Modern & Contemporary Art

The Museum’s collections of modern and contemporary art present work made after 1945, with a strong emphasis placed on contemporary artists. The scope of the collections area has grown and diversified since the Museum began to collect modern art assiduously in the late 1940s. Early holdings in postwar art were shaped largely by gifts, many from artists, including Lee Bontecou, Sam Gilliam, Yayoi Kusama, Alice Neel, and Princeton alumnus Frank Stella. Alongside Willem de Kooning’s gift of Black Friday (1948), the former director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Princeton alumnus Alfred Barr donated Andy Warhol’s Blue Marilyn (1962), which marked postwar abstraction and Pop art, respectively, as collection strengths. Beyond the Museum’s walls, a 1968 gift endowing the John B. Putnam Memorial Collection filled the University campus with outdoor sculpture by artists such as Alexander Calder, Henry Moore, and Louise Nevelson, among others.  

The Museum’s first curator dedicated to modern and contemporary art was appointed in 2007. With the endowment of the Haskell Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art position in 2010, the collections have increasingly been inflected by global expansiveness, with artists representing six continents, to complement the University’s evolving teaching and research needs. Also in 2010, the Museum established the Sarah Lee Elson, Class of 1984, International Artist-in-Residence Program, which invites contemporary artists working outside of the United States to the Museum to engage with curators, faculty, students, and the community through lectures, workshops, and other programs.  

The Museum has prioritized and continues to actively acquire works by African and African Diasporic, Asian, Asian American, Indigenous North American, Latin American, Latinx, and Middle Eastern artists; enriching the Museum’s holdings by women has also been a sustained initiative for over twenty years. With the completion of the recent “campaign for art,” an effort to secure gifts and promised gifts of works of art on the occasion of the new building, key new works by artists including Ai Weiwei, El Anatsui, Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, Gerhard Richter, Mark Rothko, Nari Ward, and others join the collections.