Joslyn Art Museum opened to the public in 1931 as the Society of Liberal Arts. Since that time, the Museum’s collection has grown to include over 11,000 works representing artists and cultures from antiquity to the present. Highlights include a highly regarded collection of Greek pottery; Renaissance and Baroque masterworks by Titian, El Greco, Veronese, Jacob Van Ruisdael, and Claude Lorrain; noteworthy nineteenth-century French paintings by Jules Breton, William Adolphe Bouguereau, and Jean-Léon Gérôme; and Impressionist masterpieces by Camille Pissarro, Auguste Renoir, and Claude Monet.
Joslyn’s equally renowned collection of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American art includes portraits by James Peale, Mary Cassatt, and Thomas Eakins; genre paintings by Severin Roesen, Eastman Johnson, and William M. Harnett; and images of the American landscape by Thomas Cole, Thomas Worthington Whittredge, Albert Bierstadt, and Thomas Moran.
The twentieth century is well represented with major paintings by Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, George Ault, Jackson Pollock, Kenneth Noland, and Helen Frankenthaler, and contemporary works by artists including Robert Irwin, Donald Judd, George Segal, and Martin Puryear.
Joslyn Art Museum is internationally recognized for its collection of artists and explorers of the American West, including major holdings by Alfred Jacob Miller and nearly 400 watercolors and drawings by Swiss artist Karl Bodmer, who journeyed up the Missouri River between 1832–34 to portray the landscapes of the high plains and its native inhabitants. American Indian cultures are represented by a diverse collection of nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists, as well as nineteenth-century portraits of important Plains chiefs by Charles Bird King and Henry Inman.
Joslyn features an active exhibition program that presents art of the ancient world; European and American painting; modern and contemporary art; photography; and the American West.
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