The Hyde Collection in Glens Falls, New York, has announced a gift of fifty-five works of art from Werner Feibes and the late James Schmitt.

The largest gift of modern art the museum has received in three decades includes paintings, drawings, prints, mixed media, and sculptures by Josef Albers, Sol LeWitt, Grace Hartigan, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Motherwell, Bridget Riley, Robert Rauschenberg, David Smith, and thirty-eight other artists. The donated works represent a third of the Feibes and Schmitt Collection; Feibes plans to bequeath the remaining two-thirds of the collection to the Hyde. Feibes and Schmitt began collecting modern art in the 1950s, and pieces from their collection have been borrowed for exhibitions by the likes of the Guggenheim and Whitney, the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart.

Schmitt, a native of Erie, Pennsylvania, and Feibes, whose family fled Nazi Germany in 1938 when he was nine, met at the University of Cincinnati, where they studied architecture. They eventually became life partners and practiced architecture together for fifty-five years in Schenectady. Schmitt died at the age of 87 in 2013, just two months after the two were married.

"This is a transformational gift for the Hyde," said the museum's director, Erin Coe. "[We are] largely known as a collection of Old Masters. The donation from Werner Feibes and James Schmitt now makes us a leading repository of modern art in the region."