A beautiful pictorial display of some of the world's most stunning public spaces devoted to the arts, this volume features wonderful photographs, detailed floor plans and comprehensive textual accompaniment. Projects include folk art museums, heritage ce

The Art Museum is the finest art collection ever assembled between two covers. This revolutionary and unprecedented virtual art museum in a book, features 1,000 oversized pages of over 2,500 works of art. It is the most comprehensive and visually spectacular history of world art ever published. Ten years in the making, this unique book was created with a global team of 100 specialists in art history, who have collected together important works as they might be displayed in the ideal museum for the art lover. Unrestricted by the constraints of physical space, this volume contains an unprecedented wealth of masterworks spanning three millennia and culled from 650 museums, galleries and private collections from 60 countries to tell the history of world art. It is organized by innovative color-coded, galleries, rooms, corridors and special exhibitions, which display the paintings, sculptures, frescos, photographs, tapestries, friezes, installations, performances, videos, woodblock prints, folding screens, ceramics and manuscripts that tell the history of world art. This is the only museum to house Leonardo's Mona Lisa, a collection of Rembrandt's finest self portraits, Velázquez's Las Meninas and Picasso's Guernica, as well as ceramics from China, Hokusai's woodblock prints, gold artefacts from Peru, and works by Jackson Pollock in one place. With intelligent in-depth text throughout, explanatory lels for each artwork, a comprehensive glossary and detailed location maps, The Art Museum, is accessible for everyone from casual art fans to experts in the field.

ArtScience Museum Singapore explores the architecture and history of a museum that has staged large-scale exhibitions by some of the world's most famous artists, including Leonardo da Vinci, M.C. Escher, Salvador Dalí, Andy Warhol and Vincent van Gogh. ArtScience Museum is the cultural heart of Marina Bay Sands in Singapore and explores the intersection between art, science, technology and culture. Since its opening in February 2011, ArtScience Museum has staged large-scale exhibitions by some of the world's most famous artists, including Leonardo da Vinci, M.C. Escher, Salvador Dalí, Andy Warhol and Vincent van Gogh. Other significant exhibitions have explored aspects of science and technology - from particle physics and big data to robotics, palaeontology, marine biology and space science.

A compelling examination of the art museum from a renowned director, this sweeping book explores how architecture, vision, and funding have transformed art museums around the world over the past eighty years. How have art museums changed in the past century? Where are they headed in the future? Charles Saumarez Smith is uniquely qualified to answer these questions, having been at the helm of three major institutions over the course of his distinguished career. For The Art Museum in Modern Times, Saumarez Smith has undertaken an odyssey, visiting art museums across the globe and examining how the experience of art is shaped by the buildings that house it. His story starts with the Museum of Modern Art in New York, one of the first museums to focus squarely on the art of the present rather than the past. When it opened in 1939, MoMA’s boldly modernist building represented a stark riposte to the neoclassicism of most earlier art museums. From there, Saumarez Smith investigates dozens of other museums, including the Tate Modern in London, the Getty Center in Los Angeles, the West Bund Museum in Shanghai, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. He explores our shifting reasons for visiting museums, changes to the way exhibits are organized and displayed, and the spectacular new architectural landmarks that have become destinations in their own right. Global in scope yet full of personal insight, this fully illustrated celebration of the modern art museum will appeal to art lovers, museum professionals, and museum goers alike.

Several of the world's foremost museum and art gallery architects and designers have contributed remarkable imagery and thought provoking drawings to what will surely beocme the leading book on museum and art gallery design.

One of the twentieth century's leading abstract expressionists, Sam Francis (1923-94) was one of the few visual artists who traversed the globe multiple times during the 1950s and 1960s, becoming one of the first postwar American painters to develop a truly international reputation. Francis's engagement with the world and his fascination and involvement with different cultures, in particular that of Japan, is explored in this compelling volume, published in conjunction with the exhibition Sam Francis and Japan: Emptiness Overflowing at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Richard Speer, a co-curator of the exhibition, offers astute insights into the visual, technical, and philosophical affinities between traditional Asian art and Francis's work as a modern abstract painter. He delves into the relationship of Francis's aesthetics to much older Japanese artistic traditions, in particular the concept of ma, a symbolically rich in-between zone that is paralleled in the lyrical deployment of negative space in Francis's paintings. In addition, Speer looks at Francis's friendships with many of the Gutai and Monoha artists and highlights their shared conceptual theories involving notions of time, space, and a limitless continuum. A contemplative and discerning overview of the artist in Japan, the book draws on archival research and individual interviews with Francis's Japanese colleagues, as well as family and friends. It suggests the transformative power of art as a cultural bridge while expanding our insight into the artist's visual language and his devotion to the image. Francis's own aphoristic essay "One Ocean One Cup," first published in Japan in 1977, revealing the artist's reactions to living and working in the transcendental Japanese environment, rounds out the book. Exhibition: The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, United-States (04.10.2020 - 24.01.2021).

The need to personalize our surroundings is a defining human characteristic. For some this need becomes a compulsion to transform their personal surroundings into works of art. The John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, has undertaken the mission to preserve these environments, which are presented for the first time in Sublime Spaces and Visionary Worlds. This colorful and inspiring book features the work of twenty-two vernacular artists whose locales, personal histories, and reasons for art-making vary widely but who all share a powerful connection to the home as art. Featured projects range from art environments that remain intact, such as Simon Rodia's Watts Towers in California, tosites lost over the years such as Emery Blagdon's six hundred elaborate "Healing Machines," made of copper, aluminum, tinfoil, magnets, ribbons, farm-machinery parts, painted light bulbs, beads, coffee-can lids, and more. Sublime Spaces and Visionary Worlds is the first book to explore these spectacularly offbeat spaces in detail.From "Original Rhinestone Cowboy" Loy Bowlin's wall-to-wall glitter-and-foil living room to the concrete bestiary of "witch of Fox Point" Mary Nohl, each artist and project is described in detail through a wealth of visuals and text. Sublime Spaces and Visionary Worlds reminds us that our decorative choices tell the world not just what we like but who we are.

Everyone who looks at contemporary art is familiar with galleries. But visual features of these mysterious temples tend to be taken for granted. The basic purpose of this book is to enliven the reader’s latent knowledge of galleries, including architectural motifs, the intended impression that is conveyed to the visitor, and human interactions within them. The contemporary art world system includes artists’ studios, art galleries, homes of collec-tors and public art museums. To comprehend art, one needs to understand these settings and how it travels through them. The contemporary art gallery is a store where luxury goods are sold. What distinguishes it from stores selling other luxuries – upscale clothing, jewelry, and posh cars – is the nature of the merchandise. While much has been written about the art, this book uncovers the secretive culture of the galleries themselves. The gallery is the public site where art is first seen – anyone can come and look for free. This store, a commercial site, is where aesthetic judgments are made. Art’s value is determined in this marketplace by the consensus formed by public opinion, professional re-viewers and sales. The gallery, then, is the nexus of the enigmatic, billion dollar art world, and it is that space that is dissected here. The first chapter briefly describes the beginnings of the present contemporary art gallery. The second presents the experience of gallery going, presenting summary accounts of vis-its to some contemporary galleries. The third expands and extends that analysis, with de-tailed close up descriptions and comparative evaluations of many diverse contemporary galleries, in order to identify the challenges provided by these marvelous places. Then the fourth chapter indicates why, in the near future, due to the proliferation of myriad art fairs and online platforms extant today, such galleries might disappear altogether.