Oscar Bluemner's painting, "Old Canal Port" from 1914.
Photo by Victoria Pesta via the Norton Museum of Art.
March 18 through July 16, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday to Saturday and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday at the Norton Museum of Art, 1450 S. Dixie Hwy., West Palm Beach
Information: Free to members and children ages 12 and under, $10 for students, $20 for seniors 60 and over, $23 for ages 18 and over (plus $5 exhibition admission), 561-832-5196, norton.org
Two new exhibitions, “At the Dawn of a New Age: Early Twentieth-Century American Modernism” and “From Man Ray to O’Keeffe, American Modernism at the Norton,” opened March 18 and run through July 16. Each displays close to 40 years of visual modernist art from nearly 100 years ago.
Drawn from the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, these exhibits display the optimism of artists at the start of the 20th century. Largely ignored in favor of urban realism by the Whitney when the museum was founded in 1930, these pieces didn’t start to be collected until the mid-1970s. They include works by previously excluded female artists and artists of color.
Particularly between 1900 and 1930, these artists seemed inspired by the vibrancy of America’s growing cities, plus progressive initiatives like the women’s suffrage movement and dawning forms of manufacturing, communication and transportation.
Featured artists include Man Ray, Georgia O’Keeffe, Oscar Bluemner, Yun Gee, Albert Bloch, Ben Benn, Marsden Hartley, Agnes Pelton, Patrick Henry Bruce, Florine Stettheimer and William Zorach.
