Английский язык. Хрестоматия по чтению специальных текстов «Famous World Museums» для студентов 1-2 курсов специальности 070503 «Музейное дело» дневно
.pdfenvironmental hazards. Objects in storage are kept under optimum conditions appropriate to their medium, age, and state of preservation.
Only a small percentage of the museum's permanent collection is on view at any given time. However, the museum regularly rotates its exhibits, enabling returning visitors to see a large proportion of the museum's holdings. In addition to displaying the permanent collection, the museum mounts about 30 special exhibitions every year, accompanied by catalogues, lectures, symposia, and related activities.
The museum regularly presents guided tours for museum visitors. It also presents gallery talks, lectures, concerts, films, teacher workshops, and other educational programs. The museum publishes more than 20 catalogues, periodicals, scholarly books, and popular guides each year.
SCHOLARSHIP
The Met has two major libraries that house reference works, exhibition and sales catalogues, books on archaeology and art history, and photographs and slides. These libraries are open to scholars, who may either visit the museum or access part of the collection online via the Internet. Scholars are regularly invited to study the collections and to present papers at symposia or through the Met's scholarly journal, the Metropolitan Museum Journal. The museum's Egyptian and Ancient Near East departments sponsor archaeological expeditions in the Middle East and regularly publish their findings in leading scholarly journals.
The museum, in collaboration with the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University, sponsors a curatorial studies program for graduate students in art history. The Met's education department works with New York City's public and private schools to offer on-site and outreach programs. The museum also offers internships to high school and college students. Interns learn about museum careers by working on departmental projects, giving gallery talks, or working at the Visitor Center.
FUNDING
The museum receives funding from corporations, individuals, foundations, and the federal, state, and city governments. Admission fees, membership dues, and income from the endowment and from auxiliary activities (such as shops and restaurants) also support the museum's operations.
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FACILITIES
Nearly all of the Met's curatorial and conservation departments, libraries, and most support staff offices are located in the museum's main building, which is 140,000 sq m (1.5 million sq ft). In addition, the museum houses a photography studio, an electronic resource center, two auditoriums, several shops, two restaurants, and a public cafeteria. The museum's major curatorial departments organize and oversee collections of American art; ancient Near Eastern art; arms and armor; arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas; Asian art; costumes; drawings and prints; Egyptian art; European paintings; European sculpture and decorative arts; Greek and Roman art; Islamic art; European art; medieval art; musical instruments; photographs; and 20th-century art.
AMERICAN ART
Housed in the American Wing, this vast collection includes paintings, sculpture, furniture, silverware, glass, ceramics, textiles, and 25 unique period rooms featuring art from various time periods throughout American history. Paintings include masterworks by American painters John Singleton Copley, John Singer Sargent, Thomas Eakins, and Winslow Homer. The Henry R. Luce Study Center offers visitors access to objects not on view in the galleries.
ANCIENT NEAR EASTERN ART
The objects in this department range from a vast geographical area in southwest Asia and northeast Africa from around 5000 be to around ad 600. Notable works include Assyrian relieves from the palace of King Ashurnasirpal II at Calah (now Nimrud, Iraq), Sumerian sculpture, Anatolian ivories, Iranian bronzes, and Achaemenid and Sassanian works in silver and gold. This department is renowned for its collection of European armor from the Middle Ages (5th century to 15th century) and the Renaissance (14th century to 17th century). It also contains significant objects from North America, the Middle East, and Asia. The department exhibits various pieces of armor, edged weapons (such as spears and swords), and firearms as works of art.
ARTS OF AFRICA, OCEANIA, AND THE AMERICAS
This department contains works of art from Africa, the Pacific islands, and pre-Columbian America. The collection expanded considerably in 1978 when the museum acquired a vast assortment of works donated by Nelson A.
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Rockefeller, former United States vice president. Now housed in a wing named for Rockefeller's son, Michael C. Rockefeller, the department's holdings are rich in pre-Columbian gold artifacts, ceramics from Peru, Dogon and Benin sculpture, and various objects from New Guinea.
ASIAN ART
The Asian Art collection contains some of the world's finest examples of art from China, Japan, Korea, and South and Southeast Asia. The works range from around 3000 B.C. to the present. The collections of Chinese painting, calligraphy, and monumental Buddhist bronzes, as well as Japanese screens, lacquerwork, and prints are especially notable. See also Japanese Art and Architecture; Chinese Art and Architecture; Printing Techniques: Screen Printing.
THE COSTUME INSTITUTE
Founded in 1937, The Costume Institute is a research facility that collects, preserves, and exhibits clothing from the late 16th century to the present. The department maintains thousands of examples of costumes and accessories in storage. It also operates an extensive library. The Costume Institute holds special exhibitions three times a year to show aspects of costume history and contemporary fashion.
