Saint Louis Art Museum


The Saint Louis Art Museum is an art museum located in St. Louis, Missouri, United States. With paintings, sculptures, cultural objects, and ancient masterpieces from around 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.
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.
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History

The museum's origins date to 1879, when the Saint Louis School and Museum of Fine Arts was founded as part of Washington University. 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. 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. After the museum’s move, the Peabody-Stearns building rapidly fell into disrepair and was eventually demolished in 1919.
After the relocation, Director Ives introduced a bill into the General Assembly for an art tax to support museum maintenance. 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 Supreme Court of Missouri 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 debuted in the new auditorium space as a 50th anniversary event.
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. This expanded the tax base for the 1908 tax to include St. Louis County. In 1972, the museum was again renamed, to the Saint Louis Art Museum.
Today, the museum is supported financially by the tax, donations from individuals and public associations, sales in the Museum Shop, and foundation support.

Expansion

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 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.
Construction began in 2009; the museum remained open. The expansion added more than 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.

Collection

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. 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. The collection also includes Chuck Close's Keith.
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. Its collection of American artists includes the largest U.S.-museum collection of paintings by George Caleb Bingham.
The collection contains at least six pieces that Nazis confiscated from their own museums as degenerate. 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.
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.
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.

Exhibitions

2020

  • Buzz Spector: Alterations
  • Storm of Progress: German Art after 1800 from the Saint Louis Art Museum
  • Currents 118: Elias Sime
  • New Media Series — Martine Syms
  • Millet and Modern Art: From Van Gogh to Dalí
  • New Media Series – Sky Hopinka
  • Javanese Batik Textiles
  • The Shape of Abstraction: Selections from the Ollie Collection

2019

2018

  • Southwest Weavings: 800 Years of Artistic Exchange
  • Printing Abstraction
  • Graphic Revolution: American Prints 1960 to Now
  • Kehinde Wiley: Saint Louis
  • New Media Series–Renée Green
  • Balance and Opposition in Ancient Peruvian Textiles
  • Currents 115: Jennifer Bornstein
  • New Media Series: Cyprian Gaillard
  • Sunken Cities: Egypt's Lost Worlds
  • Chinese Buddhist Art, 10th–15th Centuries

2017

  • Greek Island Embroideries
  • Thomas Struth: Nature & Politics
  • Currents 114: Matt Saunders
  • New Media Series—Ben Thorp Brown
  • Fired Up: Ink Painting and Contemporary Ceramics from Japan
  • A Century of Japanese Prints
  • New Media Series: Amy Granat
  • Reigning Men: Fashion in Menswear, 1715-2015
  • Cross-Pollination: Flowers in 18th-Century European Porcelain and Textiles
  • Currents 113: Shimon Attie Lost in Space
  • The Hats of Stephen Jones
  • New Media Series: Shimon Attie
  • Learning to See: Renaissance and Baroque Masterworks from the Phoebe Dent Weil and Mark S. Weil Collection
  • In the Realm of Trees: Photographs, Paintings, and Scholar's Objects from the Collection
  • Degas, Impressionism, and the Paris Millinery Trade

2016

  • New Media Series: Rodney McMillian
  • Conflicts of Interest: Art and War in Modern Japan
  • New Media Series: Dara Birnbaum
  • Textiles: Politics and Patriotism
  • Impressions of War
  • Japanese Painting and Calligraphy: Highlights from the Collection
  • Self-Taught Genius: Treasures from the American Folk Art Museum
  • From Caravans to Courts: Textiles from the Silk Road
  • The Carpet and the Connoisseur: The James F. Ballard Collection of Oriental Rugs
  • Currents 112: Andréa Stanislav: Convergence Infinité
  • Real and Imagined Landscapes in Chinese Art
  • A Decade of Collecting Prints, Drawings, and Photographs

2015

  • Blow-Up: Graphic Abstraction in 1960s Design
  • St. Louis Modern
  • New Media Series—Ana Mendieta: Alma, Silueta en Fuego
  • Currents 111: Steven and William Ladd: Scouts or Sports?
  • Journey to the Interior: Ink Painting from Japan
  • New Media Series—Alex Prager: Face in the Crowd
  • The Artist and the Modern Studio
  • Senufo: Art and Identity in West Africa
  • Currents 110: Mariam Ghani
  • Beyond Bosch: The Afterlife of a Renaissance Master in Print
  • Adorning Self and Space: West African Textiles
  • Navigating the West: George Caleb Bingham and the River
  • Creatures Great and Small: Animals in Japanese Art
  • Thomas Cole's Voyage of Life

