Princeton Collects Showcases New Gifts to the Museum

Princeton University is one of the oldest collecting institutions in the United States, having acquired its first work of art in 1755, only nine years after what was then known as the College of New Jersey was founded. The College’s initial collection was destroyed during the Battle of Princeton on January 3, 1777, causing it to have to start its collection anew, which it did with gusto in 1783, when its trustees commissioned a portrait of General George Washington to be painted from life by the greatest American portraitist of the time, Philadelphia’s Charles Willson Peale. The hero of the American Revolution was so pleased with the prospect that ultimately Washington underwrote the cost of the commission himself.

With this remarkable gesture began a history of philanthropy from which the Museum’s collections have grown over the past 244 years. Today’s collections number more than 117,000 works of art and are the direct result of philanthropy from the University’s alumni and many other friends who donated works of art or the funds with which to acquire them. That history continues into the present moment. From 2021 to June 30, 2025, some two hundred benefactors donated or made promised gifts totaling some 2,000 works of art committed over the past four years on the occasion of the new Museum facility. 

Dubbed a “campaign for art,” this effort to acquire gifts and promised gifts has had transformative impacts on our collections, our galleries, and our teaching, filling lacunae in our holdings and amplifying our strengths. The first gifts and promised gifts made as part of this effort were announced in 2022 and include an extraordinary group of eight modern paintings committed by Preston H. Haskell III, Class of 1960, with works by Mark Rothko, Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, and Gerhard Richter, among others.

Occupying the Museum’s two primary temporary exhibition spaces, Princeton Collects brings together approximately 150 works of art across media, time, cultures, and geographies from this larger group of gifts and promised gifts. It is in this sense a celebration of the Museum in miniature, and it was thus impossible to impose a single organizing principle on such a disparate corpus of material. Instead, works are installed in boundary-crossing ways to bring out formal affinities or shape provocative juxtapositions. The broad groupings offered in the exhibition are among those that inform the whole of the history of art, including interrogations of the human form; the compelling uses of materials, textures, and finishes; the dynamism of color and form; and the enduring power of landscape as subject. 

On view in one of these two exhibition spaces will be landmark gifts of Abstract Expressionist painting, historical and contemporary photography, American furniture and decorative arts, nineteenth-century British art, and more. The largest work executed to date by the Irish-born artist Sean Scully anchors the installation. The second space will feature selections of prints, drawings, and photographs that date from the dawn of printmaking in Europe to our present moment. Other works that have come to us as part of Princeton Collects are to be found throughout the building.

Entering the primary temporary exhibitions space, visitors will be greeted by an earthenware sculpture from Western Han dynasty China (206 BCE–9 CE) in the form of a so-called sleeve-dancer. In close relationship to this elegant figure will hang Willem de Kooning’s dynamic oil painting Woman II (1961). Contextually dissimilar, these artworks speak to each other in compelling ways: the furling sleeves of the figurine echo the sweeping brushstrokes of the painting; the traces of reddish-pink pigment that remain in the folds of the sleeve-dancer’s garment are picked up by a similar hue breaking through the vigorous blue in de Kooning’s composition. A profound sense of fluidity informs both works, establishing—as a case study—one of the organizing principles for the exhibition, namely artistic concerns that cross centuries and continents.

The breadth of materials represented by works in Princeton Collects is seen to the greatest advantage in a section of the exhibition that focuses on texture and materiality. In opposite corners from each other, one will find Gerhard Richter’s Abstract Painting (613-3) (1986) and a tall case clock (ca. 1760–70) designed by David Rittenhouse. Taken alone, these artworks stand as testaments to their creators’ deft manipulation of materials. Richter’s oil composition is built from purposeful layers, the first with ordinary brushwork and the second with the hard edge of a squeegee that the artist coated with paint and dragged across of the canvas. This action blended some layers of paint and tore through others, producing a palimpsest of broken surfaces, textural dynamism at its peak. The smooth, oiled walnut that houses the intricate brass clockface is a marked textural contrast to Richter’s painting, yet the rich wood grain calls to mind the orange brushwork visible in the right-hand side of the painting. The decorative brass filigree behind glass begs a closer look and impresses viewers with the skill of the artisan who crafted an object combining beauty with utility. 

Moving through the exhibition, visitors will find a large-scale acrylic painting by Dona Nelson paired with two smaller-scale oil paintings by Hans Hofmann. Nelson’s Providence (2023) and Hofmann’s Composition #3 (1952) are well matched in their vigorous application of colors and their expressive, sweeping forms and lines. However, the two artists embodied different approaches in practice: Nelson made Providence by pouring thinned acrylic paint onto the back of an unprimed canvas, allowing the fabric to absorb the paint while it seeped through to the front. The result is a multicolored web of pools, splotches, and skeins that permeate the surface chaotically and invite the canvas to be seen as having two fronts and no back. In Composition #3, Hofmann was concerned with pictorial structure and unity, the spatial illusion created through the “push and pull” of color, shape, and placement. Together, these works hint at the compelling history of abstraction across the past seventy-five years.

Landscape is another focus of Princeton Collects. Joan Mitchell’s monumental Aires Pour Marion (1975–76) creates a visual symphony emblematic of the artist’s interest in both Abstract Expressionism and landscape painting. Working in Vétheuil in northern France, overlooking Monet’s former home, Mitchell endeavored to “catch a feeling” rather than paint recognizable views, and she was deeply influenced both by Monet’s atmospheric, expansive canvases and by the rural landscape of the region.

Across from Mitchell’s work hangs a pair of photographs by Huang Yan, Chinese Landscape No. 5 and Chinese Landscape No. 8. In this series, the artist physically embodies the long and rich history of landscape painting in China by using his body as a canvas. In particular, he references the blue-and-green landscapes of the Tang dynasty (618–907), which have associations with imagined realms of immortals, now brought to bear on the fleeting ephemerality of human skin. Huang’s colors and compositions find further affinity with the aesthetic crafted by Mitchell in Aires Pour Marion. 

Altogether these distinctive pairings establish a rhythm of resonances across the galleries, providing a unifying structure to the sprawling diversity of Princeton Collects and offering glimpses of the remarkable ways in which the collections continue to grow and evolve thanks to the generosity of so many.

Princeton Collects will be on view October 31, 2025, to March 29, 2026. The exhibition is made possible by the Allen R. Adler, Class of 1967, and Frances Beatty Adler Exhibition Fund; the Donna and Hans J. Sternberg, Class of 1957, Art Museum Program Fund; the Melanie and John Clarke Exhibition Fund; and contributors to the Director’s Exhibition Fund.