Held in conjunction with the exhibition At the Dawn of a New Age: Early Twentieth-Century American Modernism, this show will explore connections between the leading collections of American modernist art held by the Norton and the Whitney Museum of American Art. The core of the Norton’s holdings in this area is still the works acquired by museum founder Ralph Norton, who grew increasingly fascinated by modernism in the last years of his life. His bequest to his museum reflects his passion for work by painters such as
Charles Demuth,
John Marin, and Georgia O’Keeffe who were supported by New York photographer and dealer
Alfred Stieglitz as well as American direct carvers like
John Flannagan. Since Norton’s death in 1953, the museum has continued to make important acquisitions in this area, in recent years focused particularly on work by people of color and women such as Henry Bannarn,
Helen Torr, and Beulah Ecton
Woodard. As at the Whitney, such significant recent acquisitions help the Norton present a history of modernism that more accurately reflects the true diversity of American creativity in this period. Although Ralph Norton did not collect photography, the museum has also built significant holdings of American modernist photographs beginning with the major gift of the Baroness Jeane van Oppenheim in 1998. Like the paintings, sculpture, and works on paper in this exhibition, photographs by such practitioners as
Imogen Cunningham,
Man Ray, and
Edward Weston demonstrate how these artists’ interests in abstracting form and depicting the modern world distinguished this innovative era in American art.