Philadelphia Museum of Art - On View : In the Galleries : Modern & Contemporary Art

The Museum’s modern and contemporary art galleries feature objects from one of the most distinguished collections in the world.

Highlights from the Collections

Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War)

Explore objects on view in the Modern & Contemporary galleries >>

In these galleries, giants of modern art join younger artists who are breaking new ground today

Highlights you may find on view include works by such artistic giants as Pablo Picasso, Constantin Brancusi, Henri Matisse, and Joan Miró. The Stroud gallery boasts an extraordinary collection of works by Marcel Duchamp, including The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) and a number of iconic readymades.

The galleries of contemporary art include major works by Cy Twombly, Jasper Johns, and Sol LeWitt, along with younger artists who are breaking new ground today. There is also a video gallery, featuring changing exhibitions of works in new media.

Here, you may also find work by Mexican Modernists, African American artists, and self-taught or outsider artists. Changing exhibitions drawn from the Museum’s growing collection of modern and contemporary design are featured as well.

Joan Miró: Paintings 1925–1944

Gallery 48, ground floor

Joan Miró (Spanish, 1893–1983) was one of the great innovators of modern European painting. His early work, made in his native Barcelona—the culturally rich Catalan capital near the French border—reveals the influence of the bright colors and fragmented geometries of Fauvism and Cubism, revolutionary Parisian art movements of the early twentieth century. Upon moving to Paris in 1920, Miró became a prominent member of the still growing avant-garde, developing his signature, enigmatic style of biomorphic abstraction.

American Art of the Machine Age and The Stieglitz Circle

Galleries 49 & 50, ground floor

These installations showcase the Museum’s holdings in American modern art and design made during the transformative years of the early twentieth century.

Please note, many of the objects on view in these galleries rotate periodically.