North Carolina Museum of Art

COLLECTIONS - PERMANENT COLLECTION

Highlights | Permanent Collection | Origin of the Collection | Recent Acquisitions

Highlights of the American and Modern Collections

The North Carolina Museum of Art's collection spans more than 5,000 years, from ancient Egyptian artifacts to the latest in contemporary art. Admission to the permanent collection is free.

The hallmark of the collection is the Museum's European Galleries, boasting an enviable national and international reputation. Recently refurbished, the galleries boast masterworks of European painting and sculpture from the Renaissance through Impressionism, with important works by Giotto, Sandro Botticelli, Raphael, Anthony van Dyck, Peter Paul Rubens, Antonio Canova, Claude Monet and more. A recent addition to the galleries is the Museum's new Virginia Camp Smith Seventeenth-Century Flemish Kunstkamer, unique in American art institutions for its faithful recreation of a Flemish-style "art room" celebrating both the fine and the decorative arts.

A nearby gallery of American art from the 18th and 19th century features paintings by John Singleton Copley, Thomas Cole, Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, and William Merritt Chase. Much of the brilliance of the European and American Galleries dates back to the Museum's earliest days: an initial $1 million appropriation from the State of North Carolina in 1947, which was used to purchase 139 European and American paintings and sculpture (making this the first state in the nation to use public funds to buy a collection of art), and a matching gift from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation of 75 works of art in 1960—the second largest gift ever presented by that Foundation to an American art museum (after the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.).

Eight additional galleries include works spanning both centuries and continents.

Encompassing three galleries, the ancient collection includes two Egyptian coffins and other funerary art and important examples of sculpture and vase painting from the Greek and Roman worlds.

The Modern and Contemporary Galleries feature major works by such American artists as Marsden Hartley, Georgia O'Keeffe, Franz Kline, Frank Stella, John Biggers, Jacob Lawrence and Thomas Hart Benton, and by modern European masters including Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Paul Delvaux, Henry Moore, Anselm Kiefer and Gerhard Richter. The most recent works, dating to 2000, includes a new painting by David Salle and the Museum's first piece of video art, Bill Viola's haunting Quintet of Remembrance.

Galleries are also devoted to African, Ancient American, and Oceanic Art, and the Museum boasts one of several galleries in the country devoted to Jewish ceremonial art.