Lewis Hine, John Pento, Hartford, Connecticut, March 1909, 1909, gelatin silver print, 4-5/8 x 6-5/8 innches, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC, Gift of Harry H. Lunn, Jr., through Graphics International Ltd., 1977.54.2.

Sanford Robinson Gifford, Ruins of the Parthenon, 1880, oil on canvas, 27-5/8 x 53-3/8 inches, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC, Museum Purchase, Gallery Fund, 81.7.

Winslow Homer, A Light on the Sea, 1897, oil on canvas, 28-1/4 x 48-1/4 inches, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC, Museum Purchase, Gallery Fund, 07.3.

Albert Bierstadt, The Last of the Buffalo, c. 1888, oil on canvas, 71-1/8 x 118-3/4 inches, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Gift of Mary (Mrs. Albert) Bierstadt, 09.12.

John George Brown, The Longshoremen's Noon, 1879, oil on canvas, 33-1/4 x 50-1/4 inches, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Museum Purchase, Gallery Fund, 00.4.

Arthur Dove, Space Divided by Line Motive (U.S.A.), 1943, oil on canvas, 23-7/8 x 31-7/8 inches, Corcoran Gallery of Art,
Washington DC, Museum Purchase, William A. Clark Fund, 68.17.

Gilbert Stuart, George Washington, c. 1803, oil on canvas, 35-1/2 x 30-3/4 inches, Bequest of Mrs. Benjamin Ogle Tayloe, 02.3.

Andy Warhol, Mao, 1973, synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen ink on canvas, 50-1/8 x 42-1/4 x 1-1/4 inches, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Gift of the FRIENDS of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1976.44, © 2008 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts / ARS, New York.

Marsden Hartley, Berlin Abstraction, 1914-1915, oil on canvas, 31-13/16 x 25-1/2 inches, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Museum Purchase, Gallery Fund, 67.3.

Mary Cassatt, Young Girl at a Window, c. 1883-1885, oil on canvas, 39-1/2 x 25-1/2 inches, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, Museum Purchase, Gallery Fund, 09.8.

Corcoran Gallery of Art
500 Seventeenth Street NW
202-639-1700
Washington
The American Evolution:
A History through Art
March 1-July 27, 2008

The American Evolution: A History through Art offers a fresh look at the Corcoran’s time-honored collection of American art. A display of nearly 200 objects in a wide range of media dating from the colonial era to the present, the exhibition focuses on five overarching themes that have shaped American culture: Money, Land, Politics, Cultural Exchange, and The Modern World. These themes are fundamental to the way the United States has developed, and to the stories we tell about ourselves.

The term “evolution” suggests change over time. Embracing the idea that the United States is a dynamic nation in a constant state of re-definition, the exhibition nevertheless reveals remarkable continuities in artistic production from the 18th to the 21st century. From Gilbert Stuart’s stately c. 1803 portrait of George Washington to Andy Warhol’s irreverent 1973 likeness of the Chinese leader Mao Zedong, and from Frederic Edwin Church’s dramatic 1857 view from the brink of Niagara Falls to Richard Diebenkorn’s abstract 1975 rendering of the suburban expanses of Ocean Park, California, The American Evolution explores some of the ways that American life and art have evolved over two and a half centuries.

This exhibition is organized by the Corcoran Gallery of Art and curated by Emily D. Shapiro, assistant curator of American art, and Sarah Newman, assistant curator of contemporary art. To read more about the curators, please click here.

The lure of money has long held powerful sway over American culture. The settlers who established the North American colonies were motivated as much by a desire for economic opportunity as by the promise of political and religious freedom, and the colonies’ economic subordination to England was one of the primary motivations for the American Revolution. As the United States developed into a global superpower, the ideal of free enterprise continued to shape the nation’s political, social, and cultural agendas.

Economic interests directly informed the earliest American art. Painting in the colonies was limited almost exclusively to portraiture, a genre that developed alongside and bolstered the burgeoning consumer society. As in Europe, prosperous merchants and landowners commissioned likenesses of themselves and their families in elegant poses and fine dress as a means of asserting their financial success and elevated social stature. Prominent colonial artists such as John Singleton Copley and Joseph Blackburn amassed their own small fortunes producing these distinguished likenesses of America’s elite.

In the later 19th century, America became the world’s leading economic power. Mark Twain famously described the era as “The Gilded Age,” in reference to both the great wealth created and the ostentatious lifestyle it engendered. Magnates of industry and commerce collected still life paintings and images of leisure-class women in interiors that conveyed the opulence and abundance of this culture and offered a visual respite from the more unseemly aspects of industrialization. A select group of artists, including John George Brown and Lewis Hine, focused their attention on the working-class population that resided on the other side of the nation’s widening economic divide.

There is perhaps no substance or ideal more central to America’s mythology than the land. For a young nation challenged to define itself in the absence of an official history, the native landscape was an important source of pride. The vast forests, fertile plains, and great mountains of North America offered seemingly limitless opportunity for exploration and invention, as well as commercial exploitation. Over the years, the land has served as a wellspring of aesthetic inspiration, spiritual sustenance, and economic opportunity.

