Word: 20th
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...exhibition itself is sober, clearly set out and--given some of the Whitney's embarrassing efforts in the past to swamp serious art with intrusive audiovisual aids like at the 1995 Edward Hopper show--fairly short on hoopla. It touches upon all the major American movements of the 20th century and does it with balance and care and, in general, a keen eye for the best examples. If you want a short account of the turn-of-the-century New York realist group known as the Ashcan School (Robert Henri, John Sloan, George Bellows and others), the selection here could...
...country of immigrants, the question of who is and who is not an American artist is always a vexing one. In the early 20th century, modernism itself was attacked as an "alien," or immigrant, form. America has never been short of blood-in-the-eye nativists and cultural conservatives (not a few of them painters, like Thomas Hart Benton), who believed that the art of Jews, gays and anyone else they disliked couldn't be really American. Such primitivism is gone now--or, at any rate, nobody who cares about art would deploy it. Obviously, the question...
...epic, spiritual and transcendental. The cluster of feelings surrounding American landscape had come directly into modern art from 19th century images of sacred wilderness--God's fingerprint, there in the Catskills or the Grand Canyon. This would be faithfully preserved by photographers, like Ansel Adams at Yosemite. But 20th century painters from Dove and Hartley through Pollock conveyed them into more modern idioms, often with great power and poignancy. Landscape, in fact, was the matrix in which most of the impulses of American abstract art, except for its weaker strand of purist geometry, unfolded. In no other country except England...
...second image field arose from a fascination with the power of the diametric opposite of nature--industrial imagery, seen as the essence of 20th century experience and as belonging more vividly to America than to any other place. If God was present in the mountain lake, he could also be uneasily satirized as a plumber's grease trap by the New York Dadaist Morton Schamberg; if sublimity was in the mountains, it was also in the skyscrapers of New York City and in the relentlessly massed geometric forms of the Ford auto plant at River Rouge, Mich., which Charles Sheeler...
...continuing series of special issues on the 100 most influential people of the 20th century will culminate in December, when TIME will name a single figure as the Person of the Century. To help the magazine's editors make the choice, we are asking a select group of people to tell us whom they would pick. Here are the latest thought-provoking suggestions...