Modern Art and Design

August 2, 2016–July 9, 2017

Installation views of the Smart's gallery of Modern Art and Design.

The modern gallery features European, American, and Latin American painting, sculpture, and decorative arts dating from the 1880s to the early 1960s.

Highlights of the 2016–2017 installation include masterpieces like Frank Lloyd Wright's Robie House furniture as well as paintings by Diego Rivera, Robert Motherwell, Kenneth Noland, and Mark Rothko.

These and other works demonstrate the varied ways artists and designers of the period responded to a world transformed by industrialization, city population growth, and shifting social structures and political ideologies, forces that spawned both mechanized warfare and new forms of urban leisure.

Artists devised innovative styles and subject matter to embody such experiences, including images of the city and its entertainments, the unconscious mind and charged inner feelings, and the formal and material properties of art itself.

Collection Rotations

In 2016–2017, a portion of the Modern Art & Design gallery will be used as the primary site of the special project Conversations with the Collection: Belonging. 

Presented in the Elisabeth and William M. Landes Gallery