Brooklyn Museum. Departments of European Painting and Sculpture, American Painting and Sculpture, Contemporary Art.

The origins of the Departments of European Painting and Sculpture, American Painting and Sculpture, and Contemporary Art can be traced to the opening of the Brooklyn Museum building in 1897. William Henry Goodyear, who had been titular curator of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences since 1890, became curator in 1899 of the Brooklyn Museum's new Department of Fine Arts, the predecessor of the Department of Painting and Sculpture.

In the early 1930s, the Department of Painting and Sculpture was reorganized into three components, based on important historical periods in Western art: Medieval Art, under Marvin C. Ross; Renaissance Art, with Frederick A. Sweet as curator; and Contemporary Art, under Herbert Tschudy. The galleries and museum floors were also arranged chronologically. In the early 1940s the department was re-consolidated under one curator: John I.H. Baur. Then in 1984 the department underwent another important restructuring dividing it geographically: American Art and European Art. A Contemporary Art division covered both geographic areas from 1945 to the present. In 2000 these divisions became three separate curatorial departments. Three years earlier photography was transferred to the Prints and Drawings Department.

...