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Brooklyn Museum
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Brooklyn Museum, June 2008
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| Location: | Brooklyn, NY |
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| Built: | 1895 |
| Architect: | McKim, Mead & White; French,Daniel Chester |
| Architectural style: | Beaux-Arts |
| Governing body: | Private |
| NRHP Reference#: | 77000944[1] |
| Added to NRHP: | August 22, 1977 |
The Brooklyn Museum is an art museum located in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. At 560,000 square feet, the museum holds New York City's second largest art collection with roughly 1.5 million works.[2]
Founded in 1895, the Beaux-Arts building, designed by McKim, Mead and White, was planned to be the largest art museum in the world. The museum went through struggles to maintain its building and collection, only to be revitalized in the late 20th-century, thanks to major renovations. Significant areas of the collection include antiquities, specifically their collection of Egyptian antiquities spanning over 3,000 years. African, Oceanic, and Japanese art make for notable antiquities collections as well. American art is heavily represented, starting at the Colonial period. Artists represented in the collection include Mark Rothko, Edward Hopper, Norman Rockwell, Winslow Homer, Edgar Degas, Georgia O'Keefe, and Max Weber. The museum also has a "Memorial Sculpture Garden" which features salvaged architectural elements from throughout New York City. [2]
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The roots of the Brooklyn Museum extend back to the 1823 founding of the Brooklyn Apprentices’ Library in Brooklyn Heights. The Library moved into the Brooklyn Lyceum building on Washington Street in 1841; the institutions merged two years later to form the Brooklyn Institute, which offered exhibitions of painting and sculpture and lectures on diverse subjects. In 1890, Institute leaders reorganized as the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences and began planning the Brooklyn Museum. Until the 1970s the Museum would remain a subdivision of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, among other subdivisions that at one point included the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and the Brooklyn Children’s Museum (all became independent at that time).[3]
Opened in 1897 and founded by Augustus Graham, the Brooklyn Museum building is a steel frame structure—built to the standards of classical masonry—designed by the famous architectural firm of McKim, Mead, and White and built by the Carlin Construction Company. The initial design for the Brooklyn Museum was four times as large as the actualized version; actualized plans reflect a compromise to the specifications of the New York City government.[4] Daniel Chester French, the noted sculptor of the Lincoln Memorial, was the principal designer of the pediment sculptures and the monolithic 12½ foot figures along the cornice. The figures were carved by 11 different sculptors. French was also the designer of the two allegorical figures Brooklyn and Manhattan currently flanking the museum's entrance (created in 1916 for the Brooklyn approach to the Manhattan Bridge, relocated to the museum in 1963).
William Henry Fox was the first director of the museum serving from 1914-1934. He was followed by Philip Newell Youtz from 1934-1938, Laurance Page Roberts from 1939-1946, Isabel Spaulding Roberts from 1943-1946, Charles Nagel, Jr. from 1946-1955, Edgar Craig Schenck from 1955-1959.
Thomas S. Buechner was named as the museum's director in 1960, making him one of the youngest directors in the country. Buechner oversaw a major transformation in the way the museum displayed art and brought some one thousand works that had been languishing in the museum's archives and put them on display. Buechner played a pivotal role in rescuing the Daniel Chester French sculptures from destruction due to an expansion project at the Manhattan Bridge in the 1960s.[5]
From 1971-1974 Duncan F. Cameron served as director, with Michael Botwinick serving from 1974–1982, Linda S. Ferber as acting director for part of 1983, and Robert T. Buck from 1983-1997.
The Brooklyn Museum changed its name to Brooklyn Museum of Art in 1997, shortly before the start of Arnold L. Lehman's current term as director. On March 12, 2004, the museum announced that it would revert to its previous name. In April 2004, a new entrance pavilion, designed by James Stewart Polshek and facing Eastern Parkway, opened at the Brooklyn Museum.[6]
The Brooklyn Museum, along with numerous other New York institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, is part of the Cultural Institutions Group (CIG). Member institutions occupy land or buildings owned by the City of New York and derive part of their yearly funding from the City. The Brooklyn Museum also supplements its earned income with funding from Federal and State governments, as well as with donations by individuals and organizations.
In 1999, the museum hosted the Charles Saatchi exhibition Sensation in 1999, resulting in a court battle over New York City's municipal funding of controversial art.
