At the Dawn of a New Age: Early Twentieth-Century American Modernism Whitney Museum of American Art

American artists greeted the 20th century with a youthful confidence in progress and innovation. Animated by the technological changes that were revolutionizing communications and engineering, as well as cultural shifts such as women's suffrage, artists embraced the new over the traditional and fixed.

They were no longer content to replicate reality, they turned to vanguard styles... Show more

American artists greeted the 20th century with a youthful confidence in progress and innovation. Animated by the technological changes that were revolutionizing communications and engineering, as well as cultural shifts such as women's suffrage, artists embraced the new over the traditional and fixed.

They were no longer content to replicate reality, they turned to vanguard styles as a way to communicate their excitement about an age that critic Walter Lippmann characterized as “bursting with new ideas, new plans, and new hopes.”

With over 60 works by 45 artists – drawn primarily from the Whitney's permanent collection – At the Dawn of a New Age offers an expanded understanding of the complexity of American art produced between 1900 and 1930 and recaptures the exuberant sense of freedom and experimentation that underlay it.

Some of the artists featured in this exhibition, such as Georgia O'Keeffe and Marsden Hartley, are well known today, but many similarly groundbreaking modernists have been largely forgotten.