The story
On the 3rd of June 1962, a chartered plane carrying more than a hundred of Atlanta's art patrons crashed on takeoff at Orly airport near Paris. They had been touring Europe's museums together, and 106 of them died in seconds, the worst loss the city's cultural world had ever suffered.
Atlanta answered by building. An arts centre rose as a memorial, funded partly by an anonymous eight-million-dollar gift, and it grew into the complex the High Museum belongs to today. France sent a cast of Auguste Rodin's The Shade, a bowed bronze figure that stands over the victims' names on the museum grounds.
The gallery itself became a landmark in 1983 when Richard Meier wrapped it in white porcelain panels and a great curving ramp of light, and Renzo Piano added more room in 2005. Inside, the collection is strongest in American art and in the self-taught art of the South, from Howard Finster's painted sermons to the quilts of the Black women of Gee's Bend.
