American Art of the Twentieth Century | 9780789202635 | Introduction by David A. Ross / Text by Adam D. Weinberg and Beth Venn

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American Art of the Twentieth Century

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Charles Demuth (1883-1935). My Egypt, 1927. Oil on composition board, 35-3/4 x 30 in. (90.8 x 76.2 cm).By the mid-to late 1920s, a group of modernists approached the changing urban and industrial landscape, transforming it into precisely structured forms that became paeans to American technological advancement.

Stuart Davis (1892-1964). The Paris Bit, 1959. Oil on canvas, 46 x 60 in. (116.8 x 152.4 cm).Abstract art in the 1950s, though generally believed to have been dominated by Abstract Expressionism, was in fact a battleground of competing styles and artistic tendencies. This moment of American art, as rich in formal innovation as in passionate debate about the nature of abstraction, has long been credited with bringing American art to international prominence.

Everett Shinn (1876-1953). Revue, 1908. Oil on canvas, 18 x 24 in. (45.7 x 61 cm).Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and Juliana Force, the first director of the Whitney Museum, long supported many of the rebels who were derisively grouped as the Ashcan School--artists who focused on seemingly insignificant aspects of urban life, painted in a loose, brushy, realist mode. John Sloan, William Glackens, and Robert Henri brazenly recorded tenements, parks, and music halls, subjects then considered unworthy of fine art. When The Eight, as the Ashcan artists were formally called, held their one and only exhibition at the Macbeth Galleries in 1908, Mrs. Whitney purchased four of the seven paintings sold, among them Everett Shinns Revue, an act that artist John Sloan considered almost as radical as the making of such frank, unidealized works.

Jacob Lawrence (b. 1917). Tombstones, 1942. Gouache on paper, 28-3/4 x 20-1/2 in. (73 x 52.1 cm).In the cities, other images of this troubled time served documentary and polemical purposes, exposing the social inequities, political injustices, and sense of hopelessness that threatened the stability of American society.

Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988). Hollywood Africans, 1983. Acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 84 x 84 in. (213.4 x 213.4 cm).The profusion of art made during the last quarter of the twentieth century has been largely defined by the catchall term postmodern, since it leaves behind those modern concerns that define art as primarily about its own making, materials, and meaning. Although it is impossible to consider recent art from any single vantage, many artists during the past two decades have shown renewed interest in the social and political function of art itself.

American Art of the Twentieth Century
Treasures of the Whitney Museum of American Art

Introduction by David A. Ross / Text by Adam D. Weinberg and Beth Venn
Size: 4 x 4 3/8"
Hardcover, 288 pages
240 full-color illustrations
Published 1998
ISBN: 978-0-7892-0263-5
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$11.95

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The Whitney Museum in New York is one of the countrys premier showcases for 20th-century American art.

This survey of the Whitneys Permanent Collection presents a selection of remarkable works, in a variety of media, by the most notable American artists. Among the more than two hundred images are paintings by Edward Hopper, Georgia OKeeffe, Frank Stella, Franz Kline, Andy Warhol, and Jasper Johns; sculpture by Alexander Calder, Claes Oldenburg, and David Smith; photographs by Robert Frank, Man Ray, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Diane Arbus; and drawings by Hopper, Philip Guston, and Jackson Pollock. A handy companion to the Whitneys Permanent Collection, this Tiny Folio offers a century of masterpieces from a superlative institution.

David A. Ross was the director of the Whitney Museum of American Art from 1991 to 1998. Adam D. Weinberg is curator of the Permanent Collection at the Museum. Beth Venn is associate curator of the Permanent Collection.

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