Portland Art Museum
Encyclopedia
The Portland Art Museum in Portland, Oregon
Portland, Oregon
Portland is a city located in the Pacific Northwest, near the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers in the U.S. state of Oregon. As of the 2010 Census, it had a population of 583,776, making it the 29th most populous city in the United States...

, United States, was founded in 1892, making it the oldest art museum on the West Coast and seventh oldest in the United States. Upon completion of the most recent renovations, the Portland Art Museum became one of the twenty-five largest art museums in the United States, at a total of 240,000 square feet (22,000 m²). The permanent collection has more than 42,000 works of art, and at least one major traveling exhibition is presented most of the time. The Portland Art Museum features a center for Native American art, a center for Northwest art, a center for modern and contemporary art, permanent exhibitions of Asian art, and an outdoor public sculpture garden. The Northwest Film Center
Northwest Film Center
The Northwest Film Center is a regional media arts resource and service organization based in Portland, Oregon, United States that was founded to encourage the study, appreciation, and utilization of film...

 is also a component of Portland Art Museum.

The mission of the Portland Art Museum is to serve the public by providing access to art of enduring quality, by educating a diverse audience about art and by collecting and preserving a wide range of art for the enrichment of present and future generations. The museum is accredited by the American Association of Museums
American Association of Museums
The American Association of Museums is a non-profit association that has brought museums together since its founding in 1906, helping develop standards and best practices, gathering and sharing knowledge, and advocating on issues of concern to the museum community...

, with accreditation through 2024.

Founding

The museum was founded in late 1892 when seven leaders from Portland's business and cultural institutions signed the letters of incorporation creating the Portland Art Association. The goal of the Association was to create a first-class art museum that would be accessible to all citizens.

The museum purchased its first collection of some one hundred plaster casts of Greek and Roman sculptures with its first gift from prominent local citizen Henry Corbett, who donated $10,000 for the acquisition. Another local citizen, Winslow B. Ayer, and his wife selected the casts during a trip to Europe after receiving advice on their purchase from museum professionals at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is a renowned art museum in New York City. Its permanent collection contains more than two million works, divided into nineteen curatorial departments. The main building, located on the eastern edge of Central Park along Manhattan's Museum Mile, is one of the...

 in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts, is one of the largest museums in the United States, attracting over one million visitors a year. It contains over 450,000 works of art, making it one of the most comprehensive collections in the Americas...

 in Boston.

This initial collection purchased by Ayer, called the Corbett Collection, went on display in the Portland Art Museum's first location in the upper hall of the new library building
Multnomah County Library
Multnomah County Library is a public library system serving Multnomah County, Oregon, United States. Started in 1864, the system has 19 library locations with books, magazines, DVDs, and computers. It is the largest library system in Oregon serving a population of 724,680, with more than 425,000...

 at SW 7th and Stark Streets. It immediately became one of Portland's most important and popular cultural resources, attracting art groups, school field trips, and large audiences for lectures.

Early history

By the time of the Lewis & Clark Exposition held in Portland in 1905, the Portland Art Museum had outgrown its location in the public library and had moved into its own building at SW 5th and Taylor. The first exhibition in the new building featured watercolors and paintings that had come to Portland as part of the 1905 Exposition. Curator Henrietta H. Failing (the niece of founder Henry Failing
Henry Failing
Henry Failing was a banker, and one of the leading businessmen of the Pacific Northwest of the United States. He was one of Portland, Oregon's earliest residents, and served as that city's mayor for three two-year terms...

) organized the exhibition with New England artist Frank Vincent DuMond.

Three years later, in 1908, the museum acquired its first original piece of art, "Afternoon Sky, Harney Desert" by American impressionist painter Childe Hassam
Childe Hassam
Frederick Childe Hassam was a prolific American Impressionist painter, noted for his urban and coastal scenes. Along with Mary Cassatt and John Henry Twachtman, Hassam was instrumental in promulgating Impressionism to American collectors, dealers, and museums...

