Art under the Arch - revitalized art scene in St. Louis, Missouri

Art in America, July, 2001 by Ann Wilson Lloyd

When open, the two facilities will add prestige to Grand Center, which was established a decade ago to revitalize a downtown area near St. Louis University. Arts leaders say the long-planned cultural district has yet to live up to its potential, despite the presence of such major institutions as the St. Louis Symphony's Powell Hall, the acoustically renowned Sheldon Concert Hall, the Grandel Theater housing the St. Louis Black Repertory Company and the landmark 1929 Fox Theater. The Fox, with its Byzantine decor, sits at the opposite end of the Ando building's block. It regularly hosts traveling Broadway shows and headliner entertainment. Like the other performance venues, it attracts evening audiences. Daytime street life is sparse, and empty storefronts are interspersed among the cultural establishments. It is hoped that the art spaces will increase daytime traffic to Grand Center, which would encourage the recycling of shuttered buildings into shops and cafes.

Grand SLAM

Other good news is the recent programming (accompanied by a national PR initiative) of the St. Louis Art Museum (SLAM), the grande dame of the city's art institutions. Both the museum's Beaux-Arts building and Forest Park, in which it lies, date from the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition (the world's fair that inspired the Judy Garland movie Meet Me in St. Louis).

The museum was founded in 1879 with a mandate to collect and show "art of the present." Unlike most city fine-arts museums, SLAM has maintained its commitment to contemporary art, with significant help from the area's several serious collectors of new work. At the same time, SLAM's permanent collection was recently enhanced with its first Jackson Pollock, Number 3, 1950, donated by Emily Pulitzer. It was one of the few major Pollocks still in private hands. Previously, Pulitzer has given SLAM major 20th-century works by Matisse, Picasso, Guston, Newman and Kiefer, among others. SLAM's collection is famously strong in works by Max Beckmann, who lived in the city and taught at Washington University in the late '40s, where he was the center of a small group of art lovers, including the enthusiastic collector and St. Louis department store mogul Morton D. May, who donated many of the works to the museum. The 1999 show "Beckmann and Paris," organized by SLAM curator of modern art Cornelia Homburg, examined the combined French and German influence on Beckmann and other German artists in the museum's collection.

Contributing to SLAM's strong modern and contemporary holdings is the practice of encouraging communal funding. A 1996 Bruce Nauman video installation titled World Peace (Received) lists 18 donors. "You don't usually see these long credit lines," says curator Rochelle Steiner. "It's something rather distinct about SLAM. Usually it just says `museum purchase.' But here, so many people in the community, including big collectors, have rallied around the idea of bringing important works by major artists into the collection."