"In the Columbus Museum of Art I came into a room and it was a pleasant one. It was all Cubist and good Picassos and Juan Gris and others but really good ones. There had never been anything like that either in choice or quality or like that in any other museum."

— Gertrude Stein, Everybody's Autobiography

As Gertrude Stein remarked, the Columbus Museum of Art houses an outstanding collection of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American and European modern art. This collection includes major works by Monet, Matisse, Picasso, Renoir, Hopper and O'Keeffe and other spectacular examples of Impressionism, German Expressionism, and Cubism. Also recognized for extraordinary regional collections, the Museum boasts the largest public collection of woodcarvings by Columbus folk artist Elijah Pierce as well as the world's largest repository of paintings and lithographs by Columbus native George Bellows, who is widely regarded as the finest American artist of his generation. In 2001 in a watershed event in the growth of the Museum's holdings in photography, a significant collection entitled The Photo League was acquired, which consists of 170 photographs by 69 artists including Berenice Abbott, W. Eugene Smith and Weegee.

The Museum also hosts a continuous program of national and international traveling exhibitions. Recent noteworthy exhibitions organized by the Museum include Symphonic Poem: The Art of Aminah Robinson, the 2003 winner of the Greater Columbus Arts Council's Award for Artistic Excellence and Illusions of Eden: Visions of the American Heartland, chosen by the U.S. State Department as one of only three Millennium projects to tour outside the United States to help promote political, economic and cultural ties and exchanges.