The Unlikeliest Collectors

The Springville Spring Salon celebrates its 100th anniversary by looking back at its unusual origins

- Anne Underwood

For centuries, artists have relied on the support of wealthy patrons. But in 1938, the exclusive Robert C. Vose Galleries in Boston sold a painting to a very different type of collector-a high school in Springville, Utah, which displayed the picture in its annual Spring Salon. That a high school was holding yearly salons is surprising enough. Even more astonishing, the students raised the money to buy the painting by holding bake sales. (Mrs.

Rothwell's pies were particularly popular.) The movement that began at Springville High School in the 1920s still endures under the auspices of the Springville Museum of Art, and this year marks its 100th anniversary. To celebrate the milestone, the museum is holding a special retrospective called Salon 100, featuring 100 paintings and sculptures from the past century, plus a smaller installation of ephemera from the Salon's early days.

The high school may have been small, but the students managed to persuade some big names in representational art to send them paintings. Nationally known artists who exhibited their work there between the late 1920s and the 1950s include Robert Henri, Childe Hassam, J. Alden Weir, Edward Hopper, John Twachtman, Rockwell Kent, Georgia O'Keeffe and John Koch.

If the concept of placing museum-quality art in schools sounds odd today, it didn't seem strange at the time. "With the progressive movement in education, there was a belief that having original art in schools made students better students," says Emily Larsen, director of the Springville Museum of Art. Examination of the paintings and sculptures would encourage critical thinking, beyond the rote memorization that was integral to so much education at the time.