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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George Luks’s Armistice Night records one of the frenzied, flag-waving celebrations that marked the end of World War I. Luks’s skill at capturing the essence of an event in a few swift strokes was honed during his years as a newspaper illustrator in Philadelphia at the turn of the twentieth century, when he was often dispatched to sketch scenes of breaking news. In Armistice Night, as in his earlier illustrations, Luks does not deliberate over particulars: the painting is a blur of American and Allied flags, faces, and fireworks. Blue smoke obscures the buildings in the background, and few individuals stand out in the quickly-rendered crowd. Typically, Luks was more committed to capturing the spirit of the moment than to transcribing visual facts—in this case the action and human drama in a celebratory crowd.

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America Is Hard to See

Eight West Eighth

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George Luks (1867–1933), Armistice Night, 1918

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On the Hour

America Is Hard to See

Eight West Eighth

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George Luks (1867–1933), Armistice Night, 1918

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Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection