Milwaukee Art
Museum
Looking out over the vast blue green waters of
Lake Michigan in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the Milwaukee Art Museum
rises like a unique space craft, but really began in 1872, when
numerous organizations were founded so that they could bring an
art gallery to the city, since this growing port town had little
or no place to house or host major art exhibitions. During the
previous nine years, every attempt had met failure, even though,
the Exposition Hall would host such events in 1881, that was the
city's main event venue, but sometime after that, Alexander
Mitchell would donate all of her collections into building the
city's first permanent art gallery. In 1882, the Milwaukee
Museum of Fine Arts was founded, but would be closed down within
six years, and then in 1888, a group of German panorama artists
and local businessmen created the Milwaukee Art Institute, with
its first home being the Layton Art Gallery. During 1911, the
Milwaukee Art Institute, a different structure to house other
exhibitions and collections would be finished, adjacent to the
Layton gallery; and the Milwaukee Art Center that would grow
into the Milwaukee Art Museum was the result of a merge between
the two art galleries in 1957. It moved into a three story
structure below the Eero Saarinen designed Milwaukee County War
Memorial. Now, the museum contains more than 25,000 works with
permanent holdings of old masters, post-1960 American art, 19th
and 20th century artworks, American decorative arts, some of the
country's best collections of German expressionism and folk and
Haitian art. It also houses a big number of Georgia O'Keefe
works, as well as Gabriele Munter, the German expressionist.
|
