Best Museum Studies & Museology Books
Here you will get Best Museum Studies & Museology Books For you.This is an up-to-date list of recommended books.
1. The Louvre: The History, The Collections, The Architecture
Author: by Genevieve Bresc-Bautier
English
616 pages
0847868931
Experience the Louvre’s majestic halls, grand galleries, and stunning artworks in this exquisite visit to the world-renowned museum-highlighting beloved works of art alongside hidden gems, all situated in the palace’s stunning architectural spaces. Every year, more than ten million visitors from around the world visit the Louvre’s 68,000 square meters of gallery space containing more than 35,000 works of art.
The Louvre is widely considered the most innovative of the world’s preeminent museums. This gorgeous tome is a celebration of an enduring institution and the magnificent works of art that it houses. Rather than showing only isolated images of the artworks themselves, this book shows many of the pieces in the context of the beautiful galleries and spaces where they live, to give the reader an experience similar to being at the Louvre.
The Louvre explores the eight centuries of fascinating history surrounding the museum, which began in the Middle Ages as a fortress, then became a royal residence which continued to enlarge, expand, and develop over the centuries with the most brilliant architects and painters being called to work on this architectural masterpiece.
2. The Little(r) Museums of Paris: An Illustrated Guide to the City's Hidden Gems (RUNNING PRESS)
Author: by Emma Jacobs
Running Press Adult
English
192 pages
Discover a new side of Paris, hidden in plain sight, with this beautifully illustrated guide to the city’s smaller collections and best-kept secrets, from artists’ studios to scientific museums. A visit to Paris can often seem like a highlight reel – the Louvre, the Musee d’Orsay, the Eiffel Tower.
But Paris isn’t only about the big attractions; in fact, some might say it’s the offbeat destinations that hold the greatest treasures. The Little(r) Museums of Paris takes a whimsical journey through these smaller destinations, from the fantastical to the bizarre, offering both a guide to the city and inspiration for armchair travelers.
Rather than traveling by neighborhood, this charming guide explores the different types of institutions nestled within Paris, from time capsules like the Musee Nissim de Camondo to explorations of the world beyond the city limits, including the Institute of the Arab World.
Readers will peek behind the curtains of artists’ apartments and into the microscopes of collections of scientific oddities. Each entry opens up a new world of adventure, with a description of the museum’s collection, as well as a short history, watercolor illustrations, and a miniature map.
3. The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History
Author: by Robert M. Edsel
English
496 pages
1599951495
At the same time Adolf Hitler was attempting to take over the western world, his armies were methodically seeking and hoarding the finest art treasures in Europe. The Fuehrer had begun cataloguing the art he planned to collect as well as the art he would destroy: “degenerate” works he despised.
In a race against time, behind enemy lines, often unarmed, a special force of American and British museum directors, curators, art historians, and others, called the Monuments Men, risked their lives scouring Europe to prevent the destruction of thousands of years of culture.
Focusing on the eleven-month period between D-Day and V-E Day, this fascinating account follows six Monuments Men and their impossible mission to save the world’s great art from the Nazis.
4. The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century
Author: by Kirk Wallace Johnson
Viking
English
320 pages
As heard on NPR’s This American LifeAbsorbing … Though it’s non-fiction, The Feather Thief contains many of the elements of a classic thriller. Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh AirOne of the most peculiar and memorable true-crime books ever. Christian Science MonitorA rollicking true-crime adventure and a captivating journey into an underground world of fanatical fly-tiers and plume peddlers, for readers of The Stranger in the Woods, The Lost City of Z, and The Orchid Thief.
On a cool June evening in 2009, after performing a concert at London’s Royal Academy of Music, twenty-year-old American flautist Edwin Rist boarded a train for a suburban outpost of the British Museum of Natural History. Home to one of the largest ornithological collections in the world, the Tring museum was full of rare bird specimens whose gorgeous feathers were worth staggering amounts of money to the men who shared Edwin’s obsession: the Victorian art of salmon fly-tying.
Once inside the museum, the champion fly-tier grabbed hundreds of bird skinssome collected 150 years earlier by a contemporary of Darwin’s, Alfred Russel Wallace, who’d risked everything to gather themand escaped into the darkness. Two years later, Kirk Wallace Johnson was waist high in a river in northern New Mexico when his fly-fishing guide told him about the heist.
5. Museum Registration Methods (American Alliance of Museums)
Author: by John E. Simmons
English
604 pages
1538113112
Since the first edition was published in 1958, Museum Registration Methods has defined the profession and served as a fundamental reference for all aspects of collections registration, care, and management. The sixth edition of Museum Registration Methods is a comprehensive guide to registration and collections management for museums, from acquisition to use and deaccessioning.
