| Portland Art Museum is the oldest art museum in the Pacific Northwest came into existence in the last days of 1892, when seven leaders of Portland's business and cultural institutions signed the letters of incorporation that created the Portland Art Association. Their goal was to give their young community a first-class museum, for they believed that the world of art should be accessible to all citizens. Henry Corbett's gift of $10,000 went towards the first collection: a group of some one hundred plaster casts of Greek and Roman sculpture. They were chosen by Winslow B. Ayer, with advice from East Coast museum professionals at the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. After visiting these institutions, Ayer and his wife spent several months touring museums and galleries in Europe, selecting the works for Portland. In 1895, the Corbett Collection, as the casts were known, were installed in the Museum's first home: the upper hall of the new Library building at Southwest Seventh and Stark Streets. The collection was an instant success, and considered the city's most important and popular cultural resource. Art groups met to draw from the casts, school children visited the little galleries, and attendance at the many lectures was high. At the same time, the Museum joined an informal consortium including the Metropolitan Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago to purchase a quantity of photographs of famous paintings; these also became the foundation for educational lectures and exhibitions. Museums in the East applauded Portland's efforts. Robert W. De Forest, president of the Metropolitan noted, "It is exceedingly interesting to me to find you gentlemen of the Far West so intelligently interested in art and beginning at a scientific point of view as to the true function of an art collection..."As the twentieth century dawned, Portland planned for a great extravaganza, the 1905 Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition. The fair established Portland as a leading West Coast cultural and commercial center. Visitors could also tour the new Portland Art Museum at Southwest Fifth and Taylor. The building was constructed with funds from Henry Corbett's bequest and a donation from Mrs. William Sargent Ladd. The first exhibition in the new galleries featured watercolors and paintings that had come to Portland as part of the Exposition. Curator Henrietta H. Failing (niece of founder Henry Failing) had enlisted a New England artist, Frank Vincent DuMond, to organize the art exhibitions at the Exposition and the Museum. For the next several years, DuMond, who had married a Portland woman, returned to the city often to teach and lecture. As an Oregonian reporter noted in 1905, the city had grown up: "Portland is ornamented, from the Skidmore Fountain to the City Park and the Library, to the Plaza blocks, with the artistic flowering of the early struggles of her pioneers. The foundations of those fortunes, which are now enlisted in statues and monuments, were laid in the hardest and homeliest kind of toil." Although the Museum had, as yet, no original works of art in its collection, it could draw on local collections for its exhibitions. Families like the Ladds, Corbetts, Failings, Lewises, Hirsches, Adams, Fleischners and Woods were generous lenders, whose holdings included prints, paintings, textiles, sculpture, decorative arts and Native American art. In understated prose, the Annual Report for 1909 outlined a year of phenomenal growth: "To summarize the achievement of the year: there have been an unusual number of exhibitions; an art school has been successfully established; the membership of the Association has been greatly increased, and in the organization of the Association the foundation has been laid for greater work." The cast gallery, SW Fifth and Taylor streets. In the museum's early days, some 100 cast Greek and Roman sculpture was the foundation for lectures, art classes, and school tours. These phrases were written by an extraordinary woman, Anna Belle Crocker. She succeeded Henrietta Failing as Curator of the Museum and was also head of the Museum Art School (known today as the Pacific Northwest College of Art.) Miss Crocker announced her own arrival: "The present Curator reached Portland from abroad the end of last August and began work in the Museum on September 1st." Seemingly, Miss Crocker barely stopped working for the next twenty-seven years. Until her retirement in 1936, she was a tireless administrator, curator, fund-raiser and teacher, notable for her commitment and her vision. The Museum Miss Crocker administered in 1909 had enjoyed its best year ever, with an annual attendance of 19,832. Listed in its inventory, in addition to the casts and photographs, a reference library of ninety-one volumes, and a case of ancient coins, was one original oil painting purchased the year before. Appropriately enough, it was a painting of Oregon by American Impressionist Childe Hassam. Afternoon Sky, Harney Desert was painted during the weeks Hassam and his friend C.E.S. Wood spent in eastern Oregon's Malheur and Harney Counties. The Museum Art School was started with the help of Mrs. Lee (Julia) Hoffman, whose generous contribution made it possible to hire a full-time instructor, Kate Cameron Simmons. (Miss Simmons was joined the next year by