The Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) is an art museum in Baltimore, Maryland, United States. Founded in 1914, the BMA's collection of 95,000 objects encompasses more than 1,000 works by Henri Matisse anchored by the Cone Collection of modern art, as well as one of the nation's finest holdings of prints, drawings, and photographs. The galleries currently showcase collections of art from Africa; works by established and emerging contemporary artists; European and American paintings, sculpture, and decorative arts; ancient Antioch mosaics; art from Asia, and textiles from around the world.
The museum is distinguished by a neoclassical building designed in the 1920s by American architect John Russell Pope and two landscaped gardens with 20th-century sculpture. The museum is located between Charles Village, to the east, Remington, to the south, Hampden, to the west; and south of the Roland Park neighborhoods, immediately adjacent to the Homewood campus of Johns Hopkins University, though the museum is an independent institution and not affiliated with the university.
The highlight of the museum is the Cone Collection, brought together by Baltimore sisters Claribel and Etta Cone. Accomplished collectors, the sisters amassed a wealth of works by artists including Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, nearly all of which were donated to the museum. The museum is also home to 18,000 works of French mid-19th-century art from the George A. Lucas collection, which has been acclaimed by the museum as a cultural "treasure" and "among the greatest single holdings of French art in the country."Stanley Mazaroff, A Paris Life, A Baltimore Treasure, Chapter Fourteen, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018.
The BMA is currently led by Dr. Asma Naeem, who was appointed in January 2023. Naeem is the first person of color and the first person raised in Baltimore to lead the museum. Since October 2006, The Baltimore Museum of Art and the Walters Art Museum have offered free general admission year-round. The museum is also the site of "Gertrude's Chesapeake Kitchen", a popular restaurant owned and operated by chef John Shields.
History 20th century In February 1904, the Great Baltimore Fire destroyed much of the central part of the Baltimore's downtown business district. In response, the municipal government established a city-wide congress to develop a master plan for the city's recovery and future growth and development. The congress, headed by Dr. A. R. L. Dohme, decided that a major deficiency of the city was the lack of an art museum. This decision led to the formation of an 18-person Committee on the Art Museum, with art dealer and industrialist Henry H. Wiegand as chairman. Ten years later, on November 16, 1914, the museum was officially incorporated. Along with Minneapolis and Cleveland, Baltimore's museum was "modeled after two prominent 1870s predecessors, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston". According to a booklet published at the time of incorporation, it was stated that Baltimore lagged behind other cities "in regard to matters of aesthetic interest."
Still without a permanent site, the fledgling museum was founded with but a single painting, William Sergeant Kendall's Mischief, which was donated by Dr. Dohme himself. As the museum's founders were confident that more art would eventually be acquired, the nearby Peabody Institute agreed to hold the collection for a time until a permanent home was established. The committee began planning a permanent home for the museum's holdings.
By 1915, the group had decided to permanently house the museum in the Wyman Park area, west of the Peabody Heights neighborhood, later renamed Charles Village. In 1916, a building was purchased on the southwest corner of North Charles and West Biddle Streets as a possible location for the museum. Although an architect was employed to remodel it, it was never occupied. By 1917, the group had received a promise from Johns Hopkins University for the land further south of the new Georgian Revival architecture-Federal styled campus they were in the process of moving to. This prospective plot was near the old Homewood Mansion of 1800 and the later Italianate style Wyman Villa mansion of William Wyman, a Johns Hopkins University donor and trustee. The group subsequently left the downtown site at North Howard Street and West Centre, which they had occupied since 1876.
Prior to moving to its permanent home in 1929, however, the museum was temporarily moved in July 1922 to the former home of their prime benefactor and foundress, Mary Elizabeth Garrett, at 101 West Monument Street, on the southwest corner with Cathedral Street facing West Mount Vernon Place and the Washington Monument. Garrett, a philanthropist who also further endowed the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, was the only daughter of John Work Garrett, the Civil War-era President of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad who supported then President Abraham Lincoln, and was a scion of the Robert Garrett banking firm in the city.
In 1923, the museum's inaugural exhibition opened there with attendance topping 6,775 during its first week. The house was offered by Miss M. Cary as a home for the "collections" and a meeting place for the board of trustees. The old Garrett mansion was acquired in 1925 by the group of art enthusiasts who bought the property for the purpose of keeping the museum intact. Despite having limited space, the museum offered accommodations to art associations and a hall for meetings.
