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The National Portrait Gallery, the National Gallery and the Royal Academy all saw either radical architectural interventions or rethinks of their mission under Charles Saumarez Smith's leadership, making him uniquely qualified to explore the ways in which art museums have changed over the past century and examine where they might be headed in the future.

For this book, Saumarez Smith has undertaken an odyssey to art museums across the globe. From Tate Modern in London to the Benesse House Museum on the Japanese island of Naoshima; from the Getty Center in Los Angeles to the Museum of New and Old Art, a ferry-ride from Hobart in Tasmania; from the Pompidou Centre in Paris to the West Bund Museum in Shanghai - he has visited them all, casting an acute eye on the way the experience of art is shaped by the buildings that house it and the organizing principles by which it is displayed.

What has changed over the past century? Where the public once visited museums to be educated in art history, he argues, they are now more likely to be in search of a private, aesthetic experience. Museum displays that were automatically didactic, chronological and either national or Western in viewpoint are now thematic and global. While museums used to be invariably in city centres, they may now be in remote locations, destinations of cultural pilgrimage. And where architects once created neutral spaces in which to display art, they now build spectacular architectural landmarks, stamping an identity on run-down neighbourhoods and sparking regeneration through cultural tourism.

With 122 illustrations in colour

Tabla de contenidos provista por Syndetics

• Preface(p. 008)
• Introduction: The Traditional Museum(p. 012)
• 1 The Modern Museum(p. 024)
• The Museum of Modem Art, New York (1939)(p. 025)
• Louisiana, Humlebæk (1958)(p. 030)
• Guggenheim Museum, New York (1959)(p. 035)
• Castelvecchio Museum, Verona (1964)(p. 040)
• Whitney Museum, New York (1960)(p. 043)
• New National Gallery, Berlin (1968)(p. 047)
• São Paulo Museum of Art, São Paulo (1968)(p. 049)
• Christ Church Picture Gallery, Oxford (1968)(p. 054)
• Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth (1972)(p. 056)
• Centre Pompidou, Paris (1977)(p. 062)
• Yale Center for British Art, New Haven (1977)(p. 065)
• Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich (1978)(p. 069)
• East Building, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (1978)(p. 073)
• 2 The Postmodern Museum(p. 080)
• Neue Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart (1984)(p. 081)
• Saatchi Gallery, London (1985)(p. 083)
• Musée d'Orsay, Paris (1986)(p. 086)
• The Menil Collection, Houston (1987)(p. 089)
• The Louvre Pyramid, Paris (1989)(p. 094)
• The Sainsbury Wing, National Gallery, London (1991)(p. 096)
• Benesse House Museum, Naoshima (1992)(p. 102)
• Getty Center, Los Angeles (1997)(p. 106)
• Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao (1997)(p. 113)
• Beyeler Foundation, Basel (1997)(p. 117)
• 3 Museums for the New Millennium(p. 122)
• Tate Modern, London (2000)(p. 123)
• Ondaatje Wing, National Portrait Gallery, London (2000)(p. 129)
• Neue Galerie, New York (2001)(p. 133)
• Dia:Beacon, Beacon, NY (2003)(p. 136)
• Museum of Modern Art, New York (2004)(p. 140)
• 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa (2004)(p. 144)
• Kolumba, Cologne (2007)(p. 147)
• Neues Museum, Berlin (2009)(p. 152)
• Hepworth Wakefield, Yorkshire (2011)(p. 159)
• Turner Contemporary, Margate (2011)(p. 162)
• 4 The Museum Reinvented(p. 164)
• MONA, Hobart (2011)(p. 165)
• Louvre Museum, Lens (2012)(p. 170)
• The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia (2012)(p. 173)
• Whitney Museum, New York (2015)(p. 179)
• The Broad, Los Angeles (2015)(p. 184)
• Blavatnik Building, Tate Modern, London (2016)(p. 186)
• Louvre Abu Dhabi (2017)(p. 189)
• The Royal Academy of Arts, London (2018)(p. 195)
• Muzeum Susch, Susch (2019)(p. 199)
• West Bund Museum, Shanghai (2019)(p. 202)
• 5 Key Issues(p. 208)
• The role of the client(p. 209)
• The role of the architect(p. 212)
• The rise of the private museum(p. 215)
• The morality of wealth(p. 217)
• The end of history(p. 220)
• The changing characteristics of works of art(p. 221)
• Globalization(p. 224)
• The digital world(p. 226)
• The search for the sacred(p. 229)
• Audience expectations(p. 231)
• Conclusion(p. 232)
• Notes(p. 237)
• Bibliography(p. 251)
• Illustration credits(p. 262)
• Acknowledgments(p. 264)
• Index(p. 266)

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Publishers Weekly Review

Former National Portrait Gallery director Smith examines how museums' architecture and design has elevated the experience of art in this perceptive and generously illustrated volume. Beginning with New York's Museum of Modern Art, Smith takes a sweeping inventory of contemporary museums worldwide, revealing how funding, leadership, vision, and architecture have transformed the institutions' meaning and purpose, rendering these spaces "as much about the geography of contemporary cultural and artistic experience as about the history of the art and culture of the past." With detailed case studies of venues including London's Victoria and Albert Museum, which salute more scholarly works, and New York's MoMA, which demonstrates the "experience of modernity," Smith considers how museums have changed over the past 80 years and now focus less on the canon than on evolving displays, stimulating viewing experiences, and striking architecture. He further elucidates his points with mini-histories of playful postmodern institutions interested in taking visitors on a "personal, private journey," among them Frank Gehry's Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain, with its transfixing, "free-form design," and the Broad Museum in Los Angeles, a cavernous structure where art-seeing becomes a "visceral and sensual experience." Insightful and thought provoking, this work is required reading for cultural historians, art connoisseurs, and museumgoers. (Apr.)

CHOICE Review

Saumarez Smith (former director of the UK's National Portrait Gallery and National Gallery) focuses narrowly on museum leadership's effect on current institutions but does not address the nuances of museum evolution. He provides case studies of his favorite museums, organized in uninspired chronological order, and uses MoMA (NYC) as the standard against which he compares others. Saumarez Smith nods at how the architecture of "modern" structures is often part of the collection, but ignores such other important art historical studies of the spaces of museums as Rosalind Krauss's The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum (1990), Hal Foster's The Art-Architecture Complex (2011), and Claire Bishop's Radical Museology (2013). Though a few museums in other locations are included, the author has an obvious American and Western European bias and maintains the older, whiter favoritism of lazy art history. A treatment of the interactions between institutions or a closer look at the changed expectations of visitors over time would have benefited the work and the reader. He closes by leaving it to the next generation of "architects, trustees, and museum directors" (leaving out many critical museum roles). Overall: this topic deserves better. Summing Up: Optional. Researchers, professionals. --Katherine E. Staab, Kaiser Permanente

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

Charles Saumarez Smith was Director of the UK's National Portrait Gallery 1994-2002, Director of the National Gallery 2002-2007 and Secretary and Chief Executive of the Royal Academy 2007-2018. He is the author of East London ; The Company of Artists: The Origins of the Royal Academy of Arts in London ; and The National Gallery: A Short History , among other titles.