An Art Collection for Saint Paul

Essay by Kristin Makholm, Ph.D.  MMAA Executive Director

The art collections of the Minnesota Museum of American Art are like a living organism.  They have grown, developed, morphed, and adapted through decades of change and transition, from the organization’s flourishing as an art school in the 1940s, through its success as a museum of primarily non-Western art in the 1970s, to its renewed focus on American and regional artists in the 1980s and 1990s.  Works have been accessioned and deaccessioned, galleries have come and gone, and the museum has seen its good and bad days.  But in this twenty-first century, over eighty years since its incorporation as the Saint Paul School of Art in the 1920s, the collections of the MMAA continue to distinguish the museum as a leading light in American art in our state and our region.

When the organization was incorporated as the Saint Paul School of Art in 1927, it had already fulfilled a significant role in arts education in the Twin Cities that went back to the 1880s.  Starting as the Art Workers’ Guild of Saint Paul in 1882, it merged over time with the Ceramics Club, the Saint Paul School of Fine Arts, the Art Museum Association of Saint Paul, the Arts Guild of Saint Paul, and the Saint Paul Institute of Arts and Sciences (the predecessor to today’s Science Museum of Minnesota).  In the 1920s the Saint Paul School of Art become known as a serious place for art instruction, following a hiatus of several years due to World War I.

With local artists Dewey Albinson and then Cameron Booth at the helm, it had many different homes all over St. Paul, where it provided a high quality education in the fine and applied arts (fig. 1).  The school mounted exhibitions of the work of its students and faculty, as well as art from local collections and artists, but also presented nationally touring exhibitions—such as one of Mexican modernist Jose Clemente Orozco’s work—in the spacious gallery on the top floor of the Saint Paul Public Library, a frequent satellite location for the school’s exhibitions.

The exhibition program took off in the 1940s with the acquisition of the Chancey Griggs mansion at 476 Summit Avenue (fig. 2), which Mr. and Mrs. Roger Shepard sold to the school in 1939 for the sum of one dollar.  Changing its name to the Saint Paul Gallery and School of Art, the organization finally had its own home with space to mount exhibitions, as well as rooms that could be adapted to studios and classrooms.  In 1940 the school mounted its first major exhibition, 3,000 Years of Chinese Art, with loans from the permanent collection of the Walker Art Center (which was switching to its new focus on modern art) and jade objects from the collection of Alfred F. Pillsbury (then housed at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts).  The popularity of this exhibition reflected the public’s eagerness to see quality works of art from local collections.

Exhibitions in the 1940s revealed director Cameron Booth’s dedication to introducing the school’s students and the public to art of all kinds, from local talent in painting, sculpture, and handicrafts to the most cutting edge art in America and abroad. Traveling shows from collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of Art, photographs of Margaret Bourke-White, contemporary French and German art, art from Southwest America and Southeast Asia, works from Albrecht Dürer to Marsden Hartley—month after month, the flurry of exhibitions starting in 1940 was remarkable.  Grace Flandreau, a writer for the St. Paul Pioneer Press, wrote that the school’s exhibition schedule “rings with great names … with even an occasional squint at tomorrow.”[1]  Artwork began to be given to the Saint Paul Gallery—a Hogarth portrait, Chippendale furniture, and paintings by faculty members and students—but art collecting was not yet a pivotal concern to the school’s board and mission.

Not at least until Malcolm Lein showed up.  A young architect who had recently helped design the famed “Idea House” for the Walker Art Center, Lein took over the directorship of the school in 1947 and proceeded to develop the school’s activities in design and craft, both in teaching and in exhibitions and acquisitions.  He began the Designed for Living shows that brought in hundreds of great design items from Twin Cities stores, all for sale, and the Craftsman’s Market, which sold fine local craft in all media.  He hired promising craft artists, including the young potter Warren MacKenzie and his wife Alix, both of whom moved from Chicago in 1948 to teach at the Saint Paul School and live in its Summit Avenue carriage house. Through Warren MacKenzie, Lein invited renowned British potter Bernard Leach to visit the school in 1950 for a weeklong workshop and subsequent exhibition of his work. Activities like this distinguished the Saint Paul Gallery and School of Art early on as a leader in the appreciation of craft, as the first one-person exhibition of a young American painter named Joan Mitchell that same year helped cement the Gallery’s commitment to contemporary art.[2]

Yet, it was the development of a national competition for American and Canadian craftsmen in 1951 that set the stage for what the MMAA is still known for:  a dynamite collection of mid-century studio craft.  Known as Fiber–Clay–Metal, the six exhibitions that took place between 1951 and 1964 lured the finest North American artists working in textiles, ceramics, and metalwork to submit work to the St. Paul show (fig. 3).  Juries for the show included highly respected international artists, such as Harvey Littleton, Anni Albers, Shoji Hamada, John Prip, Warren MacKenzie, Peter Voulkos, and even Bernard Leach. The exhibitions showed hundreds of the most innovative works being created at the time, many of which were purchased by the Saint Paul Gallery.[3]  The last Fiber–Clay–Metal exhibition in 1964, fragmented by scandal when only 100 of the over 1,000 submitted objects were actually accepted, paved the way for other craft exhibitions—Goldsmith, Objects USA, and Wooden Works—which continued to bring stellar works of craft and design into the museum’s permanent collection into the 1970s.

