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Permanent Collection
Visitors to the FWMoA permanent galleries will have the chance to progress through American art history from the late eighteenth century through today as they traverse three galleries of Permanent Collection works. The evolution of American fine and decorative arts will unfold through objects, stories and vignettes of moments in history.
About the Permanent Collection
The Fort Wayne Museum of Art’s permanent collection consists of nearly 1,400 American paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints and photographs. The museum’s collection includes primarily American created after 1850. Significant works include paintings by Janet Fish, William Forsyth, George Inness, Thomas Moran and Larry Rivers; sculpture by Mark di Suvero and George Rickey; and a collection of 56 Indiana Amish quilts.
The Fort Wayne Museum of Art’s first benefactor was Wayne Knitting Mills’ owner Theodore F. Thieme. In 1921 Thieme donated ten paintings to the Fort Wayne Art School, marking the museum’s auspicious birth. Gifts and bequests of art from private individuals have largely shaped the permanent collection over the years.
When the museum moved to the current facility, built in 1984, approximately one half of the current holdings had been acquired. Through the 1980s up to the present the museum pursued creative means of purchasing works of art. The museum has benefited from purchase awards from area and national foundations and purchase grants from Arts United in Fort Wayne and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1996 the Hamilton Circle was established, consisting of members who donated money to fund purchases, including works by Jennifer Bartlett, John Hrehov and Hung Liu.
Selections from the Permanent Collection
Thomas YoungThe fashion of painting miniature portraits developed as a genre of traditional portrait painting. By creating a miniature likeness of a loved one, the artist enabled the recipient to carry or wear the image wherever he or she might like. Miniature portrait painting flourished during the American Revolution and continued into the middle of the nineteenth century. The Museum has been fortunate to acquire an excellent example of this genre, A Portrait of A Gentleman, by artist Thomas Young. Thomas Young (1765-1821) spent his professional career in Providence, where his prominent sitters included the Senator and Governor of Rhode Island. Young’s miniature of Mary Thayer Holden is in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Signed miniatures by this artist are exceedingly rare. Set in the original rolled gold pendant frame with beaded bezel, this miniature is signed on the backing paper: Thos. Young/1799. It is interesting to note that the miniature has a square of silver foil behind the face, a European technique virtually unknown in America in the 18th century. |
Thomas Young |
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Louis LozowickBest known for his lithographs of skyscrapers, constructions, and machinery, Louis Lozowick emigrated to the States in 1907 after graduating from the Kiev Art School in the Ukraine. Here, he continued his studies at the National Academy of Design in New York and became absolutely awed by the rise of that American metropolis. To his thinking, “...the dominant trend in America of today, beneath all the apparent chaos and confusion, is toward order and organization which find their outward sign in the rigid geometry of the American city:... in the squares of its streets, the cubes of its factories, the arc of its bridges, the cylinders of its gas tanks...” Lozowick was devoted to a career-long study of industrial and urban America — its construction, its evolving skyline, and the lives of the people living in its midst. As a muralist for the Public Works Art Project, he also toured the country extensively, avidly sketching scenes of American life which, later, found their way into his lithographs. Although he was also a painter, his true love was lithography and he continuously worked and re-worked his heavy litho stones to achieve the powerful, velvety dark areas that he used to contrast his open planes of pure white. We are most appreciative of the Hamilton Circle’s support that enabled us to add his fabulous Above The City to the Museum’s growing collection.
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Louis Lozowick
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DeWitt LockmanThe history of American Art is rich with the stories of artists of prodigious talent and recognized achievement whose reputations somehow did not manage to extend much beyond their particular lifetime. One of these gifted, yet currently under-appreciated, American artists is DeWitt McClellan Lockman, an extremely talented painter born in Brooklyn in 1870. The Museum has recently been given a major Lockman picture by one of the Midwest’s most aesthetically astute designers, Mr. Russ S. Sunday. The picture, entitled Pandora’s Box, is a striking portrait of Ione Kimmell Grey (a cousin of Mr. Sunday) who was a very fashionable model at the turn of the 20th Century. Lockman was at the height of his popularity when he executed this fine painting. Long considered a child prodigy, Lockman shocked everyone in the art world when, at age 10, the National Gallery selected one of his drawings for their annual exhibition. By the age of 19, he was exhibiting regularly in Paris and throughout Europe. Lockman’s work was so highly sought out that even at the height of the Depression, his portraits regularly sold for $3,000. DeWitt Lockman’s works are held by numerous institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Academy of Design.
