Historyofmetropolitan

HISTORY

The Georgia Museum of Art, on the campus of the University of Georgia, in Athens, Georgia Museum of Art is both an academic museum and the official art museum of the state of Georgia. The permanent collection consists of American paintings, primarily nineteenth and twentieth century; American, European, and Asian works on paper; the Samuel H. Kress Study Collection of Italian Renaissance paintings; and growing collections of southern decorative arts and Asian art. From the time it was opened to the public in 1948 in the basement of an old library on the university's historic north campus, the museum has grown consistently both in the size of its collection and in the size of its facilities. Today the museum occupies a contemporary building in the Performing and Visual Arts Complex on the university's burgeoning east campus. There, 52,000 square feet house more than 8,000 objects in the museum's permanent collection-a dramatic leap from the core of 100 paintings donated by the museum's founder, Alfred Heber Holbrook.

Much of the museum's collection of American paintings was donated by Holbrook, in memory of his first wife, Eva Underhill Holbrook. Included in this collection are works by such luminaries as Frank Weston Benson, William Merritt Chase, Stuart Davis, Arthur Dove, Georgia O'Keeffe, Childe Hassam, Winslow Homer, Jacob Lawrence, and Theodore Robinson. Over the years it has been impossible to separate the history of the museum from the story of Holbrook's generosity.

Holbrook retired from an active New York law practice at the age of seventy. He began a personal quest to learn about the world of art, an interest piqued by his passion for visiting museums. In his retirement he was determined to study art in a gentle southern climate. A trip to Athens in the mid-1940s led to his introduction to Lamar Dodd, head of the university's art department. Instantly, the two began a friendship, sharing a joint vision of enriching the visual arts environment in Georgia. Holbrook, clad in a knee-length pink artist's smock with pipe in hand, attended art classes at the university. The Georgia Museum of Art was founded in 1945, and Holbrook became its first director and one of the university's and the state's most beloved citizens. Holbrook continued to serve as the museum's director past his ninetieth birthday.

Under the leadership of succeeding directors, numerous museum exhibitions have traveled to national and international venues. When Adriaen van Ostade: Etchings of Peasant Life in Holland's Golden Age was exhibited at the Rembrandt House in Amsterdam, the catalog quickly sold out, becoming a text for the study of seventeenth-century Dutch printmaking in classrooms across the country. This exhibition also reflected the importance of prints and drawings in the programming of the museum, which houses one of the finest collections of works on paper in the Southeast. The collection includes Old Master prints, Parisian prints of the 1890s, and American prints and drawings of the early twentieth century. Exhibitions from international museums such as the National Gallery of Scotland, the Palazzo Venezia in Rome, the Rembrandt House, and the San Carlos National Museum in Mexico City have all been displayed in the galleries of the museum over the past decade. The museum also offers traveling exhibitions formed from its permanent collection to other museums and art institutes around Georgia and the Southeast.

Since the early 1970s the Friends of the Museum, a support group of more than 1,200 members, has hosted fundraisers and openings for exhibitions and has sponsored exhibitions and educational programs at the museum. The museum continues to balance its dual designation as an academic museum with its role as the official state art museum of Georgia. Its schedule is a reflection of the academic study of the history of art and a broader array of popular exhibitions that appeal to all audiences. From the time Alfred Holbrook first loaded works from his art collection in the trunk of an old Buick to share with Georgia's schoolchildren until today, when the museum staff crisscrosses the state of Georgia to present a variety of educational programs, the Georgia Museum of Art has made the state a richer and more culturally viable place to live.


 * Information Provided From: http://www.uga.edu/gamuseum/index.html