Coming of Age: American Art, 1850’s to 1950’s

In the period from the 1850's to the 1950's, American art and culture came of age, evolving from the provincial to the international and moving from literal depictions of the particular to abstract interpretations of universal ideals. Coming of Age will explore the complex and extended process of maturation that took place throughout this formative century of American art.

The exhibition includes 72 paintings and sculptures drawn from the internationally renowned collection of the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., whose holdings include more than 13,000 works – paintings, prints, works on paper, sculpture, photography and decorative arts – by generations of American artists from Colonial times to the present. The exhibition has been organized by the Addison Gallery and the American Federation of Arts, New York, and will be curated by William Agee, Professor of Art History at Hunter College, New York, and Susan Faxon, Associate Director and Curator at the Addison Gallery.

Focusing on the key movements during this era in which American art matured and took its place in the international arena, Coming of Age will begin with mid-19th-century American landscapes, followed by late 19th-century works such as marine paintings by Winslow Homer, portraits by Thomas Eakins, genre paintings by Eastman Johnson, and landscapes by John Singer Sargent and James McNeill Whistler. Turn-of-the-century works by American Impressionists such as Childe Hassam and Maurice Prendergast will contrast with Ashcan paintings by artists such as Robert Henri and John Sloan. Twentieth-century modernist masterpieces by Stuart Davies, Georgia O'Keeffe and Marsden Hartley, among others, transition into mid-century abstract works by artists such as Hans Hofmann, Franz Kline, Lazlo Moholy-Nagy and Jackson Pollock.

The exhibition is made possible, in part, by the Philip and Janice Levin Foundation Fund for Collection-Based Exhibitions at the American Federation of Arts.

Information from venue's website