Author Description

The Museum as Muse: Artists Reflect surveys the ways in which artists, mostly of the present century, have addressed the museum, commented on its nature, confronted its concepts and functions, drawn from its methods, and examined its relationship to the art it contains. This lively, involving, and intellectually provocative presentation encompasses a tremendous variety of artworks, large and small, intimate and expansive, in mediums both familiar and surprising: paintings, sculptures, photographs, drawings, prints, videos, and installations. Fully illustrated with the works of an international cross section of more than sixty artists, this volume makes a substantial and lasting contribution to our understanding of the intertwining, continually metamorphosing relationship between artists and museums. Published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1999 on the occasion of the major exhibition The Museum as Muse: Artists Reflect, this book features an introductory essay by Kynaston McShine, Senior Curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art and director of the exhibition. In the ensuing plate section, short entries by several authors on the art and artists accompany 233 full-color and black-and-white illustrations representing a wide diversity of works of art. Among them are photographs of people, art, spaces, and events taken inside museums, by such artists as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Elliott Erwitt, Eve Arnold, Garry Winogrand, and Thomas Struth. Personal museums and cabinets of curiosities, large and in miniature, have been created by Charles Willson Peale, Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Cornell, Claes Oldenburg, Fluxus, and Mark Dion: others have focused on fantastic images of the destruction or transformation of museums, such as the painter Hubert Robert (the first curator of the Louvre), Edward Ruscha, Komar and Melamid, and Christo. This wealth of material is followed by an anthology of manifestos, statements, and meditations written by artists in this century; biographies and exhibition histories of the artists; and a bibliography of general and monographic publications.