Critics hated this modernist jewel box when it went up on Balboa Park's Plaza de Panama in 1965, but the Timken Museum of Art holds Old Master paintings and American art remarkable for a city of San Diego's size and age. The building itself is noteworthy for all the wrong initial reasons: it was built in 1965 in a modernist style that made it a stark outlier on the Plaza de Panama, surrounded by ornate Spanish Colonial Revival buildings. Critics hated it at the time and some still do.
But the collection inside has earned the institution enormous respect. The Timken holds European paintings from the twelfth through the nineteenth centuries — works by Rembrandt, Rubens, El Greco, François Boucher, and others — as well as a collection of American paintings and a gallery of Russian icons. The collection was assembled by the Putnam sisters, Amy, Anne, and Irene, San Diego philanthropists who spent decades acquiring works of genuine importance and donated them to the city.
Admission is free, has always been free, and is enshrined as a condition of the museum's founding charter. In an era when major museum admission fees can reach $30 or more, the Timken's open-door policy is a radical act of civic generosity.