Date: Wed 16-Jun-1999

Publication: Ant

Author: CAROLL

Quick Words:

culture-Whitney-Intel-history

Full Text:

AA LEAD: The American Century Art & Culture 1900-2000

(with cuts)

NEW YORK CITY -- At the Whitney Museum of American Art through August 22 is

part one of the two part exhibition, "The American Century: Art & Culture

1900-2000." The show was organized by the Whitney Museum and is presented by

Intel Corporation, who have collaborated on the Internet-based program. This

collaboration includes an online extension of the exhibition, an

Internet-based national education program and research into the use of

in-museum computer technologies as exhibition information resources.

"The American Century" explores the evolution of the American identity as seen

through the eyes of America's artists over the last century. It examines the

impact of such forces as immigration, technology and the mass media on art and

culture. The exhibition is comprised of more than 1,200 works of painting,

sculpture and photography, with related materials in architecture, decorative

arts, music, dance, literature and film culled from the Whitney's Permanent

Collection, private collections and public institutions around the country.

Presented in two consecutive parts, "The American Century" will fill the

entire Whitney Museum for nine months. Part I (1990 to 1950), was organized by

Barbara Haskell, curator of prewar art at the Whitney Museum. Part II

(1950-2000), curated by Lisa Phillips, curator of contemporary art at the

Whitney Museum and director-designate of the New Museum of Contemporary Art,

and Whitney Museum associate curators Susan Harris and Karl Willers, will be

presented from September 26, 1999, to mid-February, 2000. A team of more than

60 advisors on art history and American culture from the fields of

architecture, decorative arts, music, dance, literature and film have

consulted on the project.

Intel provided the largest corporate contribution ever made to an art museum

exhibition to support the organization and presentation of "The American

Century" at the Whitney. It drew on its educational, engineering and

technological resources in the development of these programs.

"The American Century" exhibition explores how Twentieth Century American art

and culture reflect and define America's changing sense of self, and can serve

as a window into national values and aspirations. Painting, sculpture and

photography are presented in the context of related materials in architecture,

design, music, dance, literature and film to illustrate other artistic

perspectives that have shaped and reflected a changing American identity and

culture. Related materials include magazine illustrations and books,

advertisements, fashion photography, movie posters, comics, architectural

drawings, decorative art objects, music recordings, news, film and theater

clips and a retrospective film program.

The first installment (1900-1950) traces the evolution of the American

identity from the turn of the century to just after World War II. The

exhibition presents icons of American art, including such landmark works as

Thomas Eakins' "The Thinker: Portrait of Louis" (1900); Alfred Stieglitz's

"The Steerage" (1907); Joseph Stella's "Battle of Lights, Coney Island"

(1912-14); Man Ray's "Revolving Door Series" (1916-17); Edward Hopper's "Chop

Suey" (1929); Grant Wood's "American Gothic" (1930); Ben Shahn's "The Passion

of Sacco and Vanzetti" (1931-32); Georgia O'Keeffe's "Summer Days" (1936);

Jacob Lawrence's "War Series: The Letter" (1946); and Jackson Pollock's

"Number 27" (1950).

Haskell and exhibition designers Lana Hum, Chris Muller and Matthew Yokobosky

have created an installation in which painting, sculpture and photography will

be interspersed with small clusters of related cultural materials. The

galleries dedicated to the period 1900-1919 capture America as it entered the

Twentieth Century with a youthful confidence about its place in the world.

Visitors will see artistic expressions in many mediums that explore a range of

themes, including: genteel society and the Dadaists who flouted it; the rise

of industry countered by the Arts and Crafts movement; and artists finding

inspiration both in the daily lives of Americans and in symbolist and

Orientalist fantasies.

Part I features film clips on more than 35 monitors interspersed within the

galleries. Matthew Yokobosky, Whitney Museum consulting curator, also

organized a retrospective of important American achievements in filmmaking for

Part I. Each week in the series highlights a different theme or important

genre. More than 200 films are being shown chronologically during Part I.

Maxwell Anderson, director of the Whitney, and David Ross, former Whitney

director who helped develop "The American Century," co-produced the online

extension of the exhibition with Intel and the Whitney. Ross is currently

director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Currently planned to be available online for three years, this technology will

extend the impact of the exhibition. The online extension of the exhibition is

accessible through the Whitney Museum's Web Site: www.whitney.org that links

to www.artmuseum.net a new Internet-based museum gallery produced by Intel

that will showcase online versions of exhibitions like "The American Century."

America In The

Age Of Confidence, 1900-1919

The growth of big cities, the shift of populations from rural areas to urban

centers, from Europe to the United States, along with the advent of modern

industry and transportation were transforming America into a complex, diverse,

and cosmopolitan country in the first two decades of the Twentieth Century.

Artists responded to these profound changes in ways that were equally complex

and diverse. Many painters, photographers, sculptors, and illustrators, as

well as songwriters and filmmakers, celebrated the dynamism and novelty of the

urban and industrial spectacle. The Ashcan artists -- George Bellows, Robert

Henri, William Glackens, George Luks, Everett Shinn, John Sloan -- found

inspiration in the daily lives and entertainments of ordinary Americans; and

photographers such as Jessie Tarbox Beals, Arnold Genthe and Lewis Hine

documented the opportunities and hardships encountered by new immigrant

populations.

