The Saint Louis Art Museum (SLAM) began as the Saint Louis School and Museum of Fine Arts, an independent entity within Washington University in St. Louis. Originally housed in a building in downtown St. Louis, the Museum moved to its current home in Forest Park after the 1904 World’s Fair. The Saint Louis Art Museum’s building was designed by renowned American architect Cass Gilbert for the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, also known as the World’s Fair. Originally part of the Palace of Fine Arts, the Museum was the only building from the Fair designed to be a permanent structure, the “one material monument of the Exposition.” It stands as a reminder of that defining event in the history of the city of St. Louis and the State of Missouri. In 1909 the museum separated from Washington University and was renamed the City Art Museum of Saint Louis. During the 1950s, the museum added an extension to include an auditorium for films, concerts and lectures. In 2005, noted British architect David Chipperfield was appointed to design a further expansion of the museum. Chipperfield has won some of Europe’s most prestigious commissions, including the restoration of the Neues Museum and master plan for Museum Island in Berlin and the redesign of Venice’s historic cemetery island, San Michele. He was awarded the RIBA Stirling Prize in 2007 for the Museum of Modern Literature in Marbach, Germany. His U.S. projects include the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, Iowa; the Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center; and the Des Moines Central Library. The expansion will include more than 224,000 square feet (20,800 m2) of gallery space, including an underground garage, within the lease lines of the property. The expansion is expected to cost $125 million. The project officially broke ground in early 2010 and will be completed in 2012. The museum will remain open during construction. The museum’s mission is to collect, present, interpret, and conserve works of art of the highest quality across time and cultures, to educate, inspire discovery, and elevate the human spirit and to preserve a legacy of artistic achievement for the people of St. Louis and the world. Through generations of public support and private benefaction, the Saint Louis Art Museum has assembled one of the finest comprehensive art collections in the country, totaling more than 32,000 works, and the museum is visited by more than half a million people every year. Visit the museum’s website at … http://www.slam.org
The Saint Louis Art Museum is one of the nation’s leading comprehensive art museums with collections of artworks that include those of exceptional quality from virtually every culture and time period. Areas of notable depth include Oceanic art, pre-Columbian art, ancient Chinese bronzes, and European and American art of the late 19th and 20th centuries, with particular strength in 20th-century German art. The American art collection features masterworks of paintings and sculpture from Colonial portraiture through modernist and abstract art of the first half of the 20th century. The Museum’s American holdings reflect the nation’s longstanding fascination with landscape and include Hudson River School paintings by Jasper Cropsey, Thomas Cole, and John Frederick Kensett, as well as scenes of the Western frontier. The local landscape is well represented in the work of Missouri artists Henry Lewis, Charles Ferdinand Wimar, and George Caleb Bingham. The Election Series, illustrating three stages of the Missouri electoral process, is one of the highlights of the Museum’s paintings by Bingham. The collection also includes major works by the late nineteenth-century artists Winslow Homer, William Merritt Chase, and Bessie Potter Vonnoh as well as Impressionist compositions by Henry Ossawa Tanner, Childe Hassam, and John Henry Twachtman. Important twentieth-century work by Georgia O’Keeffe, Thomas Hart Benton, Marsden Hartley, and Philip Guston is also presented. The Collection of European Art to 1800 includes exceptional examples of art made across the continent of Europe and the British isles from the seventh through the eighteenth centuries. The earliest pieces in the collection are a pair of toga pins made in Spain in the seventh century. Other examples from the medieval period include enamels and metalwork; architectural fragments; stone, wood and ivory sculpture; manuscript illuminations; and stained glass. The Museum’s medieval holdings are strongest in French and German Romanesque (c.1050–c.1200) and Gothic (c.1200–c.1500) art. Highlights include a French St. Christopher, a superb alabaster Madonna, an exquisite head of St. Roch, and a German gilded Christ of exceptional quality.The collection of paintings and sculpture comprises work made in Europe between 1300 and 1800. Highlights include a late Titian masterpiece (1570–76) left in his studio at his death; a marble Pan made in Michelangelo’s workshop in the 1530s; one of only 37 known works by the baroque master Bartolomeo Manfredi painted around 1615; a copper painting made in 1612 by Artemisia Gentileschi; an important Neo-Classical narrative painting by François-André Vincent exhibited in 1785; and a stunning portrait by Hans Holbein depicting the wife of King Henry VIII’s comptroller of 1527. The Department of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs houses more than 13,000 works of art on paper. There are approximately 8,500 prints, 3,000 photographs, and 1,500 drawings, watercolors, and collages from a wide range of periods and cultures. The department has particular strengths in art from Western Europe and the United States. It is internationally known for its German works on paper, and houses the largest public collection of Max Beckmann’s prints in the world. The print collection also has impressive holdings by Albrecht Dürer, Max Klinger, Rembrandt van Rijn, and Jacques Callot. The collection of drawings features significant works by George Caleb Bingham, Edgar Degas, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. The photography collection is strong in 20th century American with large holdings of works by Edward Curtis, Paul Strand, Andreas Feininger, and Moneta Sleet Jr.
