Allen Memorial Art Museum

The Allen's declared and demonstrated strength is seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish painting, sitting inside a broader European holding that runs from the fifteenth century to the present. Its second serious strength is Asian art, built substantially on the Mary A. Ainsworth ukiyo-e bequest and extending into Chinese, Persian and South Asian material shown in the Ripin Gallery. Both are unusual depths for a museum of this size, and both exist because a sequence of individual donors -- Olney, the Allens and Prentisses, Ainsworth, Garbaty -- gave collections rather than funds, so the museum's holdings still visibly carry the shape of the people who assembled them a century ago.

The Allen Memorial Art Museum traces its origin to 1904, when Charles F. Olney, vice president of the Cleveland School of Art, left Oberlin College roughly 8,000 works of art on his death. The gift outgrew anywhere the college had to show it. Dr. Dudley Peter Allen, an 1875 Oberlin graduate, and his wife Elisabeth Severance Allen (later, in her second marriage, Elisabeth Severance Allen Prentiss) commissioned a purpose-built museum to house and display the Olney bequest to the public rather than let it sit in storage. Allen died before construction finished, and the completed building, opened in 1917, was named in his memory.

Elisabeth Severance Prentiss was the daughter of Louis H. Severance, a Standard Oil magnate, and her later gifts did as much to shape the collection as her first husband's memorial did to shape the building. In 1937 she funded a teaching wing, still in use today by the college's Art department and as the Fisher Gallery student exhibition space. When she died in 1944 she left the museum a substantial endowment along with part of her own art collection, assembled during her first marriage to Allen. The museum's motto is carved into the facade above the arched entrance: a line from William Morris, 1884, reading The Cause of Art is the Cause of the People. It was written as a statement of purpose, not decoration, and the museum has kept free admission since the day it opened as the literal expression of it.

Cass Gilbert designed the original 1917 building in an Italian Renaissance idiom, drawing on Tuscan Renaissance architecture to give a teaching museum the gravity of a European palazzo. The central gallery carries a richly decorated coffered ceiling, painted by Frederick J. Wiley to Gilbert's commission in emulation of French Renaissance ceilings: canvas panels of musical instruments, foliage, animals and boats set into roughly 100 plaster coffers, with stanzas from a poem by the nineteenth-century transcendentalist Christopher Pearse Cranch running along the clerestory. Ironwork throughout the building is by Samuel Yellin. The ceiling and clerestory paintings underwent cleaning and conservation in 2014 and 2015.

By the 1960s the museum and the college's art department had outgrown Gilbert's building. Museum director Richard Spear led the search for an architect for an addition, and the committee settled on Robert Venturi, working with his wife and partner Denise Scott Brown. Their 1977 addition, built in explicit and self-aware dialogue with Gilbert's building, is counted among the earliest and most fully realised examples of postmodern architecture built in the United States, an instance of what Venturi called a decorated shed. The addition holds the Clarence Ward Art Library, the Ellen Johnson Gallery for modern and contemporary art, and studio and classroom space for the art department. From 2009 to 2011, under museum director Stephanie Wiles, both buildings went through a renovation focused on heating, ventilation and air conditioning, expanded art storage, improved lighting and energy efficiency, after which the museum earned USGBC LEED Gold certification. The result is a building that argues with itself on purpose: a 1917 Renaissance-revival block and a 1977 postmodern addition, kept in the same conversation the architects intended.

The collection holds more than 15,000 objects across paintings, sculpture, decorative arts, prints, drawings and photographs, organized by the museum itself into Ancient, European, Asian, Africa and Oceanic, Americas, and Modern and Contemporary departments, alongside the standalone Eva Hesse archive and the Art Rental program. Its acknowledged strength is seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish painting, alongside nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European and American work and a substantial Asian holding built around Japanese prints. The Ancient department is shown in Gilbert's central rotunda, under the coffered ceiling, ringed by an arcaded upper gallery.

The Asian collection rests heavily on the bequest of Mary A. Ainsworth, an 1889 Oberlin graduate who gave the museum more than 300 volumes of Japanese artists' books and seven printing woodblocks after her own travels in Japan; the museum's own collections page illustrates Chonunsai Eishi's ukiyo-e print The Courtesan Somenosuke of the Matsubaya House, from that bequest, as a representative highlight. The Ripin Gallery upstairs shows Chinese painting alongside Persian and South Asian material, including prayer rugs and pages from the Quran. The museum's first-ever acquisition, a Chinese vase given by the missionary Dalzell Bunker in 1894, predates the museum building itself by more than two decades.

