Beginning in the 1920s, Kress and his foundation assembled, first in New York, and later in Washington, the nation's most inclusive collection of Italian art. In 1938 he decided to donate the collection to the National Gallery of Art, and when it opened in 1941, 375 paintings and 18 works of sculpture from the Kress gift were installed in the West Building. The Gallery's holdings of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Italian paintings have been enriched by gifts from P.A.B. Widener and Paul Mellon, and more recently from purchases. This catalogue is the first of four volumes to document the National Gallery's great collection of Italian paintings.

Rather than centering on the well-known collections in Western European and North American museums, Collecting Asian Art turns to museum collections of Asian art in Central Europe which emerged from the late 19th century onwards. Highlighting the dimensions of Central European connectedness, this volume explores how these collections evolved and changed under changing cultural and political conditions from the pre-World War I to the post-World War II periods. With a primary focus on collections of East Asian, South Asian, and West Asian art in Vienna, Prague, Berlin, Warsaw, Kraków, Budapest, and Ljubljana, it outlines the transregional connections and networks that gradually developed. Collecting Asian Art locates Asian art across the twentieth-century in Central Europe via discourse and ideology, and discusses key collections and the way individual collectors built their networks. It thus explores transregional connections that developed through collecting activities and strategies in the prewar, interwar and postwar eras. Contributors also examine the personal connections between a group of Indologists from postwar Prague and modernist Indian artists from the early 1950s to the 1980s and also discuss the systematic archiving of East Asian art collections in Slovenia. A concluding conversation looks at colonisation and decolonisation from a broader perspective by approaching it through recent art historical discussions on the global dimensions of modernism. By defining the region through its external relationships and its entanglements with regions across Asia rather than as a self-contained unit, the contributions in this volume outline how these transregional connections and networks evolved and changed over time, thus highlighting their singularity in comparison to developments in Western Europe. Based on recent research, Collecting Asian Art reveals neglected sources while reinterpreting well-known ones.

Three-dimensional cutaway illustrations and floor plans of key landmarks complement these richly illustrated, fully updated travel handbooks that also include enhanced maps, street-by-street guides, background information on a host of popular sights and an expanded traveler's survival guide providing tips on hotels, restaurants, local customs, transportation, medical services, museums, entertainment and more.

This important critical study of the history of public art museums in Austria-Hungary explores their place in the wider history of European museums and collecting, their role as public institutions, and their involvement in the complex cultural politics of the Habsburg Empire. Focusing on institutions in Vienna, Cracow, Prague, Zagreb, and Budapest, The Museum Age in Austria-Hungary traces the evolution of museum culture over the long nineteenth century, from the 1784 installation of imperial art collections in the Belvedere Palace (as a gallery open to the public) to the dissolution of Austria-Hungary after the First World War. Drawing on source materials from across the empire, the authors reveal how the rise of museums and display was connected to growing tensions between the efforts of Viennese authorities to promote a cosmopolitan and multinational social, political, and cultural identity, on the one hand, and, on the other, the rights of national groups and cultures to self-expression. They demonstrate the ways in which museum collecting policies, practices of display, and architecture engaged with these political agendas and how museums reflected and enabled shifting forms of civic identity, emerging forms of professional practice, the production of knowledge, and the changing composition of the public sphere. Original in its approach and sweeping in scope, this fascinating study of the museum age of Austria-Hungary will be welcomed by students and scholars interested in the cultural and art history of Central Europe.