, who frequented Malheur
Malheur County, Oregon
Malheur County is a county located in the southeast corner of the U.S. state of Oregon. It is included in the eight-county definition of Eastern Oregon. Most of the county observes the Mountain Time Zone, although the southern quarter of the county observes the Pacific Time Zone along with the...

 and Harney
Harney County, Oregon
-National protected areas:*Malheur National Forest *Malheur National Wildlife Refuge*Ochoco National Forest -Demographics:As of the census of 2000, there were 7,609 people, 3,036 households, and 2,094 families residing in the county. The population density was 1 people per square mile...

 counties in Eastern Oregon
Eastern Oregon
Eastern Oregon is the eastern part of the U.S. state of Oregon. It is not an officially recognized geographic entity, thus the boundaries of the region vary according to context. It is sometimes understood to include only the eight easternmost counties in the state; in other contexts, it includes...

 with his friend, C.E.S. Wood.

Anna Belle Crocker succeeded Henrietta Failing as curator of the museum in 1909. She would remain at the museum until her retirement in 1936. Crocker became one of the Portland Art Museum's most important early figures. She was also the first head of the Museum Art School, which opened in 1909 and is now the Pacific Northwest College of Art
Pacific Northwest College of Art
The Pacific Northwest College of Art is a private fine art and design college in Portland in the U.S. state of Oregon. Established in 1910, the art school grants bachelor of fine arts degrees and master of fine arts degrees and has an enrollment of about 550 students...

.

In late 1913, the museum hosted one of its most important early exhibitions. The exhibition featured artwork that had been on display earlier that year at the famous 1913 New York Armory Show
Armory Show
Many exhibitions have been held in the vast spaces of U.S. National Guard armories, but the Armory Show refers to the 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art that was organized by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors...

, which introduced American audiences to modern art
Modern art
Modern art includes artistic works produced during the period extending roughly from the 1860s to the 1970s, and denotes the style and philosophy of the art produced during that era. The term is usually associated with art in which the traditions of the past have been thrown aside in a spirit of...

. The exhibition included works by Cézanne
Paul Cézanne
Paul Cézanne was a French artist and Post-Impressionist painter whose work laid the foundations of the transition from the 19th century conception of artistic endeavour to a new and radically different world of art in the 20th century. Cézanne can be said to form the bridge between late 19th...

, Van Gogh, Gauguin
Paul Gauguin
Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin was a leading French Post-Impressionist artist. He was an important figure in the Symbolist movement as a painter, sculptor, print-maker, ceramist, and writer...

, Matisse, Manet
Manet
-MANET as an abbreviation:*MANET is a mobile ad hoc network, a self-configuring mobile wireless network.*MANET database or Molecular Ancestry Network, bioinformatics database-People with the surname Manet:*Édouard Manet, a 19th-century French painter....

, Renoir
Renoir
-People with the surname Renoir :* Pierre-Auguste Renoir , French painter* Pierre Renoir , French actor and son of Pierre-Auguste Renoir* Jean Renoir , French film director and son of Pierre-Auguste Renoir...

, and the controversial Nude Descending a Staircase by Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp was a French artist whose work is most often associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. Considered by some to be one of the most important artists of the 20th century, Duchamp's output influenced the development of post-World War I Western art...

.

The museum continued to grow during the years following World War I. In the 1920s, the museum hosted two memorable exhibitions organized by Sally Lewis, the daughter of a prominent Portland family. Lewis had befriended many well-known artists on trips to New York and Europe. In 1923, Lewis organized an exhibition at the museum that included 44 paintings by Picasso, Matisse, André Derain
André Derain
André Derain was a French artist, painter, sculptor and co-founder of Fauvism with Henri Matisse.-Early years:...

 and American modernists, such as Maurice Prendergast
Maurice Prendergast
Maurice Brazil Prendergast was an American Post-Impressionist artist who worked in oil, watercolor, and monotype...

, Charles Burchfield, and Max Weber
Max Weber (artist)
For the social theorist and philosopher, see Max WeberMax Weber was a Jewish-American painter who worked in the style of cubism before migrating to Jewish themes towards the end of his life.-Biography:...

