Museums Of Art

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is an art museum located on the eastern edge of Central Park, along what is known as Museum Mile in New York City, USA. It has a permanent collection containing more than two million works of art, divided into nineteen curatorial departments. The main building, often referred to simply as "the Met," is one of the world's largest art galleries, and has a much smaller second location in Upper Manhattan, at "The Cloisters," which features medieval art.

Represented in the permanent collection are works of art from classical antiquity and Ancient Egypt, paintings and sculptures from nearly all the European masters, and an extensive collection of American and modern art. The Met also maintains extensive holdings of African, Asian, Oceanic, Byzantine and Islamic art. The museum is also home to encyclopedic collections of musical instruments, costumes and accessories, and antique weapons and armor from around the world. A number of notable interiors, ranging from 1st century Rome through modern American design, are permanently installed in the Met's galleries.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art opened on February 20, 1872, and was originally located at 681 Fifth Avenue. John Taylor Johnston, a railroad executive whose personal art collection seeded the museum, served as its first President, and the publisher George Palmer Putnam was its founding Superintendent. In 1873, occasioned by the Met's purchase of the Cesnola Collection of Cypriot antiquities, the museum took up temporary residence at the Douglas Mansion on West 14th Street; after negotiations with the City of New York, the Met acquired land on the east side of Central Park, where it built its permanent home, a red-brick Gothic Revival stone "mausoleum" designed by American architects Calvert Vaux and Jacob Wrey Mould. The building was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1986.

As of 2007, the Met measures almost a quarter mile long and occupies more than two million square feet, more than 20 times the size of the original 1880 building.

The Met's permanent collection is cared for and exhibited by nineteen separate departments, each with a specialized staff of curators, restorers, and scholars.

Represented in the permanent collection are works of art from classical antiquity and Ancient Egypt, paintings and sculptures from nearly all the European masters, and an extensive collection of American and modern art. The Met also maintains extensive holdings of African, Asian, Oceanic, Byzantine and Islamic art. The museum is also home to encyclopedic collections of musical instruments, costumes and accessories, and antique weapons and armor from around the world. A number of notable interiors, ranging from 1st century Rome through modern American design, are permanently installed in the Met's galleries.

In addition to its permanent exhibitions, the Met organizes and hosts large travelling shows throughout the year.

The Met's director from 1955 to his death on May 11, 1966, was James J. Rorimer. He was succeeded by Thomas Hoving, who served from March 17, 1967 to June 30, 1977. The current director is Philippe de Montebello, who announced January 8, 2008 that he planned to retire at the end of the year.

The Met has one of the world's best collections of European paintings. Though the collection numbers only around 2,200 pieces, it contains many of the world's most instantly recognizable paintings. The bulk of the Met's purchasing has always been in this department, primarily focusing on Old Masters and nineteenth-century European paintings, with an emphasis on French, Italian and Dutch artists. Many great artists are represented in remarkable depth in the Met's holdings: the museum owns thirty-seven paintings by Monet, twenty-one oils by Cezanne, and eighteen Rembrandts including Aristotle With a Bust of Homer. The Met's five paintings by Vermeer represent the largest collection of the artist's work anywhere in the world. Other highlights of the collection include Van Gogh's Self-Portrait with a Straw Hat, Pieter Bruegel the Elder's The Harvesters, Georges de La Tour's The Fortune Teller, and Jacques-Louis David's The Death of Socrates. In recent decades, the Met has carried out a policy of deaccessioning its "minor" holdings in order to purchase a smaller number of "world-class" pieces. Though this policy remains controversial, it has gained a number of outstanding (and outstandingly expensive) masterpieces for the European Paintings collection, beginning with Velázquez's Juan de Pareja in 1971. One of The Met's latest purchases is Duccio's Madonna and Child, which cost the museum more than 45 million dollars, more than twice the amount it had paid for any previous painting. The painting itself is only slightly larger than 9 by 6 inches, but has been called "the Met's Mona Lisa".

During the 1970s, under the directorship of Thomas Hoving, the Met revised its deaccessioning policy. Under the new policy, the Met set its sights on acquiring "world-class" pieces, regularly funding the purchases by selling mid- to high-value items from its collection. Though the Met had always sold duplicate or minor items from its collection to fund the acquisition of new pieces, the Met's new policy was significantly more aggressive and wide-ranging than before, and allowed the deaccessioning of items with higher values which would normally have precluded their sale. The new policy provoked a great deal of criticism (in particular, from the New York Times) but had its intended effect.

Many of the items then purchased with funds generated by the more liberal deaccessioning policy are now considered the "stars" of the Met's collection, including Velázquez's Juan de Pareja and the Euphronios krater depicting the death of Sarpedon. In the years since the Met began its new deaccessioning policy, other museums have begun to emulate it with aggressive deaccessioning programs of their own. The Met has continued the policy in recent years, selling such valuable pieces as Edward Steichen's 1904 photograph The Pond-Moonlight (of which another copy was already in the Met's collection) for a record price of $2.9 million.

Now, Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is one of the most famous museums in the world. It is visited by thousands of people every month, it has one of the most interesting pieces of art and it is truly a great museum.

Have you ever been in a museum, that is so big, that you can get lost in it? And, you won't even notice it, because you are going to be busy looking at some of the worlds most famous art pieces. Welcome to the Hermitage!

