|
 |
Frieze depicting "Physical Fitness" from the front facade of Municipal Auditorium, downtown Kansas City, Missouri.
William Rockhill Nelson
Kansas City, Missouri
The Kansas City Star was founded Sept. 18, 1880, by William
Rockhill Nelson, an Indianan who had run a construction business, gambled and lost in commodities and, before heading west, owned the Fort Wayne Sentinel. At Nelson's side was Samuel Morss, a veteran newspaperman who had helped Nelson establish the Sentinel as a vigorous proponent of civic reform.
The Star faced competition from two morning papers, The Times and The Journal, and an afternoon daily, The Mail, each priced a nickel a copy. The fledgling evening Star set its price at 2 cents a copy and set its editorial policy to cover local events intensely. In the late 19th century, Kansas City had few paved streets and few sidewalks. Mud and horse manure were everywhere. Nelson, a public-works contractor for part of his career in Indiana, used The Star to campaign for paved roads and streets, first in the Bottoms and Downtown and later elsewhere. Also, he crusaded for improved sidewalks and sewers, decent public buildings, better streetlights, and more fire and police protection. His most enduring legacy was the city's park system, which he began promoting in 1881 along with August Meyer, a wealthy real estate man.
The origin of The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri, can be traced to Nelson’s dissatisfaction with Kansas City. Nelson thought the city was “incredibly commonplace and ugly. I decided that if I were to live here, the town must be made over.” When he died in 1915, his will provided that when his wife and daughter died, all the proceeds of his estate were to be used for “the purchase of works of art and reproductions of works of the fine arts, such as paintings, engravings, sculpture, tapestries and rare books…which will contribute to the delectation and enjoyment of the public generally.”
The first problem was the lack of a museum building. Nelson had erroneously assumed the city would provide it. Fortunately Mary 
Atkins, a reclusive former school teacher who developed an appreciation for fine art late in life, willed $300,000 to Kansas City for the establishment of an art museum. The trustees of her estate combined its assets with funds bequeathed by Nelson’s widow and daughter, his son-in-law, Irwin Kirkwood, and an attorney and family friend, Frank F. Rozzelle. Kirkwood also deeded the site of Oak Hall, Nelson’s home, to the city for an art museum, and ground was broken in 1930.
Unlike most great museums, the Nelson-Atkins was not built on existing collections of art. Laurence Sickman, the late director emeritus, said in 1983, “When the Nelson-Atkins started to build in 1930, it didn’t even own an etching. Practically all museums start with a nucleus of a collection, but there was none in Kansas City. So the trustees had to start buying.”
That apparent disadvantage proved to be an enviable stroke of good fortune. At the depths of the Depression, the new museum was in a buyer’s market, armed with plenty of money. The Museum’s buyers were able to procure excellent pieces at relatively low prices. The Museum also was fortunate to find Sickman, who at the time was a Harvard-Yenching fellow in China. He was hired to purchase Asian art for the Nelson-Atkins, and he was able to find art treasures at their source, thereby acquiring art at much lower prices and expediting shipping. Much more important, however, was Sickman’s gift of connoisseurship. As John Russell, art critic for The New York Times said in 1983, “It is difficult not to regard (the Chinese galleries) as one of the finest single curatorial achievements in museum history.”
Today, the Asian collection is recognized as one of the country’s finest. It includes art from China, Japan, India, Iran, Indonesia, Korea, and Southeast and South Asia. The large collections of Chinese paintings and furniture are considered especially fine.
The European painting collection at the Nelson-Atkins also is particularly notable. It includes masterpieces from a wide spectrum of periods and countries by such artists as Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Vincent van Gogh, Jean Baptiste Siméon Chardin, Guercino, Titian, Caravaggio, Peter Paul Rubens and Rembrandt.
The American painting collection, through the Enid and Crosby Kemper Foundation, is home to important works by Thomas Eakins, John Singleton Copley, Winslow Homer, Frederic Church and John Singer Sargent. The American holdings also include the largest public collection of works by Missouri native Thomas Hart Benton and numerous works by Missourian George Caleb Bingham both featured in the paintings at the top of each page on this website learn more>>
Special thanks to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art for contributing to this page. More on one of America's top ten galleries of art, the Nelson-Atkins, can be found at www.nelson-atkins.org
|