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| Established | 1844; 182 years ago (1844) |
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| Location | 600Main Street,Hartford, Connecticut, U.S. |
| Type | Art museum |
| Director | Matthew Hargraves |
| CEO | Jeffrey N. Brown |
| Public transit access |   61, 63, 69 |
| Website | thewadsworth |
Wadsworth Atheneum | |
Wadsworth Atheneum | |
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| Location | 25 Atheneum SquareHartford, Connecticut, U.S. |
| Coordinates | 41°45′48″N72°40′26″W / 41.76333°N 72.67389°W /41.76333; -72.67389 |
| Built | 1842 – July 31, 1844 |
| Architect | Alexander Jackson Davis andIthiel Town |
| Architectural style | Gothic Revival[2][3] |
| NRHP reference No. | 70000709[1] |
| Added to NRHP | October 6, 1970 |
TheWadsworth Atheneum is anart museum inHartford, Connecticut. The Wadsworth is noted for its collections of EuropeanBaroque art, ancient Egyptian and Classical bronzes, French and AmericanImpressionist paintings,Hudson River School landscapes,modernist masterpieces and contemporary works, as well as collections of early American furniture and decorative arts.
Founded in 1842 and opened in 1844, it is the oldest continually operating publicart museum in the United States.[4]
The museum is located at 600 Main Street in a distinctive castle-like building in downtownHartford, Connecticut, the state's capital. With 75,000 square feet (7,000 m2) of exhibition space,[5] the museum is the largest art museum in the state of Connecticut. It was listed on theNational Register of Historic Places in 1970.[1]
The museum is a member of theNorth American Reciprocal Museums program.
The Wadsworth, as it is most commonly known, was constructed on the site of the family home ofDaniel Wadsworth[6] in the heart of downtown Hartford. Its architects wereAlexander Jackson Davis andIthiel Town, who designed the "castle" that is the Atheneum's oldest building. Construction began in 1842 after the museum was incorporated on June 1 of that year. The museum opened on July 31, 1844, and has operated continuously since then.
The Wadsworth family, being one of the oldest and most affluent in the city, contributed numerous valuable pieces of art to be displayed at the time the museum opened. The first collection consisted of 78 paintings, twomarblebusts, oneportrait miniature, and onebronze sculpture. In addition to the fine arts collection, the original building housed the forerunners of theHartford Public Library andConnecticut Historical Society, giving rise to the name "Atheneum," an institution broadly devoted to culture and learning. In light of that public role, the Wadsworth has, since its founding, played host to a wide variety of cultural and community activities, including dramatic and dance performances, exhibits of historical artifacts, social functions, and benefits.
Building on the Wadsworth family's largess, generations of more recent donors have added to the museum's collections and resources. Foremost among them areElizabeth Jarvis Colt, widow of firearms magnateSamuel Colt, and financier and Hartford nativeJohn Pierpont Morgan. They each contributed more than 1,000 objects to the museum's collections, the former a significant group of Hudson River School landscapes and the Colt firearms collection, the latter an assemblage of priceless Renaissance decorative arts and Colonial-era American furniture. Samuel P. Avery donated works ranging from a Babylonian clay tablet to Chinese Qing Dynasty porcelain and mid-19th century French sculpture, as well as funds for new construction, producing the country's first museum interior designed in the International Style.
In 1927, the museum received a million-dollar bequest (about $20 million today in inflation-adjusted terms) from banker Frank Sumner, establishing a sizable acquisitions endowment. In the hands of forward-thinking museum directors, particularlyA. Everett 'Chick' Austin and Charles Cunningham, the fund has enabled the purchase of major works by masters includingCaravaggio,Dalí,Gauguin,Miró,Strozzi,Tintoretto,Van Dyck, andZurbarán.
In the 1940s and 1950s, bequests by Clara Hinton Gould and Anne Parrish Titzell enriched the museum's holdings of Hudson River School and Impressionist paintings, with celebrated pieces by Church, Cole, Gifford,Monet, andRenoir entering the collection. In the same period, artwork and funds bequeathed to the museum by Henry Schnakenberg led to the acquisition of a group of Cypriot, Egyptian, and Greek antiquities as well as paintings by modernists includingPeter Blume,Stuart Davis, andReginald Marsh. It was also in the 1940s that the museum became the haunt ofMarguerite Yourcenar as she wrote theMemoirs of Hadrian.