The State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, Russia is one of the largest museums in the world, with 3 million works of art (not all on display at once), and one of the oldest art galleries and museums of human history and culture in the world. The vast Hermitage collections are displayed in six buildings, the main one being the Winter Palace which used to be the official residence of the Russian Tsars. International branches of The Hermitage Museum are located in Amsterdam, London, Las Vegas and Ferrara (Italy). The Hermitage holds the Guinness World Record as having the world's largest collection of paintings.

Strong points of the Hermitage collection of Western art include Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Rubens, van Dyck, Rembrandt, Poussin, Claude Lorrain, Watteau, Tiepolo, Canaletto, Canova, Rodin, Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Cézanne, van Gogh, Gauguin, Picasso, and Matisse. There are several more collections, however, including the Russian imperial regalia, an assortment of Fabergé jewellery, and the largest existing collection of ancient gold from Eastern Europe and Western Asia.

In 1717 Peter the Great visited Versailles, where he was inspired by the Château de Marly that Louis XIV had built as a retreat. Louis had called the Château, his hermitage. Thus, when Peter built his own version of Versailles, Peterhof, he too included a small out building that he called his Hermitage. When the Empress Elizabeth designed Tsarskoe Selo in the 1740s, she included a Baroque dining pavilion, also called Hermitage.

The paintings hang amid opulent interior architecture.Catherine the Great started her famed art collection in 1764 by purchasing paintings from Johann Ernst Gotzkowsky, after his bankruptcy in the year before. Gotzkowsky provided 317 paintings, including 90 not precisely identified, to the Russian crown, to satisfy debts so great that he was on the verge of bankruptcy. The collection consisted of Flemish and Dutch masters such as Rembrandt (13 paintings), Rubens (11 paintings), Jacob Jordaens (7 paintings), Antoon van Dyck (5 paintings), Paolo Veronese (5 paintings), Frans Hals (3 paintings), Raphael (2 paintings), Holbein (2 paintings), Titian (1 painting), Jan Steen, Hendrick Goltzius, Dirck van Baburen, Hendrick van Balen and Gerrit van Honthorst formed the basis and the beginning of the collection in the Hermitage. One of the Rembrandts in the possession of Gotzkowsky was Ahasuerus and Haman at the feast of Esther.

Russian ambassadors in foreign capitals were commissioned to acquire the best collections offered for sale: Brühl's collection in Saxony, Crozat's in France and the Walpole gallery and Lyde Browne marbles in England. As her collection was growing through the 1760s, Catherine commissioned the French architect Jean-Baptiste Vallin de la Mothe to build an extension to the Winter Palace. The building was completed in 1769. In the tradition of Peter the Great and Empress Elizabeth, she called the structure "my hermitage" (today, this extension is known as the "Small Hermitage"). Very few people were allowed within to see its riches—in one of her letters she lamented that "only the mice and I can admire all this."

Already her collection was filling the halls—in her lifetime she acquired 4,000 paintings from the old masters, 38,000 books, 10,000 engraved gems, 10,000 drawings, 16,000 coins and medals and a natural history collection filling two galleries—so in 1770 she commissioned another major extension. Built in two phases, by Yury Velten, this expansion was known as the Old Hermitage. She also gave the name of the Hermitage to her private theatre, built nearby between 1783 and 1787 by the Italian architect Giacomo Quarenghi.

Gradually, imperial collections were enriched by relics of Greek and Scythian culture, unearthed during excavations on Pereshchepina, Pazyryk, and other ancient burial mounds in southern Russia. Thus started one of the world's richest collections of ancient gold, which now includes a substantial part of Troy's treasures unearthed by Heinrich Schliemann and seized from Berlin museums by the Red Army in 1945.

To house the ever-expanding collection of Greek, Roman, and Egyptian antiquities, Nicholas I commissioned the neoclassicist German architect Leo von Klenze to design a building for the public museum. Probably the first purpose-built art gallery in Eastern Europe, the New Hermitage was opened to the public in 1852.

As the Czars continued to amass their art holdings, several works of Leonardo da Vinci, Jan van Eyck, and Raphael were bought in Italy. The Hermitage collection of Rembrandts was considered the largest in the world.

In recent years, Hermitage expanded to the nearby buildings of the General Staff and launched several ambitious projects abroad, including the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum in Las Vegas, the Hermitage Rooms in London's Somerset House (which closed permanently in November 2007 due to poor visitor numbers), and the Hermitage Amsterdam in the former Amstelhof, Amsterdam.

The Hermitage and much of its collection were featured in the 24-hour long Japanese documentary film, the largest film ever about the Hermitage, made in the 1990s. The Winter Palace and other buildings of the Hermitage and its interiors were filmed in several Soviet documentaries and educational films, as well as in numerous feature films, such as the James Bond film Golden Eye, Anna Karenina, and other movies. The most recent movie made in the Hermitage was Russian Ark, a single-shot walkthrough with period re-enactments by actors in period-style costumes, spanning three hundred years of court meetings, balls and family life in the Winter Palace.

In July 2006, the museum announced that 221 minor items, including jewelry, Orthodox icons, silverware and richly enameled objects, had been stolen. The value of the stolen items was estimated to be approximately $543,000; by the end of 2006 some of the stolen items were recovered.

In the recent years there is proposal to open Hermitage Museum's branch in Vilnius, capital of Lithuania.