Fogg Museum

Highland, Franklin, Yucca, 1999, Edward Ruscha, Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum. More

The Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum Department of Modern and Contemporary Art collects and studies works of art from 1900 to the present. The modern period is defined as from roughly 1900 to 1960 and is represented by painting and sculpture. Contemporary begins around 1960 and includes work in all media. This division, as arbitrary as any other, conceives of pop art—with its interest in everyday life, popular culture, the encroachment of the media into all aspects of life, and its exploitation of mechanical reproducibility—as offering a definitive rupture with modernism's varied, but self-proclaimed, pursuit of art for art's sake.

The department has great strength in European modernism, beginning with cubism and extending into American color field painting and minimalism. It overlaps in interest with the Department of American Art in developing strong holdings of American modernism (Jacob Lawrence, Georgia O’Keeffe, Marsden Hartley). It is also complemented by the significant German expressionist holdings of the Busch-Reisinger Museum. Students can study the development of cubism, specifically its profound challenge to the perspectival picture plane, in works by Cézanne, Picasso, and Braque. These developments challenged art’s traditional role of representation and offered instead the possibility that art, governed by principles similar to language, was a system of signification. Additionally, the collection charts the emergence of “pure” abstraction in works by Arthur Dove, David Smith, and Jackson Pollock.

Contemporary art at Harvard is marked by works that extend the Duchampian tradition of the readymade and the introduction of language into the visual arena. Many works experiment with nontraditional materials. In using materials as varied as everyday detritus (Leonardo Drew), store-bought materials (Rachel Harrison), or gunpowder (Cai Guo-Qiang), the art of our time has extended the very definition of art to encompass a broad range of practices and meanings. The department has modest strengths in video and other projection-based works (Marcel Broodthaers, Tacita Dean, Steve McQueen, Sharon Hayes) and a growing strength in art that embraces the linguistic turn, particularly art that deploys language to focus on the creation of subjectivity and its intersection with the public sphere (Ed Ruscha, Glenn Ligon, William Pope.L, and Roni Horn). True to the intense eclecticism of recent art, the department also extends the strong painting tradition of the first half of the century in works by Agnes Martin, Joan Snyder, and Kerry James Marshall.