Harry Wentz.) The first class of 98 students included some who came from as far away as Iowa, Idaho and New Mexico. By its twenty-fifth anniversary, the Museum was on solid ground, with growing collections and programs and a modest endowment to help fund them. An article in the Christian Science Monitor had recently declared the Museum the most active on the West Coast. A school tour. In the early years, a visit to the museum included a tour of the galleries and a lecture illustrated with lantern slides. In 1915, Miss Ione Dunlap had joined the staff as Docent through collaboration with Portland's school district: a partnership unique in the country at this time. Miss Dunlap conducted hundreds of lantern slide talks and gallery tours and visited countless classrooms, reaching an average of 10,000 students each year! In the summer of 1917, Arthur Wesley Dow, well-known artist and professor, came to Portland to give a special course to art students. Dow's classes at Columbia Teachers College in New York had influenced such students as Georgia O'Keeffe, Max Weber, and Anna B. Crocker. Dow's lectures and studio workshops in Portland were highly successful, attracting ninety-seven students from across the country. In 1923 and again in 1924, Miss Sally Lewis brought two memorable exhibitions to the Museum. Miss Lewis, daughter of one of Portland's founding families had a rich and adventurous life in the arts. As her nephew, Faber Lewis once noted, "She wasn't afraid of anything. She did everything she wanted to do." That included building and furnishing a Japanese house overlooking the Willamette River, and traveling to Paris and New York where her acquaintances included artists like Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Constantin Brancusi and Arthur B. Davies. Miss Lewis's 1923 exhibition, which she had organized herself, included 44 paintings by Picasso, Matisse and Andr Derain and American modernists Maurice Prendergast, Charles Burchfield, and Max Weber. Her forward to the catalogue is an elegant statement of every curator's aim: "To bring together these paintings - bound by a thread of one's own choosing - which might not otherwise immediately find a way to wider study, is the simple object of this exhibit." Miss Lewis was among the 22 subscribers who purchased Derain's Tree for the Museum's collections. The exhibition's success led to Miss Lewis's second and perhaps more daring endeavor a year later. This exhibition, "Brought from New York and Paris by Miss Sally Lewis" included paintings, drawings, and sculpture from Europe juxtaposed with several African masks. Among the sculptures was Brancusi's A Muse, owned by Miss Lewis and given by her to the Museum in 1959. November 18, 1932: The Portland Art Museum's new building, at SW Park and Jefferson Streets, is formally opened to the public. The lead gift of $100,000 for the new construction came from a "generous donor," later revealed to be Winslow B. Ayer, for whom the Ayer Wing is named. The building was designed by Pietro Belluschi, then a young architect with the firm of A.E. Doyle and Associate Architects; the construction firm was L.H. Hoffman.Construction of the Portland Art Museum. The building just behind the Museums foundation was, until 1968, the home of the Portland Art School.The Museum had begun to take shape months before its opening on November 18, 1932. Note the Chestnut tree, which still graces the corner of the building today. Miss Crocker's description of the new Museum is as valid today as it was in 1932: "The characteristics of the building are its simplicity and convenience for the uses of an art museum... Its beauty as a museum culminates in the fine lighting through a variety of windows, the upper galleries, with the 'monitor' type, having a most satisfying illumination in which to enjoy paintings. This in itself is an achievement in museum building, beyond the general satisfaction and pleasure given by the whole conception with its warm color and fine design and the sense of space the galleries now afford." The Museum Sculpure Court as it looked before the addition of the Hirsch Wing in 1938. The courtesans Hanaogi and Kasugano of the Gomeiro with their attendant Kumegawa. The opening exhibitions included an exhibition drawn from a new gift: The Mary Andrews Ladd collection of 750 Japanese prints, still considered among the most important of its kind here or anywhere. Other galleries were devoted to the Museum's collections of lace and textiles, Greek and Italiote vases, European and American paintings and sculpture and Asian art. Barely six years later, had construction begun again, funded largely through the bequest of Miss Ella Hirsch, given in honor of her parents, Solomon and Josephine Hirsch. The Hirsch Wing, also designed by Belluschi, opened on September 15, 1939. Exhibition space was doubled and so, noted the annual report, was the expenses of running a Museum. Then, as now, board and staff worked towards increasing the Museum's endowment. During World War II, although nothing was "business as usual," Museum and school programs and exhibitions continued, albeit at a more modest scale. Many valuable works of art were sent "east of the Rockies" for safekeeping, the staff were trained to black out the building in sixty seconds flat, and the Museum curtailed its hours and, occasionally, was forced