Turn-of-the-Century America

Paintings – Graphics – Photographs, 1890–1910

A Whitney Museum of American Art publication, this catalogue accompanied the exhibition held at the Whitney in 1978 and subsequently traveled to St. Louis, Seattle, and Oakland.

Hills explores the art and visual culture of the twenty-year period when the United States emerged as a leading world power—but also a time of mass immigration, labor strikes, and conspicuous consumption by Gilded Age industrialists and financiers. The confluences and contradictions of art and its history are played out in this exhibition, which includes twelve sections:

• The Mural Movement
• Tonalists, Realists
• Portraits in Oil
• The Genteel Media
• Art Posters
• Impressionism, The Ten
• Illustrations and Cartoons
• Pictorial Photography
• Portrait Photographs
• Social Photography
• The City
• The Eight

Over 140 artists are included, with multiple works by painters such as Thomas Eakins, Mary Cassatt, John Singer Sargent, Winslow Homer, Henry O. Tanner, John Henry Twachtman, Maurice Prendergast, John Sloan, William Glackens, and Everett Shinn.

Artists producing posters include Will H. Bradley, Ethel Reed, Edward Penfield, Arthur W. Dow, Maxfield Parrish, and John Sloan. Illustrators featured are Winsor McCay, Joseph Keppler, Charles Dana Gibson, Louis Dalrymple, William Allen Rogers, Howard Pyle, Jessie Wilcox Smith, Rose O’Neill, Elizabeth Shippen Green, Florence Scovell Shinn, William Wallace Denslow, and many others.

Photographers in the exhibition include pictorialists such as Eva Watson Schütze, Alice Boughton, Anne Bergman, Clarence H. White, Alfred Stieglitz, F. Holland Day, and selected works by Gertrude Käsebier and Edward Steichen. Also featured are commercial portrait studio photographers like James Van DerZee, Addison Scurlock, and The Byron Company.

Social photographers such as Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine played a prominent role in the exhibition, as did lesser-known figures including Alice Austen, Frances B. Johnston, and Arnold Genthe.

Throughout this survey, the contributions of women artists, photographers, and illustrators are highlighted as they emerged in an era when women were demanding equal rights with men. (PH)