. She was also one of 22 patrons who purchased Derain's Tree for the museum's permanent collection. The success of her first exhibition led to her second, more daring endeavor a year later that juxtaposed paintings, drawings, and sculptures from Europe with African masks. Among the sculptures was Brancusi's A Muse, which Lewis owned and donated to the museum in 1959.

Main building

The museum's final location opened to the public on November 18, 1932, at the corner of SW Park Avenue and Jefferson Street. The building, designed by noted Portland architect Pietro Belluschi
Pietro Belluschi
Pietro Belluschi was an American architect, a leader of the Modern Movement in architecture, and was responsible for the design of over one thousand buildings....

, is situated along downtown Portland's South Park Blocks
South Park Blocks
The South Park Blocks form a city park in downtown Portland, Oregon. The Oregonian has called it Portland's "extended family room", as Pioneer Courthouse Square is known as Portland's "living room"....

 and remains a landmark in the city's Cultural District. It was constructed with a lead gift of $100,000 from Winslow B. Ayer, the same patron who selected the museum's collection of plaster casts 40 years earlier. For this reason, the original portion of today's larger main building is referred to as the Ayer Wing.

Barely six years later, construction began on a new wing to expand the main building. The Hirsch Wing, also designed by Pietro Belluschi
Pietro Belluschi
Pietro Belluschi was an American architect, a leader of the Modern Movement in architecture, and was responsible for the design of over one thousand buildings....

, was funded largely through the bequest of Ella Hirsch in honor of her parents, Solomon and Josephine Hirsch. The new wing opened on September 15, 1939 and doubled the museum's gallery space.

Post war

In 1942, the Portland Art Museum celebrated a subdued 50th Anniversary thanks to World War II. But the following year in 1943, staff completed the museum's first full inventory, which counted a permanent collection of 3,300 objects and 750 works on long-term loan.

The next decade was distinguished by a series of record-setting exhibitions. In 1956, nearly 55,000 visitors came to the museum during the six-week run of an exhibition featuring paintings from the collection of Walter Chrysler
Walter Chrysler
Walter Percy Chrysler was an American machinist, railroad mechanic and manager, automotive industry executive, Freemason, and founder of the Chrysler Corporation.- Railroad career :...

. The exhibition was organized by the Portland Art Museum and toured nine other cities. More than 80,000 people visited for a Vincent van Gogh
Vincent van Gogh
Vincent Willem van Gogh , and used Brabant dialect in his writing; it is therefore likely that he himself pronounced his name with a Brabant accent: , with a voiced V and palatalized G and gh. In France, where much of his work was produced, it is...

 exhibition in 1959, the proceeds from which were used to purchase Water Lilies
Water Lilies
Water Lilies is a series of approximately 250 oil paintings by French Impressionist Claude Monet . The paintings depict Monet's flower garden at Giverny and were the main focus of Monet's artistic production during the last thirty years of his life...

 by Claude Monet
Claude Monet
Claude Monet was a founder of French impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein-air landscape painting. . Retrieved 6 January 2007...

. The 1950s also witnessed the creation of the museum's Docent Council in 1955, which created a core group of volunteers who continue to serve the museum to this day.

In the 1960s, the museum underwent another major renovation to build the Hoffman Memorial Wing, named for L. Hawley Hoffman, who served as president of the museum twice. Funded by the museum's first capital campaign, the new wing began construction in November 1968 and was finished in September 1970. Pietro Belluschi served as the architect again, and the project allowed him to realize a complete vision for the museum that he had conceived nearly 40 years earlier. The expansion created classroom and studio space for the Museum Art School, a sculpture mall, a new vault for the collections, and an auditorium.

