Museum Collections: American Art

Detail from: Charles Burchfield (American 1893-1967), The Open Road, 1931, Watercolor and gouache on paper. Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts Association Purchase.

The Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts has collected American paintings, sculpture and works on paper since it opened in 1930. Througout the years, the Museum has acquired both individual works and collections which have made its American holdings among the most comprehensive in the Southeast. From Colonial period portraiture to contemporary, 20th-century American expressions of visual creativity in most every medium — the many aspects of American art are always on view at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts.

The Blount Collection of American Paintings

Forty-one paintings by some of this country's most important artists were given to the Museum in 1988 and are exhibited together within the permanent galleries.

The Blount Collection surveys American art with works ranging from the Colonial portraits of John Singleton Copley and Charles Willson Peale, to landscapes by Thomas Moran and Frederic Edwin Church-from outstanding watercolor paintings by Winslow Homer, Maurice Prendergast and Charles Demuth, to modern masterpieces by Stuart Davis and Edward Hopper. From the elegant society portrait of Mrs. Louis Raphael by John Singer Sargent to the mystical interpretation of a Mexican landscape by Marsden Hartley, the Blount Collection is a study in excellence of artistic expression.

With this single gift, a gesture that was as enlightened, as it was generous, Blount, Incorporated and its founder, Winton M. Blount, transformed the character of the collection of the Museum and the community as a whole. What began as a modest, but excellent collection of American art became a comprehensive demonstration of the finest work this nation's artists have produced.

"The art assembled in this collection is an expression of our society and heritage. From artists of Colonial times to the present, the Blount Collection presents a diversity of art in which each person, in his own way, can find something of enjoyment and inspiration." Winton M. Blount, 1988.

The 3-D Museum
Sculpture in the Museum Environment

Both inside and outside the Museum, visitors will enjoy works of sculpture integrated into the Museum's environment. The setting of the Blount Cultural Park provides a natural home for a work situated in the Museum lake by Edward Hendricks; the centerpiece of the lakeside terrace is the Till Fountain, an installation of bronze and limestone featuring the sculpture of Frank Fleming.

Within the galleries, works of sculpture are important features of the installation of two hundred years of American art-from Weinman's Rising Day and Descending Night to Zorach's Genesis.

The Museum is also a temporary home to some key long-term loans of important works of sculpture from other collections-a bronze work, Cloud Mountain, by Isamu Noguchi from the Noguchi Foundation in New York, as well as works from the National Museum of American Art: Hiram Powers's Proserpine, Edmonia Lewis's Hagar and Chaim Gross's Three Acrobats on a Unicycle.

Art of the American South

The Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts was originally founded as an institution to exhibit and promote the work of Alabama artists and the Museum continues this tradition by acquiring works by State and regional artists. For our local community, these works are accessible reminders of its cultural and artistic heritage. Over two hundred examples of regional art are represented in the collection. Portraits by itinerant artists reflect the popular roots of art expression in the nineteenth century while twentieth-century examples of so-called "outsider art" continue this idiom into the present day.