The Cleveland Museum of Art exists because three Cleveland industrialists - Hinman Hurlbut, John Huntington, and Horace Kelley - left trust endowments specifically for a public art museum. The neoclassical building, constructed from white Georgian marble in the Beaux-Arts style, opened on June 6, 1916, on the southern edge of Wade Park. The park itself takes its name from philanthropist Jeptha H. Wade, who donated part of his wooded estate to the city in 1881. His grandson, Jeptha H. Wade II, proclaimed the museum's mission at its opening: "for the benefit of all people, forever." That phrase was not rhetoric. More than a century later, the museum still charges no general admission. With a $920 million endowment - the fourth largest of any American art museum - it never has needed to.

The collection spans 6,000 years and 16 departments, from Chinese scroll paintings and Egyptian sculpture to Caravaggio, Picasso, and Warhol. Picasso's Blue Period masterpiece La Vie hangs here. So does Turner's The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons and Frederic Edwin Church's Twilight in the Wilderness. The museum is particularly renowned for its Asian art holdings, considered among the finest in the United States, and its Egyptian collection. In 2004, the museum acquired an ancient bronze believed to be an original work by the Greek sculptor Praxiteles - the Apollo Sauroktonos, later reattributed as Apollo the Python-Slayer. The contested provenance sparked years of scholarly investigation; in 2013, laboratory analysis dated the bronze to between 350 and 250 B.C., supporting its attribution as a genuine Praxiteles.

The original 1916 building has been expanded four times. The first addition in 1958 doubled the floor space. In 1971, modernist architect Marcel Breuer contributed a brutalist North Wing whose angular, two-toned granite facade stands in sharp contrast with the original neoclassical flourishes. A West Wing followed in 1983. Then came the most ambitious project: between 2001 and 2012, architect Rafael Vinoly demolished the 1958 and 1983 additions and wrapped the entire complex with new east and west wings connected by a soaring glass-roofed atrium. The $350 million expansion - the largest cultural project in Ohio's history - doubled the museum's total size. Movie fans may recognize the atrium: it stood in for S.H.I.E.L.D. headquarters in the 2014 Marvel film Captain America: The Winter Soldier.

The Armor Court has occupied its original location since 1916, displaying European arms and armor including a complete set of jousting armor for knight and horse from northern Italy, circa 1575 - man and horse armor together weighing 114 pounds. But the museum has also grappled with darker chapters of collecting. In 2013, it paid heirs of Arthur Feldmann to retain a drawing confiscated by the Nazis before they murdered him in the Holocaust. In 2017, it returned an ancient Roman portrait head stolen from an Italian museum in 1944. In 2023, New York prosecutors seized a Roman bronze sculpture connected to looting at the ancient Turkish town of Bubon. After extensive collaboration with Turkish authorities - including lead isotope analysis and mold comparisons - the museum announced in 2025 that it would repatriate the statue.

In 2019, the museum waived its rights to roughly 30,000 works in its permanent collection considered to be in the public domain, releasing high-resolution images under a Creative Commons Zero license. The ARTLENS Gallery offers a 40-foot interactive digital wall for browsing the entire collection, alongside digital studios where visitors create their own art. Nearly 770,000 visitors pass through the doors each year - a record set in 2018 - making it one of the most-visited art museums in the world. The Ingalls Library, one of the largest art museum libraries in the country, holds more than 500,000 volumes. Outside, Chester Beach's 1927 Fountain of the Waters still graces Wade Park, and Frank Jirouch's 1928 bronze sundial, Night Passing the Earth to Day, looks across the lagoon toward the museum entrance. The industrialists' vision endures: world-class art, free to all, forever.