Gallery, built in 1859. Now a part of the Smithsonian Institution, the Renwick housed William Wilson Corcoran's collection of American and European art. The building was designed by James Renwick Jr. and finally completed in 1874. It is located at 1661 Pennsylvania Avenue NW. Renwick designed it after the Louvre's Tuileries addition. At the time of its construction, it was known as "the American Louvre".
University museums and galleries
University art museums and galleries constitute collections of art developed, owned, and maintained by all kinds of schools, community colleges, colleges, and universities. This phenomenon exists in the West and East, making it a global practice. Although easily overlooked, there are over 700 university art museums in the US alone. This number, compared to other kinds of art museums, makes university art museums perhaps the largest category of art museums in the country. While the first of these collections can be traced to learning collections developed in art academies in Western Europe, they are now associated with and housed in centers of higher education of all types.Galleries as a specific section in museums
The word gallery being originally an architectural term, the display rooms in museums are often called public galleries. Also frequently, a series of rooms dedicated to specific historic periods or other significant themed groupings of works within a museum with a more varied collection are referred to as specific galleries, e.g. Egyptian Gallery or Cast Gallery.Visual art not shown in a gallery
Works on paper, such as drawings, pastels, watercolors, prints, and photographs are typically not permanently displayed for reasons of conservation. Instead, public access to these materials is provided by a dedicated print room located within the museum. Murals or mosaics often remain where they have been created, although many have also been removed to galleries. Various forms of 20th-century art, such as land art and performance art, also usually exist outside a gallery. Photographic records of these kinds of art are often shown in galleries, however. Most museums and large art galleries own more works than they have room to display. The rest are held in reserve collections, on or off-site.A sculpture garden is similar to an art gallery, presenting sculpture in an outdoor space. Sculpture has grown in popularity with sculptures installed in open spaces on both a permanent and temporary basis.
Architecture
Most larger paintings from about 1530 onwards were designed to be seen either in churches or palaces, and many buildings built as palaces now function successfully as art museums. By the 18th century additions to palaces and country houses were sometimes intended specifically as galleries for viewing art, and designed with that in mind. The architectural form of the entire building solely intended to be an art gallery was arguably established by Sir John Soane with his design for the Dulwich Picture Gallery in 1817. This established the gallery as a series of interconnected rooms with largely uninterrupted wall spaces for hanging pictures and indirect lighting from skylights or roof lanterns.The late 19th century saw a boom in the building of public art galleries in Europe and America, becoming an essential cultural feature of larger cities. More art galleries rose up alongside museums and public libraries as part of the municipal drive for literacy and public education.
Over the middle and late twentieth century, earlier architectural styles employed for art museums succumbed to modern styles, such as Deconstructivism. Examples of this trend include the Guggenheim Museum in New York City by Frank Lloyd Wright, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao by Frank Gehry, Centre Pompidou-Metz by Shigeru Ban, and the redesign of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art by Mario Botta. Some critics argue these galleries defeat their purposes because their dramatic interior spaces distract the eye from the paintings they are supposed to exhibit.