In the early to mid-19th century, a group of landscapists founded the country’s first national painting style. For the Hudson River School artists and their audiences, majestic images of the natural wonders of the northeastern United States rivaled the grand history paintings of their European counterparts. Later 19th-century artists such as Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Remington joined prospectors in “mining” the American West for pictorial material. At the end of the century, American artists’ interpretations of the land took a more personal turn. Painters such as Childe Hassam and George Inness produced expressive landscapes that depicted fleeting atmospheric effects and embraced the subjectivity of vision.

Nature continued to inspire artists into the 20th century. Abstract painters including Joan Mitchell and Richard Diebenkorn produced large-scale canvases that drew on the experience of intense light and color, and which produced environmental, atmospheric effects. Other artists took a more oblique approach to the issues of landscape and nature. The works of Willem de Kooning and Helen Frankenthaler, for example, are animated by the organic forms, lush surfaces, and writhing energies of the natural world.

The mixture of art and politics is a complex brew, at once intimate and wide-reaching, broad and oblique. The Corcoran’s holdings give a sense of the power and range of such connections. The collection surveys some of the great figures and moments from the nation’s history, but beyond that, it offers a glimpse into the ways that artists’ images have shaped it.

Painted portraits of 18th- and 19th-century political and military leaders such as George Washington are fundamental to the way we have come to understand them: heroic, noble icons central to the nation’s mythology. Paintings of everyday life — known as genre scenes — which gained prominence during the 19th century, emphasize a different aspect of political life. Often created with a particular slant on the day’s events, and focused on daily interactions and backroom workings, these pictures by artists such as William Sidney Mount and Horace Bonham tell the story of American democracy as born of humble origins rather than exalted leaders.

Throughout the 20th century, politically oriented artists often took a more subversive approach. Some, such as the photographers who documented the Civil Rights Movement, made pictures of dissent and struggle that expanded the language of both politics and culture. Other artists working in a variety of media, including Gordon Parks, Kerry James Marshall, and Kara Walker, made issues of class, sexuality, race, and slavery their explicit subject. Central to their work is a concern with stereotypes and the ways in which seemingly neutral traditions, histories, and images are filled with significance. In an attempt to influence political dialogue directly, much recent political art encourages viewers to question received wisdom, and creates new meanings in the process.

The arts of the United States — a nation founded by immigrants that continues to nurture a large foreignborn population — are shaped by various histories and traditions both inside and outside its borders. Influence and exchange with the wider world fundamentally informs the art we call “national.”

Before the Civil War, Italy was the most popular foreign destination for American artists, who saw classicism as a fitting aesthetic for a burgeoning republic modeled on the political ideals of ancient Greece and Rome. Italy proved a particular draw for sculptors, such as Hiram Powers, who took advantage of readily available materials and assistants. As the 19th century progressed, many Americans were drawn to the international art centers of Munich, London, and Paris. While some of the nation’s most influential artists, including Mary Cassatt and John Singer Sargent, chose to live much of their lives in Europe, they were active participants in stateside art activities.

Artists have also found inspiration in cultures as geographically distant as the Far East and as proximate as indigenous America. The opening of Japan to Western trade in 1853 brought East Asian culture before the American public, and painters such as Thomas Wilmer Dewing began to incorporate aspects of this work in their own. Euro-American artists also found inspiration in indigenous cultural forms. This influence traveled in two directions — in the early 20th century, Native Americans revived traditional tribal styles and techniques and adapted them for a western market.

Largely unburdened by longstanding tradition and the weight of the past, the United States has served as a beacon of “the new” throughout its history. In the 20th century, advances in industry, technology, and social freedom transformed its landscape and culture. Change seemed to many to be the nation’s defining characteristic. Attempting to reckon with the modern world, artists developed new and radical ways of picturing it.

In the early and middle part of the century, artists experimented with different ways of incorporating the modern world into their work. Some, such as Charles Sheeler, approached the diversity of modernity’s subjects with a style derived from America’s powerful realist and landscape traditions. Others, including Marsden Hartley, who spent time abroad, were more international in outlook, infusing European-inspired abstraction and Cubism with American popular culture and concerns. The compositions of Stuart Davis incorporated the rhythms of jazz and urban life, while Arthur Dove’s abstract paintings drew inspiration from nature.

As the century progressed, many American artists made work that was completely freed from the anchor of representation. Concerned with form and materials rather than subject matter, the work of the Minimalists and their progeny was radically ambiguous. By incorporating industrial processes, materials, and techniques, as did Tony Smith, or by merging sleek geometries with an organic physicality, as did Martin Puryear and Richard Tuttle, these artists made objects that straddled the boundaries between painting and sculpture, and between craft, industry, and idea. Their work did not represent the modern world so much as engage with it on its own terms.

Ellsworth Kelly, Yellow with Red Triangle, 1973, oil on canvas, two joined panels, 119 x 145-1/2 inches, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC, Museum Purchase with the aid of funds from the Richard King Mellon Foundation, 1977.17, © Ellsworth Kelly.