CULTURE AND SOCIETY

Brooklyn Museum

The origin of this museum dates back to 1823 when the merchant William Wood founded the Brooklyn Apprentices library to support the education of young merchants. In 1843 it merged with Brooklyn Lyceum to form the Brooklyn Institute and three years later a permanent fine arts gallery was established. In 1890 it was decided to build a new large structure dedicated jointly to the fine arts and natural sciences, reorganizing and renaming the institute as the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, the progenitor of the Brooklyn Museum. The design of the new building was entrusted in 1893 to McKim, Mead & White with the ambitious plan to build one of the largest structures in the world that also contained the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and the Brooklyn Children's Museum. In fact, the institutions remained separate and in the 1970s they became independent entities, and in the end only a quarter of the initial project was realised. This is also because the rivalry between Brooklyn and Manhattan ended with the annexation of the neighborhood to the city in 1898 and the latter already had two prestigious museum institutions, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Museum of Natural History.
The Beaux-Arts building had a large staircase leading to the entrance, which was marked by six Ionic columns surmounted by a pediment with a tympanum decorated with sculptures. The large staircase was eliminated, not without controversy, in the 1930s and in 2004 the entrance was renovated to create a portico covered by a modern glass roof.
The 52,000 square meter exhibition area houses a vast permanent collection of over 1.5 million works of art. Among these, the most important section is certainly that dedicated to Egyptian art, considered one of the best in the world, which includes sculptures, statues, paintings, sarcophagi and funeral objects.
The museum sections are:
- American Art
- Arts of Africa
- Arts of the Americas
- Arts of the Islamic World
- Arts of the Pacific Islands
- Arts of Asia
- Contemporary Art
- Decorative Arts
- Egyptian, Classical, Ancient Near Eastern Art
- Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art
- European Art
- Libraries and Archive

References

Kenneth T. Jackson, Lisa Keller, Nancy Flood. The Encyclopedia of New York City: Second Edition. Yale University Press, 2010. p. 180
Francis Morrone. The Architectural Guidebook to New York City . Gibbs Smith, 2002. pp. 381-383
Brooklyn Museum Building (Brooklyn Museum)
Brooklyn Museum (Wikipedia)

Useful links

Brooklyn Museum (Google Arts & Culture)