The Saint Louis Art Museum (SLAM) is an art museum located in St. Louis, Missouri, United States. With paintings, sculptures, cultural objects, and ancient masterpieces from around the world, its three-story building stands in Forest Park in St. Louis, Missouri, where it is visited by up to a half million people every year. Admission is free through a subsidy from the cultural tax district for St. Louis City and County.Saint Louis Art Museum Visitor Guide (2007)
In addition to the featured exhibitions, the museum offers rotating exhibitions and installations. These include the Currents series, which features contemporary artists, as well as regular exhibitions of new media art and works on paper.Library and Archives - Saint Louis Art Museum Web Site
History
The museum's origins date to 1879, when the Saint Louis School and Museum of Fine Arts was founded as part of Washington University.Saint Louis Art Museum Handbook of the Collection (2004), p. 8 The nascent museum was housed in a building commissioned of Boston architects Peabody and Stearns by businessman and politician Wayman Crow, 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.Stevens, Walter B. Page 30 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;Saint Louis Art Museum Page 9-10 an organizing board was assigned to take control in 1912.Saint Louis Art Museum Handbook of the Collection (2004), p. 10 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 expanded to include an auditorium for films, concerts, and lectures. Director Charles Guggenheim's An American Museum (1959) debuted in the new auditorium space as a 50th anniversary event.At that time, the museum considered its year of establishment to be 1909. See: An American museum : a memento of the film. Friends of the City Art Museum, 1962.
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.Saint Louis Art Museum, An Architectural History, (1987), Page 26 In 1972, the museum was again renamed, to the Saint Louis Art Museum.
Today, the museum is supported financially by the tax, donations from individuals and public associations, sales in the Museum Shop, and foundation support.Saint Louis Art Museum Handbook of the Collection (2004), pp. 4–16
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.David Itzkoff (November 6, 2008), In Tough Times, St. Louis Museum Delays Expansion New York Times.
Construction began in 2009; the museum remained open.Javier Pes (June 20, 2013), A ‘quiet and reserved’ new wing for Saint Louis Art Museum The Art Newspaper. The expansion added more than of gallery space, including an underground garage, within the lease lines of the property. Funding for the project was raised via 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 The collection of the Saint Louis Art Museum contains more than 34,000 objects dating from antiquity to the present. The collection is divided into nine areas:
American Ancient and Egyptian Africa, Oceania, Americas Asian Decorative Arts and Design European to 1800 Islamic Modern and Contemporary Prints, Drawings, and Photographs
The modern art collection includes works by the European masters Matisse, Gauguin, Monet, Picasso, Corrado Giaquinto, Giambattista Pittoni and Van Gogh. The museum's particularly strong collection of 20th-century German paintings includes the world's largest Max Beckmann collection, which includes Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery. In recent years, the museum has been actively acquiring post-war German art to complement its Beckmanns, such as works by Joseph Beuys, Gerhard Richter, Martin Kippenberger, Sigmar Polke, and Anselm Kiefer. The collection also includes Chuck Close's Keith (1970).Saint Louis Art Museum, Handbook of the Collection (2004), p. 299
The collections of Oceanic and Mesoamerican works, as well as handwoven Turkish rugs, are among the finest in the world. The museum holds the Egyptian mummy Amen-Nestawy-Nakht, and two mummies on loan from Washington University, Padi-menekh and Henut-wedjebu.Washington University in St. Louis, Student Life, 2006 Its collection of American artists includes the largest U.S.-museum collection of paintings by George Caleb Bingham.
The collection contains at least six pieces that Nazis confiscated from their own museums as degenerate.Hunn, David. "How a French masterpiece stolen by Nazis came to St. Louis" St. Louis Post-Dispatch, February 22, 2014 These include Max Beckmann's "Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery" which came to the museum through a New York art dealer, Curt Valentin, who specialized in Nazi confiscations, and Matisse's "Bathers with a Turtle" which Joseph Pulitzer purchased at the Galerie Fischer auction held in the Grand Hôtel National, Lucerne, Switzerland, June 30, 1939.Stein, Laurie."The History and Reception of Matisse's Bathers with Turtle in Germany, 1908-1939" St. Louis: The Saint Louis Art Museum, 1998
In the context of the museum's 2013 expansion, British artist Andy Goldsworthy created Stone Sea, a site-specific work for a narrow space between the old and new buildings. Twenty-five tightly packed, ten-foot-high arches made of native limestone rise in a sunken courtyard. The artist was inspired by the fact that the sedimentary rock was formed when the region was a shallow sea in Prehistoric times.