The authors and other contributors come from a wide variety of museums and specializations. The 56 chapters in this edition are either new or updated, and include the history of the profession, the role of the registrar in the museum, managing very large collections, developing and implementing collection management policies, documentation of collections, accessioning, condition reports, deaccessioning, repositories, and provenance research.
Contemporary and digital art, living and natural history collections, loans, exhibitions, found-in-collection objects, shipping, records management, and electronic data management are also addressed, along with object handling and numbering, digitization, condition reporting, preventive care, storage on and off-site, inventory, moving and packing, shipping nationally and internationally, couriering, risk assessment, security, insurance, integrated pest management, ethics, sustainability, sacred and culturally sensitive objects, intellectual property rights, appraisal, ethical and legal issues, and research.
6. The Louvre: The Many Lives of the World’s Most Famous Museum
Author: by James Gardner
English
416 pages
0802148778
The fascinating and little-known story of the Louvre, from its inception as a humble fortress to its transformation into the palatial residence of the kings of France and then into the world’s greatest art museum. Some ten million people from all over the world flock to the Louvre each year to enjoy its incomparable art collection.
Yet few of them are aware of the remarkable history of that place and of the buildings themselvesa fascinating story that historian James Gardner elegantly chronicles in the first full-length history of the Louvre in English. More than 7,000 years ago, men and women camped on a spot called le Louvre for reasons unknown; a clay quarry and a vineyard supported a society there in the first centuries AD.
A thousand years later, King Philippe Auguste of France constructed a fortress there in 1191, just outside the walls of a city far smaller than the Paris we know today. Intended to protect the capital against English soldiers stationed in Normandy, the fortress became a royal residence under Charles V two centuries later, and then the monarchy’s principal residence under the great Renaissance king Franois I in 1546.
7. The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution
Author: by Dan Hicks
English
336 pages
0745341764
Walk into any European museum today and you will see the curated spoils of Empire. They sit behind plate glass: dignified, tastefully lit. Accompanying pieces of card offer a name, date and place of origin. They do not mention that the objects are all stolen.
Few artefacts embody this history of rapacious and extractive colonialism better than the Benin Bronzes – a collection of thousands of metal plaques and sculptures depicting the history of the Royal Court of the Obas of Benin City, Nigeria. Pillaged during a British naval attack in 1897, the loot was passed on to Queen Victoria, the British Museum and countless private collections.
The story of the Benin Bronzes sits at the heart of a heated debate about cultural restitution, repatriation and the decolonisation of museums. In The Brutish Museum, Dan Hicks makes a powerful case for the urgent return of such objects, as part of a wider project of addressing the outstanding debt of colonialism.
8. The Art Museum in Modern Times
Author: by Charles Saumarez Smith
English
272 pages
0500022437
A compelling examination of the art museum from a renowned director, this sweeping book explores how architecture, vision, and funding have transformed art museums around the world over the past eighty years. How have art museums changed in the past century?
Where are they headed in the future? Charles Saumarez Smith is uniquely qualified to answer these questions, having been at the helm of three major institutions over the course of his distinguished career. For The Art Museum in Modern Times, Saumarez Smith has undertaken an odyssey, visiting art museums across the globe and examining how the experience of art is shaped by the buildings that house it.
His story starts with the Museum of Modern Art in New York, one of the first museums to focus squarely on the art of the present rather than the past. When it opened in 1939, MoMA’s boldly modernist building represented a stark riposte to the neoclassicism of most earlier art museums.
From there, Saumarez Smith investigates dozens of other museums, including the Tate Modern in London, the Getty Center in Los Angeles, the West Bund Museum in Shanghai, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. He explores our shifting reasons for visiting museums, changes to the way exhibits are organized and displayed, and the spectacular new architectural landmarks that have become destinations in their own right.
9. Alexander Calder: Modern from the Start
Author: by Cara Manes
English
144 pages
163345116X
On Alexander Calder’s fruitful, creative and enduring relationship with MoMA, from the early wire sculptures to late abstractionsAlexander Calder’s work first appeared in the Museum of Modern Art’s galleries in 1930, in the exhibition Painting and Sculpture by Living Americans. Over the next decades the artist’s connection with the Museum would be deep, productive and mutually beneficial.
Calder cultivated friendships and working relationships with notable figures, including Alfred H. Barr Jr., the Museum’s founding director, and James Johnson Sweeney, with whom he collaborated on his expansive retrospective exhibition in 1943. His work is imprinted on MoMA’s early history, not only for its material and conceptual innovation but also for its presence at significant moments, such as a mobile made to hang over the lobby’s grand staircase on the occasion of the new Goodwin and Stone building (Lobster Trap and Fish Tail, which hangs there to this day); an elaborate candelabra to adorn the tables at a celebratory anniversary event; and a sculpture to fly off a flagpole to advertise the landmark exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art.
