Museum PR Announcements News and Information

Whitney Museum of American Art opens American Legends. From Calder to O’Keeffe

Whitney Museum of American Art presents American Legends. From Calder to O’Keeffe, an exhibition on view from DECEMBER 22.


Charles Demuth My Egypt, 1927. Oil on fiberboard, 35 3/4 × 30 in. (90.8 × 76.2 cm). Whitney Museum of, New York; purchase with funds from Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney 31.172

Eighteen early to mid-century American artists who forged distinctly modern styles are the subjects of American Legends: From Calder to O’Keeffe, opening December 22 at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Drawing from the Whitney’s
permanent collection, the year-long show features iconic as well as lesser known works by Oscar Bluemner, Charles Burchfield, Paul Cadmus, Alexander Calder, Joseph Cornell, Ralston Crawford, Stuart Davis, Charles Demuth, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, Edward Hopper, Gaston Lachaise, Jacob Lawrence, John Marin, Reginald Marsh, Elie Nadelman, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Joseph Stella.

Curator Barbara Haskell has organized the museum’s holdings of each of these artists’ work into small-scale retrospectives. Many of the works included will be on view for the first time in years; others, such as Hopper’s A Woman in the Sun, Calder’s Circus, Jacob Lawrence’s War Series, and Georgia O’Keeffe’s Summer Days, are cornerstones of the Whitney’s collection. The show will run for a year in the museum’s fifth-floor Leonard & Evelyn Lauder Galleries and both the Sondra Gilman Gallery and Howard & Jean Lipman Gallery on the fifth-floor mezzanine. To showcase the breadth and depth of the Museum’s impressive modern art collection, a rotation will occur in May 2013 in order that other artists and works can be installed.

American Legends is organized by Barbara Haskell, Curator.

For general information, please call (212) 570-3600 or visit whitney.org