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75th Anniversary
Timeline
1928-1953 |
1928: Phillips Academy alumnus, trustee,
and benefactor Thomas Cochran (1871–1936,
PA 1890) donates 50 American paintings to Phillips Academy in honor of the school’s 150th Anniversary and calls for the establishment
of an art museum at the school.
 1929: Ground is broken for the museum
building designed by
architect Charles A. Platt
(1861–1933).
1930: Charles H. Sawyer (1906–2005, PA 1924) is appointed first director of the Addison.
 1931: The Addison Gallery of American Art, named for Cochran’s late friend Keturah Addison Cobb, opens to the public in May. The core collection of approximately 500 works includes paintings by Winslow Homer, Arthur B. Davies, George Bellows, and Thomas Eakins.
1931: The museum’s first exhibition showcases late Addison art committee member Lizzie P. Bliss's (1864–1931) collection of cutting edge modern American and French art. Her bequest to the Addison includes paintings by Walt Kuhn and Maurice Prendergast.
 1933: Studio art classes for Phillips Academy students commence in the basement of the Addison; Bartlett H. Hayes Jr. (1904–1988, PA 1922) is hired as an art instructor.
1934: The Addison purchases four pictures by Margaret Bourke-White, the first photographs to enter the museum’s collection.
1936: Famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright lectures to the Phillips Academy community at the Addison Gallery on October 23.
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1938: The Addison assembles the first ever John Sloan retrospective exhibition and publishes the accompanying catalogue.
1940: Charles H. Sawyer assumes the directorship of the Worcester Art Museum. Bartlett H. Hayes Jr. is appointed director of the Addison and chairman of Phillips Academy’s art department.
1943: The museum acquires Alexander Calder’s Horizontal Spines,1942 and Washington Allston’s Italian Landscape, c. 1805.
1944: Miss Anne P. Peabody, registrar at the Addison, donates Josef Albers’s Bent Black (A), 1940 to the museum through Hayes’ “Art Begins at Home: The Addison Gallery Gift Plan” project.
1946: Winslow Homer’s Kissing the Moon, 1904 and Childe Hassam’s Avenue of the Allies, 1918 arrive at the Addison, bequests of Candace
C. Stimson.
1946: Charles Sheeler serves as the Addison Gallery’s first artist-in-residence.
1947: Hayes mounts Seeing the Unseeable, a retrospective exhibition of work by Hans Hoffman. Search for the Real and Other Essays,
the first anthology of essays composed by an Abstract Expressionist artist, is published.
1950: Peggy Guggenheim donates Jackson Pollock’s Abstract Expressionist canvas Phosphorescence, 1947.
1953: Georgia O’Keeffe donates twenty-two volumes of Alfred Stieglitz’s magazine Camera Work.
1953: The Addison mounts the first
museum exhibition of selected works belonging to art collector William H. Lane.
Click here to see the 75th Anniversary Timeline 1954-Present.
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