Saint Louis Art Museum | |
---|---|
Location | Forest Park, St. Louis, Missouri |
Coordinates | 38°38′22″N90°17′40″W / 38.63944°N 90.29444°W |
Built | 1904 |
Built for | 1904 World's Fair |
Website | www.slam.org |
Type | Structure |
Reference no. | 21 |
The Saint Louis Art Museum (SLAM) is one of the principal U.S. art museums, with paintings, sculptures, cultural objects, and ancient masterpieces from all corners of the world. Its three-story building stands in Forest Park in St. Louis, Missouri, where it is visited by up to a half million people every year. Admission is free through a subsidy from the cultural tax district for St. Louis City and County. [1]
In addition to the featured exhibitions, the museum offers rotating exhibitions and installations. These include the Currents series, which features contemporary artists, as well as regular exhibitions of new media art and works on paper. [2]
The museum's origins date to 1879, [3] when the Saint Louis School and Museum of Fine Arts was founded as part of Washington University. [4] The nascent museum was housed in a building Wayman Crow commissioned of Boston architects Peabody and Stearns as a memorial to his son, Wayman Crow Jr. The structure was located at 19th and Lucas Place (now Locust Street). The school, led by director Halsey Ives, offered studio and art history instruction supported by a museum collection.
When the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition closed, the museum and school moved from the Peabody-Stearns structure to Cass Gilbert's Palace of Fine Arts building. The building at 19th and Lucas Place rapidly fell into disrepair, and was eventually demolished in 1919. [5]
After the relocation, Director Ives introduced a bill into the General Assembly for an art tax to support museum maintenance. [6] The citizens of Saint Louis approved the bill by a nearly 4-to-1 margin; however, the city's controller refused to distribute the tax as the museum was not recognized as a municipal entity and thus had no right to tax money. The Missouri Supreme Court upheld this decision in 1908. This caused the formal separation of the museum from the university in 1909, a split which was the beginning of three civic institutions:
During the 1950s, the museum added an extension to include an auditorium for films, concerts, and lectures. Director Charles Guggenheim's An American Museum (1959) debuted in the new auditorium space as a 50th anniversary event. [12]
In 1971, efforts to secure the museum's financial future led voters in St. Louis City and County to approve the creation of the Metropolitan Zoological Park and Museum District (ZMD). This expanded the tax base for the 1908 tax to include St. Louis County. [13] In 1972, the museum was again renamed, to the Saint Louis Art Museum. [13]
Today, the museum is supported financially by the tax, donations from individuals and public associations, sales in the Museum Shop, and foundation support. [14]
Plans to expand the museum, which existed in the 1995 Forest Park Master Plan and the museum's 2000 Strategic Plan, began in earnest in 2005, when the museum board selected the British architect Sir David Chipperfield to design the expansion; Michel Desvigne was selected as landscape architect. The St. Louis-based firm, Hellmuth, Obata, and Kassabaum (HOK) was the architect of record to work with the construction team.
On November 5, 2007, museum officials released the design plans to the public and hosted public conversations about those plans. A model of the new building was displayed in the museum's Sculpture Hall throughout the construction project. In 2008, citing the declining state of the economy, the museum announced that it would delay the start of the expansion, whose cost was then estimated at $125 million. [15]
Construction began in 2009; the museum remained open. [16] [17] The expansion added more than 224,000 square feet (20,800 m2) of gallery space, including an underground garage, within the lease lines of the property. Money for the project was raised through private gifts to the capital campaign from individuals, foundations and corporations, and from proceeds from the sale of tax-exempt bonds. The fundraising campaigned covered the $130-million cost of construction and a $31.2 million increase to the museum's endowment to support incremental costs of operating the larger facility. The expanded facility opened in the summer of 2013.
