A year's worth of museum news is inevitably a mixed bag of good and bad. For instance, The Metropolitan Museum of Art  in New York City reported its largest ever number of visitors—seven million—but still found itself dealing with a $xl million deficit and causing the institution to delay the building of a new $600 million wing. On the other hand, in September, the struggling Danforth Art Museum  in Framingham, Massachusetts, and its three,000-object collection was taken over by the nearby Framingham State University and renamed the Danforth Art Center at Framingham State Academy . Those who had donated coin and objects to the one-time museum might be upset at the modify of management and ownership, merely presumably an art infinite is amend than no art infinite. Something or nothing was the statement made by the director and trustees of the Berkshire Museum  in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, which decided to sell a grouping of its well-nigh prominent artworks—including prized pieces by Norman Rockwell, Frederic Church, Albert Bierstadt,  and Alexander Calder —to augment the establishment's endowment and refocus the museum'due south bones mission from an art museum exclusively to a museum of science, history and the arts. Public outcry has resulted in an injunction through January 29, 2018.

Fig. 1:Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929), All the Eternal Honey I Have for the Pumpkins, 2016 Forest, mirror, plastic, acrylic, LED. Courtesy Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo / Singapore and Victoria Miro, London. © Yayoi Kusama, awaiting joint acquisition of the Rachofsky Collection and the Dallas Museum of Art through TWOxTWO for AIDS and Art Fund.

Despite ascension museum costs, existing institutions go on to expand and new museums go along to open. Amid the former, in Sarasota, Florida, the Ringling Museum 'south Kotler-Coville Glass Pavilion, opening in January 2018, will house their growing studio glass collection; the New Museum  in New York'due south Bowery appear that Shohei Shigematsu of OMA will blueprint their expansion; and the Hammer Museum  in Los Angeles volition add together 40,000 square feet by 2020. New museums include the Magazzino  in Common cold Spring, New York, focusing on contemporary Italian artwork; the Marciano Art Foundation  in Los Angeles, which Paul and Maurice Marciano (founders of Estimate jeans) will fill with their collection of contemporary art; and the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Fine art,  which the actor and comedian plans for Los Angeles in the near time to come. After facing opposition in San Francisco and Chicago, "Star Wars" filmmaker George Lucas received the go-ahead from Los Angeles city officials to build a Museum of Narrative Fine art,  based on his collection of analogy, fantasy, and comic volume art.


Curators and directors of institutions continually desire to add to their permanent collections, either through the generosity of donors or past using specified funds. The following are just some of the textile acquired during the past year.


In 2017, contemporary art was historic by purchases at many institutions, including New York's Museum of Arts and Pattern (MAD),  which connected its commitment to supporting contemporary craft through the acquisition of 30-ix objects from established and emerging artists. Newport Embankment, California, existent estate developer Gerald E. Buck donated to the University of California at Irvine  his 3,200-piece collection of modern and contemporary artworks, valued at tens of millions of dollars, by artists associated with the country, including Richard Diebenkorn, David Park, Joan Dark-brown, Gilbert "Magu" Lujan, and Sam Francis.


Yayoi Kusama's Infinity Mirror Rooms (Fig. one) employ the repeated employ of objects and paintings in an environment of mirrors that induce a hallucinogenic experience. The Dallas Museum of Art  at present has the only Infinity Mirror Room, featuring polka-dotted pumpkins, of its kind in a North American collection, from a pending joint acquisition with the Rachofsky Collection and the Dallas Museum of Art through TWOxTWO for AIDS and Art Fund. American sculptor and furniture maker John Cederquist also likes to trick the center. He uses elaborate inlays and airbrush paint techniques to create cabinets, chairs, and other items that appear to be something else. From a distance, his 2010 Double Fuji chiffonier (Fig. two) looks similar a kimono, only is an actual working cabinet; it now belongs to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art . Among LACMA's other acquisitions was a articulation buy with the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens  of two epitome chairs (1979–eighty) by American creative person Donald Judd. The two institutions volition share buying of these pieces. The Huntington's Art Collectors' Council purchased two paintings for the museum: Albert Herter 's Adult female with a Fan(ca. 1895), and Bathers (Bath Houses) by realist painter George Tooker, the first example of the artist's work to join a museum collection in the western U.s..


Fig. 2: John Cederquist (b. 1946), Double Fuji chiffonier, 2010. Various forest, aniline dyes, epoxy resins. Los Angeles County Museum of Fine art; Gift of the 2017 Decorative Arts and Pattern Acquisitions Committee (DA²) with Suzanne and Ric Kayne. © 2017 John Cederquist, photo past Gary Zuercher, courtesy of the artist.

