Art museums are some of the largest buildings in the world. The world's most pre-eminent museums have also engaged in various expansion projects through the years, expanding their total exhibition space.
Art museums are some of the largest buildings in the world. The world's most pre-eminent museums have also engaged in various expansion projects through the years, expanding their total exhibition space.
The National Museum in New Delhi, also known as the National Museum of India, is one of the largest museums in India. Established in 1949, it holds a variety of articles ranging from the pre-historic era to modern works of art. It functions under the Ministry of Culture, Government of India. The museum is situated on Janpath. The blueprint of the National Museum had been prepared by the Gwyer Committee set up by the Government of India in 1946. The museum has around 200,000 works of art, mostly Indian, but some of foreign origin, covering over 5,000 years.
It also houses the National Museum Institute of History of Art, Conservation and Museology on the first floor which was established in 1983 and has been a university since 1989, running master's and doctoral level courses in art history, conservation and museology.
Tate Britain, known from 1897 to 1932 as the National Gallery of British Art and from 1932 to 2000 as the Tate Gallery, is an art museum on Millbank in the City of Westminster in London, England. It is part of the Tate network of galleries in England, with Tate Modern, Tate Liverpool and Tate St Ives. Founded by Sir Henry Tate, it houses a substantial collection of the art of the United Kingdom since Tudor times, and in particular has large holdings of the works of J. M. W. Turner, who bequeathed all his own collection to the nation. It is one of the largest museums in the country. In 2021 it ranked 50th on the list of most-visited art museums in the world.
The Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille (Lille Palace of Fine Arts) is a municipal museum dedicated to fine arts, modern art, and antiquities located in Lille. It is one of the largest art museums in France.
It was one of the first museums built in France, established under the instructions of Napoleon I at the beginning of the 19th century as part of the popularisation of art. Jean-Antoine Chaptal's decree of 1801 selected fifteen French cities (among them Lille) to receive the works seized from churches and from the European territories occupied by the armies of Revolutionary France. The painters Louis Joseph Watteau and François-Louis-Joseph Watteau, known as the "Watteau of Lille", were heavily involved in the museum's beginnings - Louis Joseph Watteau made in 1795 the first inventory of the paintings confiscated during the Revolution, whilst his son François was deputy curator of the museum from 1808 to 1823.
The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) is a museum within the converted Arnold Print Works factory building complex in North Adams, Massachusetts. It is one of the largest centers for contemporary visual art and performing arts in the United States.
Built by the Arnold Print Works, which operated on the site from 1860 to 1942, the complex was used by the Sprague Electric company before its conversion. MASS MoCA originally opened with 19 galleries and 100,000 sq ft (9,300 m) of exhibition space in 1999. It has expanded since, including the 2008 expansion of Building 7 and the May 2017 addition of roughly 130,000 square feet when Building 6 was opened.