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23-478: The museum currently contains a collection of over 4,500 American and European paintings, sculptures, and works on paper, housed in three buildings: the 1818 Telfair Academy (formerly the Telfair family home); the 1816 Owens-Thomas House & Slave Quarters, which are both National Historic Landmarks designed by British architect William Jay in the early nineteenth century; and the contemporary Jepson Center for

46-486: A 'lesser art' was formally challenged in the 1970s by writers and art historians like Amy Goldin and Anne Swartz. The argument for a singular narrative in art had lost traction by the close of the 20th century through post-modernist irony and increasing curatorial interest in street art and in ethnic decorative traditions. The Pattern and Decoration movement in New York galleries in the 1980s, though short-lived, opened

69-476: Is a form typical of architect William Jay, with a projecting four-column portico that is accessed via side-facing stairs. The columns are of a composite order, and the portico's entablature is continued around the building as a stringcourse. Unlike the symmetrical exterior, the interior of the house is asymmetrical, its unusually shaped rooms including an octagonal drawing room, round-ended dining room, and long drawing room with rounded ends. The building's west wing

92-527: Is a historic mansion at 121 Barnard Street in Savannah, Georgia . It was designed by William Jay and built in 1818, and is one of a small number of Jay's surviving works. It is one of three sites owned by Telfair Museums . Originally a family townhouse belonging to the Telfair family, it became a free art museum in 1886, and thus one of the first 10 art museums in America, and the oldest public art museum in

115-432: Is currently on view in this building as part of the museum's "BEFORE MIDNIGHT: BONAVENTURE AND THE BIRD GIRL" exhibition. The Owens-Thomas House & Slave Quarters contains a decorative arts collection composed primarily of Owens family furnishings, along with American and European objects dating from 1750 to 1830. Additionally the site includes intact urban slave quarters and a parterre garden. The Jepson Center for

138-606: Is it for understanding early Medieval art in Europe . During that period in Europe, fine arts such as manuscript illumination and monumental sculpture existed, but the most prestigious works tended to be in goldsmith work, in cast metals such as bronze, or in other techniques such as ivory carving . Large-scale wall-paintings were much less regarded, crudely executed, and rarely mentioned in contemporary sources. They were probably seen as an inferior substitute for mosaic , which for

161-465: Is its former carriage house, which was adapted in the 1880s as part of the building's conversion to a museum, and has fine Adam style woodwork. The house was designed by William Jay and built in 1818 for Alexander Telfair, son of Edward Telfair , one of Georgia's early post-independence governors. The site on which it was built previously housed the official residence of Georgia's colonial royal governors. In 1875 Alexander's sister, Mary , bequeathed

184-486: The " fine arts ", namely painting , drawing , photography , and large-scale sculpture , which generally produce objects solely for their aesthetic quality and capacity to stimulate the intellect . The distinction between the decorative and fine arts essentially arose from the post- renaissance art of the West, where the distinction is for the most part meaningful. This distinction is much less meaningful when considering

207-495: The Arts , designed by Moshe Safdie and completed in 2006. Each of the museum's three buildings houses a collection corresponding to the era in which it was built. The Telfair Academy contains two nineteenth-century period rooms, and it houses nineteenth- and twentieth-century American and European art from the museum's permanent collection including paintings, works on paper, sculpture, and decorative arts. The Bird Girl statue

230-410: The Arts features contemporary art galleries of American Southern art, African American art, photography, works-on-paper, two galleries for large traveling exhibitions, a community gallery, a children's gallery, and two outdoor sculpture terraces. 32°04′44″N 81°05′43″W  /  32.07889°N 81.09528°W  / 32.07889; -81.09528 Telfair Academy The Telfair Academy

253-488: The Century Guild for craftsmen in 1882, championing the idea that there was no meaningful difference between the fine and decorative arts. Many converts, both from professional artists' ranks and from among the intellectual class as a whole, helped spread the ideas of the movement. The influence of the Arts and Crafts movement led to the decorative arts being given a greater appreciation and status in society and this

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276-575: The South. Its first director, elected in 1883, was artist Carl Ludwig Brandt , who spent winters in Savannah. It was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1976. Telfair Academy is located in historic central Savannah, on the west side of Telfair Square . It occupies an entire block, bounded by Barnard, West President, North Jefferson, and West State Streets. It is a two-story masonry structure, built out of brick finished in stucco. Its entrance