In 2005, the museum was among 406 New York City arts and social service institutions to receive part of a $20 million grant from the Carnegie Corporation, made possible through a donation by New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg.[7][8]
Major benefactors include Frank Lusk Babbott.
The museum is the site of the annual Brooklyn Artists Ball. Past celebrity hosts have included Sarah Jessica Parker and Liv Tyler. [9]
The Brooklyn Museum exhibits collections that seek to embody the rich artistic heritage of world cultures. The museum is well-known for its expansive collections of Egyptian and African art, in addition to 17th, 18th, 19th, and 20th century paintings, sculpture, and decorative arts throughout a wide range of schools.
In 2002, the museum received the work The Dinner Party, by feminist artist Judy Chicago, as a gift from The Elizabeth A. Sackler Foundation. Its permanent exhibition began in 2007, as a centerpiece for the museum's Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. In 2004, the Brooklyn Museum featured Manifest Destiny, an 8-by-24-foot oil-on-wood mural by Alexis Rockman that was commissioned by the museum as a centerpiece for the second-floor Mezzanine Gallery and marking the opening of the renovated Grand Lobby and plaza at the museum.[10][11] Other exhibitions have showcased the works of various contemporary artists including Patrick Kelly, Chuck Close, Denis Peterson, Ron Mueck, Takashi Murakami, Mat Benote,[12] Kiki Smith, Jim Dine, Robert Rauschenberg, Sylvia Sleigh, Arvo Györköny and William Wegman, and a 2004 survey show of work by Brooklyn artists, Open House: Working in Brooklyn.[13]
In 2008, curator Edna Russman announced that a third of the Coptic art held in the museum's collection—second-largest in North America—is fake.[14] Of 30 works of art, Russman believes 10 are faked. The fake artworks will be displayed in an exhibition starting in 2009.[14]
The Brooklyn Museum has been building a collection of Egyptian artifacts since the beginning of the twentieth century, incorporating both collections purchased from others, such as the collection of American Egyptologist Charles Edward Wilbour (whose heirs also donated his library - now the Museum's Wilbour Library of Egyptology - to the museum), and objects obtained in archeological excavations sponsored by the museum. The Egyptian collection includes objects ranging from statuary - including the well-known "Bird Lady" terra cotta figure - to papyrus documents.[15]
Currently, the Egyptian, Classical, and Ancient Near Eastern collections are housed in a series of galleries in the Museum. Egyptian artifacts can be found in the long-term exhibit Egypt Reborn: Art for Eternity, as well as in the Martha A. and Robert S. Rubin Galleries. Near Eastern artifacts are located in the Hagop Kevorkian Gallery.[15]
The museum's collection of American art dates back to its being given Francis Guy's Winter Scene in Brooklyn in 1846. In 1855, the museum officially designated a collection of American Art, with the first work commissioned for the collection being a landscape painting by Asher B. Durand. Items in the American Art collection include portraits, pastels, sculptures, and prints; all items in the collection date to between circa 1720 and circa 1945.
Represented in the American Art collection are works by artists such as William Edmondson (Angel, date unknown), John Singer Sargent's Paul César Helleu sketching his wife Alice Guérin, ca. 1889, Georgia O'Keeffe's Dark Tree Trunks, ca. 1946, and Winslow Homer's Eight Bells, ca. 1887. Among the most famous items in the collection are Gilbert Stuart's portrait of George Washington and Edward Hicks's The Peaceable Kingdom.
Works from the American Art collection can be located in various areas of the museum, including in the Steinberg Family Sculpture Garden and in the exhibit American Identities: A New Look, which is contained within the museum's Visible Storage ▪ Study Center.[16]
The oldest acquisitions in the African art collection were collected by the museum in 1900, shortly after the museum's founding. The collection was expanded in 1922 with items originating largely in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and in 1923 the museum hosted one of the first exhibitions of African art in the United States.
With over five thousand items in its collection, the Brooklyn Museum boasts one of the largest collections of African art in any American art museum. Although the title of the collection implies that it includes art from all of the African continent, in reality works from Africa are sub-categorized into a number of collections. Western and Central sub-Saharan works are collected under the banner of African Art, while Northern African and Egyptian art are grouped with the Islamic and Egyptian art collections, respectively.