At Wyman Park, architect John Russell Pope was engaged to design the museum's permanent home. With his years of study in Europe, Pope is considered to be the main examplar of the classical revival style that proved so popular with traditional American architects. He is credited with a number of major buildings along the American east coast and abroad, including the National Archives Building in Washington, New York's American Museum of Natural History, and the Tate Gallery Sculpture Hall in London. His distinct brand of classicism, both serene and monolithic, was perhaps the perfect choice for such an ambitious project.
The cornerstone was laid on October 20, 1927, facing the future Art Museum Drive running diagonally from North Charles Street. The systems engineering for the building's original design was completed by Henry Adams, noted local mechanical engineer. The building consists of three floors and includes several rooms that were reconstructed and/or replicated from six local Maryland historic houses before their loss or razing.
The building phase was marked by controversy over its location, cost, and the quality of workmanship, but on April 19, 1929, it opened on schedule without much fanfare. The first visitors were greeted by Rodin's The Thinker in the Sculpture Court, and most of the objects on display were lent by Baltimore and Maryland collectors. An average of 584 visitors attended the museum each day during its first two months.
By the 1930s, the public reception was such that director Roland McKinney, in a letter to board chairman Henry Treide, noted, "People seem to feel that the Museum belongs to them and show that they are sincerely proud of it and its activities." However, these people were mostly upper-crust, privileged, and white, a fact noted in a 1937 Carnegie Corporation report. "[Baltimore] cultural institutions (outside of the library and the schools) have appealed to, been intended for, and been supported by a pretty small minority... they need to be opened up, for the viewpoint of the entire community and its needs", it concluded. Local artists were feeling slighted, as well. "We, the living, resent being left to work in a vacuum of indifference and neglect while so much of the dead past is exhausted [by the BMA]," the president of the Artists' Union of Baltimore complained to The Evening Sun in 1937. The writer of the letter was Morris Louis, whose work, decades later, would be in the BMA's contemporary collection. Treide responded with an extensive community outreach survey and, in 1939, presented the city's first exhibition of African-American art. The show drew over 12,000 visitors in two weeks.
Many of the objects lent to the museum when it opened were eventually donated to it. Among the donors who have shaped the museum's collection are Blanche Adler, Dr. Claribel Cone and Etta Cone, Jacob Epstein, Edward J. Gallagher, Jr., John W. and Robert Garrett, Mary Frick Jacobs, Ryda H. and Robert H. Levi, Saidie Adler May, Dorothy McIlvain Scott, Elsie C. Woodward, and Alan and Janet Wurtzburger. The growing collection is reflected in the three major expansions: the Saidie A. May Wing in 1950, the Woodward Wing in 1956, and the Cone Wing in 1957. These additions were all designed by local architects Wrenn, Lewis and Jencks to harmonize with the original Pope Building.
The museum's collection includes more than 95,000 objects, making it the largest art museum in Maryland. It is governed by a private board of trustees and receives funding from the City of Baltimore, Baltimore, Carroll, and Howard counties; the state of Maryland, various corporations and foundations, federal agencies; individual trustees, and private citizens.
21st century The BMA welcomes more than 200,000 visitors annually. In addition to its art collection, it organizes and hosts traveling exhibitions and serves as a major arts center for the region through its programs.
Between 2012 and 2015, the BMA completed a $28 million renovation that improved galleries for contemporary, American, African, and Asian art collections; improved essential infrastructure, and created more visitor amenities.
The first phase of the BMA's renovation was completed in November 2012 with the reopening of the Contemporary Wing. In November 2014, after being closed for almost 30 years, the neoclassical Merrick Historic Entrance was reopened to the public to coincide with the museum's 100-year anniversary. The next phase encompassed the Dorothy McIlvain Scott American Wing, comprising the first and second floors of the BMA's original 1929 building designed by the acclaimed American architect John Russell Pope; the 1982 East Wing Lobby and Zamoiski East Entrance designed by Bower, Lewis & Thrower; and critically important upgrades to the museum's infrastructure. The architect for this phase of the renovation was the Baltimore-based architecture firm Ziger/Snead, with construction completed by The Whiting-Turner Contracting Company of Towson, Maryland. The project manager was Synthesis, Inc., of Columbia, Maryland. The BMA also greatly expanded galleries for its African and Asian art collections, which opened in April 2015. The culmination of the renovation was the opening of the new $4.5 million, Patricia and Mark Joseph Education Center in October 2015.
The renovation was funded by the museum's philanthropic campaign, In a New Light: The Campaign for The Baltimore Museum of Art, which raised $80.7 million and added more than 4,000 artworks to the collection during the decade leading up to the BMA's 100th anniversary.