The 1940s & 1950s
The Museum's new Oriental Wing, including seven galleries devoted to the arts of Persia, China, and India, was opened in March 1940. The decade of the forties, a time when many American private collections were being dispersed, gave Kimball the opportunity for many major acquisitions, including the second George Grey Barnard Collection with its notable Medieval sculpture. The first collection assembled by Barnard, an enterpris-ing sculptor from Harrisburg, PA, forms the basis of The Cloisters museum in Fort Tryon Park in New York City.
The largest single group of objects to enter the Museum during this period was the John D. McIlhenny Collection, assembled by one of the Museum's earliest and most enthusiastic supporters who had been President of the Museum at the time of his death in 1925. The collection, which is particularly strong in Oriental carpets, was transferred to the Museum following the death of Mrs. McIlhenny in 1943. That same year, the great drawing room from Lansdowne House, London, designed in the Neoclassical style by Robert Adam, was installed in the Museum. The nucleus of the photography collection came in 1949, in the form of 68 photographs by Alfred Stieglitz in a gift from the artist's estate. The gift also included included paintings and watercolors by early twentieth-century American masters such as Marin, Hartley, and Demuth.
In 1950, Walter and Louise Arensberg deeded to the Museum their incomparable collection of modern European masterpieces—which included the largest group of sculptures by Constantin Brancusi outside of Paris and the foremost collection of works by Marcel Duchamp in the world—as well as their impressive holdings of pre-Columbian sculpture. Two years later, the final stage of acquisition of the A.E. Gallatin Collection of twentieth-century paintings and drawings further assured the Museum's prominence as a repository of masterpieces of early modern art.
After almost 30 years as Director, Fiske Kimball resigned in 1955. Former Assistant Director Henri Marceau assumed his responsibilities, and under his guidance the Museum continued to expand. The growing diversity and high quality of its collections were enhanced by several major acquisitions during the mid-fifties, such as the Joseph Lees Williams Memorial Collection, a magnificent group of Oriental carpets, which was given to the Museum in 1955. The next year, shortly after the arrival of the distinguished Austrian scholar Dr. Stella Kramrisch as Curator of Indian Art, the bulk of the Museum's collection of stone sculpture from India was acquired. In 1958, fifteen galleries devoted to Philadelphia furniture and silver were opened, as well as the Titus C. Geesey Collection of Pennsylvania German arts. And in 1959, the Museum acquired a magnificent suite of 13 tapestries, designed by Peter Paul Rubens and Pietro da Cortona and woven in Paris, which had hung in the Palazzo Barberini in Rome. A gift from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, these huge tapestries depicting events in the life of the Roman emperor Constantine the Great were installed around the walls of the second-floor balcony in the Great Stair Hall, where they constitute one of the Museum's most spectacular displays.
