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The Georgia Museum of Art is currently offering a varied look at 20th-century American art in three complementary exhibitions.
From 1945 to 1965, cutting-edge American decorative arts gained unprecedented
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| George Nelson, Marshmallow Love Seat, The American Environment. |
popularity with the general public; works that combined beauty, utility and simplicity flourished in middle-class homes and office environments. The American Environment: Decorative Arts of the Mid-20th Century, on display through Jan. 7, features some of the iconic pieces of the era by its most famous and masterly designers.
Charles and Ray Eames’s molded-plywood lounge chair and fiberglass armchairs may be the most recognizable pieces of the era, and rightly so, as they transformed such previously scorned materials as plastic and plywood into furniture that was both sinuously curved and eminently practical. Eero Saarinen’s playful chairs and George Nelson’s clocks and coconut chair demonstrate the range of color, texture and shape in an era so forward-looking that it continues to influence contemporary designers.
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| John Sloan, Sixth Avenue Elevated at 3rd St. (1928). In the City: Urban Views, 1900–1940. |
Beginning Nov. 9, the museum will also offer an exhibition called In the City: Urban Views 1900-1940, which was organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art to showcase America’s tumultuous and dynamic urban settings of the first 40 years of the century. Fifty works--by artists such as John Sloan, Edward Hopper and Reginald Marsh--illustrate all walks of life in an urban setting.
During the first 40 years of the 20th century, America was shaken by dramatic and rapid political and cultural changes--World War I, the Great Depression and the transformation of the American city from town to metropolis. The Ashcan School of the 1910s and 1920s and the Works Progress Administration artists in the 1930s focused especially on the harsh realities of life in the city. Periods of optimism and economic prosperity are represented in the exhibition too, with depictions of the glamorous, fashionable city life of the Jazz Age. Progressivism, isolationism and confidence all appear in these four decades of art.
Urban Views from the Collection, also on display now, serves as a companion to the Whitney’s larger retrospec-tive examination of the American city. Andrew Ladis and Janice Simon, both professors of art history at the Lamar Dodd School of Art, selected these works from the collection of the Georgia Museum of Art to provide a counterpoint to In the City: Urban Views 1900-1940. |
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