Word: showing
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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...
...American Century" makes proper acknowledgments to minority artists without making excessive claims. There is, for instance, a small section on the art produced by the Harlem Renaissance in the '20s and '30s, but the show doesn't fall into the trap of pretending that the artists concerned have to be the equals, in their field, of great black writers like Langston Hughes. Nor does it indulge in the kind of sentimental feminism that would have you believe that Georgia O'Keeffe, say, was a sacrosanct culture heroine and as good a painter as others in the Stieglitz circle, such...
...including everyone who lived for a time in the U.S. and influenced the art scene there, because that would make Max Ernst an American instead of a Franco-German surrealist and confer a sort of honorary American status on the Cuban Wilfredo Lam. It would also have made the show unmanageably large. Practically everyone in it, as it stands, was a U.S. citizen and resident, though expatriates like Patrick Henry Bruce (1881-1936), who left America early and came back only to commit suicide, are included...
Actually, the cultural xenophobes weren't entirely wrong. Modernism was an immigrant, and the anxiety that haunted American artists for most of the 50 years the show covers was that of provincialism. In some respects the moderns were less original than the great American figures of the 19th century: John James Audubon, Frederick Church, Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer. You were likely to be running behind the tick of the big clocks in Paris and Berlin whether you were Childe Hassam doing Impressionist streetscapes 30 years after Monet or a New York abstractionist producing ideal geometries in the early 1940s...
...Crash of 1929. Others saw salvation in it. But certainly no culture responded so passionately to it as America's; and in doing so, it produced the complicated and morally fraught self-portrait whose outlines are traced in this exhibition. For once, the Whitney has come up with a show that nobody interested in America and its self-image can afford to miss...