Carnegie Museum of Art

The Carnegie Museum of Art (CMOA) is an art museum with collections that include Fine Arts, Decorative Arts, Architecture, and Photography.

The museum’s collection comprises over 35,000 works that include European and American decorative arts from the late seventeenth century to the present. About 1,800 works are on view at any given time.

The CMOA was founded in 1895 by the Pittsburgh-based industrialist Andrew Carnegie. Carnegie stated that:

“an art-gallery in which shall be preserved a record of the progress and development of pictorial art in America.”

Carnegie envisioned a museum collection consisting of the “Old Masters of Tomorrow.”

The museum expanded significantly in 1907 with the addition of the Hall of Architecture and Hall of Sculpture. In 1974 the museum’s exhibition space more than doubled and it continues to be renovated and updated.

The 1907 Grand Staircase – Carnegie Museum of Art

The museum’s collection themes include:

Painting and Sculpture
Glass artworks
Photographs
Japanese Prints
Pittsburgh Artists
The Art of the Chair

Highlights of the Carnegie Museum of Art

“The Icebergs” by Frederic Edwin Church
The Wreck by Winslow Homer
Arrangement in Black: Portrait of Señor Pablo de Sarasate by James A. McNeill Whistler
Place des Lices by Paul Signac
Water Lilies (Nymphéas) by Claude Monet
Wheat Fields After the Rain (The Plain of Auvers) by Vincent Van Gogh
Bronze casts reproductions from Pompeii and Herculaneum
European decorative arts from the Rococo and Neoclassical periods
Plaster casts of outstanding from Romanesque, Gothic, and Renaissance European works
The unique cast of The West Portal of Saint-Gilles-du-Gard
A cast of the north transept portal of the Bordeaux Cathedral
Plaster casts from ancient and classical civilizations of Egypt, Greece, and Rome
An exhibition of architectural drawings and models
The collection of American art since 1850
The collections of African art, classical and Egyptian art, and older European art