The Africa, Oceania and Americas holdings include work by two artists whose presence in an early twentieth-century American teaching collection is itself notable: Horace Pippin, the self-taught African American painter, whose Harmonizing is in the collection, and Edmonia Lewis, working a half-century earlier, the first sculptor of both African American and Native American descent to achieve international recognition, represented by her marble Bust of James Peck Thomas. The museum also holds gifts from Eugene Leopold Garbaty, a Jewish industrialist who fled Germany in the 1930s and whose European collection entered the Allen afterward. The Eva Hesse archive, comprising the artist's notebooks, diaries, photographs and letters, sits apart from the display collection as a research holding used directly in teaching.

Not every object the Allen has held belongs in a highlights list. Egon Schiele's 1911 watercolour Schwarzes Madchen, known in English as Girl with Black Hair, entered the collection in 1958, bought from the New York dealer Galerie St. Etienne, which had itself bought it two years earlier from the Bern dealer Gutekunst and Klipstein. Before that, the picture had belonged to Fritz Grunbaum, an Austrian Jewish cabaret performer and collector of more than 400 works of art, 81 of them by Schiele, whose collection was catalogued by the art historian Franz Kieslinger and impounded into a Nazi-controlled warehouse in 1938. Grunbaum was murdered at the Dachau concentration camp in 1941. His heirs allege he was coerced into signing over power of attorney while imprisoned there, which led directly to the collection's illegal sale and dispersal.

In September 2023 the Manhattan District Attorney's office, whose Antiquities Trafficking Unit had spent years tracing the scattered Grunbaum Schieles, issued a seizure warrant for the Allen's watercolour, valuing it at 1.5 million dollars. The museum surrendered it. On 19 January 2024, in a restitution ceremony in New York, the work was returned to Grunbaum's heirs alongside a Schiele drawing that the Carnegie Museum of Art had held under the same circumstances; both were consigned afterward to Christie's. The Allen did not initiate this outcome. It came from a law enforcement investigation into where the Grunbaum collection had scattered, sixty-six years after the museum had bought the watercolour in good faith from an established New York dealer and asked, on the evidence available, no further questions. The gap between when a museum acquires a picture and when it is made to confront where that picture came from is exactly the kind of record this publication exists to keep, and the Allen's file on this object is now part of it.

The Allen was founded to support teaching, and the habit shows most plainly in the Art Rental program, started in the 1940s by Ellen H. Johnson, a professor of art history at Oberlin. At the start of every semester students camp outside the museum's north gate for first pick of original prints and paintings, including etchings and lithographs by artists such as Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Andy Warhol, Salvador Dali and Pablo Picasso, which they can then hang in their dormitory rooms for five dollars a semester. Johnson described the program's purpose as developing students' aesthetic sensibilities and encouraging ordered thinking in other areas of their lives, and it has run continuously since. The Ellen Johnson Gallery in the Venturi wing carries her name for the same reason.

The museum's Print Study Room extends the same principle to its works on paper, which are kept mostly in storage for conservation and made available for scheduled close viewing rather than permanent display. Curators have used the museum's own centenary programming to draw directly on under-shown parts of the collection: a 2017 exhibition built around the Asian holdings traced the collection back to its first Oberlin acquisition, the 1894 Chinese vase donated by the missionary Dalzell Bunker, and a companion show on Ellen Johnson's own legacy examined her role in shaping the modern and contemporary collection as both curator and teacher. A museum whose signature program lends real Picassos to undergraduates for pocket change has made a specific, sustained argument about what a collection is for, and it has kept making that argument for over eighty years.

The Allen is open Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Sunday, 1 to 5 p.m.; it is closed Mondays, major holidays and Fridays in July, in line with the college's own July office closures. Admission has been free to all visitors since the museum opened in 1917. Free street parking sits directly in front of the building, with overflow parking behind it off Willard Court for evening events. The museum is on the Oberlin College campus at the southeast corner of Main Street and Lorain Street, roughly forty minutes west of Cleveland by road.

An access ramp on the building's north side is reached through the courtyard tunnel on Lorain Street; the second-floor gallery is reached only by stairs, and visual guides to what is shown there are available at the welcome desk for visitors who cannot climb them. Personal photography without flash is permitted throughout the permanent collection, though not of works on loan from other institutions, and bags and umbrellas are checked at the rear of the building rather than carried through the galleries. None of this is complicated, which is the point: a free museum with real Old Masters, a serious ukiyo-e collection and a working Frank Lloyd Wright house a mile and a half away asks almost nothing of a visitor before handing over what it has.

Visitors consistently describe the Allen as a small museum with a collection out of proportion to its size: a free, single-building teaching museum that punches well above what its scale would suggest, on a campus most travellers would not otherwise stop at for art. Praise centres on the quality and range of the paintings for a college museum, the intimacy of seeing them without crowds, and the fact that admission has been free since the museum opened its doors in 1917.