DISCUSS: Best Museum

[Jan]

Use this thread to discuss your favorite museums.

[Monkey]

1. Natural History Museum, London
2. British Museum, London
3. Louvre, Paris

[nukey]

I am in love with the Centre Pompidou in Paris, its just so cool, and I love the plaza and area around it.

The V&A is a wonderful institution and realy does do exhibitions for everyone.

I also like the exhibitions in the Barbican.

[earthJoker]

I would say "Deutsches Museum" Munich is my favorite, I am more into technics than art. And it is the bigges museum of technics and science.

[Reivajar]

Well, I'm not going to say that the museums of Madrid are the best, but at least we have ones of the most important.

Museo del Prado.


Inside:
Las Meninas of Velázquez

La maja desnuda of Goya


Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza


Museo de Arte Moderno Reina Sofia


Inside:
Guernica of Picasso


Prado, Thyssen and Reina Sofia Museums form the called Art Triangle in Madrid.
There are more, but they are the most known.

[Medo]

British Museum and Louvre.

i dont like museums. museums are boring

[Jakob]

What about untypical museums? Let's have a look at Istanbul Modern:

[Dennis]

Metropolitan Museum Of Art - New York
Skyscrapermuseum - New York

[wickedestcity]

>Museum of Science and Industry-- you can spend an entire week there and still not have seen everything
>The Art Institute of Chicago
>Chicago Historical Society
>Shedd Aquarium

chicagos got some world class museums in my opinion

[i_am_hydrogen]

Musée d'Orsay in Paris is highly underrated. Some of the best impressionism works are housed there.

[Meditt]

Originally Posted by kdickert

Musée d'Orsay in Paris is highly underrated. Some of the best impressionism works are housed there.

yeah, so true! .. and the building itself -wether you like or not Gae Aulenti's minimalistic and cubic rehabilitation- is noteworthy too...











it houses several wonders by Van Gogh, Manet or Paul Gauguin..

[Metropolitan]

Personally, I really enjoyed the visit of the Tate Modern in London and the Guggenheim in Bilbao. About Ancient civilization, my best experience has been the Pergamonmuseum in Berlin, where you can find in one piece both the temple of Pergamon (Pergame) and the huge Ishtar Gate from Babylon. That museum is really out of dimensions !

I also agree about your comments about the Musée d'Orsay, however I won't say it's underrated. Few museums are as known worldwide as Orsay. The Louvre paintings collection ends around the 1850's. Everything between the 1850's and the 1920's are in Orsay, and we are talking about the best period in French painting. So no wonder that museum is outstanding.

My favourite collections at the Louvre are the huge paintings from the beginning of the 19th century from Gericault and Delacroix : Paintings such as "Freedom guiding the people" or "the raft of the Meduse" are truely outstanding. I also like the visit of the basement from the Medieval castle of the Louvre. And of course the Egyptian collection and the Greek statues which are really a lot of fun to visit.

[Sikario]

In London

The Natural History Museum



Imperial War Museum


British Museum



The Smithsonian in Washington D.C was great when I was there 7 years ago.

[i_am_hydrogen]

Metropolitan - I'll agree that the Musee d'Orsay is not underrated amongst a certain collection of art-viewing people. However, much of the world is likely ignorant even as to its existence.

[steel]

One of the best is the Albright Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo NY. It is not well known to tourists. But Art officios know it as having one of the best collections of contemporary art in the world. (and it has a very nice building too).























(Please respect the fact that these images are most likely copyrighted)

[yoyoyo]

Motion Picture：Adventures in the National Palace Museum







from The New York Times
by KEITH BRADSHER
December 28, 2006

TAIPEI, Taiwan, Dec. 27 — After four years of renovations that closed two-thirds of the building, the museum housing the world’s most famous collection of Chinese art is reopening this winter and holding a three-month exhibition of its rarest works.

The National Palace Museum, home to the best of the 1,000-year-old art collection of China’s emperors, is often compared to leading Western institutions like the Louvre, the Prado and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But while this museum’s holdings are magnificent, the institution has been known for being a highly politicized place where priceless porcelain sat in poorly lit display cases and where invaluable paintings were kept in a damp manmade cave for fear of Communist attack from mainland China.

That has now changed. Heroic statues of Chiang Kai-shek, Taiwan’s former leader, and of Sun Yat-sen, the founder of modern China, have been banished. New lighting, air-conditioning, climate-controlled storage vaults and other features rival the newest museums in the West. Even the wall labels attached to the artwork are now written in clear and specific Chinese, English and Japanese.

And after many years of hiding its most valuable and most fragile artworks — those from the Northern and Southern Sung dynasties that ruled China from 960 to 1279 — the museum has brought them out for a “Grand View” exhibition that opened on Christmas. Four of the best known Northern Sung dynasty paintings — one of them on loan from the Metropolitan Museum in New York — are being shown together for the first time, along with other rare paintings, scrolls and some of the world’s earliest printed books.

