ELISA LESHOWITZ | DATE 6/28/2013

ARTBOOK | DIGITAL Presents 4 New eBooks from MFA Boston and the Guggenheim

The Guggenheim Museum and MFA Boston have released four new eBooks dealing with art, architecture, design, and music, including Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum: An Architectural Appreciation, the first in a series of Guggenheim Forum Readers, and two of the MFA Highlights series books, Musical Instruments and Arts of Korea.

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum: An Architectural Appreciation
Guggenheim Museum
Available for iPad.

In 1943, Frank Lloyd Wright received a letter from Hilla Rebay, the art advisor to Solomon R. Guggenheim, asking the architect to design a new building to house Guggenheim's four-year-old Museum of Non-Objective Painting. The project evolved into a complex struggle pitting the architect against his clients, city officials, the art world and public opinion, but the resultant achievement testifies to both Wright's architectural genius and the adventurous spirit of its founders. The Guggenheim Museum is an embodiment of Wright's attempts to render the inherent plasticity of organic forms in architecture. His inverted ziggurat dispensed with the conventional approach to museum design, which led visitors through a series of interconnected rooms and forced them to retrace their steps when exiting. Instead, Wright whisked people to the top of the building via elevator, and led them downward at a leisurely pace on the gentle slope of a continuous ramp. The galleries were divided like the segments of an orange, into self-contained yet interdependent sections. The open rotunda afforded viewers the unique possibility of seeing several bays of work on different levels simultaneously. The spiral design recalled a nautilus shell, with continuous spaces flowing freely one into another. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum: An Architectural Appreciation celebrates Wright's crowning achievement with reflections by prominent architects, historians and critics. Paired alongside a half-century of photographs, they convey how, as Paul Goldberger has said, "almost every museum of our time is a child of the Guggenheim."

The Guggenheim Forum Reader 1
Guggenheim Museum
Available for iPad and Kindle; forthcoming for Nook.

Art has a way of raising questions. Since 2009 the Guggenheim Forum has pondered how themes from art affect life outside the museum's walls: What is the role of spirituality in contemporary life? What is reality in the virtual era? And what's in a name? By bringing together writers, scientists, artists and other experts from diverse fields, the Guggenheim Forum examines complex topics from all points of view, stimulating a lively dialogue among panelists. This volume gathers nine conversations from the Forum's first four years. Participants include NPR's Krista Tippet, designer Ellen Lupton, artist Martha Rosler, author Douglas Hofstadter and novelist Francisco Goldman.

Musical Instruments
MFA Publications
Available for iPad.
Free until August 1, 2013

Enhanced with 48 audio and video clips of expert musicians performing on rare and historical instruments, this eBook edition of Musical Instruments brings the world-renowned collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, to life. Musical instruments are among the most meaningful artifacts produced by humankind, a marriage of technology, artistry, symbolism, religion, and entertainment. This title presents more than 100 examples, spanning a breadth of centuries and cultures, to offer a brilliant array of instruments as producers of both aural and visual delight. The pieces included here - which range from an ancient Greek trumpet to a modern lap steel guitar, and from earthenware panpipes to the complex Indonesian gamelan - are remarkable not only for the myriad sounds they produce, but also for their varied and often extraordinarily beautiful appearance.Musical Instruments offers a vivid encounter with the sights and sounds of a rich collection, enhanced to offer an accessible and fascinating introduction to the artistry and significance of musical instruments around the world.

Arts of Korea
MFA Publications
Available for iPad.
Free until August 1, 2013

Arts of Korea invites readers to explore one of the finest collections of Korean art outside East Asia, in an enhanced eBook that features 360-degree photographs of selected treasures that can be rotated with the touch of a finger. The MFA enjoys particularly superb holdings of ceramics, including celadon masterworks from the eleventh to fourteenth centuries, as well as Buddhist paintings and sculptures, metalwork, lacquer, and ink painting. While some of the hundred objects drawn from these riches were created for royals and aristocrats, many others were originally intended for everyday use and tell a story not only about the artisans who made these boxes, mirrors, jars, tiles, and trays but also about the people who used them. The works represented in Arts of Korea reach in time from a Bronze Age dagger to contemporary ceramics and prints, highlighting the creative dialogue of artists with Korea's unique traditions, as well as with those of China and Japan, over more than two millennia. Offering illuminating essays about the objects' cultural history and enhanced with spectacular photography, this book offers an ideal introduction to the splendors and subtleties of Korean art.