This exhibition highlights a selection of purchases, gifts, and bequests since the year 2000—a group so varied it encompasses the Museum’s departments of American art, costume and textiles, East Asian art, and European decorative arts.

John G. Johnson acquired many seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish still-life paintings, including three by Willem Kalf; an early kitchen scene and two of the later pronk, or sumptuous still lifes, for which Kalf is best known.

The Museum welcomes two masterpieces made for Philadelphia by two of nineteenth-century America’s finest artists, Thomas Eakins and Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Close contemporaries and friends, they both trained in Paris and traveled in Europe before returning to the United States about 1870 to begin distinguished careers. Sharing a belief in the expressive power of the human body as a subject for modern painting and sculpture, they developed different styles.

Kansai Yamamoto is one of the founding fathers of Japanese contemporary fashion. Best known for his work during the 1970s and 1980s, his avant-garde designs are inspired by the colorful Azuchi-Momoyama period (1568-1600) and traditional Kabuki theatre. The exuberant Pop-like quality of his work contrasts with what is today associated with Japanese fashion, Zen-like simplicity and deconstructed silhouettes.