Modern Art

The Collection of Modern Art, featured primarily in the Joel and Lyla Harnett Gallery, is one of the true strengths of the Phoenix Art Museum. Comprised of more than 2,400 paintings, sculpture and works on paper from the turn of the 20th century up to 1950 represents many of the pioneers of European and American modernism, including the abstract designs of Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, Milton Avery, and Stuart Davis.

Among the American artists promoted by the famous photographer and art dealer Alfred Stieglitz are significant works by Marsden Hartley, Joseph Stella, Arthur Dove, Oscar Bluemner, and Georgia O'Keeffe. Explorations and experimentation in color can be found in paintings and mobiles by the American Alexander Calder, while Surrealist designs of the 1930s and 1940s are represented, as are works by Abstract Expressionists Hans Hoffman, Seymour Lipton and Willem De Kooning, and Color Field artists Mark Rothko and Helen Frankenthaler.

Select Exhibition History

Surrealism USA
Steele Gallery
June 5, 2005 – September 25, 2005

Vital Forms:
American Innovation in Art & Design, 1940-1960

Steele Gallery

April 6 - June 29, 2003

Left: Pink Abstraction, Georgia O'Keeffe, 1929. Oil on canvas. Collection of Phoenix Art Museum, Gift of Friends of Art. Center: Flowers, Italy, Joseph Stella, 1931. Oil on canvas. Collection of Phoenix Art Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Jonathan Marshall. Right:Female Bather with Raised Arms, Pablo Picasso, 1929. Oil on canvas. Collection of Phoenix Art Museum, Gift of the Allen-Bradley Company of Milwaukee.