Carnegie Museum of Art

While most art museums founded at the turn of the century focused on collections of old masters, Andrew Carnegie envisioned a museum collection consisting of the "Old Masters of tomorrow." In 1896 he initiated a series of exhibitions of contemporary art and proposed that the museum's paintings collection be formed through purchases from this series. Carnegie, thereby, founded what is arguably the first museum of modern art in the United States. Early acquisitions of works by such artists as Winslow Homer, James McNeill Whistler, and Camille Pissarro laid the foundation for a collection that today is distinguished in American art from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, in French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings, and in significant late-twentieth-century works.