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Cleveland Museum of Art opens Youth and Beauty. Art of the American Twenties

Cleveland Museum of Art presents Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties, a wide-ranging exhibition which brings together for the first time the work of more than sixty painters, sculptors, and photographers who explored a new approach to realism in the years between World War I and the Great Depression. On view from July 1 through September 16, 2012.

Thomas Hart Benton, Self-Portrait with Rita (detail), 1922. Oil on canvas; 124.5 x 100 cm. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Jack H. Mooney.

The 1920s were a time when American artists responded to their rapidly changing world by creating works that conversely evoked clarity, order, and stillness. Confronted with situations and environments altered fundamentally by mechanization and urbanization, as well as shifts in attitudes toward the human body and behavior, artists adopted a distilled realism in order to discover organization amid turmoil. Some looked to Old Master art for inspiration, while others took cues from recent avant-garde developments, like motion pictures and advertisements. Most Jazz Age artists were united in their drive to idealize modern existence, and the art in this exhibition highlights human and natural beauty, and captures the youthful potency of America’s emerging industrial landscape. Youth and Beauty will present more than 130 works by artists including Ansel Adams, George Bellows, Thomas Hart Benton, Stuart Davis, Aaron Douglas, Walker Evans, Edward Hopper, Isamu Noguchi, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Grant Wood.

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 free. The exhibition is free for museum members. Youth and Beauty 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.

Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties is organized by the Brooklyn Museum. Major support for this exhibition and the accompanying catalogue was also provided by the Henry Luce Foundation, the Martha A. and Robert S. Rubin Exhibition Fund, The Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Foundation for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. – www.clevelandart.org

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