DRAWINGS AND PRINTS
The drawings collection began in 1880 with a gift from American industrialist and philanthropist Cornelius Vanderbilt that consisted of 670 drawings by distinguished European artists. The collection is now one of the finest of its kind in the world, especially in its examples of Italian and French drawings from the 15th century through the 19th century. The print collection is especially comprehensive, rich in 15th-century German, 18th-century Italian, and 19th-century French images. The collection also contains more than 12,000 illustrated books, many architectural designs, and a famous collection of baseball cards.
EGYPTIAN ART
Early in the 20th century the Met's archaeological excavation program provided the museum with many fine examples of art from Egypt's prehistoric period (before 3000 be) to the 8th century ad. The collection is
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especially well endowed with art owned by Egyptian rulers during the Middle Kingdom (2040 to 1640 be) and early New Kingdom (1550 to 1070 be). It also has many examples of funerary art (art used in burials) from the Late Period of Egyptian history, between the 700s and 300s be (see Egypt: History). The collection of Egyptian art is now one of the most comprehensive outside Egypt, with 36,000 objects on view, including the mastaba (mud-brick) tomb of Perneb, an Egyptian dignitary who died in 2650 be; royal portrait sculpture from Egypt's 12th Dynasty (1900s to 1700s be); the Sphinx of Amenhotep III, from the 18th Dynasty (1300s be); and the Temple of Dendur, from the early Roman period (about 15 be).
EUROPEAN PAINTINGS
The museum owns about 3000 paintings by distinguished European artists. The Italian, Flemish, Dutch, and French schools of painting are most strongly represented, but there are also works by Spanish and British masters. Of special significance are works by Italian painters Andrea Mantegna, Sandro Botticelli, Agnolo Bronzino, and Giovanni Battista Tiepolo; Flemish painters Jan van Eyck, Peter Paul Rubens, and Sir Anthony van Dyck; Dutch painters Rembrandt, Jan Vermeer, and Vincent van Gogh; Spanish painters Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velazquez, El Greco, and Goya (see Goya y Lucientes, Francisco Jose de); and French painters Gustave Courbet, Edouard Manet, and Claude Oscar Monet.
EUROPEAN SCULPTURE AND DECORATIVE ARTS
This department of more than 60,000 works of art includes sculpture, woodwork and furniture, ceramics and glass, metalwork and jewelry, clocks and watches, scientific instruments, and tapestries and textiles. Many of the works are displayed in rooms decorated to reflect the periods in which the various objects were originally created. The department's most notable objects were created during the Italian Renaissance and in 18th-century France. The collection also contains fine examples of Italian majolica tin-glaze
GREEK AND ROMAN ART
This collection represents several millennia and many civilizations. It contains numerous examples of art from the Classical period of ancient Greece, from 475 to 323 be, and ancient Roman art dating to around ad 313. In
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addition, the collection features pre-Greek art from the ancient Cypriot, Minoan, and Mycenaean civilizations. Strengths of this department include ancient Greek sculpture from Cyprus, painted Greek vases, and Roman portrait busts and wall paintings. The holdings in glass and silver are among the finest in the world, and the sculpture collection from ancient Attica is the best outside Athens, Greece. See also Greek Art and Architecture; Roman Art and Architecture.
ISLAMIC ART
This collection contains Islamic objects from regions stretching from Spain to India, the Middle East, and Central Asia, reflecting the diversity and range of Islamic culture. Outstanding holdings include ceramics, rugs and carpets, textiles, glass and metalwork, and royal miniature paintings.
ROBERT LEHMAN COLLECTION
The Robert Lehman Wing houses the extraordinary array of works collected by the Lehman family of American philanthropists, bankers, and art collectors. Rich in distinguished European paintings, French works of the 19th and 20th centuries, drawings, majolica (tin-glazed earthenware), Venetian glass, bronzes, furniture, enamels, and textiles, the collection is exhibited in galleries designed to reflect the ambience of the Lehman family house in New York.
MEDIEVAL ART AND THE CLOISTERS
The medieval collections are drawn from all historical phases of art in the Middle Ages: Early Christian, Byzantine, Migration, Romanesque, and Gothic. The collections contain paintings, sculpture, silver, enamels, glass, ivory carvings, jewelry, and tapestries. They are displayed both in the main building and at The Cloisters, a building in northern Manhattan incorporating elements of five medieval cloisters (places of religious seclusion).
MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS
This collection of more than 4000 musical instruments illustrates the history of music and performance. The pieces were selected for technical and social importance as well as tonal and visual beauty. Of particular importance are instruments from medieval European courts, the oldest piano still in existence, rare violins and harpsichords, non-Western instruments, and the workshop of a traditional violin-maker.
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PHOTOGRAPHS
The photography department houses a collection of more than 20,000 images, including examples from the mid-1800s by such masters as English photographer William Henry Fox Talbot and French photographer Nadar. Also notable is a collection of major works by avant-garde American and European photographers covering the half century from 1895 to 1945.
THE SOLOMON R. GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, which opened on October 21, 1959, is one of the best-known museums in New York City and one of the 20th century's most important architectural landmarks. Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, the museum–which is often called simply The Guggenheim–is home to a renowned permanent collection of Impressionist. Post-Impressionist, early Modern and contemporary art, and also features special exhibitions throughout the year. Located on the Upper East Side in New York City it is the second museum opened by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation which was founded in 1937. 2009 will mark the 50th year anniversary of the Frank Lloyd Wright building, which recently underwent an extensive, three year renovation. In September, 2008, the Board of Trustees of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation confirmed the appointment of Richard Armstrong as its fifth director, effective November 4, 2008. He succeeds Thomas B. Krens, who served as Director from 1998.
HISTORY
Guided by his art adviser, the German painter Hilla Rebay, Solomon Guggenheim began to collect works by nonobjective artists in 1929. (For Rebay, the word «nonobjective» signified the spiritual dimensions of pure abstraction.) At first, Guggenheim showed his work from his apartment and then, as the collection grew, established the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in 1937 for the «promotion and encouragement and education in art and the enlightenment of the public.» Chartered by the Board of Regents of New York State, the Foundation was endowed to operate one or more museums; Solomon Guggenheim was elected its first President and Rebay its Director.
Two years later, in 1939, the Guggenheim Foundation's first museum, «The Museum of Non-Objective Painting», opened in rented quarters at 24
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East Fifty-Fourth Street in New York and showcased art by early modernists such as Rudolf Bauer, Hilla Rebay, Wassily Kandinsky, and Piet Mondrian. Guggenheim continued to add to his collection, acquiring paintings by Marc Chagall, Robert Delaunay, Fernand Leger, Amedeo Modigliani and Pablo Picasso and the collection quickly outgrew its original space. So, in 1943, Rebay and Guggenheim commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to design a permanent structure for the collection. It took Wright 15 years, 700 sketches, and six sets of working drawings to create the museum that now stands at its present location, at the corners of 89th Street and Fifth Avenue (overlooking Central Park). The building opened in the fall of 1959, ten years after the death of Solomon Guggenheim and six months after the death of Frank Lloyd Wright.
The distinctive building, Wright's last major work, instantly polarized architecture critics upon completion, though today it is widely revered. From the street, the building looks approximately like a white ribbon curled into a cylindrical stack, slightly wider at the top than the bottom. Its appearance is in sharp contrast to the more typically boxy Manhattan buildings that surround it, a fact relished by Wright who claimed that his museum would make the nearby Metropolitan Museum of Art «look like a Protestant barn.»
Internally, the viewing gallery forms a gentle helical spiral from the ground level up to the top of the building. Paintings are displayed along the walls of the spiral and also in exhibition space found at annex levels along the way. The skylight is in the center of the museum.
Most of the criticism of the building has focused on the idea that it overshadows the artworks displayed within, and that it is particularly difficult to properly hang paintings in the shallow windowless exhibition niches that surround the central spiral. Although the rotunda is generously lit by a large skylight, the niches are heavily shadowed by the walkway itself, leaving the art to be lit largely by artificial light. The walls of the niches are neither vertical nor flat (most are gently concave), meaning that canvasses must be mounted proud of the wall's surface. The limited space within the niches means that sculptures are generally relegated to plinths amid the main spiral walkway itself. Prior to its opening, twenty-one artists, including Willem de Kooning and Robert Motherwell, signed a letter protesting the display of their work in such a space.
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A 1966 U.S. postage stamp honors Frank Lloyd Wright with the Guggenheim visible in the background.
In 1992, the building was supplemented by an adjoining rectangular tower, taller than the original spiral, designed by the architectural firm of Gwathmey Siegel & Associates Architects. By that point, the building had become iconic enough that this augmentation of Wright's original design was itself controversial.
In October 2005, Lisa Dennison, a longtime Guggenheim curator, was appointed director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Dennison resigned in July 2007 to work at the auction house Sotheby's.
