About Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

Recognized internationally as one of the finest general art museums in the United States, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art now houses a collection of more than 33,500 works of art, from antiquity to the present.  The encyclopedic collection represents a pinnacle of artistic achievement and serves as evidence of humankind’s history, religions, philosophies, aspirations and daily lives.

Preeminent among these are the Asian art collections, particularly in the area of Chinese Art, in which the Museum’s holdings are among the most important in the world.  The Nelson-Atkins also has an especially strong collection of European paintings and of 20th-century sculpture, which includes the largest group of monumental bronzes in the United States by Henry Moore.  In 2006, the Museum also acquired one of the most important private collections of American photography, the Hallmark Photographic Collection. 

 

 

Inventory Details by Collection:

African Art
The African collection comprises approximately 300 artworks that are diverse in form and media.  Masks, sculpture, hair combs, headrests, textiles and vessels are among the many types of works represented; media include fiber, metal, wood, beads and clay.  Most of the works of art were created by artists living in West and Central Africa.  The Museum also holds a small collection of art from East and South Africa, including an exquisite life-like mask carved by a Yao artist from Tanzania and two sumptuously beaded capes created by Zulu artists in South Africa.  About 50 works in the Museum’s collection are among the best examples of African art in the world. 

American Art
Paintings, watercolors, drawings and sculpture from colonial times through the end of World War II comprise the nearly 600-piece-collection of American art.  Canvases by America’s best-known artists including Mary Cassatt, Winslow Homer, Edward Hopper and Georgia O’Keeffe are joined with the largest public holdings of works by Missouri’s most celebrated artistic native sons, George Caleb Bingham and Thomas Hart Benton. 

The collection has multiple examples by other American masters including George Bellows, Charles Burchfield, William Merritt Chase, George Inness and John Singer Sargent, and stellar examples relating to most of the major movements in American art, especially American Impressionism and Regionalism.

American Indian
The Museum’s holdings of North American Indian Art, numbering approximately 2,000 objects, are extensive and highly diverse, encompassing works from all of the primary culture areas and dating from the prehistoric period to the present.  These include textiles, pottery, basketry, beadwork, paintings on hide, cloth, and paper, and sculptural works of stone and wood.  Within this body of objects are a number of recognized masterworks, including one of the earliest documented Ojibwa beaded bandolier bags, a magnificent Northern Cheyenne headdress, rare early Cochiti and Santa Ana Pueblo pottery storage jars, two exceptional Navajo chief’s blankets, and an important Delaware spirit doll. 

Ancient Art
The collection of ancient Egyptian, Near Eastern, Greek, Etruscan and Roman art is comprised of more than 550 total objects, representing almost every genre and media in the ancient world.  The ancient Near Eastern collection includes works from the succeeding civilizations of ancient Mesopotamia and Iran: Sumeria, Assyria and Persia.

The collection of Greek art includes an extraordinary marble head of a youth, made at the beginning of the fifth century B.C., and a fourth-century B.C. marble lion.  Hellenistic sculptures complement the collection with a torso of a dancing satyr and a few excellent bronze statuettes.  Greek vases from the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. are included as well.  The Etruscan and Roman collection includes Imperial portraits from the second and third centuries A.D.; notable are portraits of the emperors Hadrian, Caracalla and Severus Alexander.  

Asian Art
The Museum’s Chinese collection is one of the finest in the world, with nearly 8,000 accessioned works representing the oldest continuous civilization’s highest achievements in every medium of art from every historical period.  The collection of Chinese paintings is particularly notable for its rare works from China’s most desirable period of early landscape painting¬ – the 10th through the 13th centuries.  The comprehensive ceramics collection spans 5,000 years, and Buddhist sculpture and wall paintings range from the Northern Dynasties to the Qing period and offer some of the best works of Buddhist art in the West.
A crowning jewel of the Museum is the Chinese Temple Gallery.  Among the Buddhist statues displayed here is the exquisite 11th-12th century polychrome wooden Seated Guanyin Bodhisattva. 

