During your visit to this Madison, Wisconsin attraction, explore its permanent collections and special exhibitions. In the Museum Shop you can browse products that inspire and reflect the range of artistic styles and cultural backgrounds on view at the Museum.
Highlights of the Chazen Museum of Art Collection
From the ancient world to modern times, the Chazen Museum of Art boasts over 20,000 works of art, including paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints, photographs and decorative arts that span across different geographic locations and cultures.
Paintings
The art museum’s Paintings collection spans from 1300 to the present and includes paintings from Europe and America. Among the artists represented in the collection are Giorgio Vasari, Frans Post, Cornelis Bega, Hubert Robert, Claude-Joseph Vernet, Gilbert Stuart, William Louis Sonntag, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, George Bellows, John Sloan and Sam Gilliam.
Sculpture
The Museum’s Sculpture collection includes ancient, Asian, European and American sculptures. The oldest object within the collection is a relief fragment depicting a priest from the tomb of Ptahhetep II from Egypt’s Old Kingdom, fifth dynasty. A large portion of the collection’s Asian sculptures come from South and Southeast Asia. European and American sculptures date from 1200 to the present with highlights including an English alabaster relief of the Lamentation, a northern Netherlandish Madonna and Child in wood from the late medieval period, Barye’s famous Theseus Combating the Minotaur and Raymond Duchamp-Villon’s The Horse.
Drawings and Watercolors
Among Chazen’s Drawings and Watercolors collection are European drawings and watercolors that date from 16th to18th centuries, including works by artists such as Nicolas Lancret, Jean-Baptiste and Giovanni Battista Piranesi. European and American drawings and watercolors from the 19th century include works by artists Edward Lear, John White Abbott, William Merritt Chase and Elihu Vedder. American and European 20th century drawings and watercolors are represented by artists George Bellows, Julio Gonzalez and Don Nice. Additionally, the collection includes a series of drawings by Russian sculptor Antoine Pevsner and a small collection of traditional Japanese and Chinese brush-paintings, dating from 17th to 20th centuries.
Prints
Prints dating from 15th to 17th centuries trace the development of woodcut, engraving and etching subjects. 18th century highlights within the Prints collection include early states of most of the prints of William Hogarth, a set of Los Capricios by Goya and two sets of Piranesi’s prints. 19th century prints document the European predilection for etching and include a series by Whistler and Turner as well as a large number of natural history plates by John Gould. 20th century prints within the collection document important movements such as Japonism, cubism and expressionism, represented by artists such as Arthur Wesley Dow, Pablo Picasso and Emil Nolde.
Photographs
The art museum’s Photographs collection includes images taken between the 1950s and 1980s. Photos taken by Ralph Gibson, Garry Winogrand, Elliott Erwitt and Aaron Siskind range from introspective meditations on the visual world to snapshots of street encounters to explorations of the lush possibilities of color.
Decorative Arts
The Decorative Arts collection is comprised of architectural decoration; beadwork, baskets and textiles; and ceramics, glass and metalwork. Architectural decorations include 5th-century Byzantine floor mosaics, a cast iron façade fragment from Louis Sullivan’s Gage Building, a Frank Lloyd Wright window depicting the Tree of Life designed for the Darwin D. Martin House in Buffalo and a colorful ceramic Spirit Wall from the Ming dynasty. Native American baskets; necklaces, crowns, purses and other ceremonial objects from Yoruba; and textiles produced by Wiener Werkstatte artists during the 1920s are also included in the Decorative Arts collection. Additional highlights within the collection include Chinese, English, Irish, French, German Meissen and Russian porcelain; Roman glass objects that date from ancient to contemporary times; and ancient coins connected to the Greco-Roman ruling elite.
Be sure to stop by the Museum Shop. Books, posters and cards that support Chazen’s collection and special exhibitions as well as home décor, jewelry and textiles are available to purchase.
Travel Tips
- The Chazen Museum of Art is ADA compliant.
- Do not forget your camera. Personal, non-flash photography is permitted in the Museum’s permanent collection galleries.