Viewing page 35 of 82

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

What do U.S. Museums Buy?

[[image - photograph]] 
[[caption]] BRUSH GUN, sole 1949 purchase of San Antonio's Witte Memorial Museum, was bought by Director [[Ellen Quillin (above)for $10. Her funds are spent on galleries for Texans' gifts like those in background. [[/caption]]

LIFE SURVEYS NEWEST ART PURCHASES OF SIX FAMOUS INSTITUTIONS 
PHOTOGRAPED FOR LIFE BY ARNOLD NEWMAN

In the young America of 200 years ago there was neither a single art museum nor much demand for one. In 1750 Harvard College thought about establishing one, then settled for the creation of a "Repository of Curiosities." But in 1773 Charleston, S.C. opened the first museum in the Western Hemisphere. Thirty-two years later some Philadelphians organized the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, which soon was posting notices of its "Valuable Old Pictures...as well as other paintings by our own artists." In addition the academy boasted a large collection of casts of antique sculpture, and instituted ladies' days in its galleries when the statues were modestly draped. 
Today the U.S. can count more than 2,500 public museums, 400 of them devoted to art alone. Lately these museums have been doing the biggest business in their history, with attendance doubling, in many cases, since the war. Last year close to two million people poured through New York's Metropolitan Museum, another million through the Chicago Art Institute. Such headliners as the Van Gogh show (Life, Oct.10)and Vienna treasures (Life, Oct. 24) drew large crowds. But even more people turned out to see what the museums themselves had acquired.

To learn what is going into U.S. public collections these days, Life set out to find what leading museums purchased in the past year. Such big, heavily endowed museums as the Metropolitan spent as as $525,000 on objects from all ages. Tiny museums with meager support, such as the Flint (Mich.) Institute of Arts, had spent as little as $200 on work by local artists. Many Western museums, like the Portland Art Museum (pp. 44, 45), concentrated on the native arts of their region, while such adventurous organizations as New York's Museum of Modern Art (p.47) found art in everything from saucepans to typewriters. On the following pages Life shows a cross section of what six U.S. museums purchased during the year. 

______________________________________________
THE BROOKLYN MUSEUM
The Brooklyn Museum (opposite page)bought 837 objects last year at a cost of $86,089. To its already famous Egyptian collection it added a granite sarcophagus of Prince Akhet-Hotep (2600 B.C.), on which Director Charles Nagel is leaning. On top of the sarcophagus in front of Mr. Nagel is a group of contemporary American pints while at his left is a wood statuette of an Egyptian kin (1400 B.C.) and at his right, a lion-shaped German ewer. In left foreground on an early American piano are an 18th Century French napkin, an Egyptian wooden ibis (300 B.C.) and two Egyptian ivory figurines (600 B.C.). On the floor (center, foreground) are four Egyptian burial jars (1250 B.C.). Behind them are a 15th Century carving of a Mexican warrior god and, at base of the sarcophagus, a print by the Swiss modern, Paul Klee. On the floor at right is a madonna and child (c. 1600) from Peru; behind it, a Colombian burial jar (1000 A.D.) and a costume from India. On wall behind costume is a painting of the Marys at the Tomb by Benjamin West, 18th Century American. Above it, from right, are Nursemaids and Cabs by Frenchman Pierre Bonnard; Floating by the American, Adolph Gottlieb; Phoenician Women by a Brooklyn artist, Federico Castellon, and Island Memories by Seattle's Mark Tobey. Below (left) is Italian Shepherd Boy by 19th Century American Washington Allston. 
______________________________________________