The art collections of the Saint Paul Gallery were formally inaugurated in a January 1959 catalog, which introduced the public to the “first acquisitions” of the collection, most obtained through gift since 1944.  The first major acquisition was a collection of Chinese jade, made through the bequest of George F. Lindsay in 1944.[4]  Subsequent additions, including a print by Picasso, a fifteenth-century Italian painting given by local business leader Louis W. Hill, Jr., and a collection of objects from the Northwest Coast Indians, were dwarfed by an extraordinary pastel by French artist Edgar Degas, Femme a sa toilette (Woman at Her Bath).  This work, given by Katherine G. Ordway in 1954, was considered the gallery’s first major single acquisition (fig. 4).[5]  A follow-up catalog, simply called Acquisitions 1959–60, featured more additions to the collection, including a glass and wood table by art school student Harlan Boss, a Roman amphora from around 100 B.C., and a painting by French artist Marie Laurencin.

The Saint Paul Gallery’s collection priorities were clearly articulated in the January 1959 catalog:  (1) crafts, which also included the indigenous work of Native Americans; (2) paintings, sculpture, and the graphic arts, mostly by twentieth-century artists; (3) local artists, because “the museum has an inherent responsibility to encourage their efforts by providing place and recognition for their work”; and (4) “art of the past,”  artwork of ancient Egypt and the Far East that “provides a vital supplement for the Gallery’s dominant interest in contemporary crafts, painting, sculpture, and the graphic arts.”[6]  The catalog’s foreword articulates the broader goals of assembling a collection of such breadth:

It is noteworthy that no American city of stature is without its valued art collection, filling an essential need in the city’s educational and cultural life.  The building of such a collection can be accomplished only through public support.  Once established, it is a lasting tribute to the civic pride and discernment of the individuals who began it and of those who continue to make it grow.[7]

By 1962, the organization’s Board of Trustees changed its name to the Saint Paul Art Center, in anticipation of a 1964 merger with the Science Museum of Minnesota in the new Arts and Sciences Building on Saint Paul’s Tenth Street.  The continued growth of such a unique art collection lent a new level of prestige, making it unnecessary to distinguish any longer between “gallery” and “school.”  The Saint Paul Art Center did it all, and in brand new modern galleries befitting an urban art museum.  It began a biennial competition of American drawings known as Drawings USA (fig. 5), mounted between 1961 and 1976, and inaugurated the series Africa/Images and Realities, presented in conjunction with the Social Studies Institute of Saint Paul.  Collaborations with corporate giant 3M, the Saint Paul Public Schools, and Saint Paul’s Chamber of Commerce gave the Art Center credibility in the wider context of education, civic importance, and engagement in an expanded realm.

By the 1960s certain donors began to stand out as key contributors to the development of the art collections at the Saint Paul Art Center.  One of those was Philip A. Bruno, the co-director of the Staempfli Gallery in New York and a friend of Malcolm Lein since the early 1950s. Through gifts by Bruno and his wife, Josephine (who was from Saint Paul), a wide variety of contemporary artists’ work entered the collection of the Saint Paul Art Center.  This included the early work of California artists Joan Brown and William T. Wiley, drawings and prints by Milton Avery and Ralston Crawford, and paintings by Enrico Donati and Alfonso Ossorio.  Major works by American sculptor George Rickey, one of Staempfli Gallery’s artists, also entered the museum’s collection because of this connection.  These included the monumental Two Lines Oblique (1967–1968), a 25-foot high kinetic stainless steel sculpture that was a gift from Rickey himself in 1968.

One could hardly dispute that the single most important body of artwork entered the collection of the Saint Paul Art Center in 1966 with the bequest of internationally known sculptor—and Saint Paul native—Paul Manship, who died on January 30, 1966.  Consisting of over 350 individual works of art, from large-scale bronze sculptures to drawings, medallions, and even works in glass and marble, the bequest represented one-half of the artist’s entire estate, split evenly between the Saint Paul Art Center and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Collection of Fine Art (now known as the National Museum of American Art) in Washington, D.C.  The Saint Paul Art Center got first pick and chose Manship’s luminous marble sculpture Briseis (1950) to start the selection process (fig. 6).  Installations of the Manship works were immediately mounted in the Art Center galleries with the first major exhibition, Paul Howard Manship: An Intimate View, appearing in December 1972.