Left:  Donald Judd (1928-1994), Prototype Desk-bound and Chairs, 1978-1980. Donald Judd Furniture © 2017 Judd Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; articulation conquering between the Los Angeles Canton Museum of Fine art (LACMA) and The Huntington Library, Art Collection, and Botanical Gardens. Right: George Tooker (1920-2011), Bathers (Bath Houses), 1950. Egg tempera on gessoed board, 20 3/8 10 xv 3/8 inches. Courtesy The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. Web exclusive:These two images have been added to the online version of this commodity.


Fig. iii: Miniature painted breast, Grayson County, Virginia, 1825-1850. Inscribed on the inner lid: "William, M, Mitchell / Was born Sept. the 1st 1825." Tulip poplar and paint. H. 10½, W. 17, D 9 in. Anne P. and Thomas A. Gray Southern Decorative Arts Purchase Fund (5898). Courtesy MESDA. Mitchell (1825-1888), a minister, medico, farmer, and member of the Virginia infantry, saw action under Full general Stonewall Jackson.

A significant grouping of early on colonial American furniture received by the Philadelphia Museum of Fine art  from collectors Anne and Frederick Vogel Iii is installed in an exhibition in the museum's American galleries. The Seminarians, a Boston-based collector grouping, purchased and gifted a Campeche chair to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston . The Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts (MESDA),  in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, acquired a miniature painted box (Fig. 3) with the proper noun of the original possessor and his birthdate (on the inside). It is the merely example from a recently discovered group (previously attributed to Pennsylvania) with identifiers, securely placing the box and the group in southwestern Virginia. MESDA also acquired a pair of rare North Carolina fraktur (Fig. four) that are not only visually absorbing, only relate to the family of craftsmen responsible for the architecture in two of MESDA'southward galleries. Moreover, Noah A. Moose, the artist, was too a tailor, which possibly explains the exuberant wearable. Other acquisitions included a chest of drawers signed by article of furniture maker Karsten Petersen, making information technology the Rosetta stone for identifying his work.

Longtime patrons Charles and Valerie Diker, promised 90-one examples of important Native American art to The Metropolitan Museum of Art,  which will be integrated into the American Wing. Toledo Museum of Art 's Georgia Welles Apollo Society made possible the acquisition of three significant Native American works: an Acoma embroidered manta (circa 1850, one of only xxx-five known); a Cheyenne tipi; and a Santa Domingo Pueblo polychrome clay jar (Fig. 5).


Fig. 4: Noah A. Moose (1817-1874), one of a pair of fraktur for the Sigman and Bost Families, Catawba County, North Carolina,1840. Watercolor and ink on paper, xiii ten 15 inches. Courtesy MESDA Drove; Gift of Betty and Jim Becher and the MESDA Purchase Fund ( 5919.i-2).

The Snite Museum of Art at the University of Notre Matriarch  now has a pair of porcelain Monteiths—crenelated vessels used for cooling wine spectacles—from 1861, acquired through a decorative arts purchase fund. The Cleveland Museum of Art  purchased a grouping of Nabeshima porcelain, the finest Japanese porcelain ever produced and representing the pinnacle of Japanese aesthetics in the medium. 1 of the dishes, with ginkgo leaves, was fabricated for the Shogun in Edo (present-day Tokyo) and his retinue (Fig. vi).


Though not contempo acquisitions, some items are being reintroduced. This past year, following renovations at the Clark Art Found  in Williamstown, Massachusetts, three hundred objects— including examples of American silverish and Chinese consign porcelain from the George Washington Memorial Service—were brought up from storage to the museum'due south 3,275 foursquare-pes decorative arts gallery, while the New Orleans Museum of Art,  following its renovations, is highlighting selections from its drove of glassware, piece of furniture, lamps, and other decorative pieces.


The Cleveland Museum of Fine art,  one of the many museums seeking to expand their permanent collections in African-American art, purchased Norman Lewis' 1960s Alabama, and was given Robert Colescott's 1980 Tea for Two (The Collector) by Agnes Gund. In early December, the McNay Art Museum  announced iii major acquisitions, all collages, by African-American artists Benny Andrews, McArthur Binion, and Rashaad Newsome. The Saint Louis Art Museum  received eighty-one works by contemporary African-American artists, including Stanley Whitney's 1992 Out in the Open up, from Ronald Maurice Ollie and wife Monique McRipley Ollie. The Baltimore Museum of Art  added to its growing collection of works past African-American artists, with Marking Bradford'south 2016 mixed-media painting My Grandmother Felt the Color (purchased through anonymous donations) and the 2005 video Niagara (souvenir of the creative person), also Autumn Flight(1956) past Norman Lewis (souvenir of several donors and acquisition funds).

