Saint Louis Art Museum

The Saint Louis Art Museum sits in a grand stone hall built for a party. It was the Palace of Fine Arts at the 1904 World's Fair, the huge exposition that filled Forest Park, designed by the architect Cass Gilbert, and it was made to last while the rest of the fair's plaster palaces were pulled down. The carved motto over the entrance still reads Dedicated to Art.

Today it is free to enter, paid for by a regional tax, and it holds a surprise for a Midwestern city: the largest collection of Max Beckmann anywhere. The German painter, branded degenerate by the Nazis, spent his last years teaching a short drive away at Washington University, and the museum gathered his heavy, brooding figures in force.

A dark stone-and-glass wing by the British architect David Chipperfield opened in 2013 beside the old palace, holding the modern galleries, so the collection runs from ancient China to German Expressionism under two very different roofs.