The Allen Memorial Art Museum (AMAM) is an art museum located in Oberlin, Ohio, and it is run by Oberlin College. Founded in 1917, the collection contains over 15,000 works of art.[3]
Overview
The AMAM is primarily a teaching museum and is aimed at the students, faculty and staff of Oberlin College, in addition to the surrounding community. Notable strengths include seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish art, nineteenth and early twentieth-century European and contemporary American art, as well as Asian, European and American works on paper. The collection is housed in an Italian Renaissance-style building designed by Cass Gilbert and named after its founder, Dr. Dudley Peter Allen (B.A., 1875), a graduate and trustee of Oberlin College and the first husband of Elisabeth Severance Prentiss, whose bequest as Mrs. F. F. Prentiss included parts of her art collection started during her first marriage.[1]
The Allen Memorial Art Museum has a collection of more than 15,000 objects – including paintings, sculpture, decorative arts, prints, drawings and photographs – that provide a comprehensive overview of the history of art from a variety of cultures. The collection has a focus on European and American paintings and sculpture from the 15th century to today, and also has holdings of Asian paintings, scrolls, sculpture and decorative art, including a large group of Ukiyo-e prints.
Notable donations were made by Jewish industrialist, Eugene Leopold Garbaty, who fled Germany in the 1930.[5]
In 2024, the museum restituted a watercolor by Egon Schiele entitled Schwarzes Mädchen to the heirs of Fritz Grünbaum, who was murdered in the Holocaust.[6] The artwork was one of several seized by the Manhattan D.A. in a criminal investigation by the trafficking unit.[7][8]
Prentiss Fund
Purchases made through the Mrs. F.F. Prentiss Fund include a Henry Moore sculpture and other works:
Portrait of John, 1st Lord Wodehouse, by Pompeo Batoni
Art rental
At the beginning of every semester, students camp out in front of the north gate of the museum to get first pick of original etchings, lithographs and paintings by artists including Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Andy Warhol, Salvador Dalí, and Pablo Picasso. For five dollars per semester, students can hang these works on their dorm room walls.
The program was started in the 1940s by Ellen H. Johnson, a professor of art at Oberlin, in order to "develop the aesthetic sensibilities of students and encourage ordered thinking and discrimination in other areas of their lives."[9]
References
^ abcArt Museum, Oberlin College and Conservatory, 2008, retrieved 2012-09-24
^Staff Directory, Oberlin College and Conservatory, retrieved 2016-09-05
^Reed, Victoria. "The Eugene Garbaty collection of European art." Collections: A Journal for Museum and Archives Professionals, vol. 10, no. 3, summer 2014, pp. 321
^Christies. "EGON SCHIELE (1890-1918) Schwarzes Mädchen". christies.com. Provenance Franz Friedrich "Fritz" Grünbaum, Vienna (by 1925, from whom spoliated after March 1938). Gutekunst & Klipstein, Bern (1956). Galerie St. Etienne, New York (acquired from the above, September 1956). Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Ohio (acquired from the above, 1958). Restituted to the heirs of Fritz Grünbaum, 2024.
^Angell, Sue (September 26, 2005). "Art Rental Still Going Strong After 60 Years". Oberlin Online: News and Features. (web link: Oberlin.eduArchived 2006-01-03 at the Wayback Machine)