America’s Cool Modernism: O’Keeffe to Hopper looks at a current in interwar America that is relatively unknown in Europe. The exhibition focuses 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 features iconic works of American art produced during the roaring 1920s and Depression-era 1930s. Many of the paintings travel 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 examines how technological innovations and modernist art theories inspired a generation of Americans. It is a re-examination of ‘precisionism’ and includes many artists not usually associated with the movement.
America’s Cool Modernism is co-organized by the Terra Foundation for American Art and the Ashmolean Museum of Art & Archaeology at the University of Oxford. It includes 90 paintings, prints and photographs, including 27 works from the Terra Foundation and 18 from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. It is part of a multi-year partnership with the University of Oxford that includes 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
Dates & Venues
March 23, 2018–July 22, 2018
Ashmolean Museum of Art & Archaeology (Oxford, United Kingdom)
Works of Art from the Terra Foundation Collection
The exhibition of paintings, prints, and photographs features 27 works from the Terra Foundation Collection including:
- Patrick Henry Bruce, Peinture, 1917–18
- Charles Demuth, Welcome to Our City, 1921
- Louis Lozowick, New York, 1925
- Helen Torr, Purple and Green Leaves, 1927
- Arthur Dove, Boat Going Through Inlet, c. 1929
- Charles Sheeler, Bucks County Barn, 1940
- Edward Hopper, Dawn in Pennsylvania, 1942
Publication
Katherine M. Bourguignon, Lauren Kroiz and Leo G. Mazow. America’s Cool Modernism: O’Keeffe to Hopper, Oxford, United Kingdom: Ashmolean Museum of Art & Archaeology–University of Oxford, 2018.
