History

In 1874 when the President and Fellows of Harvard College appointed Charles Eliot Norton the first professor of art history in America, they could hardly have anticipated a day when Harvard would have three distinct art museums, each a vital part of the university and the larger museum community.

The three museums that comprise the Harvard Art Museum are entities of their own, each with a particular focus and collection strength. They are linked through a common mission and with a common administration, and all are deeply engaged with the university and the communities that surround it.

As we move toward the future, a new building will unite the three museums under one roof and as a single destination that will more effectively carry out the mission of the Harvard Art Museum. Each museum will maintain its separate identity, closely tied to the ideas that inspired its creation and that inform the institution's rich history.

Fogg Museum

The Fogg Museum is Harvard's oldest art museum. Its original building, designed by Richard Morris Hunt, opened in 1895 on the present site of Canaday Hall in Harvard Yard. In 1927, the museum moved to its home at 32 Quincy Street in a building designed by Coolidge, Shepley, Bulfinch, and Abbott that became the site of the Fogg's development as the nation's premier teaching museum.

The Fogg Museum today is renowned for its holdings of Western paintings, sculpture, decorative arts, photographs, prints, and drawings from the Middle Ages to the present. Particular strengths include Italian early Renaissance, British Pre-Raphaelite, and 19th-century French art, as well as 19th- and 20th-century American paintings and drawings.

The Fogg's Maurice Wertheim Collection is a notable group of impressionist and postimpressionist works that contains many famous masterworks, including paintings and sculpture by Cézanne, Degas, Manet, Matisse, Picasso, and van Gogh. Central to the Fogg's holdings is the Grenville L. Winthrop Collection, with more than 4,000 works of art. Bequeathed to Harvard in 1943, the collection continues to play a pivotal role in shaping the legacy of the Harvard Art Museum, serving as a foundation for teaching, research, and professional training programs. It includes important 19th-century paintings, sculpture, and drawings by Blake, Burne-Jones, David, Daumier, Homer, Ingres, Renoir, Rodin, Sargent, Toulouse-Lautrec, van Gogh, and Whistler.

Busch-Reisinger Museum

In 1897 a committee of three Harvard professors of German literature published an article titled "The Need of a Germanic Museum at Harvard." By 1903 the Germanic Museum opened in Rogers Hall, a former gymnasium.

In 1921 the Germanic Museum moved to Adolphus Busch Hall at 29 Kirkland Street, and in 1950 it was renamed the Busch-Reisinger Museum. The museum moved again in 1991, this time to the new Werner Otto Hall at 32 Quincy Street, designed by Gwathmey Siegel & Associates. Adolphus Busch Hall continues to house the founding collection of plaster casts of medieval art and an exhibition on the history of the Busch-Reisinger Museum; it also hosts concerts on its world-renowned Flentrop pipe organ.

The Busch-Reisinger Museum is still the only museum in North America dedicated to the study of art from the German-speaking countries of Central and Northern Europe. Its holdings today include significant works of Austrian Secession art, German expressionism, 1920s abstraction, and material related to the Bauhaus. Other strengths include late medieval sculpture and 18th-century art.

The museum also holds noteworthy postwar and contemporary art from German-speaking Europe, including works by Georg Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer, Gerhard Richter, and one of the world's most comprehensive collections of works by Joseph Beuys.

Arthur M. Sackler Museum

In 1912 Langdon Warner taught the first courses in Asian art at Harvard, and the first at any American university. By 1977 the collections of Asian, ancient, and Islamic and later Indian art had grown enough to require a larger space for their display and study. The Arthur M. Sackler Museum, a new museum building at 485 Broadway designed by James Stirling, was completed in 1985.

Today the Arthur M. Sackler Museum holds world-renowned collections of archaic Chinese jades and Japanese surimono, as well as outstanding Chinese bronzes, ancient ceremonial weapons, and Buddhist cave-temple sculptures; Chinese and Korean ceramics; and Japanese woodblock prints, calligraphy, narrative paintings, and lacquer boxes.

The Sackler's collections of ancient and Byzantine art include notable works in all media from Greece, Rome, Egypt, and the Near East. They are especially strong in Greek vases, and in small bronzes and coins from throughout the ancient Mediterranean world.

The museum also holds exceptional works on paper from Islamic lands and India, including paintings, drawings, calligraphy, and manuscript illustrations, with particular strength in Rajput art, as well as significant Islamic ceramics from the 8th through 19th century, including Samanid epigraphic wares, luster wares from Iraq, Iran, and Spain, and Iznik Ottoman wares.