The Museum’s collection of Modern art is one of the largest and most distinguished components of its holdings, spanning more than 150 years of European painting and sculpture. Among the highlights from the 19th century are paintings by Gustave Courbet, Henri Fantin-Latour, Edouard Manet, and Paul Cézanne as well as Impressionist and Post-Impressionist masterworks by Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, and Vincent van Gogh. The 20th century holdings include the largest public collection of paintings by Max Beckmann in the world. Many of these and numerous works by German Expressionist artists such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Franz Marc, and Wassily Kandinsky were part of a significant bequest by St. Louis collector Morton D. May. Also in the Modern collection are signature works by Henri Matisse, Piet Mondrian, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Henry Moore, as well as notable paintings by Marc Chagall, Paul Klee, and Amadeo Modigliani. The Contemporary collection spans the post-war period to today. The department has particular strengths in American painting and sculpture from Abstract Expressionism through Minimalism. Highlights from the 1950s and 1960s include works by Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Helen Frankenthaler, Louise Nevelson, Barnett Newman, Frank Stella, Donald Judd, and Ellsworth Kelly. Also from the mid-twentieth century are significant examples by Pop artists Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Claes Oldenburg. Internationally known for German art from the 1970s and 1980s, the collection houses signature works by Joseph Beuys, Sigmar Polke, Anselm Kiefer, and Gerhard Richter. Acquisitions of art made in the past two decades, including video, mixed media, and installation, reflect the growing dynamism and international nature of contemporary art. Since 2000 the Contemporary department has acquired over ninety works by artists such as Glenn Ligon, Thomas Scheibitz, Rivane Neuenschwander, El Anatsui, and Julie Mehretu. The Saint Louis Art Museum also has major collections of ancient art including works from the Egyptian, Near Eastern, and Classical civilizations, mainly Greek and Roman, African art, Oceanic art, Pre Columbian and American Indian art, Asian art from across the vast continent of Asia, with particular strengths in the arts of East Asia and decorative Arts and Design featuring European and American furniture, ceramics, glass, metalwork, textiles, arms and armor, architectural elements and period rooms.
The Saint Louis Art Museum hosts a constantly changing program of temporary exhibitions, highlighting works from their collections or major travelling exhibitions. Currently on display is “Glimpsing History through Art: Selections from the Charles and Rosalyn Lowenhaupt Collection of Japanese Prints”, which features Japanese works from the collection. Until April 10th 2011, this exhibition features selected highlights from the Charles and Rosalyn Lowenhaupt Collection of Japanese Prints. The Lowenhaupts generously donated their entire collection of 1,357 Japanese prints and related works of art to the Museum in 2010. The collection includes works of art from the Meiji period (1868–1912), focusing on color woodblock prints that depict scenes from the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905). Both conflicts were fought and won by a rapidly modernizing Japan over its neighbors China and Russia. “Fiery Pool: The Maya and the Mythic Sea” until April 10th 2011, brings together over 90 works, many never before seen in the United States, to offer exciting insights into the culture of the ancient Maya. Surrounded by the sea and dependent on the life-giving power of rain and clouds, the ancient Maya created fantastic objects imbued with the symbolic power of water. This exhibition presents four thematic sections: Water and Cosmos; Creatures of the Fiery Pool; Navigating the Cosmos; and Birth to Rebirth, that explore the different ways Maya artists represented water, from setting religious narratives in watery domains to using shells and other exotic materials acquired through coastal trade networks. Internationally renowned artist William Kentridge received a Dean’s Medal from Washington University’s Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts this March. To celebrate, the Saint Louis Art Museum will present his work in two related exhibitions, one of film, the other of prints. Kentridge works fluidly between the realms of drawing, printmaking, animation, and theater. His imaginative visual narratives interweave personal, artistic, and political themes. “Visual Musing: Prints by William Kentridge” and “William Kentridge: Two Films” can both be seen until May 22nd 2011. These exhibitions bring together 44 works from two recent series of prints by Kentridge, Thinking Aloud (2004) and Nose (2007–2009). Both bodies of work blend his own visual iconography with that of stories from literature and theater. Composed of his expressive and richly layered marks, the prints demonstrate his mastery of intaglio processes. Kentridge’s works reveal a lively sense of improvisation and the unexpected unfolding of metaphorical associations. Alongside these the Saint Louis Art Museum is offering two short animated films, ‘Weighing…and Wanting’ (1998) and ‘Journey to the Moon’ (2003). In both films, Kentridge investigates two ongoing themes in his art: the political and the personal.
