Compiled by Victoria Chick

Continued from Part 1

The growth of Art Museums in the United States was slow before the economy became robust. Remember that wealth is a requirement for art museums. Within seventy-five years of America’s founding, East Coast towns were flourishing economically, and museums of art were being initiated. Another 20 years would see museum activity in San Francisco.

Surprisingly, none of the three art museums that compete for the title of “first museum” in the United States are located in New York.  The Wadsworth Athenaeum is in Hartford Connecticut.  The Corcoran Gallery is in Washington, D.C. (pictured above), and the Pennsylvania Academy is, obviously, in Pennsylvania.

Wadsworth originally planned to open only an art museum but was persuaded to create the Athenaeum instead, with a broader mission that included a library, works of art, and natural history, for public education. The Wadsworth’s gothic castle-like appearance is very different from most other art museums that adopted Roman and Greek classical architectural elements. Wadsworth was joined by other Hartford patrons, including Elizabeth Jarvis Colt, widow of firearms magnate Samuel Colt, and financier John Pierpont Morgan in developing the Athenaeum.

Although it did not change its name to the Philadelphia Museum of Art until it began to grow in the 1930s, this art museum began with the great Centennial Exhibition of 1876, held in Fairmount Park. After the fair’s conclusion, its art gallery remained open as the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art.  The museum contained a variety of fine and decorative art as well as books and jewelry when it began, but by the 1930s it had received a great number of paintings, so its designation as an art museum was well-deserved. 

The Corcoran Gallery of Art

The Corcoran Gallery had a checkered history beginning in 1874. It was the first American Art museum given totally by one individual. It was begun by William Wilson Corcoran, one of the first collectors of American art who was a banker by profession.  He wanted to share his collection and opened his home several times a week for public viewing. By the 1850s, his home was overflowing with art, so he hired the architect, James Renwick, Jr., to build a French Second Empire-style gallery across from the White House. Before the building was finished, the Civil War broke out and Corcoran moved to Paris. The bank he owned served the public, including free African Americans. Holding accounts for free Black customers was uncommon for white-owned banks at the time, and Corcoran’s personal position as an enslaver complicated his bank’s policy. Eventually, he supported emancipation, freeing the enslaved people he owned and buying the freedom of others before the Civil War began.. The half-finished building was taken over as a supply depot by the U.S. Army.

After the war was over, the building was completed, but Corcoran died a year later.  Trustees saw that the Corcoran Gallery of Art opened in 1894. It quickly needed more space and moved twice, the last time to a Beaux-Arts design building many times larger that expanded Corcoran’s ideas with an art school. 

The original gallery building became the Federal Claims Court. But by the 1950s, it had deteriorated and there were plans to demolish it.  First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy intervened to have it saved as a historic building.  It is now part of the Smithsonian American Art Museum proving that the importance of an art museum is greater than the life of its founder. Poor Mr. Corcoran, who funded the original museum, and who gave all the art in it, never got lasting recognition. His property and art got sold or shifted and disbursed to other museums. To add insult to injury the original Corcoran museum paid for by Corcoran was renamed for its architect, James Renwick.

Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, Brooklyn, N.Y

The Smithsonian Institution's first building, known as the Castle, was completed in 1855. It is not strictly an art museum but is mentioned here because art was part of the founder’s vision and because it was very early in the history of the country. The Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., is unique because it came into existence through the remarkable bequest of nearly one-half million dollars from James Smithson, an Englishman. He wished to see established in the United States an institution “for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men.”

In 1846 the U.S. Congress accepted his bequest and passed legislation establishing the Smithsonian as an institution charged with representing “all objects of art and…curious research…natural history, plants, and geological and mineralogical specimens” belonging to the United States. The U.S. National Museum opened in 1858 as part of the Smithsonian’s scientific program and formed the first of its many museums, most of which stand along the Mall in Washington, D.C.

Some early museums were the result of small interest groups or educational clubs combining resources. The Brooklyn Museum is an example of a major museum that started with an amalgamation of various groups focused on education across a variety of practical areas.   It is the second largest museum in New York but even though it has some great art, is not known as an art museum as its collections are universal.

Metropolitan Museum circa 1914

Oddly enough, the Metropolitan Museum of Art's earliest roots date back to 1866 in Paris, France, when a group of Americans gathered there and agreed to create a "national institution and gallery of art" to bring art and art education to the American people. The lawyer John Jay, who proposed the idea, swiftly moved forward with the project upon his return to the United States from France. Under Jay's presidency, the Union League Club in New York rallied civic leaders, businessmen, artists, art collectors, and philanthropists to the cause. On April 13, 1870, The Metropolitan Museum of Art was incorporated and began purchasing and acquiring works of art.

Ten years later in 1880, the Museum opened to the public at its current site on Fifth Avenue and 82nd Street. The architects Calvert Vaux and Jacob Wrey Mould designed the initial high Victorian Gothic structure, the west facade of which is still visible. The building has since expanded greatly, and the numerous additions-starting as early as 1888-now almost surround and cover the original structure.

The opening of the Metropolitan Museum of Art was a milestone in Museum building in the United States. The NY Evening Post reported that at last New York had a neoclassical palace of art, "one of the finest in the world, and the only public building in recent years which approaches in dignity and grandeur the museums of the old world."  Other newspapers across the United States reprinted this accolade.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art inspired other large cities around the country to build their art museums in a style that could be called grand, impressive and imposing.  In the first half of the 20th century, that meant going back to classical times and borrowing architectural elements such as pediments, columns, Roman arches, and a formal symmetry often with a broad stairway leading to the entrance. Building booms of art museums using many of these elements occurred in Cleveland, St. Louis, Kansas City, Denver, Chicago, Boston, and Detroit. Here are samples of museums inspired by the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

Metropolitan opening reception

The Museum of Modern Art had several locations in retail style, steel, and glass-clad buildings in Manhattan, NY. It was the first to go completely away from traditional style. As it grew from its 1929 Depression beginning, its European and American Avant-garde art was exhibited without distracting architecture or color. In both the Guggenheim and MOMA the walls were white, a departure from museums of the past and from concurrent art museums.  The term “white museums” was used by some to mock them. But by the 1950s many classically designed museums were using white walls to display their art and most commercial art galleries copied them.

Twenty-seven years passed before another risk-taking financier met an equally risk-taking architect. The Guggenheim Museum in New York was begun in 1956. Frank Lloyd Wright, its architect, took advantage of reinforced, poured concrete as the main building material to achieve the curved, sculptural effect that complemented the non-objective abstract art it contained. Critic Paul Goldberger said “Wright’s building made it socially and culturally acceptable for an architect to design a highly expressive, intensely personal museum. In this sense, almost every museum in the last 26 years is a child of the Guggenheim.”

Solomon R Guggenheim Museum Levels

Around the 1950s many small towns felt the need to have art museums.  People recognized the benefits of looking at fine art and learning from it when they visited art museums in large cities and wanted the art museum experience close to home where they could visit and enjoy often. Small-town museums were usually begun in a vacant mansion or built of brick. It is important to note small town art museums have great importance to community residents.  Inspiration and education through art museums are reasons small towns fund the initial building and contribute ongoing support. Birger Sandzen Memorial Gallery in Lindsborg, Kansas and  Roswell Art Museum in Roswell, NM are two good examples of small community support for the art significant to its residents.

We see unusual museum architecture being designed more often as the 20th century comes to a close and in the first quarter of the 21st  Century.  Recent museums will be covered in Part III. You can read Part 1, here.