Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh - Carnegie Museum of Art

Carnegie Museum of Art

When Andrew Carnegie envisioned a museum collection consisting of the "Old Masters of tomorrow", the Carnegie Museum of Art became, arguably, the first museum of modern art in the United States. Founded in 1895, today it continues Carnegie's love of contemporary art by staging the Carnegie International every few years. Numerous significant works from the Internationals have been acquired for museum's permanent collection including Winslow Homer's The Wreck (1896) and James A. McNeill Whistler's Arrangement in Black: Portrait of Señor Pablo de Sarasate (1884). The marble Hall of Sculpture replicates the interior of the Parthenon. The Hall of Architecture contains the largest collection of plaster casts of architectural masterpieces in America and one of the three largest in the world. The Heinz Architectural Center, opened as part of the museum in 1993, is dedicated to the collection, study, and exhibition of architectural drawings and models. In 2001 the museum acquired the archive of African-American photographer Charles "Teenie" Harris, consisting of approximately 80,000 photographic negatives spanning from the 1930s to the 1970s. Many of these images have been catalogued and digitized and are available online via the Carnegie Museum of Art Collections Search.

The museum's permanent collection includes European and American decorative arts from the late seventeenth century to the present, works on paper, paintings, prints (notably Japanese prints), sculptures and installations.