A Celebration of AMERICAN PAINTING.

• Author: Ross, Novelene

The Wichita Art Museum's collection represents a nation amending its traditional values of democracy and individualism to comprehend the new realities of massive immigration, relocation of rural population to the cities, grand-scale consumerism, and world power.

THROUGHOUT the nation's history, the yearning to know what distinguishes the American character from the European has been one of the central themes in U.S. art. Artist Edward Hopper once observed that the French never had worried about the painting of "the French scene" or the English about the celebration of "the English scene." Critics and artists, though, seemed to obsess over the idea of what constituted "the American scene." Hopper was entirely correct, not only about the preoccupations of artists of his own era, but about what is a distinctive and enduring feature of American cultural discourse.

Many U.S. art museums founded between 1900 and 1935 began with works of art owned by families or civic leaders. Those who chose to give their private collections a public home provided rare gifts to their communities. Museums from such sources proliferated across the country. Yet, sometimes the simple act of possessing a good idea can make great things happen, as was the case in Wichita, Kans.

Louise Caldwell Murdock left an amazing legacy to the Midwest--not a collection, but an idea to create a collection of museum-quality American objects for the people in her community. As beneficiary of this idea, the Wichita Art Museum had its beginnings in 1915 when her will created a trust for the acquisition of works by "American painters, potters, sculptors and textile weavers." Her foresight made the museum one of the earliest in the country to concentrate on the an of the U.S. In the years since the museum's founding, it has grown to house one of the most important art collections in the country and serves as major cultural resource.

Louise Caldwell Murdock named Elizabeth S. Navas, her young protege from her interior design business, as the principal trustee of the Murdock Collection. Like her employer, Navas personified the confidence and ingenuity of the so-called "new woman." With the guidance of some of the most progressive advocates of American art of her time, she purchased 167 works between 1939 and 1962. These advisors included Edith Halpert of the Downtown Gallery and Lloyd Goodrich of the Whitney Museum of American Art, both in New York City.

Navas' first purchase was "Kansas...