19th- and 20th-century Art

McNay Collection / 19th & 20th Century Art

February 2013

19th & 20th Century Art

Marion Koogler McNay’s superb group of French Post-Impressionist and School of Paris works forms the heart of the museum’s painting collection of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her love of bold form and color, as well as a taste for unfinished works and paintings that show the artist’s hand, appears in many of these works. Since her founding bequest, the painting collection has grown to represent Impressionism and its forerunners, as well as later European works.

In the decade after the museum opened, director John Leeper developed a major strength in paintings by artists of the Stieglitz group, named for legendary American art dealer Alfred Stieglitz who promoted the careers of American Modernists. Abandoning imitative realism these artists expressed personal feelings or interpreted nature through harmonious arrangements of color, line, and other formal elements. Along with the Stieglitz circle of artists, their contemporaries and other Modernists also found a home at the McNay. Without representing the grittiness that earned the group the nickname Ashcan School, the McNay’s paintings do reflect the American experience.