High Museum of Art - History

History

The Museum was founded in 1905 as the Atlanta Art Association. In 1926, the High family, for whom the museum is named, donated their family home on Peachtree Street to house the collection following a series of exhibitions involving the Grand Central Art Galleries organized by Atlanta collector J. J. Haverty. Many pieces from the Haverty collection are now on permanent display in the High. A separate building for the Museum was built adjacent to the family home in 1955.

On June 3, 1962, 106 Atlanta arts patrons died in an airplane crash at Orly Airport in Paris, France, while on a museum-sponsored trip. Including crew and other passengers, 130 people were killed in what was, at the time, the worst single plane aviation disaster in history. Members of Atlanta's prominent families were lost including members of the Berry family who founded Berry College. During their visit to Paris, the Atlanta arts patrons had seen Whistler's Mother at the Louvre. In the fall of 1962, the Louvre, as a gesture of good will to the people of Atlanta, sent Whistler's Mother to Atlanta to be exhibited at the Atlanta Art Association museum on Peachtree Street.

To honor those killed in the 1962 crash, the Atlanta Memorial Arts Center was built for the High. The French government donated a Rodin sculpture The Shade to the High in memory of the victims of the crash.

In 1983, a 135,000-square-foot (12,500 m2) building designed by Pritzker Prize winning architect Richard Meier opened to house the High Museum of Art. The Meier building was funded by a $7.9 million challenge grant from former Coca-Cola president Robert W. Woodruff matched by $20 million raised by the Museum. Meier's highly sculptural building has been criticized to have more beauty than brains. For example, the lobby, a giant cylinder in the middle of the buildings cutaway cube has almost no exhibition space, and columns throughout the interior severely restricted the way curators could desplay large works of modern art. At 135,000 square feet, the Meier building had room to display only about 3 percent of the museum's permanent collection.

The Meier building, now the Stent Family Wing, was termed Director Gudmund Vigtel's “crowning achievement” by his successor Michael Shapiro. During Vigtel’s tenure 1963-1991, the size of the museum's permanent collection tripled, endowment and trust funds of more than $15 million were established, the operating budget increased from $60,000 to $9 million and the staff expanded from four to 150.

In 2002, three new buildings designed by Renzo Piano more than doubled the Museum's size to 312,000 square feet (29,000 m2), at a cost of $124 million. The Piano buildings were designed as part of an overall upgrade of the entire Woodruff Arts Center complex. All three new buildings erected as part of the expansion of the High are clad in panels of aluminum to align with Meier’s original choice of a white enamel façade. Piano’s design of the new Wieland Pavilion and Anne Cox Chambers Wing features a special roof system of 1,000 light scoops that capture northern light and filter it into the skyway galleries.

When the museum needed more exhibition space for contemporary art, trustee John Wieland purchased a condominium across the street. Its second floor will serve as a 15,000-square-foot Kunsthalle-like space, designed by David Chipperfield as an extension of the museum programming as well as an area for displaying the Wieland family's own collection. The Wieland's foundation will fully fund it for 10 years, after which time the museum has the option to buy it for a dollar.