A Century of American Art and Culture.

• Author: HASKELL, BARBARA
• Position: Exhibition at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art

A stunning two-part exhibition at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art "explores the evolution of the American identity as seen through the eyes of the nation's artists and examines the impact of such forces as immigration, technology, and the mass media on art and culture."

AMERICA entered the 20th century with a youthful confidence about its place in the world. The growth of big cities, spurred by the shift of populations from rural areas to urban centers and from Europe to the U.S., along with the advent of modern industry and transportation, were transforming America into a complex, diverse, and cosmopolitan nation during the Age of Confidence, 1900-19.

Artists responded to these profound changes in ways that were equally complex and diverse. Many painters, photographers, sculptors, and illustrators, as well as songwriters and filmmakers, celebrated the dynamism and novelty of the urban and industrial spectacle. The so-called Ashcan artists --including George Bellows, Robert Henri, William Glackens, George Luks, Everett Shinn, John Sloan--found inspiration in the daily lives and entertainments of ordinary Americans, while photographers such as Jessie Tarbox Beals, Arnold Genthe, and' Lewis Hine documented the opportunities and hardships encountered by new immigrant populations.

Others, such as painters Thomas Anshutz, Cecilia Beaux, Frank Benson, and Edmund Tarbell and photographers Gertrude Kasebier and Clarence White, turned away from the raucous energy and commercialism of the modern city to embrace private pleasures enjoyed in genteel, domestic settings. Still others--the pictorialist painters and photographers and aesthetic dancers such as Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis--invented symbolist and orientalist fantasies, while modernist artists like Arthur Dove, Joseph Stella, and Paul Strand embraced experimentation and abstraction to transform traditional subject matter into avant-garde statements of personal expression.

Jazz Age America, 1920-29. The U.S. emerged from World War I into an era of unparalleled social freedom, material prosperity, and mass communication. Much of the visual art of the 1920s reflects a fascination with advertising and consumer products and with the glamorous icons of America's first truly national popular culture: the flappers, nightclubs, jazz, skyscrapers, and movies.

The fashionable socialites and celebrities portrayed by Guy Pene du Bois, Archibald J. Motley, Jr., and Florine Stettheimer and...