[Music] In the early 1900s, influenced by one of the state's most renowned artists, a public school in a small Kansas town built up a world-class art collection.

That collection is now reunited, on display, and influencing the culture of a community a century later.

[Music] From 1911 to 1937, the McPherson Kansas Public Schools held annual art exhibitions with the mission of collecting art to display in the school buildings.

This effort was aided by Birger Sandzen, artist and professor at Bethany College in neighboring Lindsborg.

Birger Sandzen was an immigrant from Sweden that came to America in the late 19th century and became a very popular artist in the area.

He spent some time in Northwestern Kansas in Graham County and did a lot of artwork there, which is primarily landscapes.

And that was his focus on most of his artwork.

But he was very instrumental in the public schools in McPherson.

He started collecting art, and he was influential on that.

And the book, the story of a Kansas Renaissance for the sake of art, written by Cynthia Mines, focuses on the McPherson public schools and then collecting this art.

I'm Cynthia Mines, and I've been writing about Kansas history since seventh grade.

We're here at the McPherson Museum.

It opened, this building was a new construction in 2013, and private donations enabled an art gallery to be part of the new museum to showcase the McPherson Schools art collection.

This collection began in 1911 and eventually totaled 200 pieces of art and was one of the largest in the nation and got international attention from the art world.

When I was taking a college history class, I needed a research project.

And I had heard vague references to an art collection, so I started looking and found a newspaper clipping from Kansas City Star in 1923 that talked about two etchings that had come from France that had been procured by a local art dealer named Carl Smalley, who was very good friends with Sandzen.

So the more I researched that and found this great friendship between these two men and what they together brought to Kansas schoolchildren, they both worked very actively to get original artwork into the schools.

When I was growing up in McPherson, I graduated from McPherson High School but had no idea there was this large art collection.

I knew there was a Sandzen painting hanging in the junior high and we were all very familiar with Sandzen because of his proximity in Linsburg.

In the 1990s, the McPherson School Board appointed an advisory board to oversee the collection and at that time two art teachers from the district went around to the various buildings trying to gather the collection back together.

Over the years, pieces had been stored in closets, furnace rooms, attics, and then once they were identified and brought back together, we began raising money to restore and repair them and that's what you see on exhibit here is a lot of those pieces of artwork.

One of the teachers who was actively involved in that is Elizabeth Liljegren, who was a high school art teacher at the time and continues to be an active volunteer.

I started teaching in the 65-66 school year at McPherson High School, and I was a Bethany College graduate and young and I was there the rest of my career and taught 37 years at McPherson High School.

And so my first contact with this collection was that painting right over there, the Albert Block, because it hung in my classroom.

It was a very important painting in the history of American art and very unusual and I could get the best discussions out of students having it on the wall because of the characters and what are they talking about, what's going on there.

So it was a great conversation piece.

Much of the rest of the work then was throughout the building and classrooms and offices and hallways.

When I started researching, I discovered that when McPherson was building a new high school in 1911, the superintendent had the idea of having an art exhibit, charging admission, and using the proceeds to buy artwork for the halls of the new high school.

So they did that in the first year and were able to buy two pieces of art.

They bought a Sandzen painting since he was a professor at nearby Lindsburg and bought one, Charles Hallberg from Chicago.

This painting by Charles Hallberg came from the first exhibition in 1911.

And then Sandzen was so taken with the idea of students buying artwork, he gave them a second.

So they started their collection with two Sandzen paintings and another oil painting.

Sandzen was a professor at Bethany and he would give lectures at McPherson's annual art exhibitions and have a whole room devoted to his new work.

And it was a big topic of conversation in McPherson throughout the year, what San Zane would be showing, what he would be talking about.

The first year, it was in early December.

It was rainy, muddy, it was at night, but people got in there, you know, horse and wagon and went to the high school and attended this art exhibition.

And it was a competition among the classrooms to see who could sell the most tickets.

The tickets were like a nickel for kids, a dime for adults and 25 cents for the entire week.

And that was enough money that they could, I think the first year they netted maybe $75 and bought two oil paintings.

And then the classroom that sold the most tickets would get a prize of an original piece of art, either a print or there were some statues, there were a couple of them in this room, that were given as prizes.

The kids were so excited, their parents were excited about it.

There were lots of stories in the local newspaper about it.

And the next year, it continued to grow bigger and bigger and bigger.

And they asked the local seed dealer, Carl Smalley, whose father owned a large warehouse downtown, to begin helping.

