Snite Museum of Art

Snite Museum of Art

Established	1980
Location	University of Notre Dame 100 Moose Krause Circle Notre Dame, Indiana
Coordinates
Type	Art
Website	Official website

The Snite Museum of Art is a fine art museum on the University of Notre Dame campus, near South Bend, Indiana. It owns over 23,000 works which represent many principal world cultures and periods, with a focus on Western art history. It is particularly known for its Italian Renaissance paintings and their Mesoamerican galleries. According to the website, ..."the museum now exhibits the most important collection of Olmec art in any art museum in the United States. The Unruh purchase reinforces the Museum's position as one of the most important general pre-Columbian collections in this country."

Predecessors

Before the Snite opened in 1980, Notre Dame did not have an art museum, although various public spaces at the University offered galleries. As early as 1924, the Wightman Memorial Art Gallery at University Library was used for art exhibitions. In 1952, O'Shaughnessy Hall, home of the College of Arts and Letters, was equipped with galleries. During the 1950s, Croatian sculptor Ivan Meštrović was in residence at the University, working in the eponymous Meštrović Studio.

In 1975, the Fred B. Snite family donated funds to construct the Snite Museum of Art. The museum opened in 1980, incorporating both Meštrović's sculpture studio (Snite is also home to the Ivan Meštrović papers) and the O'Shaughnessy art gallery, the latter used for the presentation of traveling and temporary exhibitions.

Outreach programs

The Museum provides curriculum-related tours for 7,000 area-school children, after-school, and summer programs at the Robinson Community Learning Center, summer art camps for at-risk children, art instruction for ACE student teachers and teacher workshops for local K-12 instructors.

Collections and holdings

This Olmec baby-face figurine is part of the Museum's large collection of Olmec artifacts.

The Snite holds paintings by artists such as Taddeo di Bartolo, Bernardino Luini, Memling, Francesco de Mura, Fiammingo, Corot, de, Walter Sickert, and Georgia O'Keeffe.

It has late medieval paintings with devotional subject matter by Gentile da Fabriano (Master of Adoration of the Magi altarpiece, Minias of Florence, Gualtieri di Giovanni da Pisa, and Neroccio di Bartolomeo de' Landi.

It has baroque period paintings by Ativeduto Grammatica, Andrea Leone, Francesco Trevisani, Francesco Vanni, Claude Lorrain, Simon Vouet, Nicolaes Maes, Jan Lievens, Jacobus Storck ("Port Scene"), and Isaack Luttichuys.

It has 18th-century paintings by François Boucher, Jean François de Troy, Carle Van Loo, and the American Benjamin West.

It also has 19th-century paintings by Léon Cogniet ("View of Tivoli"), Gustave Courbet, Thomas Couture, Charles-François Daubigny, Jean-Léon Gérôme (Study for Picador), Alphonse Legros, Georges Michel, and Alexandre-Hyacinthe Dunouy.

Americans represented with paintings at this art museum include Diego Lasansky, Marsden Hartley, Mauricio Lasansky, Milton Avery, Ralston Crawford, and Irish-born Sean Scully.

20th century painters also represented include Paula Modersohn-Becker (Tree), Natalia Goncharova (Spring), Joan Miró, Joaquín Torres García, Georgia O'Keeffe (Blue One), Philip Pearlstein, and Josef Albers.

There are also sculptings by Ivan Meštrović (Ashbaugh Madonna).

External links

• Official website