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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

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List of Contemporary Galleries

See also

External links

Online galleries

Sponsored by Museums and libraries

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

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

Independent On-Line Galleries

There are also a number of on-line 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.

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

  • The Mona Lisa Database of French Museums (from the French Ministry of Culture)*
  • 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.

Sites with a focus on the exhibition and sale of contemporary artists include:

Commercial Galleries Selling Works by Contemporary Artists

In addition, numerous commercial galleries have on-line sites displaying works by artists whom they carry, and the large auction houses, such as Sotheby's and Christie's have large on-line 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 on-line databases of art.

(Note that all figures in the above listings are as of April, 2006).

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 galleries include the Guggenheim, The Cleveland Museum of art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Art museums and galleries

Kunstmuseum | Kunstmuseum | 美術館 | 미술관 | Музеј на уметност | Konstmuseum

 

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "Art gallery".

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