In focus: Princeton University Art Museum

Founded in 1882, the Princeton University Art Museum is one of the leading university art museums in the country. From a founding gift of a collection of porcelain and pottery, the collections have grown to more than 60,000 works of art that range from ancient to contemporary art and concentrate geographically on the Mediterranean regions, Western Europe, China, the United States and Latin America.

• The arts of the ancient world have been principal components of the museum's collection since its beginning. The first major collection to enter the museum included numerous Egyptian, Greek, Roman and Etruscan vases. Today, the collection of ancient art numbers more than 5,000 objects.
   
• The works exhibited in the newly renovated gallery of African art have been reinstalled to reveal the continent's immense diversity of artistic production. On view are works from west, central and south Africa, including objects of prestige and daily use, royal regalia, and symbols of secret societies and sculptures that mark rites of passage such as birth, initiation and death.
   
• The galleries of Asian art include important collections from China, Japan, Korea, Southeast and Central Asia and India dating from Neolithic to present times.
   
• The longstanding commitment of Princeton's Department of Art and Archaeology to art of the Middle Ages is supported in the museum by examples of architectural sculpture, stained glass windows, Limoges enamels and ivories from the Byzantine Empire and the West.
   
• The collection of Western paintings ranges from early gold ground paintings by Guido de Siena to Impressionist and post-Impressionist masterpieces by Claude Monet and Vincent van Gogh to Surrealist canvases by Max Ernst and contemporary works by Andy Warhol.
   
• The photography collection at Princeton is one of the leading museum collections in the country. The first photograph in the collection, a work by Alfred Stieglitz, was registered in 1949. The department's holdings have grown to more than 20,000 photographs by some 900 artists, forming a comprehensive history of the medium from its origins in the 1840s to the present.
   
• The Department of Prints and Drawings houses more than 8,000 prints and 7,000 drawings by European and American artists ranging from French 14th-century illuminated manuscripts to prints by contemporary Latin American artists. 

From the Weekly Bulletin.