America’s Cool Modernism: O’Keeffe to Hopper looked at a current in interwar America that was relatively unknown in Europe. The exhibition focused on artists who grappled with the experience of modern America by eliminating people from their pictures, emphasizing objectivity, and inventing a cool, controlled aesthetic. It featured iconic works of American art produced during the roaring 1920s and Depression-era 1930s. Many of the paintings traveled to the UK for the very first time.
Reflecting a certain ambivalence towards modernity, artists interrogated the place of humans in an increasingly mechanized world. From the abstractions of Edward Steichen, Georgia O’Keeffe and John Covert to the lonely vistas of Edward Hopper and highly structured, geometric paintings of Charles Demuth and Charles Sheeler, the exhibition examined how technological innovations and modernist art theories inspired a generation of Americans. It re-examined ‘precisionism’ and included many artists not usually associated with the movement.
America’s Cool Modernism was co-organized by the Terra Foundation for American Art and the Ashmolean Museum of Art & Archaeology at the University of Oxford. It included 90 paintings, prints and photographs, including 27 works from the Terra Foundation and 18 from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. It was part of a multi-year partnership with the University of Oxford that included Terra Foundation Visiting Professorships in the History of Art (2016–2025) and an extended loan of three Terra Foundation paintings to the Ashmolean (2016–2018).
Co-organized by the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology at the University of Oxford and the Terra Foundation for American Art