to close galleries. To commemorate its anniversary, the Museum organized a series of exhibitions using as much of its own collections as possible. The 1892 Gallery was arranged to suggest an exhibition from the turn of the century. The Museum had begun to take shape months before its opening on November 18, 1932. Note the Chestnut tree, which still graces the corner of the building today. Nevertheless, a modest celebration marked the 50th anniversary in 1942. In the following year, and, in 1943, the Museum completed its first full inventory. The collections included 3,300 accessioned objects and nearly 750 works on long-term loan, and were growing rapidly through gifts and purchases. The 1940s were also marked by a number of collaborative projects with other educational and cultural organizations. Some of the most notable exhibitions of the 1940s, including "Ships for Victory," dealt with the war's effects on Portland. A 1942 retrospective exhibition, organized by director Robert Tyler Davis, surveyed the work of Oregon artist C.S. Price (1874-1950) and in 1947, the Museum showed works from the Axel Rasmussen Collection of Northwest Coast Native American art. Through a subsequent subscription campaign, the Museum was able to purchase the collection, one of the last of its kind to be acquired from the families who had made or owned the objects. At the end of the decade, the Museum Art School's enrollment had swelled, thanks in large measure to returning veterans studying under the GI Bill. Membership had also increased; and attendance reached new highs for an exhibition of treasures from the museums of Berlin. While the term "blockbuster show" was not yet in circulation, during the1950s a number of important - and successful - exhibitions came to the Portland Art Museum. In 1956, nearly 55,000 visitors filled the galleries during the six-week run of an exhibition of paintings from the collection of Walter Chrysler. This exhibition, organized by Portland, subsequently toured to nine other American museums. More than 55,000 visitors attended the Chrysler exhibition. In preparation for the exhibition, the Museum teamed with the Junior League of Portland to create the docent program that is still in existence today. Admission proceeds from a Vincent Van Gogh exhibition in 1959, attended by more than 80,000, enabled the Museum to purchase its priceless Waterlilies by Claude Monet. The Museum also gave one-person shows to several regional artists, including C.S. Price, Charles Heaney, Carl Morris, and Louis Bunce. As exhibitions grew larger and more ambitious, so too did the Museum's staff, collections and budget. In addition to the Monet painting, the Museum also purchased sculptures by Jacques Lipschitz, French and American paintings and a number of important Asian objects. Gifts were equally plentiful; among the highlights was William H. Nunn's 1955 bequest of funds for "endowing and enlarging the Alice B. Nunn Collection of English silver." In 1955, the Museum gained its core group of volunteers with the formation of the Docent Council, initially under the auspices of the Junior League. By the mid-1950s, the Museum and adjacent School had begun to outgrow the buildings, which had not expanded since the Hirsch Wing's construction in 1939. Newly-appointed Director Francis J. Newton wrote in 1960,"More gallery space is needed to make it possible to show more of our permanent collections and still maintain a lively exhibition program. Storage space and work areas are sorely needed. Some portions of the permanent collections already on view should be moved to galleries more suitable to the character of the work. The Museum Art School needs more studios and additional storage space. The additional courses recently added to the curriculum and the nature of these courses show our facilities to be inadequate. It has been necessary for us to find studio space outside our building to meet new needs." In 1967, Board President John A Mills wrote, "It seems to me, at this stage in the history of our Association, now on the eve of its 75th birthday, we should give thought to our programs for the next 10 to 15 years. This year your Board decided to raise a million and a half dollars, a task in which we are now engaged. The decision to raise this money to complete our building has been considered for a period of over twenty years - and the decision now made is actually a culmination of all the thinking and hard work previous board and staff members had devoted to the problem." The building of the Hoffman Wing also entailed a major renovation of the Ayer and Hirsch Wings. Despite the confusion of construction, the Museum carried on an active exhibition schedule and worked on the first-ever handbook of the collections. This announcement marked the official beginning of the Museum's first capital campaign: a campaign to build the L. Hawley Hoffman Memorial Wing. In addition to classroom and studio space for the Museum school, the new wing provided a sculpture mall, a new vault for the collections and a 480-seat auditorium. The campaign was successful; groundbreaking occurred in November 1968, and the building was ready for occupancy by September 1970. The Hoffman Wing was designed by Pietro Belluschi, working with Wolff, Zimmer, Gunsel, Frasca, and Ritter, Associated Architects. Belluschi was thus able to realize