Over the course of the next several decades, the collections and programs of the Portland Art Museum continued to grow and evolve. In 1978, Vivian and Gordon Gilkey
Gordon Gilkey
Gordon Waverly Gilkey was an American artist, educator, and promoter of the arts from Oregon. A native Oregonian, he served during World War II in Europe collecting art stolen by the Nazis for which he was award the Meritorious Service Medal and other accolades...

 began their association with the museum, bringing with them an extraordinary collection of thousands of works on paper that would eventually lead to the opening of the Vivian and Gordon Gilkey Center for Graphic Arts in 1993. Also in 1978, the Northwest Film Center
Northwest Film Center
The Northwest Film Center is a regional media arts resource and service organization based in Portland, Oregon, United States that was founded to encourage the study, appreciation, and utilization of film...

 was incorporated into the museum, offering a wide range of film festivals, classes, and outreach programs focused on the moving image arts.

Modern era

The Portland Art Museum celebrated its centennial in 1992, which was marked by successful negotiations to purchase the Masonic Temple, now known as the Mark Building. The purchase was completed in 1994, the same year that a capital campaign to finance a refurbishment of the Main Building began. This ambitious project included improving the galleries, reinstalling the permanent collection, and equipping the building with a climate control system. The refurbishment allowed the museum to host the most successful exhibition in its history: Imperial Tombs of China, which brought 430,000 visitors to the museum the following year.

A major renovation of the Hoffman Wing was completed in 2000 and added more than 50000 square feet (4,645.2 m²) of new gallery space to the museum. The first gallery space addition since 1939, the new galleries included the Grand Ronde Center for Native American Art and the Arlene and Harold Schnitzer Center for Northwest Art. The renovation was funded by the largest capital campaign ever undertaken by a cultural organization in the State of Oregon, which raised $45 million.

In 2001, the Portland Art Museum announced the largest single acquisition in its history when it purchased the private collection of renowned New York art critic Clement Greenberg
Clement Greenberg
Clement Greenberg was an American essayist known mainly as an influential visual art critic closely associated with American Modern art of the mid-20th century...

. The 159 works by artists such as Kenneth Noland
Kenneth Noland
Kenneth Noland was an American abstract painter. He was one of the best-known American Color field painters, although in the 1950s he was thought of as an abstract expressionist and in the early 1960s he was thought of as a minimalist painter. Noland helped establish the Washington Color School...

, Jules Olitski
Jules Olitski
Jules Olitski was an American abstract painter, printmaker, and sculptor.-Early life:Olitski was born Jevel Demikovski in Snovsk, in the Russian SFSR , a few months after his father, a commissar, was executed by the Russian government...

, and Anthony Caro
Anthony Caro
Sir Anthony Alfred Caro, OM, CBE is an English abstract sculptor whose work is characterised by assemblages of metal using 'found' industrial objects.-Background and early life:...

 substantially enhanced the museum's permanent collection of 20th century modern and contemporary art. To house this new collection, the museum renovated the former Masonic temple, transforming it into the 141000 square feet (13,099.3 m²) Mark Building, which opened in October 2005. The renovation added the six-floor, 28000 square feet (2,601.3 m²) Jubitz Center for Modern and Contemporary Art, the largest exhibition space for modern and contemporary art in the region. The Mark Building also houses the 33,000 volume Crumpacker Family Library, meeting spaces, ballrooms, and administrative offices.

Now with a collection consisting of some 40,000 objects, the Portland Art Museum is one of the leading cultural institutions in the Pacific Northwest. The museum is currently under the leadership of Brian Ferriso, The Marilyn H. and Dr. Robert B. Pamplin, Jr. Director since 2006. In 2007, Vincent van Gogh
Vincent van Gogh
Vincent Willem van Gogh , and used Brabant dialect in his writing; it is therefore likely that he himself pronounced his name with a Brabant accent: , with a voiced V and palatalized G and gh. In France, where much of his work was produced, it is...

's 1884 painting, The Ox-Cart, was donated to the museum, becoming the first work of that artist in a Northwest museum.