Carl Smalley graduated from high school in 1904, which was the year of the St. Louis World's Fair and took the train to the World's Fair and was totally enamored with the Palace of Fine Art and learned about original prints and realized that they were much more affordable, which allows everyone to be able to own original artwork.

So he was really taken with that idea and became a connoisseur of printmaking.

And when he came back to work in his dad's seed warehouse, he convinced his dad to let him display a few pieces of artwork and then he added a few pieces of pottery.

And the local people weren't quite sure what to make of that.

And every Sunday he would take a portfolio of prints to Sandzen's house and studio and over Sunday lunch they would look at all of these wonderful prints.

He even would get a Rembrandt, was exhibited once at McPherson.

Carl Smalley was able to get a Rembrandt etching.

And when I first started the research, Sandzen's daughter, Margaret, was still living.

So I had the great fortune to interview her.

And she's very protective of her Papa, but gave Carl Smalley total credit for getting her father started in printmaking.

Actually bought the lithographic crayons for Sandzen to use and got him to do his first print and Sandzen went on to do hundreds of prints.

And his very first print is hanging here.

He gave it to the class, I believe, of 1916.

Carl Smalley got involved in the local art exhibitions and really kind of changed the culture of McPherson.

An article in the 1923 International Studio magazine, which was published in Paris and New York, said that school kids in McPherson saved their allowance to buy artwork, original artwork, and that farmwives would save their egg money and buy artwork.

So the exhibitions eventually grew into an entire week.

And every night would be operetta or school music groups, lectures, not just Sandzen.

They brought in the Chicago Art Institute director once for a lecture.

And I mean hundreds of people attended it.

I mean, actually thousands from McPherson.

The population of McPherson was 5,000 at the time, and they say half of those people would go to an art exhibition, which is hard to imagine now.

And they were held at the high school, and the paintings would hang in the classrooms.

They'd be exhibited.

They'd bring in a lot of artwork for the exhibition and then buy a few pieces.

And so the next year, they'd show the permanent collection, which continued to grow and then bring in other original artwork from some of the best artists in the country would send artwork.

The superintendent in 1911 who had the foresight to envision original artwork on the walls of the new high school was Superintendent Penny.

And along with him and Sandzen and Smalley were the three integral pieces that brought this together every year and kept it going.

And then after he left, future superintendents continued to support the efforts.

Smalley, in addition to selling artwork in the seed warehouse, got creative with the annual seed catalog that was printed.

And I actually found a lithograph that C.A.

Seward had done for the cover of the seed catalog.

And things became much more artistic with Carl working there.

He had to travel a lot, though he was a traveling seed salesman.

And I think he only did it to help out his family.

It wasn't his passion.

And when Carl Smalley's father died, the business was not in good shape.

And he left Carl with a lot of debt.

He was able to pay off the debt and then he opened his own book and art store on Main Street in McPherson, which became quite a popular meeting place and was really well known, they say, between like Chicago and Denver as a place to stop, to talk about art, buy original art.

It was kind of a place to be on Saturday nights in McPherson.

When I was doing the research in the late 70s in college, there were still people alive who remembered his gift shop.

Some of the women I interviewed who had been patrons of Carl Smalley's art shop started collections.

One of them, her daughter became an art professor at McPherson College.

So that's probably a direct connection.

But she had quite a collection and I think it changed her life.

And the article in the International Studio Magazine mentioned how many people started art collections.

So in addition to being able to interview them and Margaret Sandzen Greenow, I was able to track down Carl Smalley's wife.

They left McPherson in the late 1930s after the Dust Bowl and the Depression and the farm economy crashed.

He wasn't able to sustain the art and gift and bookstore in McPherson any longer.

So they moved to California where he was a publisher's representative.

The McPherson School Art Annual Exhibitions continued one more year, but I don't know if they couldn't handle it with him gone since he did so much of the work.

Or if it was because they moved to a new school building.

So from 1911, when the first high school was built, until 1937, when a new building was built to move them, they had exhibitions every year and added new pieces of artwork.

So Carl Smalley would use his connections and help the students decide what pieces of artwork to buy every year.

A n etching by Whistler, as in Whistler's Mother, was exhibited here and it was purchased in 1918.

So James McNeil Whistler, print, which is pretty neat to have in a Kansas collection.

No question about that.

Others came from Chicago or Boston.

The connections Carl Smalley had made, but a lot of them were also local or regional artists.

The Dunbar, the morning letters, how I've always identified it, and it was hanging at the high school for most of my career.

