In the Wall Street Journal, Joel Henning limns the history of the Cleveland Museum of Art and its complicated path from world-class institution to the future. Halfway through a dramatic expansion, the museum has lost its director and still needs to raise $150m to build the second of Rafael Viñoly’s wings:

Cleveland’s museum is anything but bush league. A look at the beautifully restored and hung collections in the older buildings renovated under Mr. Viñoly’s master plan as well as the 25,000 square feet of new space offers evidence that much of what Cleveland owns is world class. Moreover, the unique ­vision of Sherman Lee, the ­museum’s seminal director for a quarter century, remains alive, even if what’s in the new East Wing galleries shows that his vision has been somewhat ­enlarged and ­updated. […]

Lee disdained the museum world’s fashionable enthusiasms. Thus he did not buy a Jackson Pollock until 1980 and passed on early opportunities to acquire works by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Jasper Johns (all now represented in the new galleries). He refused to recognize photography as a worthy component of a major art museum, requiring his successors to play catch-up. He preferred tasteful, high-minded, even scholarly art shows, resisting blockbuster exhibitions, ­recorded gallery tours and gift shops—all of which the current leadership embraces, as do virtually all of their peers. These qualities led the art critic John Canaday to call Lee’s Cleveland “the only really aristocratic art museum in the country.”

A New Wing, A New Direction (Wall Street Journal)