Decorative Arts
The collection of decorative arts includes approximately 5,500 objects, from the 13th century to the present, including American and European period rooms, architectural fragments, furniture, silver, metalwork, glass, textiles and ceramics.  As part of the reinstallation process, decorative arts are fully integrated into the appropriate collections galleries, offering a greater understanding of the culture and lifestyle of particular periods. 

The collection of ceramics includes rare examples of 18th-century European porcelains and the most important collection of pre-industrial British pottery outside Britain.  The collection numbers over 1,600 objects with particularly strong holdings of 17th- and 18th-century slipwares and delftwares. 

Significant recent acquisitions include a rare 17th-century slipware Owl Jug, one of only four remaining of its kind, as well as a pair of 20th century silver candelabra, a footed bowl commissioned by Napoleon III, and Ron Arad’s London Papardelle from 2004, which signals the Nelson-Atkins’ inclusion of contemporary design.

European Painting and Sculpture
The collection of European painting and sculpture, pre-20th century, numbers 1,147 works.  Among the strongest groups are the Italian paintings, of which a newly released catalog is available.  One of the Museum’s greatest treasures is Caravaggio’s Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness.  The stars of the Northern European paintings are The Madonna and Child in a Gothic Interior by Petrus Christus, Wtewael’s Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, and portraits by Rembrandt and Frans Hals. 

The French paintings include a major Poussin, The Triumph of Bacchus, as well as a fine collection of Impressionists and Post-Impressionists.  The latter includes Monet’s Boulevard des Capucines and Water Lilies, van Gogh’s Olive Orchard, Cezanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire, Gauguin’s Faaturuma, and works by Manet, Pissarro, Caillebotte and Seurat. 





Modern & Contemporary Art
The collection of modern and contemporary art includes European work from 1900 to the present and American art from 1945 to the present.  The collection includes important works by European modernists and documents the diversity of major post-1945 movements on both sides of the Atlantic. 

At the forefront of American museums collecting 20th- and 21st-century sculpture, the Nelson-Atkins holds works by Magdalena Abakanowicz, Tony Cragg, Mark di Suvero, Isamu Noguchi, George Segal, Joel Shapiro, Judith Shea, Carl Andre, Constantin Brancusi, Alexander Calder, Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti and Sol LeWitt, as well as more than 50 works by Henry Moore.  Museum landmarks include Walter De Maria’s One Sun / 34 Moons, gracing the Museum’s new entry plaza, and Shuttlecocks, by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, installed at four sites on the Museum’s expansive lawn.

In addition, the Nelson-Atkins has a rich collection of paintings that includes works by William Beckmann, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Willem de Kooning, Oskar Kokoschka, Emit Nolde, Marsden Hartley, Alexander Calder, Yves Tanguy, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, Jennifer Bartlett and Wayne Thiebaud. 

Photography
The Hallmark Photographic collection, with more than 6,500 works by 900 artists, is considered one of the most broad-ranging and important collections of American photography.  It represents the full spectrum of artistry and technical innovations in the entire history of photography, from 1839 to the present, from daguerreotypes to digital works.  The collection includes work by such masters as Southworth & Hawes, Carleton Watkins, Timothy O’Sullivan, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Alfred Stieglitz, Dorothea Lange, Harry Callahan, Lee Friedlander, Andy Warhol and Cindy Sherman.  Hallmark Cards Inc. pioneered the collection in 1964 with the acquisition of 141 prints by Harry Callahan.  It grew through the years to become one of the largest photography collections in private hands, and it was acquired by the Nelson-Atkins in 2006. 

Prints and Drawings
The Museum’s print collection, with more than 6,000 examples, is one of the largest collections in the Museum.  Old Master prints constitute about three-quarters of the collection, which ranges from the 15th to the 20th centuries.  Among the many complete graphic series are masterpieces by Albrecht Durer, Francisco Goya, William Blake, Honore Daumier, Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein.  Modern graphics of note include works by Pierre Bonnard, Paul Gauguin, Wassily Kandisky, Edouard Manet and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.