International studio (54.1914/1915)

A Western Renaissance

rural districts. Minneapolis purchased two paint-
ings, one for the Newsboys’ Club and another for
the new Minneapolis Museum. Owatonna and
the State Art Society each purchased one, and a
number were sold to private individuals this year.
Two travelling exhibits of industrial art and
school work from Minneapolis were sent to twenty-
nine cities in the State. The industrial art visited
fifteen cities, and the State Library Commission
co-operated with the State Art Society, circulating
two travelling libraries directly related to the ex-
hibits. Parts of exhibitions went to Anoka, Still-
water, Duluth, and a display was a week at the
University. The director visited eighteen cities
and towns in three weeks, lecturing on the “Art of
Common Things.” Circulating collections of col-
oured prints and its own paintings are kept on the
go continually by the Minnesota State Art Society.
It sent one to the State Federation of Women’s
Clubs. During a summer it maintained a class in
handicrafts at Mound, Minneapolis, and discover-
ing the lace makers at New Ulm and Sleepy Eye
eager for help, a lace school was organized forthem.
Meanwhile twenty-five public schools were decor-
ated and hung with pictures.
Minnesota, it will be seen, is undertaking a
State-wide movement, although the Minneapolis
Institute of Fine Arts is rising to take its place as a
great art museum of the nation. Receiving the
old Morrison homestead in the heart of Minneapo-
lis as a gift, the Minneapolis Institute of Fine Arts
was made still further possible by the gift of
$100,000 by William H. Dunwoody, whose munifi-
cence stirred his fellow citizens to a degree that
nearly $750,000 was subscribed in a single evening.
A superb art palace was planned and will be ready
for occupancy this year, and a rich collection is
assured, owing to the bequest of Mr. Dunwoody,
who recently died, giving $1,000,000 for paint-
ings and sculpture, and as a general endowment.
Associated with it is the Minneapolis Art School of
some years’ standing, of which Robert Koehler is
director and acting director of the museum.
The Milwaukee Art Society, but a few years old,
is the latest illustration of the wave of art educa-
tion in the Mississippi Valley and Great Lakes
region. Under the direction of a young and
enthusiastic painter and lecturer, Dudley Crafts
Watson, recently of the Art Institute of Chicago,
the city of Milwaukee has had its attention con-
centrated on the programme of the Art Society. Mr.
Watson, of indefatigable energy, and the gift of
leadership, within less than a year has directed
important current exhibitions from the East to

Milwaukee. He has appointed gallery lecturers in
German, Italian, Polish, Bohemian and English to
escort Sunday parties. His lecture room of four
hundred chairs is crowded Friday afternoons with
schoolchildren at the sketch class, and the evening
receptions and art lectures overflow. The Art
Society is housed in a small but artistic structure
costing $35,000, the money for which was raised
by popular subscription in six months, and there
are 1,300 live members on the rolls. Samuel 0.
Buckner, president of the Milwaukee Art Society,
is not only a collector of rare paintings, but a man
of practical foresight and executive wisdom to
lead the growing organization into the larger plans
it has outlined for itself. The Layton Art Gallery
has a collection of valuable paintings, chiefly of
European masters, which has long been the pride
of Milwaukee.
In this passing review of the Western renais-
sance an effort has been made to give prominence
to the newer ideas. The West is rich in princely
collections. Chicago could boast of the Rem-
brandts, Hobbemas, Constables, Turners, the
Early Italian, the eighteenth-century English, the
Barbizon and modern painters in the private col-
lections of Charles L. Hutchinson, Frank G.
Logan, Cyrus H. McCormick, Edward B. Butler,
Mrs. W. W. Kimball, Martin A. Ryerson and a
dozen other men and women of wealth, the major-
ity of whom are interested in the welfare of the Art
Institute. The City Art Museum of St. Louis has
its William K. Bixby; Milwaukee, Samuel 0. Buck-
ner; and Minnesota and Michigan have world-
famed canvases in their public and private col-
lections.
The renaissance of Italy was the flowering of
the romance of religion. The passion for art has
been tossed between devotion to nature and hero
worship in the past, and leaving behind us the
gallery of battles of the hundred years ago, the
worship of human beauty in the golden age of por-
traiture, all held in the net of wealth and power
until the era of Millet brought art closer to the soil
and, coming nearer our own time, in the inheri-
tance of Inness and landscape painting, the argu-
ment must be that the new renaissance will lead
to another great passion of the human soul. It
may be individual liberty and expression. But,
whatever it will be, the evidence is plain that the
Western renaissance, compelling an education in
art, opening the eyes to beauty, employing the
hands, encouraging the devotion of the masses of
the common people and children, most of all, is
something that has never been before.

XLV