The Museum of Modern Art is known for its prescient focus on the avant-garde art of Europe, but in the first half of the twentieth century it was also acquiring work by Stuart Davis, Georgia O’Keeffe, Charles Sheeler, Alfred Stieglitz, and other, less well-known American artists whose work sometimes fits awkwardly under the avant garde umbrella. American Modern presents a fresh look at MoMA’s holdings of American art from that period. The still lifes, portraits, and urban, rural, and industrial landscapes vary in style, approach, and medium: melancholy images by Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth bump against the eccentric landscapes of Charles Burchfield and the Jazz Age sculpture of Elie Nadelman. Yet a distinct sensibility emerges, revealing a side of the Museum that may surprise a good part of its audience and throwing light on the cultural preoccupations of the rapidly changing American society of the day.

Excerpt from First Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting: November 22nd, 1932, to January 5th, 1933 American Painting the Whitney Museum of American Art is following a precedent established by almost every important art museum in the United States of holding annually large and imporf tant exhibitions of American Art. An increasingly liberal spirit has broadened the scope of these exhibitions so that in recent years they have assumed greater importance to both artist and public. Believing that there exists in New York a need for this compre hensive type of exhibition in which the recent work of American artists may be seen under favorable circumstances, the Whitney Museum of American Art has established a series of exhibitions of painting, sculpture and the graphic arts, so that each year will bring one large exhibition. This year we inaugurate the series by the present show of paintings in oil. To make this exhibition representa/ tive of the various trends in painting throughout the country one hundred fifty/seven artists have been invited to contribute canvases of their own selection. This is a departure from the policy of other exhibitions similar in character where the jury system has obtained. Also, the Whitney Museum of American Art will award no prizes, but has set aside the sum of twenty thousand dollars each year for the purchase of works of outstanding excellence from the exhibi/ tions. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.