History of SDMA

For over eighty years, the San Diego Museum of Art has honored the intentions of its original founders by not only developing a world renowned collection, but by fostering an environment where both the local and international community could enjoy and learn about art in an elegant and inspirational setting.

The Museum was established in 1922 when local business and civic leader, Appleton S. Bridges (1849-1929), agreed to fund the construction of a permanent structure to house a municipal art collection. The site of the fine arts building for the 1915 Panama-California International Exposition in Balboa Park was secured and construction got underway in April 1924. The Fine Arts Society subsequently formed in 1925 from the merger of the San Diego Art Guild and the Friends of Art to operate the new museum.

Bridges hired one of San Diego's leading architects at the time, William Templeton Johnson (1877-1950), to design and construct the new art gallery. The Spanish Colonial-style architecture from the 1915 exposition in Balboa Park suggested the style for Johnson's design. Johnson and his associate Robert W. Snyder (1874-1955), however, went one step further and looked directly to sixteenth-century Spanish Renaissance models in the plateresque style for their inspiration. For the building's exterior, they borrowed motifs from the Cathedral of Valladolid and the faÁade of the University of Salamanca, while for the interior, they adapted features of the Hospital de Santa Cruz in Toledo.

Architectural sculptor Chris Mueller, who had supervised the architectural details of the 1915 exposition buildings, enhanced the faÁade with the addition of sculptural elements including life-sized sculptures of Spanish old master painters Velazquez, Murillo, and Zurbar·n as well as heraldic devices and the coats-of-arms of Spain, the United States, California, and San Diego.

With construction completed in the spring of 1925, the Fine Arts Gallery of San Diego officially opened its doors on February 28, 1926 at which time ownership and maintenance of the building was transferred to the City of San Diego. In 1925, Bridges hired Dr. Reginald Poland (1893-1975), former director of education at the Detroit Institute of the Arts, to serve as the Museum's first director. Under his direction, which lasted from 1925 until 1950, the core of the Museum's early collection was formed thanks to the generous donations of Bridges, Archer M. Huntington, Mr. and Mrs. Henry Timken, and Amy and Anne Putnam. During his tenure, Poland also instituted programs to foster appreciation of the arts for both children and adults through free artistic demonstrations by local artists and a series of free Sunday lectures given by critics, historians, and artists.

Poland also saw the Museum through the critical events of World War II when the Museum was forced to relocate its collection at other institutions further inland and at local bank vaults. A program of classes, films, lectures and other art activities were continued in members' homes. From 1943 until 1947, the Museum building actually served as a United States Navy Hospital with a ward of 423 beds.

The Museum underwent an important period of expansion, in terms of both its collections and gallery space, under successive directors Warren Beach (museum director 1955-69) and Henry Gardiner (museum director 1969-79). The completion in 1966 of the west wing, which doubled the space of Bridges's original structure, coincided with the receipt of major donations of art works by Mr. and Mrs. Norton Walbridge, Earle W. Grant, and Pliny F. Munger in the late 1960s and 1970s. In addition to augmenting an already significant collection of old masters, these gifts rounded out the Museum's holdings in nineteenth- and twentieth-century European art, American art, and large scale sculpture which filled the newly built May S. Marcy Sculpture Court. Additional gallery space was added with the completion of the east wing in 1974.

In 1978, Trustees changed the name of the Fine Arts Gallery of San Diego to the San Diego Museum of Art in recognition of the Museum's status as a repository for applied and decorative arts in addition to the fine arts of painting and sculpture. During the following two decades, under the directorship of Steven Brezzo (museum director 1979-99), the Museum became the beneficiary of four remarkable donations of art: a collection of English and French works of art from Ambassador Maxwell Gluck and his wife in 1985; a collection of prints, posters, and paintings by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec given by the Baldwin M. Baldwin Foundation in 1988; and the 1,453-piece collection of Indian and South Asian art given by Edwin Binney 3rd in 1990.

Entering the new century under the directorship of Dr. Don Bacigalupi (1999-2003), the Museum expanded and improved. In early 2001, SDMA unveiled the fruits of extensive conservation work that brought the Museum's rotunda back to its original brilliance of 1926, in addition to visitor-friendly renovations in the store, galleries, sculpture garden, and auditorium. On the threshold of its 80th anniversary year, the San Diego Museum of Art's current director, Dr. Derrick Cartwright (2004- ), is laying the foundation for additional improvements, including the complete restoration of the building's facade, as well as the expansion of the Museum's outreach efforts into the community, its bilingual initiatives, and publications program.

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