his schemes for completing the building he had first conceived nearly forty years earlier. The Hoffman family have played an important role in the history of the Museum and the School. Julia E. Hoffman's 1908 donation to fund a class in design resulted in the creation of the Museum Art School. Hoffman's son, L. Hawley Hoffman, was an active member of the Museum board and twice served as president. Julia Hoffman's daughter, Margery Hoffman Smith, was also active in the Museum and particularly interested in Asian art. Eric Hoffman, Julia Hoffman's grandson, was President of the Board in 1968-69. The 1970s and 1980s saw substantial growth of the Museum's collections and programs. In 1970, the Museum was able to purchase a collection of Cameroon art from Paul and Clara Gebauer, and in 1978, Vivian and Gordon Gilkey began their association with the Museum, bringing with them an extraordinary collection of thousands of works on paper. During the 1970s, the Museum also assembled the Evan H. Roberts Memorial Sculpture Collection, using funds donated for that purpose. In 1986, the Museum received the impressive and encyclopedic Elizabeth Cole Butler Collection of Native American Art. Programs grew as well. With the founding of the Northwest Film Center, incorporated into the Museum in 1978, the Museum's exhibition schedule also includes a wide range of film offerings. In addition, the Film Center also offers a wide range of classes, outreach programs and Film Festivals. 1993 marked the official opening of the Vivian and Gordon Gilkey Center for Graphic Arts incorporating the Copeland Gallery, the Haber Print Study Room and the Summerville Treasury for storage of works on paper. By 1992, when the Museum celebrated its centennial year, negotiations to acquire the Masonic Temple (now known as the North Wing) had been successful; the purchase was completed in 1994. The North Wing now provides the Museum a new exhibition gallery, office and conference spaces and a source of rental income. Under the leadership of Executive Director John E. Buchanan, Jr., in 1994 the Museum initiated a capital campaign to finance an ambitious renovation project. This entailed refurbishing all galleries, reinstalling the collections, and equipping the building with much-needed climate control systems, as well as an endowment to provide operating funds. In the following year, the Museum hosted the most successful exhibition in its history: Imperial Tombs of China brought 430,000 visitors to the Museum. In August 2000, the Portland Art Museum celebrated the successful completion of the Project for the Millennium: Building a Legacy Where Art Lives, a two-year $45 million renovation and construction project. The new third wing of the Museum, featuring over 50,000 square feet of new space, is highlighted by dedicated galleries for the Centers for Native American Art and Northwest Art. The Museum launched the Project for the Millennium, the largest capital effort ever undertaken by a cultural organization in the state of Oregon, in January 1998. The Project has provided $20 million for the renovation and construction project and added $25 million toward the Museums operating endowment. On November 18, 1998, the Museum broke ground on the first stage of the construction project, the renovation of approximately 42,000 square feet of space in the Hoffman Wing, one of the three wings of the Museum are complex, all designed by noted architect Pietro Belluschi. In addition, the Museum has renovated approximately 9,000 square feet of special exhibition galleries within its existing facility and has constructed a new state-of-the-art auditorium. The completed renovation and construction project includes new permanent galleries for the Museum's collections, as well as designated special exhibition space, a community education center, a new museum shop and cafe. On August 17, 2000, the Museum unveiled the final and most significant stage of the Project: the opening of the new Center for Native American Art, the new Center for Northwest Art, and the new outdoor public sculpture gardens. The completed complex has over 240,000 total square feet, placing the Portland Art Museum as one of the twenty-five largest art museums in the country in total square footage. Since it's founding in 1892, the Portland Art Museum has amassed a diverse collection numbering over 32,000 works of art. Although the Museum's collections have consistently grown over the life of the institution, it is notable that no new gallery space has been added to the Museum since 1939. With the Project for the Millennium, the Museum has, for the first time in its history, the space needed to install its collections in permanent galleries, as well as simultaneously host special exhibitions. In its 110th anniversary year, the Portland Art Museum is launching a new project to preserve and renovate its North Building to provide greater accessibility to the Museum's growing collections and programs and engage the next generation of museum-goers. Adjacent to the Museum's Belluschi Building, the North Building, formerly a Masonic Temple, was acquired by the Museum in 1991 to allow for future expansion. A dynamic contemporary design is planned for this landmark to renew it as a cultural and civic resource for the City of Portland. |
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