The Whitney Museum of American Art is making the broadcast quality HD video and soundbites available here for free and unrestricted use by accredited media.
Views are spectacular from all sides of the Whitney. Additionally,
there is approximately 13,000 square feet of outdoor galleries on
four levels of the building. Art is also installed in elevators and stairwells.
The modern forms with which American artists experimented in the first decades of the twentieth century introduced compelling tensions between figuration and abstraction. From Georgia O’Keeffe’s colorful harmonies inspired by music and nature to the hard, streamlined
forms of the Machine Age and the rise of photography, a new
century took shape as the United States rose to unprecedented international prominence.
As some artists of the 1930s and 1940s explored American subjects, myths, and stories, others turned inward to their own imaginations, under the influence of the international movement of Surrealism.
The lively spectacle of Alexander Calder’s Circus (1926-31), meanwhile, is set against voyeuristic images of the flow of urban
life. In the 1950s, New York exploded with the bold new painterly forms of the Abstract Expressionist works of Willem de Kooning,
Joan Mitchell, and Jackson Pollock.
As American art developed in the decade following World War II, artists began expanding their visual and material vocabulary to respond to a new era, from the refinement of hard-edge abstraction
to the clutter of assemblage and the dynamism of Pop art. Advances
in industrial technology further pushed artistic processes as artists exploited new materials, allowing for inventive new forms appearing
in works from the 1960s and 1970s.
Featuring works that date from the late 1960s to the present, the
fifth-floor galleries reveal artists dealing frankly with issues of
politics, identity, popular culture, and personal narrative—ones that forcefully defined the end of the twentieth century and the beginning
of a new millennium.
Views are spectacular from all sides of the Whitney. Additionally,
there is approximately 13,000 square feet of outdoor galleries on
four levels of the building. Art is also installed in elevators and stairwells.
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