San Diego Museum of Art
by Claudia Ellis
Title
San Diego Museum of Art
Artist
Claudia Ellis
Medium
Photograph - Photograph
Description
The San Diego Museum of Art is a fine arts museum located at 1450 El Prado in Balboa Park in San Diego, California that houses a broad collection with particular strength in Spanish art. The San Diego Museum of Art opened as The Fine Arts Gallery of San Diego on February 28, 1926, and changed its name to the San Diego Museum of Art in 1978. The official Balboa Park website calls the San Diego Museum of Art "the region's oldest and largest art museum�. Nearly half a million people visit the museum each year.
The museum building was designed by architects William Templeton Johnson and Robert W. Snyder in a plateresque style to harmonize with existing structures from the Panama�California Exposition of 1915. The dominant feature of the fa�ade is a heavily ornamented door inspired by a doorway at the University of Salamanca. The Cathedral of Valladolid also influenced the museum's exterior design, and the architects derived interior motifs from the Santa Cruz Hospital of Toledo, Spain. The original construction took two years. Sponsor Appleton S. Bridges donated the building to the City of San Diego upon its completion. In 1966 the museum added a west wing and a sculpture court which doubled its size, and an east wing in 1974 further increased its exhibition space. Plans are underway for a renovation to the rotunda, sculpture garden, fa�ade, auditorium, and other features.
The Museum's collections are encyclopedic in nature, with pieces ranging in date from 5000 BC to 2012 AD. The museum's strength is in Spanish works byMurillo, Zurbar�n, Cot�n, Ribera and El Greco. Much of the museum's old master collection was donated by sisters Anne, Amy, and Irene Putnam. The museum's first major acquisition was the 1939 purchase of Francisco Goya's El Marques de Sofraga, which had belonged to a private family collection until that time and had never before been on public exhibition. The Putnam sisters provided financial backing for the purchase. The following year, director Reginald Poland acquired a portrait by Giovanni Bellini for the museum's collection. Then in 1941 the museum purchased a Diego Vel�zquez portrait of the Infanta Margarita of Spain, which was possibly a study for a larger portrait of her in Vienna. Other major benefactors during the museum's first quarter century were Archer M. Huntington and Mr. and Mrs. Henry Timken, whose small art collection is housed in the nearby Timken Museum of Art, established in 1965. In 2012, the Museum of Art received 48 German Expressionist paintings, drawings and prints from a range of artists, including Otto Dix, Egon Schiele, Alexej von Jawlensky, Gabriele M�nter and Gustav Klimt from the collection of Vance E. Kondon and his wife Elisabeth Giesberger.
The museum houses works by Italian masters Giorgione, Giotto, Veronese, Luini and Canaletto. Works by Rubens, Hals and van Dyck represent the Northern European School. The museum regularly hosts touring exhibits and has lately been working to display its standard collection in new ways, including an upstairs gallery discussing information which can be gathered by looking on the back of the canvas.
In addition, the Museum regularly features major exhibitions from around the world, as well as an extensive year-round schedule of supporting cultural and educational programs for childrenand adults. Exhibition text is always in English and Spanish. The Museum�s research library offers access to an extensive collection of art history publications.
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July 6th, 2014
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