10. The Whole Picture: The colonial story of the art in our museums & why we need to talk about it
Author: by Alice Procter
Cassell (June 1, 2021)
English
288 pages
If you think art history has to be pale, male and stale – think again. Should museums be made to give back their marbles? Is it even possible to ‘decolonise’ our galleries?Must Rhodes fall? From the stolen Wakandan art in Black Panther, to Emmanuel Macron’s recent commitment to art restitution, and Beyonc and Jay Z’s provocative music video filmed in the Louvre, the question of decolonising our relationship with the art around us is quickly gaining traction.
People are waking up to the seedy history of the world’s art collections, and are starting to ask difficult questions about what the future of museums should look like. In The Whole Picture, art historian and Uncomfortable Art Tour guide Alice Procter provides a manual for deconstructing everything you thought you knew about art, and fills in the blanks with the stories that have been left out of the art history canon for centuries.
The book is divided into four chronological sections, named after four different kinds of art space:The PalaceThe ClassroomThe MemorialThe PlaygroundEach section tackles the fascinating and often shocking stories of five different art pieces, including the propaganda painting that the East India Company used to justify its control in India; the Maori mokomokai skulls that were traded and collected by Europeans as ‘art objects’; and Kara Walker’s controversial contemporary sculpture A Subtlety, which raised questions about ‘appropriate’ interactions with art.
11. The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe's Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War
Author: by Lynn H. Nicholas
Vintage
English
512 pages
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle AwardThe real story behind the major motion picture The Monuments Men. The cast of characters includes Hitler and Goering, Gertrude Stein and Marc Chagall-not to mention works by artists from Leonardo da Vinci to Pablo Picasso.
And the story told in this superbly researched and suspenseful book is that of the Third Reich’s war on European culture and the Allies’ desperate effort to preserve it. From the Nazi purges of “Degenerate Art” and Goering’s shopping sprees in occupied Paris to the perilous journey of the Mona Lisa from Paris and the painstaking reclamation of the priceless treasures of liberated Italy, The Rape of Europa is a sweeping narrative of greed, philistinism, and heroism that combines superlative scholarship with a compelling drama.
12. I Too Sing America: The Harlem Renaissance at 100 (ELECTA)
Author: by Wil Haygood
0847863123
Rizzoli Electa
English
Winner of the James A.Porter and David C. Driskell Book Award for African American Art History, I Too Sing America offers a major survey on the visual art and material culture of the groundbreaking movement one hundred years after the Harlem Renaissance emerged as a creative force at the close of World War I.
It illuminates multiple facets of the era-the lives of its people, the art, the literature, the music, and the social history-through paintings, prints, photography, sculpture, and contemporary documents and ephemera. The lushly illustrated chronicle includes work by cherished artists such as Romare Bearden, Allan Rohan Crite, Palmer Hayden, William Johnson, Jacob Lawrence, Archibald Motley, and James Van Der Zee.
The project is the culmination of decades of reflection, research, and scholarship by Wil Haygood, acclaimed biographer and preeminent historian on Harlem and its cultural roots. In thematic chapters, the author captures the range and breadth of the Harlem Reniassance, a sweeping movement which saw an astonishing array of black writers and artists and musicians gather over a period of a few intense years, expanding far beyond its roots in Harlem to unleashing a myriad of talents upon the nation.
13. The Hermitage Collections: Volume I: Treasures of World Art; Volume II: From the Age of Enlightenment to the Present Day
Author: by Mikhail Borisovich Dr. Piotrovsky
Rizzoli
English
656 pages
The definitive volumes celebrating the collections of the Hermitage Museum. For nearly 250 years the State Hermitage has been one of Europe’s most palatial museums. It encompasses more than three million works of art and artifacts displayed within a spectacular architectural ensemble, the heart of which is the famed Winter Palace.
The two volumes of The Hermitage Collections capture the masterpieces and discuss the history that make this world-famous institution a cultural destination and a global treasure. Many of its rarely reproduced works are included in these two volumes, such as The Raphael Loggias (as copied from the Vatican), Michelangelo’s Crouching Boy, The Gonzaga Cameo, Leonardo da Vinci’s Madonna with a Flower (The Benois Madonna), and Titian’s St. Sebastian.
The Hermitage collections were developed beginning in 1764 by Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia. Today, the Hermitage collections constitute one of the great art museums of the world.
