galleries

An art gallery or art museum is a space for the exhibition of art, usually visual art, and usually primarily paintings, illustrations, and sculpture. It is also sometimes used as a location for the sale of art.

The art museum is considered a fairly modern invention, the first being the Louvre in Paris, which was established in 1793, soon after the French Revolution when the royal treasures were declared for the people. Here we see the beginnings of removing art collections from the private domain of aristocracy and the wealthy into the public sphere, where they were seen as sites for educating the masses in taste and cultural refinement. Early museums in America were often a part of or affiliated with Lyceums, Atheneaums, or Libraries with a broader cultural mission, and were not necessarily devoted exclusively to art. Many museums are associated with universities or colleges.

Generally, the term art gallery is used to mean buildings or locations dedicated to displaying and/or selling art, though the large rooms in museums where art is displayed for the public are often referred to as galleries as well, with a room dedicated to Ancient Egyptian art often being called the Egyptian Gallery, for example.

Most large urban areas will have several art galleries, and most towns will be home to at least one. However, they may also be found in smaller villages, and quite remote areas, often places where artists have congregated. Examples include the Taos art colony in Taos, New Mexico, and St Ives, Cornwall.

Although primarily concerned with providing a space to show works of visual art, art galleries are sometimes used to host other artistic activities, such as music concerts or poetry readings. Conversely, some works of visual art are not shown in a gallery and, due to their form, never can be. Altarpieces, for example, are rarely shown in galleries, and murals generally remain where they have been painted. Various forms of 20th century art, such as land art and performance art, also usually exist outside a gallery. Photographic records of these kinds of art are often shown in galleries, however.

Similar to an art gallery is the sculpture garden (or sculpture park), which presents sculpture in an outdoor space. Sculpture installation has grown in popularity, whereby temporary sculptures are installed in open spaces during events like festivals.

Architecture

The architectural form of the art gallery was established by Sir John Soane with his design for the Dulwich Picture Gallery in 1817. This established the gallery as a series of interconnected rooms with largely uninterrupted wall spaces for hanging pictures and indirect lighting from skylights or roof lanterns.

The late 19th century saw a boom in the building of public art galleries in Europe an America, being an essential cultural feature of larger cities. More art galleries rose up alongside museums and public libraries as part of the municipal drive for literacy and public education.

In the late 20th century the dry old fashioned view of art galleries has increasingly been replaced with architecturally bold modern art galleries, often seen as international destination for tourists in their own right. The first example of the architectural landmark art gallery would be the Guggenheim Museum in New York City by Frank Lloyd Wright. More recent outstanding examples include Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and Mario Botta redesign of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Some critics argue that these galleries are self defeating, in that their dramatic interior spaces distract the eye from the paintings they are supposed to exhibit.

Notable art museums and galleries

• Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, van Gogh Museum
• Atlanta: High Museum of Art
• Baltimore Museum of Art
• Beijing: Palace Museum
• Berlin: Museum Island
• Bilbao: Guggenheim Museum
• Boston: Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
• Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard Art Museums
• Cambridge (UK): Fitzwilliam Museum
• Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago
• Cleveland: The Cleveland Museum of Art
• Detroit: The Detroit Institute of Arts, Cranbrook Art Museum, University of Michigan-Museum of Art
• Dresden: Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister
• Dublin: Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery, Irish Museum of Modern Art, National Gallery of Ireland,
• Edinburgh: National Gallery of Scotland
• Florence: Galleria degli Uffizi, Accademia di Belle Arti Firenze
• Glasgow: Gallery of Modern Art, Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Burrell Collection
• Hartford: Wadsworth Atheneum
• Honolulu: Honolulu Academy of Arts,
• Kansas City: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art
• London: National Gallery, National Portrait Gallery, Tate Britain, Tate Modern, Victoria and Albert Museum, British Museum, Dulwich Picture Gallery, Saatchi Gallery
• Louisiana: R.W. Norton Art Gallery
• Los Angeles: Getty Center
• Madrid: Museo del Prado, Museo Reina Sofia, Museo Thyssen Bornemisza
• Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria
• Montreal: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
• Moscow: State Tretyakov Gallery, Pushkin Museum, Kremlin Armoury
• Munich: Alte Pinakothek, Neue Pinakothek, Pinakothek der Moderne
• New Orleans, Louisiana: Ogden Museum of Southern Art
• New York: The Guggenheim, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Whitney Museum of American Art, Brooklyn Museum, Frick Museum
• North Adams (Mass): Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art
• Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada
• Oxford: Ashmolean Museum
• Paris: Louvre, Musée d'Orsay, Musée Rodin, Centre Pompidou
• Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art
• Richmond, Virginia: Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
• Rome: Vatican Museum, Galleria Borghese
• St. Louis: Saint Louis Art Museum
• St. Petersburg: Hermitage, Russian Museum
• Salem (Mass.): Peabody Essex Museum
• San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California Palace of the Legion of Honor
• São Paulo: São Paulo Art Museum
• Seattle: Soil Art Gallery
• Shanghai: Shanghai Museum
• Shreveport, Louisiana, R.W. Norton Art Foundation
• Stuttgart: Staatsgalerie
• Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales
• Taipei, Taiwan: National Palace Museum
• Tallinn, Estonia: Estonian Art Museum
• Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario
• Venice: Peggy Guggenheim Collection
• Vienna, Austria: Kunsthistorisches Museum
• Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Phillips Collection
• Wellington: City Gallery
• Winnipeg: Winnipeg Art Gallery
• Zurich: Foundation E.G. Bührle

