Category Archives: Museums

Morgan Library Exhibits: ‘Van Eyck To Mondrian’

Building on the Morgan’s tradition of presenting to the American public distinguished works from outstanding institutions abroad, Van Eyck to Mondrian: 300 Years of Collecting in Dresden focuses on the exceptional drawing collection of the Kupferstich-Kabinett, Dresden.

Established by Augustus II the Strong, Elector of Saxony, in 1720, the museum is one of the oldest and finest depositories of works on paper in the world. The exhibition celebrates pivotal moments and key traditions in the history of European draftsmanship. Most remarkably, it will feature Jan van Eyck’s Portrait of an Elderly Man (ca. 1435–40)—an exceptionally rare drawing by the great Netherlandish Renaissance painter, which has never before traveled to the United States.

The Kupferstich-Kabinett’s strength in Northern Renaissance and Baroque drawings will be further showcased through works by Lucas Cranach the Elder, Hans Holbein the Younger, Rembrandt, and Rubens, while the museum’s rich holdings of Southern European works will be represented by Correggio, Bronzino, Sofonisba Anguissola, and others.

Among works produced in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, highlights include studies by Caspar David Friedrich, Goya, Käthe Kollwitz, Gustav Klimt, Otto Dix, and Piet Mondrian.

Art & Culture: History Of Indigo (National Gallery)

Our Conservation Fellow, Kendall Francis takes a closer look at indigo, a blue dye and pigment extracted from the leaves of plants, and how it is used and represented in paintings in our collection.

Kendall’s research reveals histories that are not explicitly portrayed in the paintings and highlights the important contributions from a wider range of people, including the enslaved people who cultivated the crops and extracted the indigo against their will. Supported using public funding by Arts Council England.

Road Trips: Car Museums & Design In Saxony, Germany

The city of Zwickau in eastern Germany has a long and varied history of car production and industrial design. Its story is told in the August Horch Museum – beginning with the production of Horch cars, to Audis, to the East German car, the Trabant.

On her trip to Zwickau, Hannah Hummel discovers the city’s car history, as well as its art and cultural history. Both the composer Robert Schumann and the expressionist painter and printmaker Max Pechstein were born in Zwickau. This episode of Destination Culture also takes viewers to Schneeberg – a creative hub in Saxony, where students from around the world study fashion and textile design.

Video timeline: 00:00 Intro 01:00 Car museum Zwickau 02:47 Recreating the Horch 14-17 04:49 Trabant – the GDR cult car 06:41 Hannah driving a Trabant 10:53 Composer Robert Schumann’s birthplace 11:49 Max Pechstein Museum 13:13 Werdau, meeting photographer Philipp Gladsome 16:18 Schneeberg, University of Applied Arts 18:46 Fashion design student Ridhima Wadhwa from Gujarat, India 22:05 Miner’s parade 23:45 Fashion designer Franziska Heinze

Art: ‘Whistler To Cassatt – American Painters In France’ (Denver Museum)

Timothy J. Standring, Curator Emeritus at the Denver Art Museum, discusses Mary Cassatt, including “Mother and Child,” one of her most important works.

James Abbott McNeill Whistler challenged traditional approaches to painting by focusing more on colors and composition rather than the subject matter. In this video, Timothy J. Standring, Curator Emeritus at the Denver Art Museum, takes a look at Whistler’s artistic journey to finding his unique style.

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Podcasts: Conserving Ancient Bagan, Myanmar

“Bagan is actually a splendid site. You can imagine in only in this, like, fifty square kilometers, they have more than 3,000 monuments. And then all the monuments have different styles and different architecture”.

The ancient past of Bagan, Myanmar, is still visible today in the more than 3,000 temples, monasteries, and works of art and architecture that remain at the site. Beginning around 1000 CE, Bagan served as the capital city of the Pagan Kingdom. Many of the surviving monuments date from the 11th to 13th centuries. A number of these temples are still used by worshippers and pilgrims today. A 2016 earthquake, which damaged over 400 structures, brought renewed international attention to Bagan and its future.

In February 2020, a team from the Getty Conservation Institute (GCI) returned from doing intensive preparatory work with international and local colleagues in Bagan to launch a long-term conservation project there. Soon after, the worldwide outbreak of COVID-19 closed borders and halted travel. In February 2021, a coup d’état staged by the Burmese Military plunged the country into further uncertainty.

In this episode, Susan Macdonald, head of Buildings and Sites at the GCI, and Ohnmar Myo, the GCI’s consultant in Myanmar, discuss the history of Bagan, the demands and challenges of conservation there, and their hopes for the future of the site. Myo is a former project officer of the Cultural Unit, UNESCO, and was a principal preparator of the report that confirmed Bagan’s World Heritage Site status in 2019. This conversation was recorded in January 2021, under very different circumstances, but it captures the curiosity, ambitions, optimism, and collaborative spirit that guided the project at that time.

Museum Tours: The Met Cloisters, New York (4K)

“The Cloisters, also known as the Met Cloisters, is a museum in Fort Tryon Park in Washington Heights, Manhattan, New York City, specializing in European medieval art and architecture, with a focus on the Romanesque and Gothic periods. Governed by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it contains a large collection of medieval artworks shown in the architectural settings of French monasteries and abbeys…..”

Exhibits: ‘Life Between Islands – Caribbean And British Art 1950’s To Now’

Art: ‘Retrospectrum – Bob Dylan’, Frost Art Museum

Poetic Views: Museum at Wordsworth Grasmere

The Museum at Wordsworth Grasmere, the second phase of work at the former Lake District home of the great English Romantic poet William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy, has opened to the public, with all gallery, exhibition design and interpretative overviews by Nissen Richards Studio.

The first phase of work by Nissen Richards Studio encompassed the conservation and reinterpretation of Dove Cottage itself, where William and Dorothy once lived, plus the new identity for Wordsworth Grasmere and the scheme’s signage and wayfinding.

The new visitor journey, designed by Nissen Richards Studio in close collaboration with the Wordsworth Grasmere team, includes a series of threshold moments, such as a totem sign and the setting of words into the walkways, featuring fragments of poems going off in two directions, so that visitors see them clearly on arrival and departure.

The Museum includes a shop and ticketing area, before visitors enter a new, double-height orientation space, where quotations by Wordsworth are set within a dramatic, full-height light wall. Visitors then make their way to a former stable space that houses an immersive introductory film, before stepping over the threshold into Dove Cottage. Visitors return to The Museum via Dove Cottage’s Garden-Orchard, entering an expanded first floor space, loosely arranged into four new galleries. Galleries One and Four are set to one side and Galleries Two and Three to the other, whilst a pause space in between offers views onto the gardens and surrounding landscape.

Tours: M+ Museum In Hong Kong Opens To The Public

M+ is a museum of visual culture in the West Kowloon Cultural District of Hong Kong. It exhibits twentieth and twenty-first century visual culture encompassing visual art, design and architecture, and moving image. It opened on 12 November 2021.