The High Museum of Art was founded in 1905 as the Atlanta Art Association. In 1926, Harriet Wilson High (1862-1932), widow of department store owner Joseph Madison High (1855-1906), donated her home on Peachtree Street to be used as a museum for the Association’s collection.

In 1949, the museum received a large donation of late 19th and early 20th century American paintings from the estate of James Joseph Haverty (1858-1939), founder of Haverty’s Furniture and a prominent art collector at the time. Nine years later, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation donated much of its collection of Italian Baroque art (paintings, sculptures, and furniture) to museums all over the United States, including the High. The donation established the basis for the museum’s European Art collection.

On June 3, 1962, a group of 106 members of the Atlanta Art Association, as well as 24 others, died when their chartered plane crashed at Orly Airport in Paris, France. They were returning to Atlanta after a trip visiting great European artworks. The crash at Orly killed many of Atlanta’s most prominent citizens and patrons of the arts. It galvanized the city into creating the Atlanta Art Alliance and building the Memorial Arts Center as a memorial to the crash victims. The Memorial Arts Center became the new home for the High Museum as well as the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, the Alliance Theater, and the Atlanta College of Art, later known as the Atlanta campus of the Savannah College of Art And Design (SCAD). The Memorial Arts Center opened in 1968.

In 1982, Robert W. Woodruff (1889-1985) gave the Center its largest gift to that date and paved the way for an expansion, with famed architect Richard Meier (1934- ) designing the High Museum’s new building. The Memorial Arts Center was renamed in Woodruff’s honor and Meier won the Pritzker Prize for his work on the High Museum. Later, Renzo Piano (1937- ) designed a large addition to the Woodruff Arts Center, which opened in 2005.