The acquisition of the Manship bequest catapulted the Saint Paul Art Center into a new category of art collecting institutions, necessitating yet another name change in 1969, this time to the Minnesota Museum of Art.  The organization was thriving as an art center and museum, but it needed more space than what was available in the Tenth Street building.  Thus, in 1972, the museum purchased the Women’s City Club Building—a beautiful art deco structure on the corner of Kellogg Boulevard and Saint Peter Street, designed and built by local architect Magnus Jemne in 1931 (fig. 7).[8]  This became the home of the museum’s permanent collection, while the Tenth Street building continued to house the museum school and a community gallery devoted to exhibitions of local artists and traveling shows.  The Jemne Building (as it came to be known) featured many exhibitions devoted to the Minnesota Museum of Art’s burgeoning collections.  These included an extravaganza called Lace, Fans, and Photographs, featuring the MMAA’s lace collection (the largest in the country at that time), an exhibit of the museum’s substantial collection of prints by twentieth-century German artist Käthe Kollwitz, and the ambitious 1975 exhibition African Heritage, consisting of traditional sculpture and crafts from the museum’s permanent collection.  By 1975, the museum’s most extensive holdings were in Asian and African art.

The early 1980s saw a major shift in the exhibitions, acquisitions, and policies of the Minnesota Museum of Art.  With the departure of Malcolm Lein in the late 1970s, the museum’s move into the newly renovated Federal Courts Building (now known as Landmark Center) in 1979, and the hiring of Walker Art Center curator Dean Swanson as director, the MMA turned its attention towards American art, even as it continued to accept artwork from Papua New Guinea and Korea.  By 1981, the museum officially acknowledged a focus on American art of the first half of the twentieth century, purchasing a major painting by Ashcan school artist Robert Henri, mounting a significant exhibition of Prairie school architecture, and starting the search for a new director with a specialty in American art.

By 1982, museum trustees located Jim Czarniecki, a young director from the Mississippi Museum of Art, who led the Minnesota Museum of Art for eleven years (fig. 8).  This decad e was marked by substantial additions of American art, as well as targeted deaccessions that helped center the collection on its new American mission.  Lace, dolls, Mexican pottery, and European decorative arts were sold to purchase American paintings by Joseph Meeker, Isabel Bishop, and Childe Hassam.  The Degas pastel was sold in 1987 to purchase paintings by George Bellows and Thomas Hart Benton and create a dedicated acquisitions fund for American art.  Photographs, a special interest of Jim Czarniecki, began to be collected in the mid-1980s.  A large and distinguished collection of Edward S. Curtis photographs entered the museum in 1986 through the help of local collector Christopher Cardozo, the Cray Research Laboratories, and other key donors.            

Despite attempts to unite the museum’s programs around American art, the activities of the MMA continued to lead in many directions.  Exhibitions in the Jemne Building focused on all aspects of the permanent collection, including African and Asian art, even alongside exhibitions devoted to American multicultural and regional subjects.  A significant collection of Minnesota Ojibwe artist George Morrison’s paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints was acquired in the wake of a retrospective of his work, Standing in the Northern Lights, in 1990.  Important works by Romare Bearden, Gordon Parks, Patrick DesJarlait, and Frederick D. Jones entered the collection during this period of increased cultural inclusivity.

With over 10,000 works of art stored in four different locations, the tipping point came in the mid-1990s when attempts to consolidate the museum’s operations and locations failed, deficits in the museum’s operating budget loomed large, and Jim Czarniecki resigned as director.  By 1995, with new director Ruth Applehof and a new name—Minnesota Museum of (now) American Art—museum trustees decided to sell the Jemne Building and deaccession all the art in the collection that wasn't considered American, at the time over sixty percent of the collection.  The proceeds from auctions in California and elsewhere provided funds for future acquisitions, now firmly dedicated to the work of American artists.  This left about 3,800 works remaining in the MMAA collection.

Today, in 2011, as the MMAA seeks to restore its presence in St. Paul and the region—without a home, at present—the collection becomes the standard bearer for the museum, the thread that connects us with the past and leads us into the future.  Since 2000, programs and acquisitions have allowed a closer look at artists with roots in Minnesota, including artists such as cartoonist Charles Schultz, photographer Wing Young Huie, and a generation of Minnesota’s women painters that includes Clara Mairs, Frances Cranmer Greenman, and Elsa Laubach Jemne.  Acquisition of works by young artists living in Minnesota, like Ruben Nusz, Angela Strassheim, and Maren Kloppmann, keeps the museum’s collection current and vital.  Collecting strategies continue to be refined as befits a museum in transition.

What Our Treasures does is take stock of our collection as the foundation that keeps the MMAA firmly grounded in St. Paul and its cultural heritage.  Through a critical and thoughtful spotlight on the museum’s history, collections, and artists, the museum can reinforce its importance to the arts of our region and chart our path as a continuing leader in arts engagement and inspiration for the next generation of citizens and visitors to Minnesota’s capitol city.  With his bequest, Paul Manship dedicated his collection to St. Paul, his birthplace.  We owe it to the people and artists of our region to do the same with the remarkable collections of the Minnesota Museum of American Art.