The Museum of Modern Art is presenting through July 10 “Against the Grain; Contemporary Art from the Edward R. Broida Collection,” an exhibition of more than 100 paintings, sculpture, drawings and prints selected from Edward R. Broida’s recent gift to the museum of 175 works of art.

The acquisition of these works, which were selected by the museum’s curatorial staff at the invitation of Broida, dramatically enhances the museum’s holdings of many artists and introduces important works by several artists new to the MoMA collection. More than 30 American and European artists are represented in the exhibition with works that date primarily from the 1960s through the present. Among the works exhibited in the Broida collection are the groups of works in a variety of mediums by Philip Guston, Vija Celmins and Christopher Wilmarth, artists who Broida collected in depth.

Broida, an architect and real estate developer who died in April 2006 at age 72, began collecting art as a self-acknowledged novice in the late 1970s. His first purchases were two paintings by Philip Guston (American, 1913-80), whose work had departed from the abstraction for which he was known and returned to a more figurative style, a development that was considered unfashionable at the time. Broida subsequently assembled a significant number of works by Guston in a variety of mediums, concentrating in particular on the bold narrative style that Guston developed in the last decade of his life. Broida was also an early collector of works by Wilmarth and Celmins. Over the next three decades, with an instinctively singular vision, he developed a collection of some 700 objects notable for its great diversity of contemporary works of art.

At the center of the exhibition are two galleries of some 30 paintings, drawings and prints by Guston, presenting a small retrospective of the artist’s career. The paintings in this section show this great midcentury artists at a very early moment with “Gladiators,” 1940, and comprehensively from 1969 to 1980, providing an in-depth look at Guston’s move away from abstraction and return to figurative painting late in his career. These late works often employ recurring signature figures, such as the seemingly innocent Ku Klux Klansmen in the paintings “Edge of Town,” 1969, and “A Day’s Work,” 1970.

The 40-year career of Vijay Celmins (American, born Latvia, 1938) is traced through some 16 paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints in a monographic gallery devoted to her work. The installation ranges from rare works from the 1960s, such as the painted wood sculpture “Puzzle,” 1965-66, and the painting “Flying Fortress,” 1966, and later works such as the drawing “Star Field III,” 1982-83 and the painting “Web #3,” 2000-02.

A gallery devoted to the sculpture of Christopher Wilmarth (American, 1943-1978) has as its centerpiece “Tina Turner,” 1970-71, a series of four large industrial plates of glass aligned upright in succession to occupy a nearly 15-foot area.

Mark di Suvero (American, born 1933) is represented in a single gallery with four works dating from 1961 through 1997. Di Suvero once referred to his sculpture as “painting in three dimensions,” indicating that rough wooden beams were the sculptural equivalent of the wide, confident brushstrokes of the abstract expressionist painters. Early works by di Suvero, “Eatherly’s Lamp,” 1961, and “Measure Piece,” 1967, are joined in this gallery by the large-scale “For Gonzalez,” 1973, a homage to Twentieth Century sculptor Julio Gonzalez and a more recent sculpture, “Cubo Arcane,” 1997.

Ken Price (American, born 1935) has been working almost exclusively in ceramic since the 1950s and is represented in the exhibition with an important group of recent works made since 1995. “Arctic,” 1998, features a nose like shape with a red hole near the center.

“Seven Virtues/Seven Vices,” 1983-84, by Bruce Nauman (American, born 1941) – the lone work in its gallery – comprises seven limestone slabs, six propped up against the walls and the seventh laid flat in the center of the gallery. Each stone is inscribed with the name of one of the seven deadly sins, or vices, as outlined in the Bible, paired with one of the four cardinal virtues as presented by Plato or one of the three Christian theological virtues.

Interwoven throughout the exhibition are groups of key works from contemporary artists whose careers Broida followed.

The Museum of Modern Art is at 11 West 53rd Street. For information, 212-708-9400 or www.moma.org.