Saint Louis Art Museum

building (razed 1919) The museum's origins date to 1879, when the Saint Louis School and Museum of Fine Arts was founded as part of Washington University. The nascent museum was housed in a building Wayman Crow commissioned of Boston architects Peabody and Stearns as a memorial to his son, Wayman Crow Jr. The structure was located at 19th and Lucas Place (now Locust Street). The school, led by director Halsey Ives, offered studio and art history instruction supported by a museum collection. When the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition closed, the museum and school moved from the Peabody-Stearns structure to Cass Gilbert's Palace of Fine Arts building. After the museum’s move, the Peabody-Stearns building rapidly fell into disrepair and was eventually demolished in 1919. After the relocation, Director Ives introduced a bill into the General Assembly for an art tax to support museum maintenance. The citizens of Saint Louis approved the bill by a nearly 4-to-1 margin; however, the city's controller refused to distribute the tax as the museum was not recognized as a municipal entity and thus had no right to tax money. The Supreme Court of Missouri upheld this decision in 1908. This caused the formal separation of the museum from the university in 1909, a split which was the beginning of three civic institutions: • a newly created, public City Art Museum, to remain in the Palace of Fine Arts, the organization which evolved into the Saint Louis Art Museum; an organizing board was assigned to take control in 1912. • the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum affiliated with the private Washington University, whose collection was lent to the City Art Museum for several years, and now part of the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts • the St. Louis School of Fine Arts, also part of Washington University. In 1905 Ives had been immediately succeeded as director by Edmund H. Wuerpel; as of September 1909 Wuerpel advertised classes at Skinker and Lindell. Wuerpel remained director until his retirement in 1939. The school is now also part of the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts. During the 1950s, the museum added an extension to include an auditorium for films, concerts, and lectures. Director Charles Guggenheim's American Museum'' (1959) debuted in the new auditorium space as a 50th anniversary event. In 1971, efforts to secure the museum's financial future led voters in St. Louis City and County to approve the creation of the Metropolitan Zoological Park and Museum District (ZMD). This expanded the tax base for the 1908 tax to include St. Louis County. In 1972, the museum was again renamed, to the Saint Louis Art Museum. Expansion Plans to expand the museum, which existed in the 1995 Forest Park Master Plan and the museum's 2000 Strategic Plan, began in earnest in 2005, when the museum board selected the British architect Sir David Chipperfield to design the expansion; Michel Desvigne was selected as landscape architect. The St. Louis-based firm, Hellmuth, Obata, and Kassabaum (HOK) was the architect of record to work with the construction team. On November 5, 2007, museum officials released the design plans to the public and hosted public conversations about those plans. A model of the new building was displayed in the museum's Sculpture Hall throughout the construction project. In 2008, citing the declining state of the economy, the museum announced that it would delay the start of the expansion, whose cost was then estimated at $125 million. Construction began in 2009; the museum remained open. The expansion added more than of gallery space, including an underground garage, within the lease lines of the property. Money for the project was raised through private gifts to the capital campaign from individuals, foundations and corporations, and from proceeds from the sale of tax-exempt bonds. The fundraising campaigned covered the $130-million cost of construction and a $31.2 million increase to the museum's endowment to support incremental costs of operating the larger facility. The expanded facility opened in the summer of 2013. ==Collection==