Artworks

The museum has a collection of over 40,000 objects and works of art. Among them:
  • Castel Gandolfo
    Castel Gandolfo
    Castel Gandolfo is a small Italian town or comune in Lazio that occupies a height overlooking Lake Albano about 15 miles south-east of Rome, on the Alban Hills. It is best known as the summer residence of the Pope. It is an Italian town with the population of 8834...

    by George Inness
    George Inness
    George Inness was an American landscape painter; born in Newburgh, New York; died at Bridge of Allan in Scotland. His work was influenced, in turn, by that of the old masters, the Hudson River school, the Barbizon school, and, finally, by the theology of Emanuel Swedenborg, whose spiritualism...

     - The American Art Collection,
  • Mount Hood
    Mount Hood
    Mount Hood, called Wy'east by the Multnomah tribe, is a stratovolcano in the Cascade Volcanic Arc of northern Oregon. It was formed by a subduction zone and rests in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States...

    by Albert Bierstadt
    Albert Bierstadt
    Albert Bierstadt was a German-American painter best known for his lavish, sweeping landscapes of the American West. In obtaining the subject matter for these works, Bierstadt joined several journeys of the Westward Expansion...

     - The American Art Collection,
  • Arrival of the Westerners by Kano School (Edo Period
    Edo period
    The , or , is a division of Japanese history which was ruled by the shoguns of the Tokugawa family, running from 1603 to 1868. The political entity of this period was the Tokugawa shogunate....

     Screen) - The Asian Art Collection,
  • Paris: Quai de Bercy — La Halle aux Vins by Paul Cézanne
    Paul Cézanne
    Paul Cézanne was a French artist and Post-Impressionist painter whose work laid the foundations of the transition from the 19th century conception of artistic endeavour to a new and radically different world of art in the 20th century. Cézanne can be said to form the bridge between late 19th...

     - The Modern and Contemporary Art Collection,
  • Water Lilies
    Water Lilies
    Water Lilies is a series of approximately 250 oil paintings by French Impressionist Claude Monet . The paintings depict Monet's flower garden at Giverny and were the main focus of Monet's artistic production during the last thirty years of his life...

    by Claude Monet
    Claude Monet
    Claude Monet was a founder of French impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein-air landscape painting. . Retrieved 6 January 2007...

     - The Modern and Contemporary Art Collection,
  • The Prince Patutszky Red by Jules Olitski
    Jules Olitski
    Jules Olitski was an American abstract painter, printmaker, and sculptor.-Early life:Olitski was born Jevel Demikovski in Snovsk, in the Russian SFSR , a few months after his father, a commissar, was executed by the Russian government...

     - The Modern and Contemporary Art Collection
  • Seine at Argentieul by Pierre Renoir
  • River at Lavacourt by Claude Monet
  • The Ox-Cart by Vincent van Gogh
    Vincent van Gogh
    Vincent Willem van Gogh , and used Brabant dialect in his writing; it is therefore likely that he himself pronounced his name with a Brabant accent: , with a voiced V and palatalized G and gh. In France, where much of his work was produced, it is...

  • "Nativity" by Taddeo Gaddi
  • "Madonna and Child" by Cecco di Pietro
    Cecco di Pietro
    Cecco di Pietro lived at Pisa in the 14th century, and according to Ciampi painted in the Campo Santo in 1370, in company with five other artists. He was one of the people's representatives in 1380, and in 1386 he painted a 'Nativity of the Virgin' for the church of San Pietro in Vincolo at Pisa,...

  • "Allegory Figure of Woman" by Franz Von Stuck
  • "Top of The Town" by Roger Brown.

Oregon Biennial

The Oregon Biennial was a biennial art exhibition
Art exhibition
Art exhibitions are traditionally the space in which art objects meet an audience. The exhibit is universally understood to be for some temporary period unless, as is rarely true, it is stated to be a "permanent exhibition". In American English, they may be called "exhibit", "exposition" or...

held every two years at PAM. In 2007, it was replaced by the Contemporary Northwest Art Awards or CNAA, which will be held every two years and covers artists in Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Wyoming and Montana selected from a shortlist of artists. One artist from the CNAA show will be awarded the $10,000 Arlene Schnitzer Prize.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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