The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s holdings of works from the early 20th century associated with Dada and Surrealism just received a major boost thanks to John Pritzker, a collector, museum trustee and billionaire private equity manager based in San Francisco. On Monday (8 September), the Met announced it has received a promised gift from Pritzker that includes 188 works by 37 artists associated with these movements, including Man Ray, Max Ernst, Marcel and Suzanne Duchamp, Jean Arp, Lee Miller, Beatrice Wood, Francis Picabia, Kurt Schwitters.
The works in Pritzker’s promised gift, collectively known as the Bluff Collection, include 35 pieces that will go on view later this week in Man Ray: When Objects Dream (14 September-1 February 2026), a major exhibition devoted to the artist’s experimentation with rayographs. Among those works are many of Man Ray’s most famous images, including his photographs of the artist and performer Alice Prin (aka Kiki de Montparnasse) rendered with a violin’s sound holes on her back (Le violon d’Ingres, 1924) and posed holding a Baule mask from the Ivory Coast (Noire et blanche, 1926).
“I’ve long been interested in the period between the world wars and the exciting community of artists involved in Dada and Surrealism,” Pritzker said in a statement. “As I’ve built the collection, Man Ray has been a central figure, especially as a person who moved between groups and connected ideas. Artists in his circle, such as Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia, were, like Man Ray, instigators and innovators. Together, this group broke down barriers of what defined a painting, sculpture, text or photograph, and more—what art itself could be.”
Man Ray, Le violon d’Ingres, 1924 The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bluff Collection, Promised Gift of John A. Pritzker. Photo by Ian Reeves. © Man Ray 2015 Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY / ADAGP, Paris 2025
Pritzker, who was elected to the Met’s board of trustees in 2019, is also gifting the Met more than 100 books, pamphlets, journals and other ephemera. And, through his John Pritzker Family Fund, he will also finance a new research initiative at the Met, the Bluff Collaborative for Research on Dada and Surrealism.
The gifts come as the Met moves forward with plans for a new $550m wing for Modern and contemporary art. Construction on the Oscar L. Tang and H.M. Agnes Hsu-Tang Wing designed by Frida Escobedo—the first female architect to design a wing in the museum’s 155-year history—is expected to begin next year and be completed by 2030.
“This incredible promised gift arrives at a pivotal moment as we expand and invigorate our holdings in preparation for the opening of the Tang Wing for modern and contemporary art, and it further cements the Met as an essential destination for experiencing the full sweep of art history—from antiquity to the art of today,” Max Hollein, the museum’s director and chief executive, said in a statement. “It enhances our ability to offer a profound, more comprehensive view of these outstanding artists and enigmatic trailblazers of Modernism whose bold and influential experimentation across media continues to fascinate and inspire.”
This is not the only blockbuster gift of Modern and contemporary art that the Met has received this year. This spring the museum received more than 6,500 objects from one of the world’s foremost photography collectors, Artur Walther, and his Walther Family Foundation. It also received a trove of more than 500 prints by Inuit artists from Nunavut and Nunavik, donated by the collectors René Balcer and Carolyn Hsu-Balcer.