Art Exhibitions and Galleries

The first public art exhibition was held in the Palais Royale, Paris in 1667.

The most visited art museum in the world, The Louvre, officially opened in 1793 with an exhibition of 537 paintings.

In 1824 the British Parliament voted to spend £57,000 purchasing 38 pictures from insurance broker and patron of the arts, John Julius Angerstein, to establish a British national collection in London. The National Gallery opened in Angerstein's former townhouse on No. 100 Pall Mall later in the year on May 10, 1824. The present building in Trafalgar Square, the third to house the National Gallery, opened in 1838.

Inside the National Portrait Gallery, 2008. By Herry Lawford from London, 

New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art opened on February 20, 1872. Today it is the largest art museum in the United States with a collection of over two million works of art.

London's Tate Gallery (now Tate Britain) was officially opened in London on July 21, 1897 by the Prince and Princess of Wales (the future Edward VII and Queen Alexandra). It was founded by Sir Henry Tate, a wealthy sugar refiner who donated his collection of British art to the nation. The gallery was originally located on Millbank in London, and it was renamed Tate Britain in 2000 when the Tate Modern opened on the site of the former Bankside Power Station.

The Armory Show, the first large modern art exhibition in the United States, opened at the 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue in New York City, ran from February 17 until March 15, 1913.

Georges Braque was the first to exhibit a Cubist work, at the Salon des Independants in 1908.

The Arts Club of Chicago hosted the opening of Pablo Picasso's first solo United States showing on March 20, 1923. Entitled Original Drawings by Pablo Picasso, the artist wrote to the organizers instructing them how to mount and display his work. The exhibition, which included 53 pieces made from 1907–21 was an early proponent of modern art in the United States. It ran until April 22, 1923.

1913–14, L'Homme aux cartes (Card Player) By Pablo Picasso - Museum of Modern Art, 

The world's largest art gallery is the Winter Palace and Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia. Visitors would have to walk 15 miles to see the 322 galleries which houses nearly 3 million works of art.

In 1931 the USSR sold off many of the Hermitage's most important artworks (which they considered elitist decadence) to fund industrialization. Under Andrew Mellon, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. acquired 21 of them, creating one of the best ensembles of art in the Americas.

The National Gallery of Art was officially opened in Washington, D.C. by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on March 17, 1941. The Gallery's collection of paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, medals, and decorative arts traces the development of Western Art from the Middle Ages to the present, including the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas.

In 1931 the USSR sold off many of the Hermitage's most important artworks (which they considered elitist decadence) to fund industrialization. Several of the paintings had been in the Hermitage Collection since its creation by Empress Catherine the Great. Andrew Mellon donated the twenty-one paintings he purchased from the Hermitage to the United States government in 1937, which became the nucleus of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C

By AgnosticPreachersKid -  Wikipedia Commons

Salvador Dali once arrived to an art exhibition in a limousine filled with turnips.

While cleaning up after the 1959 Tulare County Art League exhibit in Visalia, California, a group of janitors and maintenance men set out to prove they could make art that was just as good as what was on display. Their snuck-in piece of discarded scrap metal, titled "Peterfid Tomcat", won a ribbon for merit at the following year's exhibit.

The Museum of Modern Art in New York City hung Matisse's Le Bateau ("The Boat") upside-down for 47 days, until Genevieve Habert, a stockbroker, noticed the mistake on December 4, 1961 and notified a guard.

The largest art heist in history took place on March 18, 1990 when 13 paintings worth $500,000,000 were stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. The stolen items, including works by Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Degas, have not been recovered and the crime remains unsolved despite a $10 million reward offered by the museum for information leading to the recovery of the stolen artwork. To this day, all of the empty frames are still hanging, acting as placeholders until the pieces are returned.

The Museum of Bad Art in Boston, America, holds the record for ‘least valuable art collection in a public museum’, with 573 works worth a total of $1,197 (£912) .

The Louvre in Paris was the most visited art museum in 2011, according to the Art Newspaper. The publication's annual poll stated that nearly 8.9 million people visited the French institute, which was almost a 5% increase on last year. New York's Metropolitan Museum Of Art was the second most visited venue, with the British Museum in third place. The Louvre has topped the annual list since it began in 2007.

In 2017, two students entered an art exhibition at Aberdeen's Robert Gordon University. Finding an empty table, they placed a pineapple there to see if people would take it for art. When they returned  four days later, the pineapple was covered with a glass protection.

The average time spent looking at a painting in a gallery is 28 seconds.

Source Daily Mail