Nelson Atkins Museum Of Art Is A Treasure!

One of our first stops in Kansas City was the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art.
Recognized internationally as one of the finest general art museums in the United States, the Nelson-Atkins currently maintains collections of more than 33,500 works of art.
It's a great place to spend the day and it boasts a particularly strong American and contemporary art collection as well as African and European treasures. The Nelson Atkins also has the largest collections of paintings by Missouri's own Thomas Hart Benton and the largest collection of bronze sculptures by Henry Moore.
The Museum’s highly respected post-1945 collection is presented in the new Bloch Building (shown above).
Abstract Expressionist art, with its tragic, timeless and archetypal themes; Realist art, with its profoundly human desire to document the visible world; Pop Art, with its audacious elevation of popular culture to the realm of art; Minimalism, with its emphasis on systems and the materiality of the object; Conceptual Art, with its faith in the primacy of the idea; and a host of subsequent directions that ushered in a new pluralism and global scope are all represented here.
Major contemporary works by Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, David Smith, Richard Diebenkorn, Richard Estes, Duane Hanson, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Agnes Martin, Bridget Riley, Martin Puryear, Deborah Butterfield, Elizabeth Murray, Kerry James Marshall, Alexander Ross and Anish Kapoor are on view.
Seven sculptures by Isamu Noguchi are installed in the Noguchi Sculpture Court, a large, Zen-like space in the Bloch Building. Both the impact of the artist’s Japanese-American heritage and the influence of European Surrealism can be seen in this remarkable body of work. The Nelson-Atkins Museum exhibits the largest number of Noguchi sculptures in a public setting outside the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Museum in New York and Japan.
We enjoyed a wonderful day at this world class museum.
And here's the very best part: Admission is free!
But we suggest that you do leave a generous donation for this is surely a priceless gem.
Photo copyright 2010 by Dan Cirucci