In 1973,Mierle Ukeles cleaned the steps of the museum's entrance, as part of the all-female art exhibitionc.7500, curated byLucy Lippard.[7]
The post-war and contemporary division has benefited from the generosity of Tony Smith and Susan Morse Hilles, whose gifts include groundbreaking works byJosef Albers,Jackson Pollock,Barnett Newman,Robert Rauschenberg, andMark Rothko. With funds given by the Archibald, Goodwin, Keney, and Smith families, and by Alexander Goldfarb and Charles Schwartz, the museum has acquired valuable pieces byAlexander Calder,Artemisia Gentileschi,Cindy Sherman,Bill Viola, andKara Walker. A 2004 gift of 125 photographs from Janice and Mickey Cartin Collection includes works byOn Kawara,Ed Ruscha,Hans-Peter Feldmann,Arnold Odermatt,Lucinda Devlin,Joe Ovelman,Jonathan Monk, Frank Breuer,Malick Sidibé, and more.[8]
In 2001, the museum announced a large-scale $100 million expansion designed by the Amsterdam-based architectsUNStudio;[9] the architects were chosen from a short list of innovative design teams, includingZaha Hadid,Thom Mayne, andBrad Cloepfil.[10] The design required demolishing the Goodwin Building, put up in 1969, and enclosing the Avery Courtyard.[11] However, the proposal was scrapped in 2003 due to fundraising difficulties and changes in the museum's leadership.[9] A later plan to expand into the former Hartford Times building was also abandoned due to cost concerns. In March 2010, the museum announced the start of a comprehensive renovation project across all five of the museum's buildings, which at completion resulted in the addition of 16,000 square feet (1,500 m2) of refurbished gallery space and the complete reinstallation of the museum's permanent collections of European art, European decorative arts, and contemporary art. The $33 million renovation, designed by the Hartford-based architecture firm Smith Edwards McCoy, was completed in 2015, garnering praise from local and national art critics.[9][12][13]
The structure itself consists of the original, castle-like building, plus four wings that have been added during the intervening years, in styles ranging fromTudor Revival andRenaissance Revival to International. The museum is home to approximately 50,000 objects, includingancient Roman,Greek, andEgyptian bronzes; paintings from theRenaissance,Baroque, and French and AmericanImpressionist eras, among others; 18th-century German and Frenchporcelains (includingMeissen andSèvres);Hudson River School landscapes; early American clothing and decorations; early African-American art and historical artifacts; and more. The collections span more than 5,000 years of world history.
Just outside the "castle" is an 1899 statue ofNathan Hale, byEnoch S. Woods. A short distance away, within theConnecticut State Capitol is another, better-known sculpture of Hale byBela Pratt, a copy of his original atYale University.
The Atheneum also owns theA. Everett Austin House, aNational Historic Landmark and home of one of the museum's most distinguished directors. The house, located in Hartford's historic West End, is open to the public as a museum.
Since its beginning, the Wadsworth has had a long tradition of "firsts".
In 1933, the Wadsworth sponsoredGeorge Balanchine's immigration to the United States from theSoviet Union. Shortly after his immigration, Balanchine founded theSchool of American Ballet, which led to the formation of theNew York City Ballet. He then chose to have the Producing Company of the School of American Ballet's first performances at the Avery Memorial Theatre of Wadsworth in December 1934, including his first ballet choreographed in America,Serenade.[14]
The museum was the first in America to acquire pieces bySalvador Dalí,Balthus,Frederic Church,Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio,Piet Mondrian, and many other famous artists. Under the directorship ofArthur Everett Austin, Jr., the first American exhibition ofsurrealism was shown at the Wadsworth in 1931, and the first major U.S.Pablo Picasso retrospective was held in 1934.[15] Also in 1934, the world premiere of the operaFour Saints in Three Acts byGertrude Stein andVirgil Thomson was held at the Atheneum.[16]
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The renovation has reclaimed space previously used for storage and other purposes to add 17 new galleries—nearly 16,000 square feet of new exhibition space (a 27% increase)—to the building's existing footprint. [16000 is 27% of 59240, making the total 75000 sqft]
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