It has to speak to everybody, I think, in some form or another.

It's beautifully painted and the lighting is just exquisite.

So Oscar Jacobson's an important artist and this is a wonderful piece.

O.U.

did an exhibition of Oscar Jacobson's work and contacted Cindy and we loaned this piece to their exhibition.

I learned that Albert Krehbiel, who was from Newton and whose father co-founded Bethel College, was a really well-known artist and taught at the Chicago Art Institute for 39 years and won some of Europe's top art prizes.

And he was from Newton, so we have three or four of his pieces.

Very well-known painter and the Carriage Factory Gallery in Newton is in the building that his family, I think, built carriages in.

Very active gallery.

Does classes in contemporary, shows contemporary artists' work in shows and then they also have a collection of Albert Krehbiel's pieces as well.

I think probably Carl Smalley would like to have been an artist himself and for him that was a way to express beauty.

He was quoted in the International Studio magazine in 1923 that his hope was to put original artwork on the wall of every schoolhouse in Kansas.

He and Sandzen did do a lot.

Smalley would organize traveling shows of Sandzen's work that went around, toured around the state and was shown in schools.

And they had other, Sandzen and Bethany College did a lot with schools and schoolchildren.

The International Studio magazine claimed that McPherson County owned more art per capita than any county in the world.

I'm not sure what they're, you know, how they came to that conclusion, but it very well could have been true.

So when I first started researching the story and I found in the Kansas City Star article that the French etchings were missing.

And then I found the 1923 International Studio article that had an etching I couldn't find.

And then to run across this seed dealer whose goal in life was to put original artwork on the wall of every schoolhouse in Kansas.

And then the kids selling tickets.

It was just a really intriguing story.

So I lucked into it, but it turned out to be a great story.

And so I became aware of it kind of fairly early on.

That it was one, a large collection and two, that it was historic.

Well, I began to realize it was way bigger than the Albert block and the Sandzen pieces that hung in our building.

You know, administrators come and go and teachers come and go and they don't know about the art or the collection.

And pretty soon things are off the wall and behind file cabinets.

And I began to notice that pieces weren't always where I was used to seeing them when I went to, you know, another teacher's classroom.

All of a sudden there was not a painting there.

Kay Ellis, who was the Arts Council director and who had been a student of mine, was interested in putting together again another exhibition of pieces from this collection.

And I asked her if she realized how uninventoried it was and things weren't where they were supposed to be.

And before we did this, we probably needed to get a little more up to date inventory.

So, Paula Allman, who, a fellow teacher at the middle school, and she does have an art history background.

And so she and I decided with Kay that we needed to find some of these pieces.

So, piece by piece we found them and eventually Barbara and Ken Cole Barbara was an English teacher.

And they were instrumental in helping us find a room at the middle school.

And that helped us get some things that nobody wanted in a central location.

And that was a good thing.

And yet we still wanted children to see them.

That's part of the legacy of this district.

Once Norine was the director of the newly formed Art Collection Advisory Board, things began to kind of fall into place, I think, with how are we going to take care of it, where are we going to preserve it.

And then once the museum started to make plans for this newer building, we kind of made plans to include some kind of storage for it.

And then eventually the Kecherside Foundation was able to be part of this gallery development here and being able to share them with the public.

I think displaying art in a public setting like this instills a sense of pride and possibility, as well as history, what transpired in generations before.

And artwork is something that can live forever, and it's a glimpse into the past, as well as a legacy for the future.

We have an active group in McPherson whose work to raise funds to preserve this legacy.

We've had Sandzen oil paintings restored, his paint was so thick that it begins to crack.

And it's a major undertaking and expense to get those repaired.

And then a lot of the prints people didn't take care of, so they didn't have acid-free mats, so they were beginning to turn brown.

And so this group has restored, probably 60 pieces, and it's all through private donations.

It means a lot to me because after all the years of trying to find and document and inventory and have the collection appraised, we finally have a place where it can be seen and we can change the exhibition.

It was such an important part of McPherson's history, and a lot of it had faded away.

A lot of people still don't know about this heritage, and I wouldn't have, except I was searching for a research project in college and came across it.

But it was such an amazing story that the son of a seed dealer could amass a nationally respected art collection that at one time was the second largest in the country.

It was just a confluence of perfect events with Sandzen and Lindsborg with his influence on students and then the superintendent having the foresight to see this.

But for year after year after year for thousands of McPherson residents to attend a week long of cultural events of singing and art and lectures, I would like to have been part of that time.

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