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Portland Art Museum
The Portland Art Museum (PAM)
began in 1892, in Portland, Oregon and is the oldest art museum on
the west coast, as well as the 7th oldest in the nation. When the
latest remodeling was finished, it became one of the 25 biggest art
museums in the country, containing 240,000 square feet of space that
houses over 42,000 artworks and a big traveling exhibition that is
shown the majority of the time. The museum highlights the works of
the Native American, northwest art, modern and contemporary art, an
outdoor public sculpture garden and Asian artworks. Another part of
the museum is the Northwest Film Center; allowing the museum to
fulfill its mission of giving art to the community of the best
quality, as well as educating them about the beauty and excitement
of art now and in the future. Back in 1892, seven leaders of the
city's business and cultural institutions came together and signed
letters of incorporation that began the Portland Art Association,
with the intent of beginning a high class art museum that would be
available to all of the community. The museum was able to make its
first purchase of 100 plaster casts of ancient Roman and Greek
sculptures with a generous donation from Henry Corbett; while
another local patron, Winslow B. Ayer and his wife went to Europe to
pick out the casts after getting some valuable advice from the
professionals at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. That first collection would
be called the Corbett Collection and was exhibited at the new
museum's first locale in the upper hall of the new library building
in Portland. It became quickly obvious that the museum's exhibit was
well received, becoming quite popular with the school groups, art
groups and other visitors. When the Lewis and Clark Exposition was
held in Portland in 1905, the museum was larger than the space it
occupied and moved into its own space, nearby. The new location's
first display showcased watercolors and paintings that were in the
city because of the exposition. In 1908, the museum received its
first piece of original art, "Afternoon Sky, Harney Desert" by
American impressionist, Childe Hassam, who visited the counties of
Harney and Malheur with his good friend C. E. S. Wood, one of the
state's earliest cultural icons. Anna Belle Crocker would succeed
Henrietta Failing as the next curator in 1909 and she stayed at the
museum until she retired in 1936, becoming the first head of the
museum art school that opened the same year and is now called the
Pacific Northwest College of Art. Near the end of 1913, the museum
hosted a wonderful exhibition that highlighted many pieces that were
on display at the famous 1913 New York Armory Show, that would
introduce audiences to modern art, with works by Matisse, Cezanne,
Renoir, van Gogh, Manet, Gaugin and other well known artists. One of
the pieces was a controversial painting called "The Nude Descending
a Staircase" by Marcel Duchamp. WWI came and went with the museum
still growing, and in 1920, it hosted two displays by Sally Lewis,
the daughter of a well known Portland family, that had become
friends with such notable artists as Constantin Brancusi, Arthur B.
Davies, Matisse and Picasso while traveling in Europe. In 1923, she
organized an exhibition that contained 44 works by Andre Derain,
Picasso and Matisse, as well as American modernists like Max Weber,
Charles Burchfield and Maurice Prendergast. Sally was among the 22
patrons that purchased a painting by Derain called "Tree" for the
museum's permanent collection. Because Sally's first exhibition had
been met with such success, she attempted another, daring one that
juxtaposed paintings, sculptures and drawings from Europe with
African masks. One of the sculptures that were in it was Brancusis A
Muse, that was owned by Lewis and she gave it to the museum in 1959.
During the 1930s, the museum would move into its third and last
locale, just off the South Park Blocks in downtown Portland, which
had been designed by well known Portland architect Pietro Belluschi
and it opened in 1932, replacing the Ladd School, that was often
referred to as the Park School and had been the biggest in the city
in 1914, with 1176 students. The opening exhibition in the new home
showcased the latest gift; the Mary Andrew Ladd collection of 750
Japanese prints, even today, one of the most prominent collections
of its kind. Almost six years later, the museum had more
construction going on with a new wing to add more space that was
needed. It was named the Hirsch Wing, again designed by Pietro
Belluschi and funded by a generous donation by Ella Hirsch, in honor
of her parents, Solomon and Josephine Hirsch. When that wing opened
in 1939, it essentially doubled the available exhibition space for
the museum. The museum would celebrate its 50th anniversary quietly
in 1942, because of WWII, but in the next year, after finishing its
first ever full inventory, they found that the museum held 3300
objects and 750 artworks on loan for long terms. During the 1950s,
the museum would host a number of record setting displays, like the
1956 exhibit that brought 55,000 visitors to the institution in a
six week period showcasing works from the collection of Walter
Chrysler and organized at the Portland museum so that it could go on
a tour of nine cities. In 1959, over 80,000 came for the Vincent van
Gogh display, with the proceeds from this marvelous show allowing
the museum to buy Water Lilies by Claude Monet. That decade also saw
the creation of the museum's Docent Council that would make a
nucleus of volunteers that still serve the museum today.
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