The St. Louis School of Fine Arts was founded as the Saint Louis School and Museum of Fine Arts in 1879 as part of Washington University in St. Louis, and has continuously offered visual arts and sculpture education since then. Its purpose-built building stood in downtown St. Louis on Lucas Place.
After about 25 years of operation, in 1909, a legal conflict over funding split the organization into two parts: the school and its art collection, which remained part of privately held Washington University, and a public civic art museum, which became the Saint Louis Art Museum.
The art school moved to the university campus. With changes of name and location on campus, it continued operations up until 2006 when the school was incorporated into the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, which spans graduate and undergraduate arts curriculum, graduate and undergraduate schools of architecture, and the university's art collection in its Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum.
As of 1878, painter and art professor Halsey Ives had managed an art program with an affiliation with Washington University for four years, providing both academic and vocational art training, with night classes held at no charge, and with ladies promised "the same advantages as other students". [1] That effort was formalized on May 22, 1879, the date of the formal establishment of the St. Louis School of Fine Art as a department of the university. [2] [3]
Its main financial benefactor was Wayman Crow, who commissioned a school and museum building from Boston architects Peabody and Stearns as a memorial to his deceased son Wayman Crow Jr. It stood at 19th and Lucas Place (now Locust Street).
After the closing of the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, the museum and school moved into the Palace of Fine Arts in Forest Park, designed by Cass Gilbert. The school would not remain there very long.
In 1907 Ives introduced a funding bill into the General Assembly for an art tax to support the museum and school. Voters approved enthusiastically. But the city controller refused to disburse tax money to a private university, and the Missouri Supreme Court agreed, forcing the institution to split into three organizations:
In 1905 Ives was replaced as director by alumnus and instructor Edmund H. Wuerpel.
As of September 1909 Wuerpel advertised classes at Skinker and Lindell. [7] At that corner, the art school would be temporarily housed in another remnant of the 1904 fair for more than 20 years: the former British Pavilion building, built as a replica of the Orangery at Kensington Palace. (The former school and museum downtown was also the original home of The Ethical Society of St. Louis. After the school departed in 1909, it was still used for artists' studios, and its 700-seat auditorium was used for civic functions such as public receptions for Mark Twain, After a fire in 1919 it was demolished. The Weber Implement and Automobile Company Building was built on its site. [8] )
In 1926 the art school was given its own new building on campus, Bixby Hall, which incorporated paneling and windows from the British Pavilion in its main hall. [9] [10] It was named for benefactor William K. Bixby.
Wuerpel remained director for 30 years, until his retirement in 1939. [11] The name "St. Louis School of Fine Arts" was formally retained until at least 1945, [12] with other varying names used afterward.
German-American art historian and author of the standard textbook, History of Art, H. W. Janson, taught at the school from 1941 [13] to 1948. Among its instructors were Philip Guston (1946), the German painter Max Beckmann (1946-1948), the Bauhaus visual artist Werner Drewes (1946-1965), painter Edward Boccia (1951-1986), and painter Siegfried Reinhardt (1955-1970).
George Julian Zolnay headed its sculpture department from 1903 to 1909; Carl C. Mose was the head of the sculpture department from 1936 to 1947. [14]
Kenneth E. Hudson was Dean of the School of Art from 1939 to 1969, and during his tenure, the first Bachelor of Fine Arts degree was offered in 1941. [15] Joe Deal was the dean of the School of Art from 1989 to 1999.
In 2006 the school was incorporated into the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts.
Max Carl Friedrich Beckmann was a German painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor, and writer. Although he is classified as an Expressionist artist, he rejected both the term and the movement. In the 1920s, he was associated with the New Objectivity, an outgrowth of Expressionism that opposed its introverted emotionalism. Even when dealing with light subject matter like circus performers, Beckmann often had an undercurrent of moodiness or unease in his works. By the 1930s, his work became more explicit in its horrifying imagery and distorted forms with combination of brutal realism and social criticism, coinciding with the rise of nazism in Germany.
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.
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Halsey Cooley Ives was the founding director of the St. Louis School and Museum of Fine Arts. The institution later became two distinct bodies; the Saint Louis Art Museum, and the Washington University School of Art which includes the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum. Ives was also a landscape painter, but is best remembered for the organization, administration, and popularization of art in Saint Louis, Missouri.
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The Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts is a part of Washington University in St. Louis. The Sam Fox School was founded in 2006 by uniting the academic units of Architecture and Art with the university's Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum. It is dedicated in honor of donor, former United States Ambassador to Belgium, and owner of Harbour Group Industries, Sam Fox. The school comprises
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Edmund Henry Wuerpel, was an American painter, longtime educator, and second director of the St. Louis School and Museum of Fine Arts, part of Washington University in St. Louis. In his years of training in Paris, Wuerpel became a friend of painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler who helped spread the influence of the "Tonal School" in the Midwest. In a parallel career Wuerpel also played an important role in the development of orthodontics, collaborating with the "first great teacher of orthodontia" Edward Angle and lecturing in the Midwest and western United States on aesthetics and orthodontics.
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