These include the Currents series, which features contemporary artists, as well as regular exhibitions of new media art and works on paper.

The school, led by director Halsey Ives, offered studio and art history instruction supported by a museum collection.

When the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition closed, the museum and school moved from the Peabody-Stearns structure to Cass Gilbert's Palace of Fine Arts building.

[5] After the relocation, Director Ives introduced a bill into the General Assembly for an art tax to support museum maintenance.

In 2008, citing the declining state of the economy, the museum announced that it would delay the start of the expansion, whose cost was then estimated at $125 million.

Money for the project was raised through private gifts to the capital campaign from individuals, foundations and corporations, and from proceeds from the sale of tax-exempt bonds.

[18] In recent years, the museum has been actively acquiring post-war German art to complement its Beckmanns, such as works by Joseph Beuys, Gerhard Richter, Martin Kippenberger, Sigmar Polke, and Anselm Kiefer.

[23] These include Max Beckmann's "Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery" which came to the museum through a New York art dealer, Curt Valentin, who specialized in Nazi confiscations, and Matisse's "Bathers with a Turtle" which Joseph Pulitzer purchased at the Galerie Fischer auction held in the Grand Hôtel National, Lucerne, Switzerland, June 30, 1939.

[23][24][25] In the context of the museum's 2013 expansion, British artist Andy Goldsworthy created Stone Sea, a site-specific work for a narrow space between the old and new buildings.