Where did they go? Lowry School’s missing artwork

When Thomas Lowry School opened at 29th Avenue and Lincoln Street NE in the fall of 1915, its students were greeted by 226 pieces of art specifically chosen by Lowry’s widow, Beatrice, to grace the hallways and classroom walls of the 16-room school named after the Minneapolis streetcar magnate. When the school was torn down 63 years later, the pictures were missing. Where did they go?

It’s a question that’s bothered Lowell Ludford of St. Anthony for many years. Ludford attended the school from 1936 to 1944, “give or take a year or two,” he said recently.  He’s searched for clues to the pictures’ whereabouts for many years.

Beatrice Goodrich Lowry’s gift was extravagant for the time — $5,000 worth of personally curated art, each piece identically framed in quartersawn oak to match the school’s woodwork. The collection would be worth approximately $160,000 today. According to a Jan. 16, 1916 Minneapolis Journal article, Lowry spent the last six months of her life directing the project.

“Each room in the building has from eight to nine pictures, adapted to the ages of the children and the progress they have made in school,” Harriet S. Flagg wrote for the Journal. “History, geography, literature and composition are developed around the pictures in each room.”

Flagg noted that Lowry made detailed drawings of each room and specified the location of each piece.

For example, the kindergarten room featured “Children of the Sea” by Josef Israels, while fifth graders in room 206 got to gaze upon “Dutch Courtyard” by Pieter de Hooch. Hallways were decorated with “Washington’s Farewell” by Andrew C. Gow and Edwin H. Blashfield’s “Source of the Mississippi,” among others.

The principal’s office was also the recipient of Lowry’s hand-selected art. According to Harriet Flagg, “Miss Anna Sand, the principal, believes that the old idea of the principal’s room being a sort of school police court has passed. Here will be pictures suggesting the idea of paternal care, of co-operation (sic), of consideration.”

Hung just outside of the school office was a photo of Karl Bitter’s memorial statue of Thomas Lowry, which stands today at the intersection of Hennepin Avenue, Emerson Avenue and 24th Street in Uptown.

The teachers’ lounge, sewing room and cooking room were also decorated to Beatrice Lowry’s specifications.

Many of the artworks in the collection would not be allowed in today’s public school classrooms because of their religious content; certainly, “Jesus and Children” and “Sistine Madonna” would not make the cut. Pictures of Native Americans were of the “noble savage” variety, which many would find offensive today.

Ludford recalls being particularly impressed by a photograph of Amiens Cathedral in France. “The framed photo was so big it had to be hung on a staircase wall,” he wrote in an email. “As a youngster living in upper Northeast (Johnson Street) all the churches I was familiar with were mostly small, one- or two-story neighborhood buildings.  I couldn’t imagine a church so big, and in a far-away country somewhere.  Little did I know then that many years later as an adult I would travel to France and actually see that very cathedral. I still can’t get over it.”

Although the K-8 school started in the fall of 1915, the grand opening celebration wasn’t held until March 6, 1916. Beatrice Lowry had died the previous October, but her gift was acknowledged in the program, which listed the artworks room by room.

The celebration included speeches, and a presentation of 16 silk American flags — one for each room — which were also provided by Lowry.

Over the years, as the Minneapolis school population grew, Northeast Junior High School was built, and Thomas Lowry became a K-6 school. As the classrooms shifted, the artwork probably did, too.

Familial connections

Ludford has another connection to Lowry School: His uncle, Willard Ludford.

Born in 1916, the same year that Lowry School opened, Willard Ludford taught at several Northeast schools, including Lowry, Sheridan, Schiller and Edison. He served as principal at Lowry from 1967 to 1973. It was during his tenure that the pictures disappeared from the walls.

By the 1970s, Thomas Lowry Elementary’s slate steps had grooves worn in them by the thousands of children who’d climbed them. Minneapolis Public Schools were under court-ordered desegregation. As white parents and their children decamped for the suburbs, the school population fell. Minnesota had a new statute requiring that classrooms for pre-K through second grade students be located on the same floor as the school’s exit. A two-story grade school was out of fashion.

Beatrice Lowry’s art choices were out of fashion, too. There probably weren’t very many city kids who could relate to pictures of cows being milked by hand, or a Spanish princess who lived in the 1600s. It’s hard to imagine the first and second generations of students who watched “Captain Kangaroo” on television being interested in a portrait of the book-burning priest Savonarola.

Perhaps the pictures were removed when the walls were repainted and never put back up. Maybe they graced the offices of people throughout the school district. Maybe they ended up as fuel for the school’s boiler.  All Lowell Ludford knows is that they weren’t in the school when it closed in 1977. During the school’s closing ceremony, many former students who came for one last look at the building asked, “Where are the pictures?”

In 2015, Ludford wrote to then-interim superintendent Michael Goar asking for the pictures’ whereabouts. Although the school district put former interim superintendent Mitchell Trockman on the case, no trace of the art was found, despite months of searching.

The brown brick building next to Audubon Park was demolished in 1978. The fate of Beatrice Lowry’s gift may never be known.

Editor’s note: Cynthia Sowden vaguely remembers studying Jean-François Millet’s “The Angelus” in her fifth-grade class at Lowry School during the 1960s.