New York CITY - The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA has acquired 174 works of art as a gift from the renowned contemporary collection of Edward R. Broida, MoMA Director Glenn D. Lowry announced. The fractional and promised gift highlights an international array of 38 artists through 108 paintings and sculptures, 54 drawings, and 12 prints, dating from the 1970s through the present. Among the exceptional works in the collection are the groups of paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints by Philip Guston, Vija Celmins, and Christopher Wilmarth, artists whom Mr. Broida collected in depth. The 36 works by Guston (American, born Canada, 1913-1980), comprising 12 paintings, 16 drawings and eight prints, provide a sweeping overview of his oeuvre from 1938 to 1980, but concentrates in particular on the bold narrative style Guston developed in the last decade of his life.

Celmins (American, born Latvia, 1938) is represented by a group of three paintings, three sculptures, eight drawings, and four prints, tracing almost 40 years of her career. The gift is especially rich in Celmins’ rare work of the 1960s and concludes with an important painting of a spider’s web from 2002. Wilmarth (American, 1943-1987) is represented by eleven sculptures and two drawings, covering the full span of his career. Added to the Museum’s existing holdings, this acquisition makes The Museum of Modern Art the world’s foremost collection of works by Guston, Celmins, and Wilmarth.

Mr. Lowry said, “The Museum is deeply grateful for Edward Broida’s generosity in donating these remarkable works. Mr. Broida’s commitment to these artists demonstrates a courageous and independent sense of connoisseurship. The breadth and significance of the gift and its importance within our collection cannot be overestimated. The Museum looks forward to presenting the collection to the public in the very near future.”

The gift also includes in-depth groups of paintings and sculptures by Jake Berthot, Mark di Suvero, Ken Price, Joel Shapiro, and John Walker. It features one or more major works by, among many others, Richard Artschwager, Jennifer Bartlett, Roni Horn, Wolfgang Laib, Elizabeth Murray, Bruce Nauman, Giuseppe Penone, Martin Puryear, Harvey Quaytman Susan Rothenberg, Richard Serra, William Tucker, and Richard Tuttle. Many of the drawings in the gift are by artists who work in sculpture; for example, works by Bryan Hunt, Joel Shapiro, William Tucker, Susana Solano, and Christopher Wilmarth show the way two-dimensional media can be an arena of experimentation for those whose work is primarily three-dimensional.

Mr. Broida, an architect and real estate developer born in Ohio and now residing in Malibu, California, began collecting art as a self-acknowledged novice in the late 1970s with the purchase of two paintings by Guston. Over the course of the next three decades he developed a collection of some 700 objects, notable for a great diversity of contemporary works of art nonetheless linked by a strong guiding sensibility. In preparation for the gift to the Museum, Mr. Broida invited the Museum’s curatorial staff to survey and make selections from his collection. Mr. Broida served on the Museum’s Drawings Committee from 1990 to 1996.

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