The Parthenon also serves as the city of Nashville's art museum. The focus of the Parthenon's permanent collection is a group of 63 paintings by 19th and 20th century American artists donated by James M. Cowan. Additional gallery spaces provide a venue for a variety of temporary shows and exhibits.


The History of Nashville’s Parthenon
The Cowan Collection
Planning Your Visit

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

History of the Nashville Parthenon (back...)

Early in the city’s history, Nashville acquired the nickname “Athens of the West,” because of the emphasis on education, especially a classical education, which included studies in Greek and Latin. As the United States spread ever westward, Nashville ceased to be on the frontier and the nickname changed to “Athens of the South.” It was a firmly established sobriquet by 1895, when Tennessee began planning as exposition in celebration of its first 100 years of statehood. Following the lead of Chicago’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, the planners of the Tennessee Centennial and International Exposition chose a neo-classical style for the buildings. When Nashville offered to build the art pavilion for the fair, the natural choice for the Athens of the South was a replica of the Parthenon. Built as a full-scale replica only on the outside, the interior was a series of galleries for the display of paintings and sculpture gathered from around the world for the Exposition. This replica was intended to be a temporary structure, as were all the exposition buildings, but it so filled Nashville’s collective imagination that the city decided to leave it standing as a civic monument and art center.

Although sturdily built with a stone foundation and brick walls, the structure had a temporary nature, apparent in the surface coatings and columns made of lath and plaster and the sculpture made entirely of plaster. The buildings began to deteriorate, and although it was repeatedly repaired, safety eventually required that it be demolished or completely rebuilt in a permanent material.

In 1920, the Park Board made the decision not to demolish the Parthenon. Nashville architect Russell E. Hart was engaged as the architect for the reconstruction and William B. Dinsmoor, eminent architectural historian and author of The Architecture of Ancient Greece, agreed to act as a consulting architect. The Centennial Parthenon has been an exterior copy only and not a completely accurate one at that. During the rebuilding, which took place from 1921 to 1931, great pains were taken to correct faulty measurements, to make use of all the latest scholarly judgments and archaeological evidence, and to reproduce all the optical refinements of the original. The replica was to be complete inside as well as out.

Expense, of course, was a consideration, and reinforced concrete was selected as the optimum building material to balance permanence and cost. But concrete looks nothing Pentelic marble and has the added disadvantage of being a rather cold and uninviting material. To counteract this latter difficulty, the builders chose to sheath the structural concrete in a concrete aggregate veneer developed by John Early of Washington, D.C.

Casts of the original Parthenon’s pedimental fragments, known as the Elgin Marbles, were purchased from the Victoria and Albert Museum so that sculptors Leopold and Belle Kinney Scholz could be as accurate as possible when recreating the pediments. After the molds were made and the final pedimental figures cast, the plaster casts remained as part of the Parthenon’s permanent exhibits.

In order that the Parthenon might continue to serve the Nashville community as an art center, a lower level was added to house twentieth-century art galleries and to provide support facilities for the entire structure. The lower floor and contemporary building material are the most obvious points at which the Nashville replica deviates from the original. But there were two more major differences: the building lacked its centerpiece, the huge statue of the goddess Athena, and the Ionic Frieze that surround the cella walls. The Scholzes made a proposal to the Park Board in 1931 to create both, but the Great Depression caused the project to be postponed indefinitely. In 1963, when Nashville reorganized into a metropolitan form of government, the Parthenon came under the management of the Metropolitan Board of Parks and Recreation.

In the 1980s the Athena Fund (the first incarnation of The Conservancy) was established to raise funds for the recreation of Athena. By 1990, Nashville sculptor Alan LeQuire had completed the splendid recreation of the goddess of wisdom and war, and the Parthenon took a giant step toward being a truly complete replica of the building which symbolizes, for so many, the civilization to which we owe so much.

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The Cowan Collection (back...)
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In 1897, James M. Cowan from Aurora, Illinois, visited the Tennessee Centennial Exposition. He visited as the director of a group of girls who made up the Armour Drill Corps of Chicago. Cowan already had ties to Tennessee. At the age of thirteen, he had moved with his family to Tullahoma, Tennessee, and remained there until he was in his twenties when he moved to Cincinnati. He subsequently made his wealth in insurance, but his true passion was collecting art. As he neared the end of his life, Cowan had some seven hundred pieces in his collection. Aware that Nashville’s Parthenon was being reconstructed as a permanent structure, he decided to donate anonymously a portion of his collection to be housed there. Between 1927 and 1929, the works were shipped to Nashville, to be moved into the Parthenon upon completion of the reconstruction.

In fact, he purchased many pieces specifically with this destination in mind, eventually giving sixty-three pieces to Nashville. These works, all oils on canvas, dating 1765-1923, are housed permanently in the Parthenon and bare the name of its generous donor – the Cowan Collection.

A distinguishing characteristic of this collection is that all of the work was done by American artists. Fifty-seven artists are represented in the collection, most of which dates late 19th and early 20th centuries. Almost all of the artists represented were also members of the National Academy of Design, a prestigious artists’ league of the time. Within the collection, many connections occur among the artists as among their paintings.

A common theme found in most of the paintings is Impressionism. Impressionism was a school of painting introduced by the French in the first Impressionism Exhibition held in Paris in 1874. It was an attempt using pure color to imitate light. Many of the artists in this collection studied in Paris during their careers. Within the collection can be found many secondary artist alliances including the Hudson River School, the Luminists, the Symbolists, Barbizon School influences, and Nabis influences.

The primary concentration in the collection is fifty-one landscapes, including many plein-air paintings (done on location) and four seascapes which emphasize an undulating ocean and coast; a difficult and unusual subject matter. There are eight portraits in the collection, all of which the subject of the portrait is anonymous.

Generally, there is one work by each artist in the collection, so in looking you can learn something of the man who formed this collection by his choices. We see a man who was taken with the landscape in its more unrefined form, and had a diverse and unusual interest in figure paintings. This is a fine collection of American art and we are indeed fortunate to have it here in Nashville.

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