America Is Hard to See

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

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The Whitney Museum of American Art was established as a place for artists, a legacy it has cherished since its earliest incarnation as the Whitney Studio—an exhibition space opened by the artist and arts patron Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney in 1914 in a townhouse at Eight West Eighth Street in Greenwich Village. With the energetic support of her assistant, Juliana Force, in 1918 she transformed the Studio into the Whitney Studio Club, which was a home for American artists then disdained by the conservative establishment. Over the next decade, the Studio Club expanded into the neighboring townhouses that together served as a social and creative hub for its artist-members. Force regularly organized exhibitions, lectures, and classes and provided American artists financial support (and food and drink) with the backing of Mrs. Whitney.

The works on view in this chapter evoke the diverse activities of the Studio Club, as well as the broad tastes of these two remarkable women. Paintings by Robert Henri, William Glackens, John Sloan, and George Luks are evidence of Mrs. Whitney’s adventurous early advocacy of a group of mavericks known as “The Eight,” proponents of the so-called Ashcan School who favored gritty urban realism. Photographs by Charles Sheeler and Berenice Abbott capture the townhouses’ interiors and the exhibitions held therein, while humorous drawings by Guy Pène du Bois chronicle the characters on the scene. A group of Edward Hopper’s figure studies from life-drawing class there affirm that the Studio Club was a site not just for exhibiting art but for making it. When the Whitney Museum of American Art was founded in 1931, with a collection donated by Mrs. Whitney and with Juliana Force as its first director, the institution’s identity and mission as the artist’s museum were already firmly in place.

Below is a selection of works from this chapter.

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Yasuo Kuniyoshi, who immigrated to the United States from Japan in 1906, was fascinated by American folk art and adopted a faux-naïf style in many of his works of the 1920s. Child is representative of his painting from this period. The influence of Colonial American arts is evident in the clothes and furniture and in the wide-eyed, stiff pose of the child. At the same time, the flattened space and the tilted table reveal an awareness of both Cubism and Japanese printmaking. Drawing from his memory and imagination, Kuniyoshi often depicted women, children, and circus performers in tableaus with mysterious objects that suggest enigmatic narratives.

In 1948, Kuniyoshi was the subject of the Whitney Museum’s first retrospective of a living artist, despite having been legally barred from applying for citizenship until 1952 because of his national origins.

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America Is Hard to See

Eight West Eighth

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Yasuo Kuniyoshi (1889-1953), Child, 1923

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America Is Hard to See

Eight West Eighth

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Yasuo Kuniyoshi (1889-1953), Child, 1923

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Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

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in the Whitney's collection