Art Review: Saint Louis Art Museum a Superb Venue

I visited the Saint Louis Art Museum this week, my first time in the city, which is entirely my fault since both the city and the museum are warm, welcoming hubs of high culture. Saint Louis started as a fur-trapping market town in the 1760s and wasn’t much more when the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 nearly doubled the size of the country at the attractive price of $18 a square mile.

A hundred and one years later, the city was a metropolis, so much so that it hosted the 1904 World’s Fair, nominally in honor of the Louisiana Purchase’s centennial, and later sired the movie-musical Meet Me in Saint Louis, itself a claim to fame. This week, I’ll profile the museum, a jewel in America’s string of encyclopedic civic art galleries. Set outside Chicago, New York, and the nation’s capital, they’re icons of local pride and holders of the finest in world art. St. Louis Art Museum — it goes by SLAM, which is hip, so I tend not to like it — is a center for scholarship, too. Next week, I’ll review its solid show on Jean-Francois Millet.

About the Author

Brian T. Allen

Brian T. Allen is National Review’s art critic.

I visited the Saint Louis Art Museum this week, my first time in the city, which is entirely my fault since both the city and the museum are warm, welcoming hubs of high culture. Saint Louis started as a fur-trapping market town in the 1760s and wasn’t much more when the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 nearly doubled the size of the country at the attractive price of $18 a square mile.

A hundred and one years later, the city was a metropolis, so much so that it hosted the 1904 World’s Fair, nominally in honor of the Louisiana Purchase’s centennial, and later sired the movie-musical Meet Me in Saint Louis, itself a claim to fame. This week, I’ll profile the museum, a jewel in America’s string of encyclopedic civic art galleries. Set outside Chicago, New York, and the nation’s capital, they’re icons of local pride and holders of the finest in world art. St. Louis Art Museum — it goes by SLAM, which is hip, so I tend not to like it — is a center for scholarship, too. Next week, I’ll review its solid show on Jean-Francois Millet.