American Art | European Art | Egyptian, Etruscan, & Greek Art | Asian Art | African, Pre-Columbian, & Oceanic Art | Kress Study Collection

The study of American artists, whose significance was once over-shadowed 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.

In nineteenth-century painting, Vanderbilt's collection includes oil paintings created by Childe Hassam, the leader of the American Impressionist movement; Jasper Cropsey; and George Inness, the Barbizon-influenced landscape painter. Early twentieth-century works in the collection include a painting by William Merritt Chase, considered to be the most important art teacher of his generation and whose students included Charles Demuth, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Charles Sheeler. The collection also includes The Picnic, Vermont, by Milton Avery, who alone perpetuated the post-Fauvist style of Matisse in America.

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.

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