Rivals on the Fenway: Isabella Stewart Gardner & the MFA - 01

In the first decade of the twentieth century, two new neighboring institutions in Boston’s Back Bay — the Museum of Fine Arts and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum—charted alternative visions of what an art museum might be and do. Oppositional strategies accentuated differences and tensions between public and private modes of exhibition and reception, collecting criteria and governance to offer generative examples, as well as foils, for later collectors and curators. Case studies and comparative analysis of these rivals on the Fenway yields fundamental insights into the essence, evolution, and current predicaments, of the American art museum as we know it today. Special themes include: art and interior decoration of the Aesthetic Movement in America; collecting Asian art; women as art patrons in the Gilded Age; origins of museum curating and museum education; Bernard Berenson and connoisseurship; museum gardens; philanthropy; private art museums, past and present. Field trips to both museums. Some art history background strongly recommended.

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