The African art collection covers 2,500 years of human history and includes sculpture, jewelery, masks, and religious artifacts from more than one hundred African cultures. Noteworthy items in this collection include a carved ndop figure of a Kuba king, believed to be among the oldest extant ndop carvings, and a Lulua mother-and-child figure.[17]
The museum's collection of Pacific Islands art began in 1900 with the acquisition of one hundred wooden figures and shadow puppets from New Guinea and the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia); with that hundred items as its foundation, the collection has grown to npw encompass close to five thousand works. Art in this collection is sourced to numerous Pacific and Indian ocean islands including Hawaii and New Zealand as well as less-populous islands like Rapa Nui and Vanuatu.
Art objects in this collection are crafted from a wide variety of materials; the museum lists "coconut fiber, feathers, shells, clay, bone, human hair, wood, moss, and spider webs"[18] as among the materials used make artworks including masks, tapa cloths, sculpture, and jewelery.
Many of the Marquesan items in the collection were acquired by the museum from famed Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl.[18]
The museum’s center for feminist art opened in 2007 and is dedicated to preserving the history of the movement since the late 20th century as well as raising awareness of feminist contributions to art and informing the future of this area of artistic dialogue. Along with an exhibition space, and library, the center features a gallery housing a masterwork by Judy Chicago, a large installation called The Dinner Party.[19]
The Brooklyn museum has among others late Gothic and Early Italian Renaissance paintings by Lorenzo di Niccolo ("Scenes from the life of Saint Lawrence"), Sano di Pietro, Nardo di Cione, Lorenzo Monaco, Donatello ("Saint Jerome"), Giovanni Bellini. It has Dutch paintings by Frans Hals, Gerard Dou, and Thomas de Keyser as well as others. It has 19th Century French paintings by Charles Daubigny, Narcisse Virgilio Díaz, Eugene Boudin ("Port,Le Havre"), Berthe Morisot, Edgar Degas, Gustave Caillebotte ("Railway Bridge at Argentieul"), Claude Monet("Doges Palace,Venice), Camille Pissarro, and Paul Cezanne as well as many others.
In 2000, the Brooklyn Museum started the Museum Apprentice Program in which the museum hires teenagers in high school, to give tours in the museum's galleries during the summer, assist with the museum's weekend family programs throughout the year, participate in talks with museum curators, serve as a teen advisory board to the museum, and help plan teen events.
On the first Saturday of each month, the Brooklyn Museum stays open until 11pm. General admission is waived from 5-11pm, although ticketed exhibitions may still require an entrance fee (check with the Visitor Services department in advance. First Saturday programming is a fun, family-friendly event that is always educational. Visitors can attend free family events, collection based art-making for children, gallery tours and lectures, live performance, and a dance party.[20]
The museum's online collection browser features a user-based tagging system, allowing the public to tag and curate sets of objects online, as well as solicit additional scholarship contributions.[21]
Attendance at the Brooklyn Museum has been in decline in recent years, from a high "decades ago" of nearly one million visitors per years to more recent figures of 585,000 (1998) and 326,000 (2009).[22]
The New York Times attributed this drop partially to the policies instituted by current director Arnold Lehman, who has chosen to focus museum energy on "populism", with exhibits on topics such as "Star Wars movies and hip-hop music"[22] rather than on more classical art topics.
“The quality of their exhibitions has lessened,” said Robert Storr, the dean of the Yale University School of Art and a Brooklynite. “ ‘Star Wars’ shows the worst kind of populism. I don’t think they really understand where they are. The middle of the art world is now in Brooklyn; it’s an increasingly sophisticated audience and always was one.”[22]
Lehman has also brought more controversial exhibits, such as a 1999 show that included Chris Ofili’s infamous dung-decorated The Holy Virgin Mary, to the museum.[23]
In contrast to sinking attendance numbers, however, Lehman points out that the demographics of museum attendees are showing a new level of diversity. According to the New York Times, "[t]he average age [of museum attendees in a 2008 survey] was 35, a large portion of the visitors (40 percent) came from Brooklyn, and more than 40 percent identified themselves as people of color." Lehman asserts that the museum's interest is in being welcoming and attractive to all potential museum attendees, rather than simply amassing large numbers of them.[24]