Harvard Art Museum / Busch-Reisinger Museum

Self-Portrait in Tuxedo, 1927, Max Beckmann, Harvard Art Museum/Busch-Reisinger Museum. More.

The Harvard Art Museum/Busch-Reisinger Museum is the only museum in North America devoted to promoting exploration and critical understanding of the arts of the German-speaking countries of Central and Northern Europe in all media and from all periods. Founded in 1903 as the Germanic Museum through the efforts of Kuno Francke, a professor of German literature at Harvard, the museum originally contained only reproductions, notably plaster casts of major Germanic sculptural and architectural monuments that still constitute a valuable teaching resource. Renamed the Busch-Reisinger Museum in 1950 in honor of the St. Louis families who had contributed decisively to its support, the museum now holds nearly 40,000 original works of art that range in date from the 7th century to the present.

Under the curatorship (1930–1968) of Charles L. Kuhn, the museum developed into one of the leading collections of modern art from Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and related cultures. Today the museum has especially important holdings of late 19th-century painting, art of the Austrian Secession (Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Josef Hoffmann), German expressionism (Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Emil Nolde, Vassily Kandinsky), 1920s abstraction (El Lissitzky, László Moholy-Nagy), and material related to the Bauhaus (including the archives of Lyonel Feininger and Walter Gropius). Kuhn acquired the museum's first modern oil painting in 1941, Max Beckmann's 1927 Self-Portrait in Tuxedo, which the Nazis had confiscated from the Berlin Nationalgalerie as part of their campaign against so-called Degenerate Art.

In recent years, the Busch-Reisinger has focused on deepening its collection of postwar and contemporary art from German-speaking Europe. Holdings from this period include works by such major figures as the Zero Group, Gerhard Richter, and Sigmar Polke. Of particular note is the collection of unique and editioned artworks by Joseph Beuys, which is among the world's most comprehensive. The museum also provides visitors the opportunity to view works by many significant artists less well-known in the United States and seldom seen in American collections.

In addition to these exceptional modern and contemporary holdings, the museum has noteworthy collections of late medieval, Renaissance, and baroque sculpture, 16th-century painting, and 18th-century porcelain.