Others, turned away from the raucous energy and commercialism of the modern

city to embrace private pleasures enjoyed in genteel, domestic settings. Still

others -- the pictorialist painters and photographers and "aesthetic" dancers

-- invented symbolist and Orientalist fantasies, while Modernist artist such

as Arthur Dove, Joseph Stella and Paul Strand embraced experimentation and

abstraction to transform traditional subject matter into avant-garde

statements of personal expression.

Jazz Age America, 1920-1929

America emerged from World War I into an era of unparalleled social freedom,

material prosperity and mass communication. Much of the visual art of the

1920s reflects a fascination with advertising and consumer products and with

the glamorous icons of America's first truly national popular culture: the

flapper, nightclubs, jazz, skyscrapers and the movies.

The fashionable socialites and celebrities portrayed by Guy Pene du Bois,

Archibald J. Motley, Jr, and Florine Stettheimer and photographed by Edward

Steichen and James VanDerZee personified a new American dream of youthful

sophistication, wealth and leisure, a theme echoed in the novels of F. Scott

Fitzgerald and Anita Loos and the music of Cole Porter and George Gershwin.

America in Crisis, 1930-39

On October 29, 1929, the New York Stock Market crashed, and along with it went

the prosperity and euphoria of the Jazz Age. The Regionalist artists --

championed a nationalist art of renewal and reaffirmation that celebrated

agrarian values and folk traditions values and themes drawn from the

collective national past. Federal arts programs promoted the creation of a

socially meaningful art by funding public murals and works projects, theater

and dance programs, and documentary archives of American folk music and

decorative arts. Modern dancers also developed choreography based on

indigenous themes. Under the auspices of the Farm Securities Administration,

photographers created an indelible record of the human and economic toll of

the Depression. The urban American Scene painters and photographers found

renewal and stability in images of contemporary everyday life. More polemical

writers and artists held up a mirror to the racial, political and labor

struggles that threatened national unity.

Other artists turned away from the turmoil of the 1930s to posit alternative

realities. Architects and industrial designers used streamlined forms to

suggest the promise of new technological progress and efficiencies. Hollywood

invited moviegoers to escape, if only briefly, to a world of luxury and

romance.

The American Abstract Artists group modeled a utopian vision of universal

harmony using a geometric, nonobjective art of order and stability, devoid of

references to the real world. Other abstractionists, a biomorphic, associative

and playful imagery. By the late 1930s and early 1940s, a new generation of

abstract artists including Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning and Jackson

Pollock were beginning to explore the expressive potential of more open,

gestural configurations and archetypal themes.

America in the 1940s

With democracy threatened on all sides, the search for American roots was

transmuted into an adamant defense of those native values most endangered by

war in Europe -- freedom, democracy and community. Many artists created

overtly propagandistic posters, illustrations and paintings. The film industry

also responded to the war effort with zeal, issuing "Victory" newsreels and

documentary training films by well-known directors such as Frank Capra, while

Life magazine reported the war from Europe and the Pacific as documented by

photojournalists such as Robert Capa and W. Eugene Smith, who were working on

the front lines. At home, popular music, films and Broadway theater rallied

the nation to a sense of common purpose. Musicals and ballets brought formal

innovation to a fascination with America's pioneer past.

The arrival of European artists, designers, and architects exiled by the war,

and the return of American expatriates shifted the geographic center of the

art world to New York. The emergence of the new generation of painters and

sculptors who would later be called Abstract Expressionists -- made it the

cultural center as well and for the first time brought American art world-wide

acclaim.

America after the war faced new opportunities and challenges brought by its

status as the richest and most powerful nation on earth. The trauma of the

Holocaust and the atomic age was given voice by the disillusioned protagonists

of novels and plays. At the same time, military victory brought material

prosperity and unleashed the pent-up desires of young families for new

housing, mobility and modern conveniences. Architects and designers responded

by exploiting new materials and technologies to create high-quality,

affordable homes and objects for the mass market.

A two-volume book entitled The American Century: Art & Culture 1900-2000 was

published by the Whitney Museum in association with W.W. Norton & Company.

This publication serves as a sourcebook on Twentieth Century American art and

culture and features more than 700 images in each volume. Each volume includes

a comprehensive essay on American art and its historical context by the

exhibition curators, plus texts by leading specialists in a variety of fields.

Volume I was published in April 1999; Volume II will be available fall 1999.

Tickets for "The American Century" are $12.50 for adults and $10.50 for

seniors, students, and groups of 15 or more. For the first time at the

Whitney, the public can purchase timed tickets in advance (for a $2 service

charge) by calling 1-877/WHITNEY or by ordering online at www.whitney.org.

The Whitney Museum of American Art is a leading advocate of Twentieth Century

and Contemporary American art. Founded in 1930, the Whitney Museum emerged

from Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney's active role in supporting the American

artists of her day and, over the course of 69 years, the museum's holdings

have grown to include approximately 12,000 works of art representing more than

1,900 artists.

The permanent collection is a preeminent collection of Twentieth Century

American art and includes the entire artistic estate of Edward Hopper, as well

as significant works by Marsh, Calder, Gorky, Hartley, O'Keeffe, Rauschenberg,

Murphy and Johns among other artists.

The Whitney Museum and its two corporate-funded branch facilities -- at

Champion International Corporation in Stamford, Conn., and at Philip Morris,

New York -- bring a diverse range of exhibitions from historical surveys to

in-depth retrospectives to an annual audience of nearly 500,000. The Whitney

Museum also organizes the Biennial exhibition -- an invitational show of work

produced in America in the preceding two years.

The Whitney Museum is at 945 Madison Avenue in New York.