The collection of the Saint Louis Art Museum contains more than 34,000 objects dating from antiquity to the present. The collection is divided into nine areas:
The modern art collection includes works by the European masters Matisse, Gauguin, Monet, Picasso, Corrado Giaquinto, Giambattista Pittoni and Van Gogh. The museum's particularly strong collection of 20th-century German paintings includes the world's largest Max Beckmann collection, which includes Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery . [18] In recent years, the museum has been actively acquiring post-war German art to complement its Beckmanns, such as works by Joseph Beuys, Gerhard Richter, Martin Kippenberger, Sigmar Polke, and Anselm Kiefer. [16] The collection also includes Chuck Close's Keith (1970). [19]
The collections of Oceanic and Mesoamerican works, as well as handwoven Turkish rugs, are among the finest in the world. The museum holds the Egyptian mummy Amen-Nestawy-Nakht, and two mummies on loan from Washington University, Padi-menekh and Henut-wedjebu. [20] [21] Its collection of American artists includes the largest U.S.-museum collection of paintings by George Caleb Bingham. [22]
The collection contains at least six pieces that Nazis confiscated from their own museums as degenerate. [23] These include Max Beckmann's "Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery" which came to the museum through a New York art dealer, Curt Valentin, who specialized in Nazi confiscations, and Matisse's "Bathers with a Turtle" which Joseph Pulitzer purchased at the Galerie Fischer auction held in the Grand Hôtel National, Lucerne, Switzerland, June 30, 1939. [23] [24] [25]
In the context of the museum's 2013 expansion, British artist Andy Goldsworthy created Stone Sea, a site-specific work for a narrow space between the old and new buildings. Twenty-five tightly packed, ten-foot-high arches made of native limestone rise in a sunken courtyard. The artist was inspired by the fact that the sedimentary rock was formed when the region was a shallow sea in Prehistoric times. [16]
In 2021, the museum received a promised gift of 22 paintings and sculptures from the collection of the American curator and philanthropist Emily Rauh Pulitzer, the widow of the media heir Joseph Pulitzer Jr. The donation includes works by 17 European and American artists, including Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Constantin Brâncuși, Joan Miró, Philip Guston, Ellsworth Kelly and others. [26]
The Louvre, or the Louvre Museum, is a national art museum in Paris, France, and one of the most famous museums in the world. It is located on the Right Bank of the Seine in the city's 1st arrondissement and home to some of the most canonical works of Western art, including the Mona Lisa,Venus de Milo, and Winged Victory. The museum is housed in the Louvre Palace, originally built in the late 12th to 13th century under Philip II. Remnants of the Medieval Louvre fortress are visible in the basement of the museum. Due to urban expansion, the fortress eventually lost its defensive function, and in 1546 Francis I converted it into the primary residence of the French kings.
The Rijksmuseum is the national museum of the Netherlands dedicated to Dutch arts and history and is located in Amsterdam. The museum is located at the Museum Square in the borough of Amsterdam South, close to the Van Gogh Museum, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and the Concertgebouw.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, colloquially referred to as the Met, is an encyclopedic art museum in New York City. By floor area, it is the fourth-largest museum in the world and the largest art museum in the Americas. With 5.36 million visitors in 2023, it is the most-visited museum in the United States and the fourth-most visited art museum in the world.
Henri Émile Benoît Matisse was a French visual artist, known for both his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter.
The Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology on Beaumont Street, Oxford, England, is Britain's first public museum. Its first building was erected in 1678–1683 to house the cabinet of curiosities that Elias Ashmole gave to the University of Oxford in 1677. It is also the world's second university museum, after the establishment of the Kunstmuseum Basel in 1661 by the University of Basel.
The Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMoA) is an art museum originally chartered in 1876 for the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. The main museum building was completed in 1928 on Fairmount, a hill located at the northwest end of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway at Eakins Oval. The museum administers collections containing over 240,000 objects including major holdings of European, American and Asian origin. The various classes of artwork include sculpture, paintings, prints, drawings, photographs, armor, and decorative arts.
The Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) is a museum institution located in Midtown Detroit, Michigan. It has one of the largest and most significant art collections in the United States. With over 100 galleries, it covers 658,000 square feet (61,100 m2) with a major renovation and expansion project completed in 2007 that added 58,000 square feet (5,400 m2). The DIA collection is regarded as among the top six museums in the United States with an encyclopedic collection which spans the globe from ancient Egyptian and European works to contemporary art. Its art collection is valued in billions of dollars, up to $8.1 billion USD according to a 2014 appraisal. The DIA campus is located in Detroit's Cultural Center Historic District, about 2 miles (3.2 km) north of the downtown area, across from the Detroit Public Library near Wayne State University.
The High Museum of Art is the largest museum for visual art in the Southeastern United States. Located in Atlanta, Georgia, the High is 312,000 square feet and a division of the Woodruff Arts Center.
The Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) is an art museum located in the Arts District of downtown Dallas, Texas, along Woodall Rodgers Freeway between St. Paul and Harwood. In the 1970s, the museum moved from its previous location in Fair Park to the Arts District. The new building was designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes and John MY Lee Associates, the 2007 winner of the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal. The construction of the building spanned in stages over a decade.
The Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia) is an arts museum located in Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States. Home to more than 90,000 works of art representing 5,000 years of world history, Mia is one of the largest art museums in the United States. Its permanent collection spans about 20,000 years and represents the world's diverse cultures across six continents. The museum has seven curatorial areas: Arts of Africa & the Americas; Contemporary Art; Decorative Arts, Textiles & Sculpture; Asian Art; Paintings; Photography and New Media; and Prints and Drawings.
Ellsworth Kelly was an American painter, sculptor, and printmaker associated with hard-edge painting, Color field painting and minimalism. His works demonstrate unassuming techniques emphasizing line, color and form, similar to the work of John McLaughlin and Kenneth Noland. Kelly often employed bright colors. He lived and worked in Spencertown, New York.
Anni Albers was a German-Jewish visual artist and printmaker. A leading textile artist of the 20th century, she is credited with blurring the lines between traditional craft and art. Born in Berlin in 1899, Fleischmann initially studied under impressionist painter Martin Brandenburg from 1916 to 1919 and briefly attended the Kunstgewerbeschule in Hamburg in 1919. She later enrolled at the Bauhaus, an avant-garde art and architecture school founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar in 1922, where she began exploring weaving after facing restrictions in other disciplines due to gender biases at the institution.
Hiroshi Yoshida was a 20th-century Japanese painter and woodblock printmaker. Along with Hasui Kawase, he is regarded as one of the greatest artists of the shin-hanga style, and is noted especially for his landscape prints. Yoshida made numerous trips around the world, with the aim of getting to know different artistic expressions and making works of different landscapes. He traveled widely, and was particularly known for his images of non-Japanese subjects done in traditional Japanese woodblock style, including the Taj Mahal, the Swiss Alps, the Grand Canyon, and other National Parks in the United States.
The Art Institute of Chicago, founded in 1879, is one of the oldest and largest art museums in the United States. The museum is based in the Art Institute of Chicago Building in Chicago's Grant Park. Its collection, stewarded by 11 curatorial departments, includes works such as Georges Seurat's A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, Pablo Picasso's The Old Guitarist, Edward Hopper's Nighthawks, and Grant Wood's American Gothic. Its permanent collection of nearly 300,000 works of art is augmented by more than 30 special exhibitions mounted yearly that illuminate aspects of the collection and present curatorial and scientific research.
Water Lilies is a series of approximately 250 oil paintings by French Impressionist Claude Monet (1840–1926). The paintings depict his flower garden at his home in Giverny, and were the main focus of his artistic production during the last thirty years of his life. Many of the works were painted while Monet suffered from cataracts.
York Art Gallery is a public art gallery in York, England, with a collection of paintings from 14th-century to contemporary, prints, watercolours, drawings, and ceramics. It closed for major redevelopment in 2013, reopening in summer of 2015. The building is a Grade II listed building and is managed by York Museums Trust.
Hayv Kahraman is an Iraqi-American-Swedish artist of Kurdish descent, who was born in Baghdad and fled to Sweden with family during the Gulf War, studied in Florence, and is currently based in Los Angeles. She is primarily a painter.
Michael J. Byron is an American visual artist. He holds a B.F.A from the Kansas City Art Institute and a M.F.A from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. Byron currently lives in St. Louis, Missouri and is a former professor at Washington University in St. Louis. In 1996, Byron was the first person to hold the Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Teaching Fellowship at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Art.
Laylah Ali (born 1968) is an American contemporary visual artist. She is known for paintings in which ambiguous race relations are depicted with a graphic clarity and cartoon strip format. She lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and is a professor at Williams College.
Edward Eugene Boccia (1921–2012) was an Italian American painter and poet who lived and worked in St. Louis, Missouri and served as a university professor in the School of Fine Arts, Washington University in St. Louis. Boccia's work consisted mostly of large scale paintings in Neo-Expressionist style, and reflect an interest in religion and its role in the modern world. His primary format was multi-panel paintings.