The four paintings are magnificent landscapes that tower over visitors but still have the exquisite detail of miniatures. The Chinese characters of the name of one artist are so subtly hidden in the trees of one painting that they went unnoticed until this century. A deputy director of the museum is credited with discovering them, although rumor says that a janitor was really the first to find them, said Ho Chuan-hsing, a museum specialist in early paintings and calligraphy.

Many of the pieces are so fragile that they are never lent to museums elsewhere. Some will only be on display here for half the exhibition: either from Christmas to Feb. 7 or from Feb. 8 to March 25. Museum policy allows these works to be shown only for 40 days, after which they are loosely rolled and placed in a vault to rest for at least three years; the exhibition here will not go on tour.

Art scholars describe the “Grand View” as unique.

“To see all of these paintings come out at one time again is just not going to happen,” said Marc F. Wilson, a Chinese-art specialist who is the director and chief executive of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo., which lent two rare scrolls to the exhibition here. “These are the foundations of modern Chinese pictorial sensibility.”

Also on temporary display this winter in a single case are 50 of the 70 known examples of Ju Ware, one of the world’s rarest and most valuable kinds of porcelain. Manufactured for imperial use at a single kiln in central China for just two decades at the end of the 11th century, Ju (pronounced rue) Ware is glazed with a lustrous, green-tinged shade of blue that has a faint, rose sparkle.

Craftsmen ground up agate, a semiprecious quartz, to make the glaze, using a technique that was soon lost and has never been rediscovered. The 50 pieces on exhibit here include the museum’s own 21 examples and 29 borrowed from other collections around the world.

The presentation of the Ju Ware is raising eyebrows at a museum so conservative that many of the curators wore the traditional blue silk robes of Chinese scholars into the 1970s. The vases and dishes sit on a 100-foot-long, waist-high white surface that is an imitation of the runways on which models promenade at fashion shows.

Jimmy Yang, a 33-year-old Taiwan-born but Australian-educated architect and designer who showed up at the opening on Christmas in a black T-shirt and blue jeans, arranged the exhibition.

“We wanted it to be a little more up-to-date, a little humorous even,” he said as visitors began ogling the spotlighted vases.

Chi Jo-hsin, the chief curator of the museum’s antiquities department, acknowledged that the presentation had been controversial within the museum’s staff. “Some think it is good, and some think it should be different,” she said.

The Imperial Palace in Beijing, better known as the Forbidden City, became a museum in 1925 as part of a republican bid to prevent the restoration of the last emperor, Pu Yi. When Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists became worried in 1933 about a possible Japanese attack, they secretly sent the collection in wheelbarrows to Beijing’s train station to be transported south, the start of the collection’s 16-year odyssey during war with Japan and China’s civil war.

The Nationalists ended up shipping the most valuable art to Taiwan, where it has remained ever since. The mainland government has since gathered at museums in Beijing and Shanghai a large number of the works that were left behind, together with the fruits of archaeological excavations as well as the purchase or confiscation of mainland collections and gifts from tycoons in Hong Kong and elsewhere.

The exhibition here is taking place in rooms that have been heavily renovated as part of an extensive overhaul of the museum. Elevators and other features have also been added to make the building completely accessible to the elderly and the disabled, and the building has been strengthened to improve protection against earthquakes, including one that shook Taiwan on Tuesday evening but did not damage the museum or its collection.

Tu Cheng-sheng, who started the renovation as the museum’s director in 2002, said then that it would be too controversial to remove the memorial hall dedicated to Sun Yat-sen, a symbol of Taiwan’s ties to the mainland. But the hall and its giant bronze statue are gone now, a disappearance that Ms. Lin and Mr. Tu, now Taiwan’s education minister, declined in separate interviews to discuss.

The building’s exterior still has jade-green tile roofs and yellow walls designed to evoke the Forbidden City. But the museum’s celebrated tearoom has been transformed as part of an effort by Ms. Lin, the director, to address a problem facing art museum directors all over the world: how to draw the young and trendy.

While the museum’s collection has an international reputation among art connoisseurs, it has been distinctly less popular in Taiwan, and especially among young Taiwanese who feel little connection to the mainland. Slightly more than half the museum’s two million visitors a year come from outside Taiwan, mainly from Japan, Korea and other countries in Asia.

The tearoom, on the museum’s top floor with lovely views of the surrounding mountain valley, used to be a reproduction of the Three Treasures room at the Forbidden City, complete with an elaborately carved and flamboyantly painted ceiling. The ceiling has now been covered with gray-brown paint and the room turned into a very contemporary Taiwanese tearoom with sturdy furniture made of oak, not traditional sandalwood.

