Jewel box museum of Old Master artworks reopens in San Diego

The Timken Museum of Artwork in San Diego’s Balboa Park reopens this week after a $3m floor-to-ceiling renovation that goals to showcase its modestly-sized however important assortment in its full splendour. The museum, which holds a 84-piece assortment of Outdated Grasp work, Russian icons and works by early Twentieth-century American artists, was closed for 2 years for the refurbishment, which was overseen by the San Francisco-based structure agency Gensler.

The Timken opened in 1965 however its historical past dates to the Nineteen Thirties, when three heiresses (associated to a person named Henry Putnam, who invented the bottle stopper) inherited round 5 million {dollars} and started accumulating Outdated Grasp work, donating a few of the works to the San Diego Museum of Artwork.

The gathering traveled to different cities for some years earlier than the sisters’ lawyer, Walter Ames, approached the Timken household (whose fortune got here from having invented the curler bearing) to supply the capital to ascertain a standalone museum for the gathering in San Diego.

It at present holds a $25m endowment and the one Rembrandt in public show within the metropolis, the work Saint Bartholomew (1657).

Ames was the primary director of the museum, adopted by his daughter after which her son. Megan Pogue, the second non-family member to be appointed govt director of the museum, says the renovation took into consideration that “this can be a historic constructing—it’s not designated historic nevertheless it’s historic by way of the way it’s seen by the general public”.

The museum was initially designed by the architect John Mock of the agency Frank L. Hope and Associates and is taken into account an distinctive instance of mid-century Fashionable structure in San Diego. “It’s an iconic constructing that has been very lovingly maintained however in want of some updates and enhancements, largely to its mechanical programs, but in addition some beauty,” Pogue says.

The renovation started in March 2020 and concerned the overhaul of the museum’s 5 galleries, new lighting programs, the reconfiguration of the sculpture backyard and the addition of digital know-how within the galleries. It has additionally added a military-grade air filtration system that allegedly kills 99.9% of airborne pathogens, so guests can “really really feel the air within the museum—a clear, crisp degree of purification”, Pogue says.

The museum is celebrating its reopening with two acquisitions: Ella Ferris Pell’s portray Salomé (1890) and the sculpture Bust of Eve (1874) by the American sculptor Thomas Ball, each donated to the museum by California-based personal collectors.