Left:  Stanley Whitney (b. 1946), Out in the Open, 1992. Acrylic on canvass, 53 1/ii x 60 inches. Courtesy Saint Louis Fine art Museum; the Thelma and Bert Ollie Memorial Collection (E14521.79). ©Stanley Whitney. Correct: Norman Lewis, Autumn Flight, 1956. Autumn Flight is an exemplary painting by the influential artist. It evokes a flock of birds moving through a mottled autumnal sky, referencing the natural world through the artist'due south signature make of abstraction. The paint was applied to the sail in several layers by brushing and spraying, either directly or with the use of a precipitous stencil. Courtesy Baltimore Museum of Art. Web sectional: These two images have been added to the online version of this commodity.


The High Museum  of Art  in Atlanta purchased Kara Walker's fifty-eight- foot-long cut-paper silhouette installation The Jubilant Martyrs of Obsolescence and Ruin (2015), and acquired fifty-four works past thirty-three contemporary African-American artists from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, a nonprofit system whose aim since 2010 has been to expand the recognition of leading contemporary African-American artists in the Southeast through support for exhibitions, programs and publications. In 2014, the Foundation began a programme to transfer its drove to leading American and international museums. Another beneficiary of the Foundation's gift-purchase arrangements in 2017 was the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF),  which acquired threescore-two works of art made by twenty-two African-American artists, which are currently in an exhibition that runs through Apr 2018 (Fig. 8); the New Orleans Museum of Fine art (Fig seven)and the Ackland Art Museum  were also in receipt of the foundation'south collections, with the conquering of ten and twelve works respectively.


The Whitney Museum of American Fine art  was given a 1932 Edward Hopper  painting, Urban center Roofs (Fig. nine), by an bearding donor, too as a wealth of archival materials from the Arthayer R. Sanborn Hopper Collection Trust. The Huntington Museum of Art  in Huntington, West Virginia, acquired a rare English Chinoiserie sugar and tea caddy set past Royal goldsmith Thomas Heming (1722–1801) (Fig. 10). The Kimbell Fine art Museum  in Fort Worth, Texas, acquired Portrait of the Art Dealer Heinrich Thannhauser past Lovis Corinth (1918). Corinth was an creative person revered as a critical figure in the history of German expressionism; in 1904, his sitter founded Moderne Galerie in Munich, which was at the forefront of the art scene. As well inbound the drove was Head (circa 1913), one of less than thirty sculptures carved past Amedeo Modigliani (Fig. 11).

Fig. ix: Edward Hopper (1882–1967), Metropolis Roofs, 1932. Oil on sheet, 29 x 36 inches. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Promised gift of an anonymous donor (P.2016.11). © Heirs of Josephine Northward. Hopper, licensed by Whitney Museum of American Art. The painting depicts the rooftop of Hopper'due south Greenwich Village studio, which he maintained for more than than fifty years.

Fig. 10: Iii-slice sugar and tea caddy prepare past Regal goldsmith Thomas Heming (1722–1801), England, 1757. Silverish with original fitted box. Photo by John Spurlock. Courtesy The Huntington Museum of Arts, Huntington, West Virginia.

 A piece of work by French artist François-Pascal-Simon Gérard (1770-1837) enters The Frick Collection  in New York (Fig. 12). The full-length portrait of Prince Camillo Borghese, the brother-in-law of Napoleon Bonaparte, is the museum's near important painting acquisition since 1991 and will be part of an exhibition opening in October 2018. With the passing of broker and art collector David Rockefeller in March, a promised gift of Camille Pissarro 'south 1868 oil Landscape at Les Pâtis, Pontoise (Fig. 13) entered the collection of the National Gallery of Art , bringing to sixty-seven the number of works by the artist in the museum'due south permanent drove.


Longtime benefactors Peter and Paula Lunder saw that they could make a transformative difference at Colby College Museum of Art  in Waterville, Maine, through their souvenir of 1,150 artworks, estimated at more than $100 million, past 150 artists, amidst them, Mary Cassatt, Albrecht Dürer,  Vincent Van Gogh, Jasper Johns,  Maya Lin, Georgia O'Keeffe, Claes Oldenburg, Rembrandt Van Rijn, James McNeill Whistler, and Ai Weiwei.


