The Figurative Tradition
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A Whitney Museum of American Art publication in association with the University of Delaware Press, this catalogue accompanied the exhibition held at the Whitney in 1980. It was coauthored by Patricia Hills and Roberta K. Tarbell, who contributed scholarly essays on the changing themes of the artists over time. Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and the Whitney Museum of American Art played an important role in the history of art during the 20th century. After the founding of the museum, the Whitney has displayed the contemporary art of each decade through both biennials and annuals, for which the earlier curators chose to include those artists who were both established and also new to the art scene.
During the post-World War II years, changes occurred in American art which profoundly affected the direction of figurative painting and sculpture. Abstract artists questioned the traditionally rendered figure as a suitable form for aesthetic concerns, whereas humanistic realists, often afflicted with cultural pessimism, challenged traditional naturalism for being inadequate to the complexities of content. The Whitney Museum responded by accommodating the many tendencies which the staff had the foresight to recognize as valid. Hills and Tarbell drew from this storehouse of paintings and sculpture to select 103 painters and 47 sculptors. The exhibition included works of art not only from New York, but also Boston, Chicago, and California, many works not placed
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