It is a tourist cliché to visit art galleries, but it is still worth visiting them. What are the most famous galleries in the world simply must visit during a trip, we will consider in this review.
Louvre (Paris, France)
It was founded in 1793 on the basis of the collections of French kings. The Louvre Art Gallery is located in the center of Paris in the palace of the same name. The main entrance is the famous glass pyramid.
Halls of the museum offer more than 35 thousand items – paintings, drawings, sculpture, Egyptian, Greek, Roman and Eastern antiquities, arts and crafts. Louvre is a large gallery, its museum fund counts 460 thousand objects. In the Louvre you can see the most famous works of art – the Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci and the ancient Greek Venus of Milossa, paintings by Rubens and Rembrandt. The main staircase of the treasury is decorated with the sculpture “Nika of Samothrace”.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, USA)
The Metropolitan is the largest art museum in the United States. The gallery was founded in 1870 by businessmen and art lovers. The museum is located in the Central Park district of New York City.
There are about 2 million objects in the halls of the gallery. These are objects of ancient Greek art, paintings by American and European artists, including van Dyck, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Renoir, Matisse and others. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is one of the largest galleries with an extensive collection of impressionist paintings and many valuable artifacts of Muslim art.
National Gallery (London, UK)
The London National Gallery was founded in 1824 with the help of the British Parliament. The museum building is located in the city center in Trafalgar Square.
On the exhibition grounds of the gallery with a total area of more than 46.4 thousand square meters the masterpieces of European painting of XIII-XX centuries are presented. The overview of paintings is in chronological order, which provides visitors with an immersive experience of art history over several centuries. London National Gallery offers works by Titian, Rubens, Raphael, van Dyck, Cézanne and other great masters.
Tate Modern (London, UK)
Tate Modern London gallery was founded in 2000. The exhibition area is located in the building of the former power station and is about 35 thousand square meters.
The main hall of the Tate Modern is interesting, located in the former turbine room with a 99-meter brick chimney, where large art objects are displayed. The collection includes masterpieces of modernist and contemporary art, works by British authors since 1500 and works by masters from other countries since 1900. The gallery offers a look at the creations of Holman Hunt, Gabriel Rosetti, John Milles and other famous artists.
Princess Sofia Museum (Madrid, Spain)
The Reina Gallery appeared in 1986 as a venue for temporary exhibitions. The official opening of the Princess Sofia Museum took place in 1992.
The gallery’s collection is filled with paintings by famous avant-garde artists Miró, Picasso and Dali. Avant-garde art is represented by works by artists from the 20s and 30s, including Julio Gonzalez, Maria Blanchard, Pablo Gargallo, Alberto Sanchez, and Max Ernst. The gallery will also be of interest to fans of abstract informalism. The museum gives a complete picture of the development of art from the last century to the present day.
Modern Art Museum (San Francisco, USA)
This private, non-profit gallery was established in 1935. The Museum of Modern Art is the largest facility in the United States with an extensive collection of 19th and 21st century art.
The gallery’s collection is continually expanding through the acquisition and long-term loan of works from private collections. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art offers about 29,000 works of painting, drawing, sculpture, photography and architecture. The collection of contemporary media art objects is interesting. Since 2009, its halls have housed about 1,100 works by famous authors, including Warhol, Kiefer, Calder, Lichtenstein and others.
National Gallery of Art (Washington, USA)
The museum is considered to be the largest structure in the world built of marble. This gallery was opened in 1937 with the help of American congressmen.
The collection of the museum is no less than 130 thousand art objects, including about 4 thousand paintings. The latter are represented by works from the Renaissance to the present day. The most famous authors of the presented paintings, sketches and photographs are Vermeer, Rembrandt, Monet, Van Gogh, Leonardo da Vinci, Picasso, Matisse, Pollock, Warhol, Lichtenstein, Calder. The sculpture garden, part of the gallery, is decorated with masterpieces by Miró, Bourgeois and Guimard.
Uffizzi Gallery (Florence, Italy)
The name of the building built in the Middle Ages that houses the famous museum was originally used to house the local administration. The site’s history as a gallery begins with a small exhibition by the Duke of Medici on the second floor of the building structure.
The golden masterpieces of the museum’s collection today are works by the great Italian masters. These are Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus,” “Madonna and Child with Angel” and “Spring,” Michelangelo’s “Madonna Donni,” Raphael’s “Madonna with a Cheek,” Titian’s “Venus of Urbino,” Caravaggio’s “Bacchus, Da Vinci’s “Adoration of the Magi” and “Annunciation”, Verocchio’s “Baptism of Christ” as well as paintings, sculptures and tapestries by non-Italian authors, including Dürer and Rembrandt. The Uffizzi Gallery is also interesting with its unique collection of self-portraits.
The famous collections of architecture and paintings in any of the museums reviewed above can take a long time to explore. Nevertheless, the galleries in this review are worth a visit when visiting the cities and countries where they are located.