299-421: The art of other cultures and periods, where the most valued works, or even all works, include those in decorative media. For example, Islamic art in many periods and places consists entirely of the decorative arts, often using geometric and plant forms , as does the art of many traditional cultures. The distinction between decorative and fine arts is not very useful for appreciating Chinese art , and neither

322-500: The building are statues of Rembrandt , Rubens , Phidias , Raphael , and Michelangelo (see the link to Commons below). In addition to these works from notable European and American artists, Telfair Academy houses fine and decorative artworks representing Savannah's history and from native Savannah artists. Decorative arts The decorative arts are arts or crafts whose aim is the design and manufacture of objects that are both beautiful and functional. This includes most of

345-660: The cost of materials or the amount of skilled work required to produce a work, but instead valued artistic imagination and the individual touch of the hand of a supremely gifted master such as Michelangelo , Raphael or Leonardo da Vinci , reviving to some extent the approach of antiquity. Most European art during the Middle Ages had been produced under a very different set of values, where both expensive materials and virtuoso displays in difficult techniques had been highly valued. In China both approaches had co-existed for many centuries: ink wash painting , mostly of landscapes ,

368-581: The house, including its furnishings and family collections, to the Georgia Historical Society, which opened the first art museum in the southeastern United States here in 1886. The house was remodeled and expanded to be a museum by architect Detlef Lienau . Telfair Academy features furnished period rooms that highlight the museum's collection of decorative arts and many family furnishings including beautiful 19th and 20th century American and European paintings and sculptures. In front of

391-460: The objects for the interiors of buildings, as well as interior design , but typically excludes architecture . Ceramic art , metalwork , furniture , jewellery , fashion , various forms of the textile arts and glassware are major groupings. Applied arts largely overlap with the decorative arts, and in modern parlance they are both often placed under the umbrella category of design . The decorative arts are often categorized in distinction to

414-511: The period must be considered a fine art, though in recent centuries mosaics have tended to be considered decorative. A similar fate has befallen tapestry , which late medieval and Renaissance royalty regarded as the most magnificent artform, and was certainly the most expensive. The term "ars sacra" ("sacred arts") is sometimes used for medieval christian art executed in metal, ivory, textiles, and other more valuable materials but not for rare secular works from that period. The view of decoration as

437-620: The rise of the Arts and Crafts movement . This aesthetic movement of the second half of the 19th century was born in England and inspired by the writings of Thomas Carlyle , John Ruskin and William Morris . The movement represented the beginning of a greater appreciation of the decorative arts throughout Europe. The appeal of the Arts and Crafts movement to a new generation led the English architect and designer Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo to organize

460-482: The way to a more inclusive evaluation of the value of art objects. Modern understanding of the art of many cultures tends to be distorted by the modern privileging of fine visual arts media over others, as well as the very different survival rates of works in different media. Works in metal, above all in precious metals, are liable to be "recycled" as soon as they fall from fashion, and were often used by owners as repositories of wealth, to be melted down when extra money

483-627: Was needed. Illuminated manuscripts have a much higher survival rate, especially in the hands of the church, as there was little value in the materials and they were easy to store. The promotion of the fine arts over the decorative in European thought can largely be traced to the Renaissance, when Italian theorists such as Vasari promoted artistic values, exemplified by the artists of the High Renaissance , that placed little value on

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506-678: Was soon reflected by changes in the law. Until the enactment of the Copyright Act 1911 only works of fine art had been protected from unauthorized copying. The 1911 Act extended the definition of an "artistic work" to include works of "artistic craftsmanship". In the context of mass production and consumerism some individuals will attempt to create or maintain their lifestyle or to construct their identity when forced to accept mass-produced identical objects in their life. According to Colin Campbell in his piece “The Craft Consumer”, this

529-448: Was to a large extent produced by and for the scholar-bureaucrats or "literati", and was intended as an expression of the artist's imagination above all, while other major fields of art, including the very important Chinese ceramics produced in effectively industrial conditions, were produced according to a completely different set of artistic values. The lower status given to works of decorative art in contrast to fine art narrowed with

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