The Kress Collection: Making Art Accessible to Atlanta
Post by Ginia Sweeney
A gallery view including Giovanni Bellini’s Madonna and Child from ca. 1510, a gift from the Samuel H. Kress foundation.
A large part of the High Museum’s European Art collection was donated in the 1950s by businessman and philanthropist Samuel H. Kress, who deeply believed in art as a force for good, and worked to make it accessible to everyone. Kress’s gift and its underlying social activism helped shape our museum—and many others across the country—into the valuable community resource it remains today.
Born into a middle-class Delaware family, Kress built a fortune through his eponymous 5-10-25 cent stores, then a ubiquitous part of the American landscape. As his wealth grew, he developed an interest in art and purchased his first Italian masterpieces to decorate his Fifth Avenue palazzo in 1927. Only a few years after he started collecting, Kress determined to share his art treasures with the American people. One Christmas, he put Giorgione’s Adoration of the Shepherds—now in the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington—on view in the window of his Fifth Avenue New York store, much to the horror of his dealer.
Photograph of Samuel H. Kress
In the early 1930s, as the Great Depression raged, Kress made his first donations to American museums. He felt that his fortune had been built from the pennies of the American people, and thus they deserved to share in its fruits. In 1932, he made one of the first major gifts to the High Museum: a painting by Italian Rococo Master Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, now titled Roman Matrons Making Offerings to Juno. He donated the “instructive and educational” work, as he wrote to the museum’s leaders, out of a desire to do something “of interest and benefit to the people of Atlanta,” before all such rare paintings vanished from the art market completely. Our Tiepolo remains one of the prized objects in our collection.
That same year, 1932, Kress put together a traveling exhibition of more than fifty of his prized works. The exhibition visited twenty-four cities over the course of nearly three years, and was met with enthusiastic crowds wherever it went. Upon the paintings’ return home, Kress decided to make his entire collection permanently available to the public under the auspices of the recently founded Kress Foundation.
In the mid-twentieth century, those works of Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque art that resided in the United States were largely concentrated in New York and Washington. The Kress Foundation began its Regional Galleries program in order to distribute great works of Italian art to cities that otherwise did not have access to such artifacts of history. It was through this program that the High Museum received, in 1958, 27 Italian paintings and three sculptures, many of which are on view on the second floor of the Stent Family Wing.
The gift was made on the condition that the paintings be housed in a climate-controlled, fireproof building. As a result, the brick building that housed the Museum from 1955 – 1983, now enveloped by the Memorial Arts Building, was constructed.
With a tone of incredulity, the editor of the distinguished British art journal Burlington wrote of the Kress gift:
We can be sure that these altar-pieces from Italian churches, these allegorical panels from French chateaux, which now stray across the American continent like bewildered refugees, will one day work their way, like every other foreign body in this astonishing country, into the very fabric of American life.
His prediction was spot on: the Kress Collection today remains a valuable and educational part of Atlanta that belongs to all the city’s people.
