Modern Collection

More about the Modern Collection

The core of the Modern collection was established in the late 1980s to the early 1990s through gifts from William H. and Eloise R. Chandler of more than 50 paintings by well-known American artists such as George Bellows, John Steuart Curry, Rockwell Kent, John Marin, and John Sloan. During the following decades, the Harn significantly added to the quality and depth of these holdings through purchases and generous gifts. In 1999, the Harn acquired a stellar Impressionist landscape by Claude Monet, Champ d’avoine (Oat Field)—a generous gift of Michael A. Singer—that paved the way for gifts and purchases of American Impressionist paintings by Theodore Robinson and Childe Hassam. A transformative gift in 2020 of nearly 1,200 works of Florida-themed art has provided new resources for exhibitions, programs, and teaching. The Florida Art Collection, Gift of Samuel H. and Roberta T. Vickers represents more than 800 artists, mostly American, who captured Florida’s landscape, history and people, and scenes of daily life.

 

Today, the Modern collection comprises more than 2,200 works spanning the mid-19th to the mid-20th century addressing a wide range of themes including history, identity, the realities of everyday life, social and technological change, popular culture, nature, and the environment. The collection represents many significant movements in American art, from the Hudson River School and Impressionism in the 19th century, to Geometric Abstraction, Urban and Social Realism, and Regionalism in the 20th century.

 

Highlighted American landscape paintings from the 19th century include examples by Martin Johnson Heade, Herman Herzog, William Morris Hunt, Thomas Moran, and Louis Comfort Tiffany. Impressionism and Post-Impressionism are represented by the paintings of Theodore Robinson, Childe Hassam, and Maurice Prendergast. Examples of early American Realism include works by George Bellows, George Luks, Ernest Lawson, and John Sloan whose portraits, landscapes, and city views reflect the quickly industrializing world and hastened pace of life in the early 20th century. Urban and Social Realist themes are represented in city views by Isabel Bishop, Reginald Marsh, and Raphael Soyer, while key examples of Regionalism include scenes by George Biddle, John Steuart Curry, and Robert Gwathmey. The collection also includes important paintings by Hale Woodruff and Palmer Hayden who were key figures in the Harlem Renaissance, a cultural movement that flourished in the 1920s and 30s in New York City. American Abstraction is represented by the hard-edged Geometric Abstraction of Suzy Frelinghuysen and Albert Gallatin, and the Precisionist paintings of Ralston Crawford, Francis Criss, Preston Dickinson, and Joseph Stella.

 

A significant collection of prints from the 1930s and 1940s, known as the Carnell Collection, comprises 175 prints representing more than 75 artists who were employed in the New York City Graphic Arts Division of the Works Progress Administration and the Federal Arts Project from 1935 to 1945. Examples include lithographs, engravings, woodcuts, wood engravings, etchings, aquatints and silkscreen prints by key figures in American printmaking such as Don Freeman, Jacob Kainen, Louis Lozowick, Nan Lurie, Ann Nooney, Leonard Pytlak, Joseph Vogel, and Hyman Warsager.

 

The collection also features sculptural works that represent the concerns of American modernists who experimented with color, line and space, and sought a balance between realism and abstraction. These include Alexander Archipenko, Jose de Creeft, John Flannagan, Gaston Lachaise, Elie Nadelman, Louise Nevelson, John Storrs and William Zorach, among others. The Harn’s holdings of American art glass include more than 100 stunning examples of glass artistry by two of the movement’s greatest pioneers, Louis Comfort Tiffany and Frederick Carder. These pieces span the 1890s through the 1930s and celebrate the innovation and creativity of American glass artists. Special highlights include Tiffany’s Eighteen-Light Pond Lily Lamp (c.1902) and many examples of Frederick Carder’s iridescent Aurene vessels, first created for Steuben Glass Works in 1904.

 

The museum’s collection of Latin American art continues to grow through important purchases and gifts. These holdings represent important works by artists from the Caribbean, Mexico, and Central America, as well as several countries in South America (Brazil, Chile, Uruguay). Examples include paintings by Uruguayan artist Joaquín Torres-García and Puerto Rican artist Ángel Botello, drawings by Mexican muralists Diego Rivera and Alfredo Ramos Martínez, and Surrealist-inspired drawings by Mexican artist Rufino Tamayo and Chilean artist Roberto Matta.

 

Holdings of European art include stellar examples of paintings, sculpture, and works on paper. Highlights include French Impressionist Claude Monet’s Giverny landscape Champ d’avoine (1890), Auguste Rodin’s Standing Fauness bronze from the artist’s famed Gates of Hell project (1880-1917), and drawings by the Swiss Romantic painter Henry Fuseli and Italian Futurist Umberto Boccioni. European prints include examples by Honoré Daumier, Francisco Goya, Henri Matisse, Edvard Munch, Pablo Picasso, Georges Rouault, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.