The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: A Handbook of the Collection

ISBN: 1555950892

Author: Ward, Roger

Condition: New

Kansas City's Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, which resulted from the combined legacies of William Rockhill Nelson (1841-1915) and Mary McAfee Atkins (1836-1911), is one of America's glories, uniquely combining masterpieces of Western and Asian art. This pictorial treasury, published in celebration of the sixtieth anniversary of the museum's opening, presents about 1,200 works in every medium (chosen from a collection that totals nearly 30,000 objects), representing every key civilization in the history of art: The Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas; Art of the Ancient Mediterranean World; the Western Tradition in Europe; American Art; and the Arts of Asia. Essays by Roger Ward, Curator of European Art, introduce each section of the book and relate the history of this incomparable institution and its collections.In comparing this handbook to its immediate predecessor, published in 1973, Ward notes, among the changes, the addition of many European paintings; recently acquired American masterworks of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; additions among the arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas; bequests of much-needed Japanese art; and acquisitions of Western decorative arts and scores of prints.This is actually the sixth handbook published by the Nelson-Atkins. Director Marc F. Wilson, in his Foreword, refers to it as "a self-portrait of the Nelson-Atkins drawn by the generation charged with its welfare as the institution marks its sixtieth anniversary," a moment when the collection continues to expand in all directions.