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Above:
Edward Hopper
Railroad Sunset, 1929
Oil on canvas
39 1/4 x 48 in.
(74.3 x 121.9 cm)
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Josephine N. Hopper Bequest 70.1170

The Whitney Museum houses one of the world's foremost collections of twentieth-century American art. The Permanent Collection of some eleven thousand works encompasses paintings, sculptures, multimedia installations, drawings, prints, and photographs. The Museum was founded in 1931 with a core group of seven hundred art objects, man of them from the personal collection of founder Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney; others were purchased by Mrs. Whitney at the time of the opening to provide a more thorough overview of American art in the early decades of the century. Mrs. Whitney favored the art of the revolutionary realist artists derisively called the Ashcan School, among them John Sloan, George Luks, and Everett Shinn, as well as American Scene painaters such as Edward Hopper, John Steuart Curry, and Thomas Hart Benton. However, many important works by early modernist artists -- among them Stuart Davis, Charles Demuth, Charles Sheeler, and Max Weber -- were also part of her initial gift. Virtually all the works collected by the Museum for the next twenty years came through the generosity of Mrs. Whitney.

The Whitney's Permanent Collection may be currently viewed in Modernisms.

Modernisms, a fifth-floor presentation of works from the collection, looks mainly at artists working in the first half of the 20th century — George Bellows, Thomas Hart Benton, Paul Cadmus, Alexander Calder, Ralston Crawford, Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, Georgia O'Keeffe, Charles Sheeler, and John Sloan, among others — artists whose works, both figurative and abstract, pushed the margins of American art outward. This presentation reflects the multiple strands of modernism that characterize 20th-century American art. Organized in a loose chronology and in broad historical categories, it recognizes that various "modernisms" overlap, crossover, and intermingle in subject matter, process, thought, and material.

Modernisms is on view through January 13, 2008.