Art in the Desert

Phoenix (pop. 370,000) has long smarted under the reproach that it was the largest U.S. city without an art museum of its own. “If you lived in Phoenix and you wanted to go to an art museum with a broad coverage of art,” Actor-Collector Vincent Price once pointed out, “you’d have to go as far west as Los Angeles, as far south as Mexico City, as far east as Denver and as far north as Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan.” Last week Phoenix proudly opened its brand-new, $500,000 Museum of Art, housing a collection of art valued at $2,600,000 in a handsome, low-lying, stuccoed masonry, glass and aluminum structure on North Central Avenue, designed by Architect Alden Dow. Along with the adjacent Little Theater and Public Library, the new museum now makes Phoenix a center of culture in the desert.

Phoenix’s new urge for culture is part of the national tidal wave that has nearly doubled museum space since World War II, has found art societies and institutes sprouting in towns that once would have been hard pressed to support a framing shop. Phoenix itself started modestly enough when, in 1915, the Woman’s Club set up an Art Exhibition Committee to improve the quality of art shown at the Arizona State Fair. Even as late as 1940, Art Patroness Maie Bartlett Heard gave the city nearly a full city block for a civic center, only to find Phoenix citizens willing to contribute less than a third of the $1,000,000 required for the buildings.

It remained for the upsurge of postwar prosperity (320 new manufacturing companies in the last decade) and population boom (2,500-3,000 new inhabitants each month) to bring the bloom of art to the desert. Sparking the drive for a new museum were Local Banker Walter Bimson and Insurance Man George Bright, a recovered TB victim. Able, young Museum Director Forest Melick Hinkhouse, 34, soon had donations and art rolling in, ranging all the way from Van Dyck’s Portrait of Charles I and Tintoretto’s Portrait of a Nobleman to such modern works as Karel Appel’s Portrait of Count Basie, John Hultberg’s From a Car and Richard Diebenkorn’s Woman by a Window.

Having at last closed the culture gap, Director Hinkhouse is already planning a new $750,000 museum wing. “Man needs a good diet for the mind,” Hinkhouse points out. “The art museum helps complete the menu.”