University of Arizona Museum of Art. The University of Arizona Museum of Art is an art museum in Tucson, Arizona, operated by the University of Arizona. The museum's permanent collection includes more than 6,000 works of art, including paintings, sculptures, prints and drawings with an emphasis on European and American fine art from the Renaissance to the present. The museum is located on the UA's campus near Park Avenue and Speedway Boulevard. Admission is free to UA students, faculty, and staff with student ID. It is part of the Museum Neighborhood, a cluster of four museums within walking distance of each other; the other three museums are the Center for Creative Photography, Arizona State Museum, and Arizona Historical Society. A university gallery at the University of Arizona existed in the 1930s. In the 1930s, the Works Projects Administration, one of the New Deal agencies, donated 200 lithographs and prints created by artists that it supported. These works formed the core of the museum's initial collection of works. In 1944, University of Arizona alumnus Charles Leonard Pfeiffer donated many American paintings. This was followed by the addition of the Samuel H. Kress Collection, a donation from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, which originally comprised 50 European paintings, in the early 1950s. Museum director Peter Bermingham led the museum for over 20 years, from 1978 to 1998. During his tenure, the museum more than doubled its holdings. Peter Briggs, who had begun his work in the museum as curator of collections in 1990 under Bermingham, was promoted to chief curator, but his contract was not renewed in 2004. On the day after Thanksgiving 1985, shortly after the museum opened, a woman distracted a guard on the museum's staircase while a man working with her cut Willem de Kooning's Woman-Ochre out of its frame and hid it under his coat while the two left. Guards realized immediately afterward that the painting had been stolen. It was found in 2017 by some Silver City, New Mexico, antique dealers, in the house of a woman who had died, and returned to the museum shortly afterwards. The museum is currently raising funds for its restoration. Among the museum's several different collections are: The Samuel H. Kress Collection, donated in the early 1950s. It consists of more than 60 European works from the 14th through 19th centuries, including the 26-panel Retablo of the Cathedral of the Ciudad Rodrigo by Fernando Gallego and Maestro Bartolome. A retablo is a church altarpiece with a picture or relief on a religious subject. Arizona Public Media produced a one-hour documentary on the panels, which were originally from Ciudad Rodrigo and include depictions of the creation according to Genesis, the Life of Christ, and the Last Judgment, tracing the retablo through earthquakes, damage from the Napoleonic War, a trans-Atlantic voyage, and storage in a bunker during the Second World War. The panels are considered by scholars to be some of the most beautiful and iconographical ambitious paintings of the 15th century. According to historian David Leighton, the collection was first revealed to the public during the three-day inauguration ceremony of University of Arizona President Richard A. Harvill, in 1951. The Kress collection also includes paintings by Jusepe de Ribera, Domenico Tintoretto, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Horace Vernet and Louise Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun. There are also Late Medieval and Renaissance paintings by Jacopo del Casentino, Taddeo di Bartolo, Niccolo Del Ser Sozzo Tegliacci, Francesco De Bosio Zaganelli, Vittore Crivelli, Guidiccio Cozzarelli, and Vittore Carpaccio. The C. Leonard Pfeiffer Collection, donated in 1944 by Charles Leonard Pfeiffer. It includes almost 100 American works from the early 20th century, including pieces by John French Sloan, Stuart Davis, Edward Hopper, Isabel Bishop, Jacob Lawrence, Reginald Marsh, John Steuart Curry, and Philip Evergood. The Edward J. Gallagher III Memorial Collection, which includes over 200 European and American works from the late 19th and 20th centuries. The collection was established in honor of Edward Gallagher Jr.'s son and includes sculptures by Auguste Rodin, Jean Arp, Aristide Maillol, Alexander Archipenko, Jacques Lipchitz, David Smith, Isamu Noguchi, Henry Moore, and Alexander Calder; abstract expressionist paintings by Morris Louis, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline and Robert Motherwell; and works by Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, Joan Miro, Fernand Leger, Marc Chagall, Emil Nolde, and Kurt Schwitters. The Robert Priseman Collection, which includes 71 paintings by the British artist Robert Priseman.