NELSON-ATKINS RECEIVES 400 WORKS FROM DONORS

This week, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City announced that seventy-five of its supporters have either given or promised to give some four hundred works of art to celebrate the museum’s seventy-fifth anniversary and to honor its veteran director, Marc F. Wilson, who is retiring in June.

“This is about the future,” said Sarah Rowland, chairwoman of the Nelson-Atkins board, according to the New York Times. “Kansas City may be small, but it has a deep philanthropic base. And there are a lot of people who care deeply about their community.”

The range of gifts is broad: There’s everything from paintings, drawings, prints, and photographs to textiles, ceramics, silver, furniture, and rare books. Capping it all is the Marion and Henry Bloch Collection of Impressionist and modern art, which includes twenty-nine works by van Gogh, Manet, Monet, Cézanne, and Gauguin that experts say are worth more than three hundred million dollars alone. In 2007, the museum named a building after the Blochs. (He was a founder of H&R Block.) Designed by the architect Steven Holl, it opened in 2007 with, appropriately enough, an exhibition of the Blochs’ collection.