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Bust of Christopher ColumbusAmerican sculptors in the nineteenth century looked to Rome for instruction, inspiration, and raw material, primarily the finest marble in the world. In Rome, surrounded by countless classical figures from Antiquity and the Renaissance, young Americans diligently studied proportions and learned how to apply the chisel to stone. Two of the most talented Americans in this company were Horatio Greenough and his younger brother, Richard. Horatio’s arrival abroad preceded his brother’s by over a decade and he had the good fortune to have befriended Bertel Thorvaldsen, Antonio Canova’s most talented student. Canova was the unrivaled dean of Neoclassic sculpture but, as he aged, he looked to Thorvaldsen to carry his mantle. Thorvaldsen and Greenough looked beyond neoclassicism, though, to a more naturalistic approach to their subjects. Rather than putting their sitter’s countenance on an idealized Greek body, they portrayed their sitter realistically, as the individual was in nature. This new approach found tremendous popular support and secured their reputations quickly. When young Richard arrived in Rome in 1837, he found himself warmly welcomed as an artist who would soon be as famous as his older brother. Richard’s training progressed very well and, after two years in Italy, he returned to Boston to open a studio and begin his career. He secured numerous small commissions, but it was his formidable bust of historian William H. Prescott that established him as an important sculptor. Today, Richard Greenough’s sculptures grace the galleries of numerous museums, including the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, and our Fort Wayne Museum of Art. Our bust of Christopher Columbus is one of Greenough's most inspiring and accomplished works.
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Richard Greenough |
Philadelphia Silversmith Samuel WilliamsonToward the end of the eighteenth century and into the first decade of the nineteenth, American silversmiths developed a new aesthetic that increasingly referenced Greek and Roman style. The extreme simplicity of form and precise proportion of this classically inspired style appealed to the new republic, whose national motto, decimal currency, form of federal government, as well as public architecture, were all based on Roman forms. In silver, as in furniture, the new style was chiefly characterized by clean lines, restrained ornament, and refined proportions. Philadelphia silversmith Samuel Williamson was just finishing his apprenticeship with master silversmith Joseph Lownes as this new aesthetic emerged and he delighted in the opportunity to be among the first to work in the popular new style. Williamson proudly opened his own shop in the heart of the city in 1794 and his reputation for fine work grew rapidly. One of his largest commissions came from Merriweather Lewis who was in Philadelphia preparing for his great expedition. In 1803, just two years before he created our handsome teapot, Williamson produced five hundred brooches and seventy-two rings for the Lewis & Clark expedition.
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Samuel Williamson |
Robert Scott DuncansonRobert Scott Duncanson was the very first African American artist able to earn his living through his painting. Born in 1822 in upstate New York, Duncanson apprenticed as a house painter and carpenter while teaching himself to paint by copying reproductions of Hudson River School landscapes. Both diligent and gifted, Duncanson progressed rapidly, advertising himself in the local paper as a “painter and glazier” while he was still in his teens. |
Robert Duncanson |
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Nazi Era Provenance Research
The Fort Wayne Museum of Art is pleased to assist in the world-wide effort to identify unlawfully appropriated objects during the World War II era. From 1933 through the end of World War II in 1945, the Nazi regime executed a massive, systematic plan of theft, coerced sale, confiscation, looting, and destruction of art and other cultural property from private citizens and museums throughout occupied Europe. Some of the finest works were destined for state museums. Others were kept in the private collections of officials or used as monetary assets.
After the end of World War II, Allied forces were able to return tens of thousands of confiscated works to their owners, heirs, or countries from which they were taken. Still, many works came onto the international market and were unknowingly acquired by museums and private individuals.
Following the guidelines set forth by the American Association of Museums, the Fort Wayne Museum of Art has identified the following objects in its permanent collection that were created before 1946, acquired by the museum after 1932, and could have possibly underwent a change in ownership during 1933-45 in continental Europe.
Similar to other museums, many of the museum’s object records have little detail and gaps in ownership. The Fort Wayne Museum of Art is committed to conducting provenance research to trace the ownership history of each of these works from the time it was created to its acquisition by the Fort Wayne Museum of Art. Being listed here does not suggest that the works were definitely among those looted during World War II.
To help make this information available to the public, the Fort Wayne Museum of Art has also listed its works with the American Association of Museum’s Nazi Era Provenance Internet Portal (www.nepip.org), a searchable registry of objects in U.S. museum collections.
Historical Background
From 1933 through the end of World War II in 1945, the Nazi regime orchestrated a program of theft, confiscation, coercive transfer, looting, pillage, and destruction of objects of art and other cultural property in Europe on a massive and unprecedented scale. Some confiscated objects were sold to fund Nazi activities, while others were retained for the private collections of high-ranking party officials.
Following the war, tens of thousands of confiscated objects were recovered by the Allies and returned to their countries of origin. Nevertheless, some recovered objects never made it back to their original owners, and other objects were not recovered at all.
Over the past decade, US museums have recognized that objects appropriated during the Nazi era without subsequent restitution—that is, with neither return of the object nor payment of compensation to the object’s original owner or legal successor—may have made their way into US museum collections in the decades since the war.
As part of the Guidelines and Recommended Procedures adopted by the museum field, the American Association of Museums accepted responsibility to develop an Internet-accessible search tool covering objects in US museum collections that had changed hands in Continental Europe during the Nazi era. The result is the Nazi-Era Provenance Internet Portal.
About the Nazi-Era Provenance Internet Portal
Designed and managed by AAM on behalf of the U.S. museum community, the Nazi-Era Provenance Internet Portal (www.nepip.org) provides a searchable registry of objects in US museum collections that were created before 1946 and changed hands in Continental Europe during the Nazi era (1933-1945). People seeking objects can use the Portal to refine their search. For each registered object, the Portal provides basic descriptive information along with links to additional information provided by the participating museum.