2014

  • Vija Celmins: "Intense Realism"
  • Scenic Wonder: An Early American Journey Down the Hudson River
  • Nicholas Nixon: 40 Years of The Brown Sisters
  • Atua: Sacred Gods from Polynesia
  • Currents 109: Nick Cave
  • Calligraphy in Chinese and Japanese Art
  • New Media Series—Janaina Tsch¨pe: The Ocean Within
  • Louis IX: King, Saint, Namesake
  • Facets of the Three Jewels: Tibetan Buddhist Art from the Collections of George E. Hibbard and the Saint Louis Art Museum
  • Brett Weston: Photographs
  • Tragic and Timeless: The Art of Mark Rothko
  • Currents 108: Won Ju Lim
  • Impressionist France: Visions of Nation from Le Gray to Monet
  • Sight Lines: Richard Serra's Drawings for Twain
  • Anything but Civil: Kara Walker's Vision of the Old South
  • Flowers of the Four Seasons in Chinese and Japanese Art
  • New Media Series — Marco Brambilla: Evolution
  • Life Cycles: Isabella Kirkland's Taxa
  • Mother Earth, Father Sky: Textiles from the Navajo World

2013

  • The Weight of Things: Photographs by Paul Strand and Emmet Gowin
  • Chiura Obata: Four Paintings, Four Moods
  • Currents 107: Renata Stih & Frieder Schnock
  • Yoko Ono: Wish Tree
  • Encounters Along the Missouri River: the 1858 Sketchbooks of Charles Ferdinand Wimar
  • Postwar German Art in the Collection
  • A New View: Contemporary Art
  • New Media Series—Hiraki Sawa: Migration
  • Mantegna to Man Ray: Six Explorations in Prints, Drawings, and Photographs
  • Highlights of the Textile Collection
  • New Media Series—William E. Jones: "Killed"
  • Focus on the Collection—Edward Curtis: Visions of Native America

2012

  • New Media Series—James Nares: Street
  • Federico Barocci: Renaissance Master
  • Focus on the Collection: Drawn in Copper, Italian Prints in the Age of Barocci
  • New Media Series—Laleh Khorramian: Water Panics in the Sea
  • Restoring an American Treasure:The Panorama of the Monumental Grandeur of the Mississippi Valley
  • Plants and Flowers in Chinese Paintings and Ceramics
  • Harper's Pictorial History of the Civil War, by Kara Walker
  • Currents 106: Chelsea Knight
  • An Orchestrated Vision: The Theater of Contemporary Photography
  • New Media Series—Teresa Hubbard/Alexander Birchler: Single Wide
  • At the Crossroads: Exploring Black Identity in Contemporary Art
  • The First Act: Staged Photography Before 1980

2011

  • Monet's Water Lilies
  • Focus on the Collection: Expressionist Landscape
  • New Media Series—Guido van der Werve: Number Twelve: Variations on a Theme
  • Focus on the Collection: Francesco Clemente's High Fever
  • Restoring an American Treasure: The Panorama of the Monumental Grandeur of the Mississippi Valley
  • New Media Series—Martha Colburn: Triumph of the Wild
  • Currents 105: Ian Monroe
  • Focus on the Collection: Engraving in Renaissance Germany
  • Fiery Pool: The Maya and the Mythic Sea
  • Visual Musing: Prints by William Kentridge
  • Aaron Douglas
  • Glimpsing History through Art: Selections from the Charles and Rosalyn Lowenhaupt Collection of Japanese Prints
  • New Media Series—William Kentridge: Two Films

2010

  • Joe Jones: Painter of the American Scene
  • New Media Series—Pae White: Dying Oak
  • Portrait of Depression-Era America
  • New Media Series—Laurent Grasso, The Birds
  • Bill Viola: Visitation
  • The Mourners: Tomb Sculptures from the Court of Burgundy
  • Form in Translation: Sculptors Making Prints and Drawings
  • Currents 104: Bruce Yonemoto
  • Lee Friedlander
  • New Media Series | Marc Swanson & Neil Gust, Dark Room
  • African Ceremonial Cloths: Selections from the Collection

Services

  • The Richardson Memorial Library, a public research library founded in 1915, retains resources that document the Museum's history, enrich its identity, and inform its collections and programs.
  • Free guided tours for groups led by trained docents.

More information

  • Saint Louis Art Museum 2004, Saint Louis Art Museum Handbook of the Collection, Saint Louis Art Museum, Saint Louis, Mo.
  • Saint Louis Art Museum 1987, Saint Louis Art Museum, An Architectural History, Fall Bulletin, Saint Louis Art Museum, Saint Louis, MO.
  • Stevens, Walter B. 1915, Halsey Cooley Ives, LL.D. 1847–1911; Founder of the St. Louis School of Fine Arts; First Director of the City Art Museum of St. Louis, Ives Memorial Society, Saint Louis, MO
  • Visitor Guide, Saint Louis Museum of Art, 2005.
  • Washington University in St. Louis, Student Life, 2006, Buried Treasure:University Owned Mummy Kept at Saint Louis Museum.