The collection forms a comprehensive survey of art history and is a focal point for public programming. Although the collections are richest in works of the Western tradition, there are significant holdings of outstanding works of Asian, African, Oceanic, and Native American art. Four areas of the collection are especially strong:
1. Renaissance and baroque painting and sculpture include works by Giovanni di Paolo, Fra Angelico, Antico, Rogier van der Weyden, Sebastiano del Piombo, Claude, Preti, Chardin, Gainsborough, and Reynolds.
2. Nineteenth-century art is represented with works by Goya, Thorvaldsen, Delacroix, Corot, Manet, Monet, Rodin, Cézanne, Degas, Cassatt, Renoir, Gauguin, van Gogh, and Seurat. American nineteenth- and early twentieth-century art includes masterpieces by Church, Sargent, Eakins, Prendergast, Tanner, Bellows, and Saint-Gaudens, as well as 43 works by Remington.
3. Twentieth-century art includes all major movements illustrated through works by Matisse, Picasso, Léger, Modigliani, Brancusi, Giacometti, Kandinsky, Klee, O' Keeffe, Pollock, Kline, Oldenburg, Rothko, Johns, Guston, Rothenburg, Nevelson, Bourgeois, and Baselitz.
4. Photography comprises over 10,000 works that feature extensive collections of Brassaï, Heartfield, Moholy-Nagy, Sudek, and Frank; over 900 contemporary photographs donated by Allan Chasanoff; and large-format mixed media works by contemporary artists, including Baldessari, Piper, and Boltanski. The contemporary Mexican photography collection is one of the two largest in the United States. The museum also owns one of the largest collections of photographs by African Americans outside of museums dedicated to African-American art.
In addition, nearly 6,000 prints and drawings include works from Dürer and Rembrandt, through Pollock and Johns. Decorative arts at the museum include fine examples of eighteenth-century European porcelain; seventeenth- and eighteenth- century Engli