The museum began to systematically collect Modern art in the late 1940s and 1950s. Many of the key works in its collection were presented by generous donors, mainly alumni, as gifts or bequests. There is an important group of late landscapes by Claude Monet, and an enigmatic painting by Édouard Manet, known as Gypsy with a Cigarette. The painting by Max Ernst, The Witch, represents Surrealism, and Blue Marilyn by Andy Warhol is an early example of Pop Art—both were gifts of Alfred Barr, the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. A small but select group of works by Central European modernists includes landscapes and portraits by Wassily Kandinsky, Gabriele Münter, and Emil Nolde. A rare late work by Ilya Repin is one of the artist’s most important paintings outside of Russia.

The Abstract Expressionist style can be studied in Willem de Kooning’s Black Friday, from the artist’s breakthrough exhibition in 1948. A generation of artists and collectors joined in donating works to honor William C. Seitz, Graduate School Class of 1955, author of the first American doctoral dissertation on living American artists and the teacher of a painting class taken at Princeton by Frank Stella, Class of 1958. The recently given Head of a Man and Seated Nude by Pablo Picasso is the Museum’s first painting by the artist who dominated twentieth-century art.

Search this Collection