The story
A public university on the plains of Oklahoma is an unexpected place to find Monet, Van Gogh and Renoir hanging together, yet the University of Oklahoma's art museum in Norman has had exactly that since 2000. In that year the alumnus Max Weitzenhoffer and his parents gave the museum their collection of French Impressionism, 33 paintings by Degas, Gauguin, Pissarro, Toulouse-Lautrec and Vincent van Gogh among others.
It counts as one of the largest gifts of Impressionist art ever made to a public university, and it turned a teaching collection begun in 1936 into a place worth a detour.
The museum carries the name of Fred Jones Jr., a student who died young. Beyond the French rooms its holdings run wide, with notable Native American and Southwestern art and a large group of Asian works gathered over the museum's long life on campus.
