Masterworks of Abstract Expressionism Gifted to the Princeton University Art Museum

A longtime collector of post–World War II abstract art, Haskell served on the Museum’s Advisory Council for twenty-four years and as its chair for four years (2010–14), prior to moving to honorary status. In 2010 he endowed the Haskell Curatorship of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Museum, a position held by Mitra Abbaspour. “Early on, I focused on the American postwar abstract expressionism movement, works that are entirely nonobjective and highly spontaneous, colorful, and emotional,” Haskell says. “I found myself passionately drawn to the energy, mystery, and excitement of these works—a passion that is as difficult to rationalize as the art itself.”

Six of the eight paintings featured in the Museum’s exhibition Rothko to Richter: Mark-Making in Abstract Painting from the Collection of Preston H. Haskell, held in 2014. The exhibition explored the dramatic developments in abstract art that unfolded between 1950 and 1990, when experimen­tation with various methods of producing an abstraction and applying paint to a surface was common as artists alternately emphasized or suppressed traces of their touch.

The exhibition’s curator, Kelly Baum, who was the Museum’s first Haskell Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, wrote in the accompanying catalogue:

“As seen through the perspective of the Haskell Collection, painting does not progress in a linear fashion from one movement to its successor, concluding triumphantly at a particular moment in time; instead, it advances, falters, invents, borrows, revisits, breaks, resumes, and changes. . . . Precisely because the collection to which they belong represents the unique perspective of a single individual, the works featured here provide novel perspectives on the history of art, specifically the parallel evolution of abstract painting and mark-making in the last four decades of the twentieth century.”