Utah Museum of Fine Arts
The Utah Museum of Fine Arts is an art museum in Salt Lake City, the capital of the U.S. state of Utah. It is both the Art Museum of the University of Utah as well as the state. The museum was opened on 6 May 1951, the history of the collection already starts at the beginning of the 20th century.
History
At the beginning of the 20th century was a small gallery on the top floor of the Park Building in Salt Lake City, Utah, the forerunner of the Museum of Fine Arts was. She showed initially in one room works by artists from the region. In the following decades, the Department of Fine Arts of the University of Utah received more donations of works of art and requests to transform the gallery into a museum. After a renovation of the premises of the Director of the University, Albert Ray Olpin the Utah Museum of Fine Arts opened, on May 6, 1951.
1967 Frank Sanquinetti was appointed the first professional director of the museum. At this time, the collection was expanded so far that a new and larger museum building was needed. This was established in 1970 based. The aim of the museum management at this time was a further expansion of the collection. For this was advertised primarily to local and regional support, so that the expansion, particularly of patrons, local and national associations and organizations, the university, as well as other citizens, and especially the state of Utah was born. The increasing number of exhibits and stocks again led to space problems, so that was begun in 1998 with the support through donations to build a new building. In June 2001, the museum opened in the Marcia and John Price Museum Building. The same year, David L. Dee was appointed director of the Utah Museum of Fine Arts.
Since the second move of the museum experienced a continued strong growth of the collection and an increase in activities. In February 2005, Parliament declared the Utah Museum to a federal facility, which underlines the importance of the institution for the state.
Collection
The Collection of the Utah Museum of Fine Arts comprises over 17,000 works. It includes departments for African, American, Asian, Oceanic and European art, and the Greco -Roman antiquity, Modern and Contemporary Art, Pre-Columbian, Native American and regional art.
Some outstanding works of art are an allegory of the earth by Pieter Brueghel the Younger, Princess Eudocia Ivanovna Galitzine as Flora by Élisabeth Vigée -Lebrun and American Portrait of Mrs. Benjamin West and Her Son Raphael Benjamin West. Besides modern works such as American Wizard of Helen Frankenthaler and American Flags II by Jasper Johns can be seen.
Special
Since 1961, host regular exhibitions in the Utah Museum of Fine Arts. The first exhibition was The early Coptic art of Egypt. Since then found to exhibit various forms of art as well as retrospectives held by individual artists, considerations of individual epochs and regions. Examples of such exhibitions are Russian Stage and Costume Designs for the Ballet, Opera and Theatre: A Loan Exhibition from the Lobanov - Rostovsky, Oenslager and Riabov Collections from 1968 and objects from Buddhist cultures from 1971, continue to the 1975 exhibition LeConte Stewart: Retrospective that the 1987 exhibition Three Photographers: Susan Makov, Craig Law, and John Telford and the 1990 exhibition My Beloved Is Mine: Marriage and Womanhood in the Jewish tradition. Another exhibition focus is the presentation of collections of private individuals, but also museums such as the Museum of Modern Art
The most successful exhibition at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts is Monet to Picasso from 2008, were shown in the loan from the Cleveland Museum of Art. Within four weeks, nearly 15,000 people visited the exhibition heavily advertised, which means an average of about 500 visitors per day. Overall, the museum attracted over 50,000 visitors.