“Youth and Beauty offers a compelling look at the Roaring Twenties, a decade that still continues to fascinate. A generous survey of great works of art, the exhibition reveals a nation coping with significant social changes that could be both inspiring and sobering,” states Mark Cole, the Associate Curator of American Painting and Sculpture at the Cleveland Museum of Art. “Visitors will discover how people at the time responded to their new modern existence—one brought about by transformations in culture and technology—something that all future generations, including our own, can relate to.”
Loans for the exhibition, almost all of which are making their Cleveland debut, have been secured from a host of distinguished public and private collections across the United States.
Highlights of Youth and Beauty include:
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Thomas Hart Benton, Self-Portrait with Rita, 1922. This painting is considered to be among the most startling figure subjects of the early twenties, due to Benton’s presentation of himself and his young wife, Rita, as models of liberated physical vitality. In this work, Benton abandons abstraction for a modern figural style inspired by 16th-century Italian Mannerist art.
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Georgia O’Keeffe, Two Calla Lilies on Pink, 1928. O’Keeffe is an artist well represented in Youth and Beauty through a half-dozen of her canvases, as well as a pair of portrait photographs taken by her husband Alfred Stieglitz. Inspired by close-up photography popular in the decade, Two Calla Lilies on Pink, one of her most striking creations, zooms in upon blooms so exuberantly oversized that they appear on the verge of bursting through the composition’s rectangular border.
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Nickolas Muray, Gloria Swanson, about 1925. Muray was highly sought after for his photographic portraits, working most frequently with actors and dancers. In this captivating image of a young Gloria Swanson, the artist recorded the sultry perfection of the actress’s visage framed by her sensuously bare shoulder and precisely placed hand.
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Charles Sheeler, Church Street El, 1920. In this masterpiece from the Cleveland Museum of Art, Sheeler inventively cast urban architecture as a precisely calculated composition of sleek geometric forms. Shown in a dynamic, upward-tilting perspective, the forms appear crystalline—at once frozen and expansive.
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Charles Demuth, My Egypt, 1927. In this work Demuth sought a titular link between industrial forms in his hometown and distant Egyptian monuments—popularized by the 1922 discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb. The artist employed a dramatic upward perspective and intersecting fanlike rays to transform grain elevators in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, into a transcendently radiant icon.
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Lewis Hine, Power House Mechanic, 1920–21. The clean muscularity and precise industrial order presented by Hine in this work demonstrates the photographer’s shift in 1919 from a gritty documentary style to what he called “interpretive photography”—an approach intended to raise the stature of industrial workers, who were perhaps overshadowed by the massive machinery they operated.
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Edward Hopper, Lighthouse Hill, 1927. Seen from a dramatically low vantage point in strong raking sunlight, the massive tower and the steep-roofed house appear strikingly austere, suggesting the exposure of the site and the elemental existence of its remote inhabitants.
Adult tickets for Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties are $15, seniors and college students $13, children ages 6–17 $7.50, children 5 and under are free. The exhibition is free for museum members. The museum has planned complementary programming including architectural tours, gallery talks, lectures, silent films, and musical programs. Programming information is available at www.clevelandart.org.
Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, co-published by the Brooklyn Museum and Skira Rizzoli, featuring an essay by the exhibition’s organizing curator, Teresa A. Carbone, the Andrew W. Mellon Curator of American Art and Managing Curator, Arts of the Americas and Europe at the Brooklyn Museum, along with additional essays by notable America art scholars.
Painting: Luigi Lucioni, Paul Cadmus, 1928, oil on canvas, Brooklyn Museum, Dick S. Ramsay Fund
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