When you walk out of the Contemporary Galleries of the St. Louis Art Museum, you find yourself in a room of European art. The majority of the ground floor of the museum is dedicated to European Art. The galleries are arranged in interesting, and somewhat eclectic ways. There is an element of style and time period, but themes also play an important role in determining what is located with what from gallery to gallery. If you enter from the main foyer, you would encounter two rooms of mostly sculpture from ancient Greece and Rome; however, works from the middle ages are then located on the opposite side of the building a dozen galleries away.
The middle portion of the museum has a large, light filled, atrium dedicated to the works of Max Beckman alone. I have never seen so many Max Beckman paintings in one place before in my life, and depending on which egress you use to enter from or exit to you will find yourself in a gallery with contemporary works or those from 400 years removed. I gave up rather quickly on trying to make sense of it and just decided to be surprised and delight in whatever was waiting in the next space.
As a whole, the collection on exhibit is weaker in predictable "masters" through the ages. If you want to see Rembrandt, visit Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, DC, Detroit or Chicago. Don't expect a Vermeer, don't pine over the lack of a Cranach, a Memling, or a Holbein. Do expect to see contemporary artists of these A-listers that you will NOT see in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, etc. To expect to be surprised by a Gentileschi, Brueghel the Elder, three Vuillards! Hell, three van Goghs, which my travelling companion who worked in the sales office of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC said was more than that museum has. An assertion that I found incredulous. So I checked it out: the National Gallery of Art has 23 of Van Gogh's paintings and drawings in its collection. But the fact that the St. Louis Art Museum has three amazing paintings together in one gallery, must have elevated the presence of Van Gogh here to such a place that it seemed remarkable in her memory. A thing of note compared to something else she knew.
It might seem like I'm dissing SLAM...or slamming SLAM. I am not. I'm just comparing it to what I know in a way that makes sense of it as a museum. It's collection is RICH. It's comparable in depth to the Chrysler Museum of art in Norfolk, VA, or the Walter's Collection in Baltimore, MD. It's deeper and wider than the New Orleans Museum of Art in Louisiana or the DeYoung Museum of Art in San Francisco, CA. Very much in line with the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City.
Having said all of that: Here is a series of gallery views and works of art arranged in the order that I encountered them covering 25 Galleries.
Italian