The “Grand View” this winter may also represent the last chance for visitors from the United States and elsewhere to see the best of China’s art without having to push through throngs of mainland Chinese tourists.

Taiwan is negotiating with Beijing officials to allow mainland tourists to start visiting here this spring. While the number of tourists is supposed to be limited to 1,000 a day at first, the tourism industry is expected to press for quick increases in that cap.

Jason Kuo, a Taiwan-born professor of Chinese art history at the University of Maryland who studied at the National Palace Museum from 1971 to 1973, said the museum faced a difficult balance as it prepares to handle more visitors, appeal to young Taiwanese and protect the art collection.

“They want to be open to the West,” he said, “but they want to maintain their heritage.”




Travelers Among Mountains and Streams


Early Spring


Wind in Pines Among a Myriad Valleys


Blue Magpie and Thorny Shrubs


Magpies and Hare


Mansions in the Mountains of Paradise


Two Horses and a Groom


A Palace Concert


Literary Gathering


Children at Play in an Autumn Garden


Scholar




more... ...

[yoyoyo]

Taipei - National Palace Museum

1. Handled Ivory Openwork Container
2. Jadeite Cabbage with Insects
3. Ivory hat stand with set of concentric ivory balls with human figures in openwork relief



4. Ju Ware Bowl in the Shape of a Lotus
5. Ju Ware Narcissus Planter
6. Ting Ware White Ceramic Pillow in the Shape of a Child



7. Copper Snuff Bottle with Plum Blossoms in Painted Enamelware
8. Gall-bladder vase in yang-ts'ai enamels with figures décor
9. Gall-bladder vase in yang-ts'ai enamels with cranes and plum blossom décor



10. Copper Snuff Bottle with Plum Blossoms in Painted Enamelware (detail)
11. Monk's Cap Ewer with Ruby Red Glaze
12. Oblation Tsun with Turquoise Inlay and Gold Filament



13. Pair of soup bowls in yang-ts'ai enamels with incised red ground pattern of flower brocade and landscape décor
14. Pair of gall-bladder vases in yang-ts'ai enamels with incised blue ground pattern of flower brocade and band décor
15. Pair of gall-bladder vases in fa-lang-ts'ai enamels with sparrow and mynah bird décor



16. Pair of dishes in fa-lang-ts'ai enamels with painting pattern of flower brocade and figures décor


17. Square vase in yang-ts'ai enamels on yellow ground with western floral décor
18. Ku vase in yang-ts'ai enamels with plantain leaves décor on yellow ground
19. Vase in yang-ts'ai enamels with décor of western floral and fungus



20. Revolving bowl in yang-ts'ai enamels with landscape and imperial poem décor
21. Lidded spittoon in yang-ts'ai enamels with incised pattern of flower brocade
22. Teacup in yang-ts'ai enamels with incised blue ground pattern of flower brocade





23. Revolving openwork vase in yang-ts'ai enamels, with fish and aquatic plant décor, painted blue ground and gold tracery
24. Vase in yang-ts'ai enamels with incised red ground pattern of flower brocade and butterfly décor
25. Square vase in yang-ts'ai enamels with incised pattern of flower brocade and landscape, imperial poem décor





26. Famille Rose Conjoined Vase with Panels of Birds and Flowers
27. Copper Snuff Bottle with Plum Blossoms in Painted Enamelware
28. Six Conjoined Vases in Tea Dust Glaze



29. Gilt Bronze Shakyamuni Buddha and Stand
30. Standing Maitreya
31. Tsung-chou Bell





more... ...

[yoyoyo]

Taipei - National Palace Museum


1. Timely Clearing After Snowfall
2. Yüan-huan



Three Passages: P'ing-an, Ho-ju, and Feng-chü


Draft of a Requiem to My Nephew


The Cold Food Observance


Autobiography


Essay on Calligraphy


Poem in Seven-character Verse


Autumn Colors on the Ch'iao and Hua Mountains


One Hundred Horses


Ayusi Scattering Rebels with Upraised Spear


Macang Lays Low the Enemy Ranks


Dwelling in the Fu-ch'un Mountains (Wu-yung Version)


Along the River During the Ch'ing-ming Festival


Spring Morning in the Han Palace




more... ...

[yoyoyo]

Taipei - National Palace Museum

Herd of Deer in a Maple Grove


Residents on the Outskirts of Dragon Abode


Waiting for Guests by Lamplight


Eight Princes on a Spring Excursion


Homeward Oxherds in Wind and Rain


Enjoying Antiquities


Listening Quietly to Soughing Pines


After the Line "Idly Watching Children Catch Willow Flowers"


T'ao Ku Presenting a Lyric to Ch'in Jo-lan


Returning Late from a Spring Outing


Paired Cranes in the Shade with Flowers


Activities of the Twelve Months (The Twelfth Lunar Month)


Birds and Flowers


Hanging scroll, silk tapestry




more... ...