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  Modern and contemporary art at the Gallery includes painting, sculpture and mixed medium work from 1900 to the present. The modern collection features masterworks by artists such as Joseph Albers, Louise Bourgeois, and Pablo Picasso, and includes Marcel Duchamp’s famous painting Tu m’ (1918). Many of these works came to Yale in the form of gifts and bequests from important American collections, including those of John Hay Whitney, Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, B.A. 1929, Stephen Carlton Clark, B.A. 1903, and the Katharine Ordway Collection. Art from 1920 to 1940 is strongly represented in the Société Anonyme Collection. This remarkable group of objects—conceived by the artists’ organization founded by Katherine S. Dreier and Marcel Duchamp with Man Ray—was transferred to Yale in 1941 by Dreier and Duchamp, and later expanded to over 1,000 items through additional gifts. The collection comprises a rich array of paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures by major twentieth-century artists, including Duchamp, Constantin Brancusi, Max Ernst, Wassily Kandinsky, Fernand Léger, El Lissitzky, Piet Mondrian, and Kurt Schwitters. For more information on the Société Anonyme, please visit http://artgallery.yale.edu/socanon.

The modern and contemporary art collection culminates in the dynamism of American art after the war. Highlights include Jackson Pollock’s Number 13A: Arabesque (1948) and Roy Lichtenstein’s Blam (1962), given with other important postwar works to the Gallery by Richard Brown Baker, B.A. 1935, and Charles B. Benenson, B.A. 1933. Significant works by artists such as Claes Oldenburg, Mark Rothko, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, and Andy Warhol are also featured. The Gallery’s collection of art from the 1970s to the present includes works by John Baldessari, Matthew Barney, Chuck Close, Eva Hesse, Roni Horn, Donald Judd, William Kentridge, Sol Lewitt, Kerry James Marshall, Robert Morris, Ree Morton, Martin Puryear, Gerhard Richter, Dieter Roth, and Do-Ho Suh.





Jennifer Gross
Jennifer Gross, the Seymour H. Knox, Jr., Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, recently organized the contemporary exhibition Continuous Present at the Yale University Art Gallery and the traveling exhibition The Société Anonyme:  Modernism for America. Dr. Gross is a visiting critic at the Yale School of Art. She earned her Ph.D. from the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She has published numerous essays and exhibition catalogues on contemporary artists including Kristin Baker, David Ireland, Josiah McElheny, Jim Nutt, Mamiko Otsubo, Laura Owens, Richard Tuttle, and Rachel Whiteread.Download curriculum vitae
Cathleen Chaffee
Cathleen Chaffee, the Horace W. Goldsmtih Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, received her M.A. from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London and is writing her Ph.D. dissertation for New York University on the exhibition practice of Marcel Broodthaers (1924–1976). Download curriculum vitae


Dreier, Katherine S., and Marcel Duchamp. Collection of the Société Anonyme: Museum of Modern Art 1920. Ed. George Heard Hamilton. New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 1950.

Forster-Hahn, Françoise. French and School of Paris Paintings in the Yale University Art Gallery. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1968.

Greenberg, Susan D. A Selection of French Impressionism from the Yale University Art Gallery. Foreword by Robert L. Herbert. New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 2002.

Gross, Jennifer R., ed. Edgar Degas: Defining the Modernist Edge. With essays by Suzanne Boorsch, Susan P. Casteras, Jill DeVonyar, Aruna D’Souza, Susan D. Greenberg, Richard Kendall, and Edgar Munhall. New Haven and London: Yale University Art Gallery and Yale University Press, 2003.

Herbert, Robert L., Eleanor S. Apter, and Elise K. Kenney, eds. The Société Anonyme and the Dreier Bequest at Yale University: A Catalogue Raisonné. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1984.

Hollander, John, and Joanna Weber, eds. Words for ../../../images: A Gallery of Poems. New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 2001.

The Katharine Ordway Collection. Introduction by Alan Shestack. Commentaries by Lesley K. Baier. New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 1983.

Newman, Sasha M., ed. Collecting with Richard Brown Baker. New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 1995.

Shestack, Alan, ed. Yale University Art Gallery: Selections. New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 1983.