PRINCETON, NJ.- From Pop art pioneers, to participants in the collaborative heyday of the downtown New York art scene of the 1980s, to the latest generation of artists focused on new approaches to drawing and documentary photography, collectors Herb and Lenore Schorr have focused passionately on the art of their time. Collecting Contemporary, 1960-2015: Selections from the Schorr Collection features approximately 20 choice paintings, drawings, prints and photographs acquired by Herb Schorr, Princeton Graduate School Class of 1963, and his wife, Lenore, since they began to collect seriously in 1968-69. Artists in the exhibition include Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Jasper Johns, Alex Katz, Justine Kurland, Roy Lichtenstein, Nick Mauss, Elizabeth Murray, James Rosenquist and Andy Warhol, among others. The exhibition is on view at the Princeton University Art Museum from June 27 through Sept. 20, 2015.

Collecting Contemporary, 1960-2015: Selections from the Schorr Collection is curated by Kelly Baum, Haskell Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Princeton University Art Museum. All of the works in the exhibition have been donated to Princeton by the Schorrs or have been on long-term loan to Princeton for two and a half decades.

“This gathering of work from Herb and Lenore Schorr’s spirited collection underlines our shared commitment to presenting contemporary art at Princeton,” said James Steward, Nancy A. Nasher–David J. Haemisegger, Class of 1976, Director of the Princeton University Art Museum. “Embodying successive creative communities who left powerful legacies across the artistic landscape, the Schorrs’ collection has played an important role in the museum’s educational mission.”

The exhibition includes striking examples of Pop art – paintings and prints that exemplify that movement’s fascination with celebrity, everyday life and commercial imagery, such as Lichtenstein’s irreverent Study for Rouen Cathedral (1968) and two versions of Round Jackie (1964) by Warhol. Other works, such as Basquiat’s Leonardo da Vinci’s Greatest Hits (1982), Haring’s Barking Dogs and Lightbulb (1981) and Nick Mauss’s Your Many Faces (2003) speak to a strong graphic impulse spanning more than two decades of artistic practice. Some of these pieces were created during the heyday of New York’s vibrant downtown art scene, when graffiti artists collaborated with hip-hop musicians and filmmakers; others come from the late 1990s and early 2000s, when drawing experienced a renaissance. The exhibition concludes with photographs by three artists – Dana Hoey, Justine Kurland and Malerie Marder – who emerged simultaneously in the late 1990s as they explored both the myths and expectations that shape our perception of femininity as well as the status of the photographic document, deliberately merging fact and fiction, reality and artifice.

Almost all of the works in Collecting Contemporary were purchased by the Schorrs not long after they were created, usually while the artists’ reputations were still in flux. Thus, they testify to the collectors’ penchant for risk and experimentation as well as their longstanding commitment to the art of their day.

Collecting Contemporary, 1960-2015: Selections from the Schorr Collection has been made possible by the Virginia and Bagley Wright, Class of 1946, Program Fund for Modern and Contemporary Art; the Allen R. Adler, Class of 1967, Exhibitions Fund; and the Partners and Friends of the Princeton University Art Museum.