The story
Three blue horses fill almost the whole canvas, their necks curving together against red and yellow hills. Franz Marc, a German painter of the Blue Rider group, made The Large Blue Horses in 1911, and when the Walker bought it in 1942 the purchase changed what kind of place this was. Until then the galleries had mostly shown the collection of T. B. Walker, a Minneapolis lumberman who first opened his home gallery to the public in 1879, with older European paintings and Chinese jades.
The Walker Art Center itself opened in 1940, revived with help from a New Deal arts programme. Through that decade money from Mrs. Gilbert Walker, the founder's daughter-in-law, went into the work of living artists. Edward Hopper's Office at Night came in those years too, a man at a desk and a woman at a filing cabinet seen from above, a view Hopper said was suggested by night rides on the elevated train in New York.
Today the Walker shows contemporary art and stages performance. Its brick building by the architect Edward Larrabee Barnes dates from 1971, and a 2005 extension by the Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron added a theatre and more galleries. Across the street lies the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, opened in 1988 with more than 60 works, where Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen's Spoonbridge and Cherry, a giant spoon balancing a red cherry, stands in a pond.