From October 2005 to February 2008, Thomas Krens remained director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, having won a decisive victory over billionaire philanthropist and board member Peter Lewis. A significant contributor to the Guggenheim Foundation, Lewis resigned in 2005 in a dispute with the board over the direction and leadership of the Foundation. Despite this, Krens and Lewis nevertheless continue to agree in describing the building itself as «the most important piece of art in the collection.»
In February 2008, Krens stepped down as the Director of the Guggenheim Foundation, but remains an advisor to the Guggenheim's international expansion projects. The search for a new Director, who will head both the New York museum and the Foundation was recently completed with the Board's appointment of Richard Armstrong, formerly director of Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museum of Art, as its fifth director.
2005-2008 exterior restoration
From September 2005 to July 2008, the Guggenheim Museum was enclosed in scaffolding while a team of architects, structural engineers, and conservators undertook a comprehensive condition assessment and restoration of Frank Lloyd Wright's landmark building in preparation for its 50th anniversary celebration in 2009.
In the first phase of this project, a team of restoration architects, structural engineers, and architectural conservators worked together to create a comprehensive assessment of the building's current condition that determined that the structure was, fundamentally sound. This initial condition assessment included:
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•the removal of 11 coats of paint from the original surface, revealing hundreds of cracks caused over the years, primarily from seasonal temperature fluctuations
•detailed monitoring of the movement of selected cracks over 17 months
•impact-echo technology, in which sound waves are sent into the concrete and the rebound is measured in order to locate voids within the walls
•extensive laser surveys of the exterior and interior surfaces, believed to be the largest laser model ever constructed
•core drilling to gather samples of the original concrete and other construction materials
•testing of potential repair materials.
20TH-CENTURY ART
Located in the Lila Acheson Wallace Wing, this department includes European and American paintings, works on paper, sculpture, design, and architecture created from 1900 to the present. Works by Spanish artist Pablo Picasso, Swiss artist Paul Klee, and examples of abstract expressionism are especially well represented. The department displays sculptures during warm months.
MUSEUM OF THE MOVING IMAGE
The Museum is located on the site of the largest, busiest, and most significant motion picture and television production facility between London and Hollywood, the Astoria Studio. Built in 1920 across the East River from midtown Manhattan, the studio was Paramount's East Coast production facility, and, in the 1930s, a site for independent film production. In 1942 the U.S. Army bought the Astoria Studio and renamed it the Signal Corps Photographic Center. The studio filled a major need for expanded production capability to speed the training of millions of wartime inductees. After the Army left in 1971, the site fell into disrepair.
In 1977, the Astoria Motion Picture and Television Center Foundation, Inc. (the Museum's predecessor organization) was formed. The not-for-profit organization obtained national historic site status in 1978 and began the process of returning the studio to feature-film production. By January 1981 it had become clear that additional resources would be needed to redevelop the studio site, and the City of New York found a real estate developer to operate
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a commercial feature-film and television production facility (now known as Kaufman Astoria Studios).
In 1982, ownership of the entire studio site was transferred from the U.S. General Services Administration to the City of New York. At the same time, in recognition of the Foundation's key role in saving the site, the City set aside one of the thirteen studio buildings for educational and cultural purposes related to the history of motion pictures and television. In 1981, Rochelle Slovin was appointed Executive Director. At her recommendation, the purpose of the organization which had been to reopen the Astoria Studio for film production was revised. The creation of a museum about motion pictures and television was established as the organization's new directive. Public education was made the central goal, and presenting exhibitions and screenings and maintaining a collection were set forth as its major activities. The Astoria Motion Picture and Television Foundation was reincorporated as the Museum of the Moving Image in 1985. A successful $20 million capital campaign enabled the Museum to renovate one of the original studio buildings and to open to the public in 1988.
TEXAS MILITARY FORCES MUSEUM
In 1986, a project was started at Camp Mabry in Austin, Texas, to establish a museum and archival collection, dedicated to the men and women who served in the military forces of Texas. In 1987, a military historical holding was established, sanctioned by the United States Army Center of Military History.
In 1990, the Adjutant General designated building 6 as the site for the museum. Volunteers were recruited and assembled and work began to establish two exhibit galleries, and a workshop. As a result of their labor and dedication, a formal opening was held November 14, 1992. The museum was incorporated with a state charter and established as a not-for-profit corporation with the Internal Revenue Service. The history of all major Texas National Guard units is being preserved by means of exhibits and written histories. The storyline begins with the Texas War for Independence and extends through all major conflicts. In addition to the main gallery, separate galleries include the history of the Texas Air National Guard, the history of the 36th Infantry Division, and the «Lost Battalion» (2nd Battalion, 131st Field Artillery); the Great Hall exhibit of aircraft, weapons, equipment and vehicles; Armor Row
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