New Orleans Museum of Art

Visiting the New Orleans Museum of Art is a treat for the senses, inside and out.

The Beaux Arts building housing the Gulf South’s premier art museum is in City Park, one of the city’s most breathtakingly beautiful parks, studded with old live oaks. During the holidays, thousands line up to drive or walk to see holiday lights in the trees in the Celebration in the Oaks.

Inside, NOMA has an art collection worthy of the city’s rich heritage and ranked among the country’s top 100 art museums. The reopened Fabergé Gallery includes 82 objects, including some of the Russian jeweler’s Easter Eggs, an Easter-egg-shaped box, a pearl-studded pink clock owned by the last Tsarina of Russia, a diamond-encrusted Bismark Box and 44 miniature Easter Eggs by Fabergé.

Impressionist fans (and who isn’t?) will enjoy the museum’s paintings by Edgar Degas, whose mother was from New Orleans and where he spent the winter of 1872 painting. The Museum’s Prints and Drawings collection consists of more than 3,500 printed images and unique works on paper, primarily by 19th- and 20th-century European and American artists. The collection includes work by such noted European artists as Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, as well as American artists Alexander Calder, Jasper Johns and Georgia O’Keeffe.

NOMA was born after a local businessman Isaac Delgado offered $150,000 to a park commission to create a "temple of art for rich and poor alike." The museum’s nearly 40,000 works for art are housed in 46 galleries, with strong collections of French, American, African and Japanese art, as well as photography and glass.

The Museum’s American paintings include some particularly fine examples by artists John Singleton Copley, Gilbert Stuart, John Singer Sargent, Jackson Pollock, James Rosenquist, Robert Rauschenberg and Alex Katz.

Considered to be the finest in the Southeast, NOMA’s collection of more than 7,000 vintage and contemporary photographs offers an encyclopedic survey of the entire history of the medium, with examples by virtually all the acknowledged masters of the field, including Ansel Adams, William Henry Fox Talbot, Robert Frank, Margaret Bourke-White, Edward Steichen, Imogen Cunningham, and many others.

Outside is the five-acre Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture garden, featuring work by 57 artists including several of the 20th century’s master sculptors. The garden is open free of charge during museum hours.

The New Orleans Museum of Art remains, as a local newspaper put it, "The City’s Splendid Possession."  Discounted admission for Louisiana residents  is made possible through the generosity of The Helis Foundation.

- by Diane Loupe, New Orleans Reporter for HelloMetro  (Click to leave a message)