Fogg Museum
32 Quincy Street
Cambridge, MA
617.495.9400
One of the three museums that make up the Harvard Art Museums, the Fogg Museum is the oldest, established in 1896. The museum houses Western paintings, sculptures, decorative art, photographs, prints, and drawings that date from the Middle Ages to today. The museum can be found at 32 Quincy Street.
The museum’s American art includes the Harvard University Portrait Collection which is made up of 1,200 paintings, drawings and sculptures that are installed in various locations around Harvard’s campus. Additionally, there are works by such esteemed artists as John Singer Sargent, Georgia O’Keeffe, and John Singleton Copley.
The Fogg Museum has a collection of 12,000 drawings, including Renaissance artists’ designs for furniture and objects. Goldsmith’s Designs by Michelangelo – a group of oil lamp depictions using black chalk – is an example of this genre of art found at the Fogg.
Currently, the Fogg Museum is undergoing a massive reconstruction and much of the public collection has been moved to the Arthur M. Sackler Museum so patrons can continue to visit much of the art. The museums redesign is considered to be more than just an architectural change but will additionally be an institutional revolution – shifting the role of the museum in the community and university.
The new addition includes a glass rooftop which allows natural light to filter into classrooms, exhibition spaces, and the courtyard below. The Calderwood Courtyard was designed after the façade of the Canon’s House of the Church of San Biggio in Montepulciano, Italy and has been used for a number of events over the years. During the renovation project, the courtyard is receiving improvements that will allow visitors to the galleries move throughout the new facility easier.
When the Fogg Museum reopens in 2012, it will house the works of all three of Harvard’s Art Museums – the Busch-Reisinger, the Arthur M. Sackler, and the Fogg itself.
The Arthur M. Sackler Museum
485 Broadway
Cambridge, MA
617.495.9400
In the 1980s, Asian art began to attract more and more attention. In 1985, The Arthur M. Sackler Museum was opened to meet this need.
The Sackler’s holdings represent most of the countries and regions of Asia. It holds notable works of ancient Asian art, including Chinese jade and ceramics, Japanese woodblock prints, Buddhist cave-temple sculptures, ancient narrative paintings, as well as artwork from Islamic lands and India.
There are approximately 20,000 works, spanning more than 7,000 years, from Neolithic times to the present, and originate from a broad range of Asian civilizations. While the department’s holdings include significant works from India, Southeast Asia, and Tibet, it is most renowned for its East Asian art, consisting of objects from China, Korea, and Japan.
The museum has become a vital resource in terms of research for students and specialists not only in art history but also in areas such as archaeology, social anthropology, epigraphy, literature, religion, philosophy, and political science, serving both the academic Harvard community and the public.
Busch-Reisinger Museum
32 Quincy Street
Cambridge MA
Tel: 617.495.9400
In response to past demands for a Germanic museum at Harvard, the Busch-Reisinger Museum was opened in 1903 as the only museum in North America to display and promote the understanding of arts from German-speaking Europe. Today, it is one of only two museums in North America that exhibit Germanic arts.
From Vienna Secession art and 1920s abstract art, to late medieval sculpture, Busch-Reisinger holds a wide range of renowned resources related to Germanic culture. Today some of the museum’s most celebrated holdings include the late 19th-century painting, art of the Austrian Secession (by artist like Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Josef Hoffmann, etc), German expressionism (by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Emil Nolde, Vassily Kandinsky), 1920s abstraction (by El Lissitzky, László Moholy-Nagy, etc.), and material relating to the Bauhaus (including the archives of Lyonel Feininger and Walter Gropius).
Charles L. Kuhn, the museum’s curator from 1930-1968, acquired the museum’s first modern oil painting in 1941 –The 1927 Self-Portrait in Tuxedo, by Max Beckmann, which had been confiscated from the Berlin Nationalgalerie by the Nazis as part of their campaign against so-called “Degenerate Art.” Under Kuhn’s curatorship, the Busch-Reisinger transformed into one of the leading collections of modern art not just from Germany, but from Austria, Switzerland, and many other related cultures.
If you’d like to preview the museum before visiting we recommend “The Busch-Reisinger Museum: Harvard University Art Museums” by noted artist Peter Nisbet.