In 2021, the museum received a promised gift of 22 paintings and sculptures from the collection of the American curator and philanthropist Emily Rauh Pulitzer, the widow of the media heir Joseph Pulitzer Jr. The donation includes works by 17 European and American artists, including Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Constantin Brâncuși, Joan Miró, Philip Guston, Ellsworth Kelly and others.Gabriella Angeleti (October 18, 2021), Saint Louis Art Museum receives 22 major works from American philanthropist The Art Newspaper.
Selected Paintings
Exhibitions
2026
(November 6, 2026 – August 15, 2027) Unsettling the City : Julie Mehretu’s “Epigraph, Damascus” (October 17, 2026 – January 10, 2027) Women Impressionists and the Land (October 2, 2026 – March 28, 2027) Quilts and Coverlets : American Needlework in White (June 12, 2026 – January 24, 2027) Picturing Independence (April 10, 2026 –October 18, 2026) Visions of Antiquity (March 20 – June 28, 2026) Martine Syms: Soliloquy (March 14, 2026 –August 16, 2026) Ancient Splendor : Roman Art in the Time of Trajan (February 6, 2026 – August 9, 2026) Currents 125: Blas Isasi (January 30, 2026 – September 13, 2026) Aymara Weavings: The Indigenous Andes
2025
(November 7, 2025 – March 15, 2026) Always Modern : German Art and Design from the Collection (October 18, 2025 – January 25, 2026) Anselm Kiefer :Becoming the Sea (June 13, 2025 – January 4, 2026) Patterns of Luxury: Islamic Textiles, 11th–17th Centuries (May 2, 2025 –October 19, 2025) In Search of America: Photography and the Road Trip (April 12, 2025 – July 27, 2025) Roaring: Art, Fashion, and the Automobile in France, 1918–1939 (March 21, 2025 –September 14, 2025) Grounded in Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery (February 28, 2025 –November 30, 2025) Manuel Mathieu: Pendulum
2024
(November 8, 2024 – May 25, 2025) Bolts of Color: Printed Textiles after WWII (October 25, 2024 – March 9, 2025) Currents 124: Crystal Z Campbell (October 19, 2024 – February 16, 2025) Narrative Wisdom and African Arts (August 2, 2024 – April 13, 2025) The Work of Art: The Federal Art Project, 1935–1943 (June 22, 2024 – September 1, 2024) Art and Imagination in Spanish America, 1500–1800: Highlights from LACMA’s Collection (May 3, 2024 – August 3, 2025) Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (May 3, 2024 – September 15, 2024) Romare Bearden: Resonances (April 5, 2024 – September 22, 2024) Currents 123: Tamara Johnson (March 29, 2024 – October 20, 2024) Shimmering Silks: Traditional Japanese Textiles, 18th–19th Centuries (March 15, 2024 – October 27, 2024) Concealed Layers: Uncovering Expressionist Paintings (February 23, 2024 – July 14, 2024) Native American Art of the 20th Century: The William P. Healey Collection (February 17, 2024 – May 12, 2024) Matisse and the Sea (January 12, 2024 – March 31, 2024) Wangechi Mutu: My Cave Call
2023
(October 20, 2023 – April 7, 2024) Ellsworth Kelly (September 29, 2023 – March 10, 2024) Aso Oke: Prestige Cloth from Nigeria (August 19, 2023 – January 1, 2024) The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century (June 24, 2023 – September 3, 2023) Action/Abstraction Redefined: Modern Native Art, 1940s–1970s (May 5, 2023 – May 4, 2025) Native Artist Collaboration: Faye HeavyShield (April 28, 2023 – December 17, 2023) Plants and Flowers in East Asian Art (April 15, 2023 –July 15, 2023) New Red Order’s : Give it Back: Stage Theory (April 14, 2023 –July 9, 2023) New to the Museum: Prints, Drawings, and Photographs (March 25, 2023 –June 25, 2023) Monet/Mitchell : Painting the French Landscape