The Morgan Library & Museum  added a drawing by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot  (Seated Camaldolese Monk, 1834, souvenir of Jill Newhouse), Martin Schongauer'due south Death of a Virgin (ca. 1470s), and works by David Hockney  and Martin Puryear, the latter ii acquired through buy funds. The Meadows Museum,  which oilman Algur Meadows founded at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, in 1962 to house his collection of Spanish art and which received an additional $45 million gift two years ago from the Meadows Foundation, purchased an early fifteenth-century altarpiece attributed to Catalonian painter Pere Vall. The aureate tempera on wood panel features Saints Benedict and Onuphrius. This painting is ane of merely half dozen extant panels that one time formed the bottom row of an altarpiece in one of Catalonia's many churches (two others are in the collection of the Indianapolis Museum of Art).

Left: Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796-1875), Seated Camaldolese Monk, 1834. Graphite on newspaper. Courtesy The Morgan Library & Museum; Gift of Jill Newhouse. Right: Pere Vall (Spanish, active ca. 1400–c. 1422), Saints Benedict and Onuphrius, ca. 1410. Tempera on Softwood Console. Courtesy Meadows Museum, SMU, Dallas; Museum Purchase with funds generously provided by Richard and Luba Barrett (MM.2017.01). Photo by Kevin Todora. Web exclusive: These 2 images have been added to the online version of this commodity.

A donation of 113 Dutch and Flemish Aureate Age works (Fig. xiv) by seventy-six artists (including Rembrandt, Rubens, Gerrit Dou, Frans Hals, Albert Cuyp and Jan Steen) from collectors Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo and Susan and Matthew Weatherbie to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston  is intended to be shared with wide audiences and help nurture the next generation of scholars and curators. To back up this intention, the donors made a substantial gift of funds to establish a Center for Netherlandish Art at the MFA, and the museum is committed to displaying and lending the collections generously. This center is the showtime of its kind in the U.s.; its programs are expected to launch in 2020.

Fig. xiii: Camille Pissarro (French, 1830–1903), Landscape at Les Pâtis, Pontoise, 1868. Oil on canvas, 31⅞ x 39⅜ inches. Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Souvenir (Fractional and Promised) of Mr. and Mrs. David Rockefeller, in Honor of the 50th Anniversary of the National Gallery of Art.

The J. Paul Getty Museum  in Los Angeles made what it referred to as "one of the most spectacular acquisitions in its history," with 16 drawings (Fig. 15) past such artists every bit Michelangelo, Lorenzo di Credi, Andrea del Sarto, Parmigianino, Rubens, Barocci, Goya, and Degas, as well equally a 1721 painting past Jean Antoine Watteau (The Surprise) and Parmigianino's circa-1535 The Virgin and Child with Saint Mary Magdalen and the Infant Saint John the Baptist. The Getty bought the latter in 2016 for £24.5 million from the Dent-Brocklehurst family of Sudeley Castle, Gloucestershire. An export license was not granted for eight months while the British government sought, and failed, to detect institutional buyers to friction match the price. The Getty also received from Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser 386 works by seventeen different photographers, including Berenice Abbott, Imogen Cunningham,  William Eggleston, Andreas Feininger, and Dorothea Lange.


Sometimes, permanent collections are impermanent. In 2017 the Boston Public Library  was required to return to the Italian regime two fifteenth-century illustrated religious manuscripts stolen from its owners in Sicily. The Metropolitan Museum of Art  also returned to the Italian government a 2,300-year-one-time Greco-Roman vase looted from a tomb in Italy in the 1970s. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston  reached an out-of-court settlement with the estate of Emma Budge, allowing the institution to keep seven pieces of eighteenth-century German porcelain sold nether Nazi duress in Berlin in 1937. And so, some acquisitions make worldwide headlines for other reasons, such equally when the United Arab Emirates (identified as the purchaser after much speculation) acquired Salvator Mundi, attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, for $450 million. The painting will exist on view at the Louvre Abu Dhabi.

Daniel Grant is a freelance writer specializing in the arts industry.

This article was originally published in the 18th Anniversary consequence of Antiques & Fine Art magazine, a fully digitized edition of which is available at www.afamag.com. AFAis affiliated with Incollect.