During your visit to the Milwaukee Art Museum, explore the Museum’s collection and special exhibitions spread throughout the War Memorial Center, the Kahler Building and the Quadracci Pavilion. Outside you can discover the Cudahy Gardens which provide a tranquil divide between the city and the Museum. The Milwaukee Art Museum also offers dinning at Café Calatrava and the Coffee Shop and shopping in the Milwaukee Art Museum Store.
Milwaukee Art Museum Collection
The Milwaukee Art Museum collection spans from antiquity to the present, including 15th- to 20th century European and 17th- to 20th-century American paintings, sculpture, prints drawings, decorative arts, photographs, folk and self-taught art. Strengths within the collection include American decorative arts, German expressionism, folk and Haitian art, American art after 1960 and one of the largest collections of works by Wisconsin native Georgia O’ Keeffe. Other renowned artists represented in the Museum’s collection include Nardo di Cione, Francisco de Zurbaran, Jean-Honore Fragonard, Winslow Homer, Auguste Rodin, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro, Mark Rothko, Robert Gober and Andy Warhol.
The Mrs. Harry L. Bradley Collection
The Mrs. Harry L. Bradley Collection contains important European and American paintings, prints, watercolors and sculpture that date from the late 19th century to the late 20th century. Included in the collection are Fauve paintings by George Braque and Maurice de Vlaminck, seminal Expressionist paintings by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Wassily Kandinsky, and works by Pablo Picasso and Alberto Giacometti.
American Decorative Arts and Chipstone Foundation
Milwaukee Art Museum’s American Decorative Arts Collection is among the finest ensembles of pre-1900 decorative arts. On display you can see the earliest surviving American-made chair and 18th-century Philadelphia furniture carved by “the Garvan Carver.” Additional displays feature American and English ceramics and American silver.
Marcia and Granvil Specks Collection
The Marcia and Granvil Collection is among one of the most important collections of German Expressionist prints in the United States. The collection includes over 450 prints by German artists including Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Käthe Kollwitz, Emil Nolde, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and George Grosz.
The Flagg Collection of Decorative Arts and Sculpture
Over 100 historically significant objects from the Renaissance and Baroque periods make up the Flagg Collection of Decorative Arts and Sculpture. Works within the collection including clocks, tableware and vessels, cabinets and larger furniture pieces, and intricately tooled metalwork are recognized for their virtuoso displays of craftsmanship and use of precious materials.
The Floyd and Josephine Segel Collection of Photography
Over 300 works by master photographers such as Diana Arbus, Bill Brandt and Irving Penn were donated to the Milwaukee Art Museum by Floyd and Josephine Segel in 1986. While most of the photographs within the collection fall within the humanist tradition, the collection also includes a photogram by Man Ray and experimental works by André Kertész.
The Layton Art Collection
Gifted to the Museum by meat packer Frederick Layton in 1888, the Layton Art Collection originally consisted of 38 paintings by European artists William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Jules Bastien-Lepage, James Tissot, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, and Frederic Leighton and American artists Winslow Homer, Frederic Edwin Church and Asher Brown Durand. Since it was established, important landscape and genre scenes by Thomas Cole, Eastman Johnson, and Washington Allston, as well as an impressive group of colonial portraits have been added to the Layton Art Collection.
The Maurice and Esther Leah Ritz Collection
The Maurice and Esther Leah Ritz Collection is comprised of nearly 300 works including paintings, drawings and prints by artists from Rembrandt to Georg Baselitz with a concentration on German Expressionists and the Ashcan school. The collection’s highlights include paintings by Gabriele Münter, Alexej von Jawlensky, and Paula Modersohn Becker and prints by Paul Gauguin, James Ensor, Jacques Villon and Vassily Kandinsky.
The Michael and Julie Hall Collection of American Folk Art
Boasting some 270 objects that date from the 18th century to the present, the Michael and Julie Hall Collection of American Folk Art is one of the finest in the nation, revealing the traditional roots and individual creativity of folk art from 18th century colonial America through the work of self-taught artists like Bill Traylor, Edgar Tolson, Felipe B. Archuleta and Elijah Pierce.
The René von Schleinitz Collection
The Milwaukee Art Museum boasts extensive collections of German art including the René von Schleinitz Collection of 19th century German and Austrian paintings and decorative arts. Artists represented within the René von Schleinitz Collection are Franz Seraph von Lenbach, Carl Spitzweg, Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller and Franz von Defregger. Highlights within the collection include Biedermeier furniture and decorative arts that include important examples by well-known Viennese and Berlin craftsman.
The Richard and Erna Flagg Collection of Haitian Art
The Richard and Erna Flagg Collection of Haitian Art is among the finest in the world. The collection is comprised of 90 paintings and sculptures by artists Hector Hyppolite, Castera Bazile, Wilson Bigaud, Préfète Duffaut, Philomé Obin, Rigaud Benoit and Georges Liautaud.
The Anthony Petullo Collection
At the core of the Anthony Petullo Collection is European self-taught art. Gifted to the Museum by Anthony Petullo, who built his collection over a span of three decades, the collection represents the most extensive grouping of this work in any American museum or private collection, making the Milwaukee Art Museum a leading American institution for self-taught material.
Cudahy Gardens
Outside you can discover the Cudahy Gardens, providing a tranquil divide between the city and the Museum. Designed by landscape architect Dan Kiley, the Cudahy Gardens site is 600 feet long and 100 feet wide. It features a series of high hedgerows and a fountain with a solid 4-foot-high curtain of water that divides the garden into ten sloping lawns. On each end of Cudahy Gardens is a plaza with a fountain that sprays water 35 feet in the air.
Dining at Milwaukee Art Museum
Enjoy a snack or lunch at the Milwaukee Art museum. The Coffee Shop, located at the southeast corner of Windhover Hall, serves organic fair-trade coffee, drinks, snacks and fresh desserts from independent local bakeries. Café Calatrava features an ever-changing menu of contemporary cuisine and seating that overlooks beautiful Lake Michigan.
Shop Milwaukee Art Museum Store
Be sure to stop by the Milwaukee Art Museum Store. Contemporary design objects and handcrafted items by local and nationally recognized artists, a selection of books, jewelry by known designers and toys for all ages are available to purchase.