The Brooklyn Museum is one of the largest art museums in the United States with a permanent collection of more than one million object. It's McKim, Mead and White designed building, which opened in 1987 while building continued, is 562,000 square feet. The Museum's comprehensive permanent collections range from antiquity to the present and represent nearly every culture.
Included are American and European paintings and sculpture, one of the most important collections of ancient Egyptian treasures in the world, African, Oceanic, Asian, Islamic, Native American, and Spanish colonial art, as well as rich holdings of prints, drawings, and photographs. The Museum also presents several temporary exhibitions each year as well as a wide range of public programs.
The collections of African, Oceanic and New World Art represent a milestone of the Brooklyn Museum and museums in America. In 1923, the museum exhibit its African collection as art as opposed to artifacts. Exhibits include a Nigerian ivory gong from the sixteenth-century; totem poles of North America; a perfectly preserved Peruvian tunic from AD600; and sculptures from the Solomon Islands.
The Decorative Arts collection is arranged in 28 American period rooms starting from the seventeenth-century. The Moorish Smoking Room from John Rockefeller's brownstone home is an example of elegance from the 1880s. There's also an authentic Art Deco study from a Park Avenue abode dating back to 1928.
The Egyptian, Classical & Ancient Mid-Eastern collections are ranked among the world's finest, harking back to 3500 BC. The Egyptian collection contains sculptures, statues, tomb paintings and most notably the silver coffin of an ibis (a sacred bird). The ancient Greek and Roman collections include statues, pottery, and jewelry. The Ancient near and Middle Eastern exhibits include reliefs from and Assyrian palace and a pottery collection.
Paintings and sculptures date back to the fourteenth century and include nineteenth-century French art (Degas, Rodin, Matisse and others), Spanish colonial paintings and North American art (including Georgia O'Keefe's Brooklyn Bridge). Ornamentation from New York buildings which have been demolished is the focal point of the Sculpture Garden.
The prints section includes Durer's woodcut print The Great Triumphal Chariot, Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works, and lithographs by Whistler. Drawings include those by Van Gogh, Picasso, Klee and many more. The photo collection focuses on the twentieth century with works by Stiechen, Margaret Bourke-White, Robert Mapplethorpe and others, mainly American.
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Brooklyn Museum.
Brooklyn Museum from the subway.
