National Gallery to Acquire Major Collection Featuring U.S. Artists

WASHINGTON — The National Gallery of Art announced agreement Thursday for the future acquisition of the extensive Meyerhoff collection of modern art, with emphasis on the works of prominent American artists.

Gallery director J. Carter Brown called it “one of the most important private collections in the world of art of the last 50 years.”

The collection, initiated in the 1950s, now consists of nearly 100 major American and European paintings and more than 100 drawings, prints and sculptures dating since World War II.

Owned by Maryland Couple

The gallery said the collection, which belongs to Maryland real estate developer Robert E. Meyerhoff and his wife, Jane, includes a strong concentration of works by Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg and Frank Stella, all major figures in postwar American art.

There also are outstanding paintings by such American abstract expressionist artists as Willem deKooning, Hans Hofmann, Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still, the gallery said.

The collection is displayed at galleries that the Meyerhoffs, who are leading Maryland philanthropists and art patrons, have built on their horse farm at Phoenix, Md.