List of notable contemporary galleries

• London: Saatchi Gallery
• London: Victoria Miro Gallery
• Tampa: Contemporary Art Museum
• New York: Gagosian Gallery
• New York: Zach Feuer Gallery

Online galleries

Sponsored by museums and libraries

Most art Museums and Galleries have only limited online collections, but a few Museums have developed substantial online catalogues. Museums and libraries with substantial online collections of prints, photographs, and other works on paper include:

• Library of Congress, prints and photographs collection (several million entries).[1]
• Peabody Essex Museum, with over 1 million entries (many being prints and works on paper).[2]

Museums with substantial online collections with more focus on paintings and sculpture include:

• Boston Museum of Fine Arts, with over 330,000 works, most with images.[3]
• Louvre, with over 80,000 works in various databases, with a large number of images, as well as another 140,000 works on paper.[4]
• National Gallery of Art, with over 108,000 works catalogued, though with only 6,000 images.[5]
• Fine Art Museums of San Francisco, with over 85,000 works.[6]
• Harvard Art Museums, with over 81,000 works, most with images. [7]
• Five College Museums/Historic Deerfield, with over 60,000 works, most with images. [8]

Independent online galleries and commercial galleries selling works by contemporary artists

There are also a number of online art catalogues and galleries that have been developed independently of the support of any individual Museum. Many of these are attempts to develop galleries of artwork that are encyclopedic or historical in focus, while others are commercial efforts to sell the work of contemporary artists.

In addition, numerous commercial galleries have online sites displaying works by artists whom they carry, and the large auction houses, such as Sotheby's and Christie's have large online databases of art which they have auctioned or are auctioning, and the site Artprice.com, with a database of over 21 million auction transactions, collects images and descriptions of artwork which have been auctioned or sold which are coming up for auction or sale through either the large houses or many of the smaller auction houses, and so has one of the more largest online databases of art.

Large databases of historical collections

Among the sites with significant focus on a broad collection of prominent and established artwork are the following:

• Artilysis- Online Gallery For Offbeat & Experimental Artworks A Huge collection of 10,000+ Original artworks from all over the world.
• The Mona Lisa Database of French Museums (from the French Ministry of Culture)[9]
• CGFA Large collection of images of paintings (ordered by artist's name, nationality or time frame)
• Web Gallery of Art 12th to 18th century European paintings and sculptures.
• Olga's online art gallery Commercial, but online collection of approximately 10,000 paintings focusing on medieval through modern European art. Includes biographical information about the artists.

Folksonomy

There are also online galleries that have been developed by a collaboration of museums and galleries that are more interested with the categorization of art. They are interested in the potential use of folksonomy within museums and the requirements for post-processing of terms that have been gathered, both to test their utility and to deploy them in useful ways.

The steve.museum is one example of a site that is experimenting with this collaborative philosophy. The participating institutions include the Guggenheim Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Vanity galleries

A vanity gallery is an art gallery that charges fees from artists in order to show their work, much like a vanity press does for authors. The shows are not legitimately curated and will include as many artists as possible. Most art professionals are able to identify them on an artist's resume. See:

• NYFA.org: 'Investing in Your Career, A Worth While Risk?'
• Blogcritics.org: Vanity Galleries

See also

• List of notable museums and galleries
• National gallery
• Art exhibition