The study of American artists, whose significance was once overshadowed by their European counterparts, has developed into a dynamic and popular branch of art history. The collection of American art at Vanderbilt remains one of the strongest areas of the university's holdings and provides a broad portrait of nineteenth- and twentieth-century stylistic movements. Those Americans represented in the collection include some of the most influential and well-known artists of the past two centuries.

Vanderbilt's nineteenth-century painting collection includes an oil painting by Jasper Cropsey, works created by a member of the American Impressionist movement, Childe Hassam, and the Barbizon-influenced landscape painter George Inness. The nineteenth century is also represented with a painting by William Merritt Chase, considered to be the most important teacher of his generation, whose students included Charles Demuth, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Charles Sheeler. The collection also includes The Picnic, Vermont by Milton Avery.

While the university owns a relatively small number of American paintings, the extensive holdings in nineteenth- and twentieth-century works on paper assist in illustrating the diversity of artistic movements that define American art. Significant painters and printmakers such as Mary Cassatt and James McNeill Whistler, both included in the collection, executed works that fully exploited and expanded the medium of printmaking. Furthermore, such modern masters as Regionalists John Steuart Curry and Grant Wood; Dadaist Man Ray; Abstract Expressionists Adolph Gottlieb, Robert Motherwell, and Lee Krasner; Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein; Minimalist Ad Reinhardt; as well as others, serve to present a unique view of the diversity and inventiveness of American artistic production.

Back to Fine Arts Gallery Collections screen

[ Fine Arts Department Homepage | Welcome | Undergraduate Program | Graduate Program | Faculty | Resources ]

[ Vanderbilt University Homepage | College of Arts and Science | Sarratt Gallery | Fine Arts Gallery ]