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300 Years of American Art, a Historical Mirror

The first survey of American art will be presented at National Art Museum of China from February to April. The exhibition named Art in America: Three Hundreds Years of Innovation will feature approximately 130 important works of American art spanning the Colonial period to the present age, focusing on paintings drawn from major US and European collections, including The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York, and The Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago. The exhibition was made possible with funding from ALCOA Foundation. Additional support was provided by the Ford Motor Company Fund and Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP. From May to June it will move to the Shanghai Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art Shanghai.

Thomas Krens, director of the Guggenheim Foundation, also leader of the curatorial team of the exhibition said, “The exhibition offers an extraordinary view of our nation’s cultural and historical developments and bold creative principles. This project hopefully can be an inspirational threshold for greater dialogue between the peoples and cultures of America and China.”

Divided into six historical periods, the exhibition demonstrates how the art of each era both reflected and contributed to a complex visual narrative of the nation during times of discovery, growth, and experi-mentation. The six sections, each marking significant phases of the country’s development, are: Colonization and Rebellion (1700–1830); Expansion and Fragmentation (1830–1880); Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism (1880–1915); Modernism and Regionalism (1915–1945); Prosperity and Disillusionment (1945–1980); and Multiculturalism and Globalization (1980–present).

The exhibition features approximately 120 artists from the early 18th century to the present. Highlights of the exhibition include: Charles Willson Peale’s George Washington (ca. 1780–82, Walton Family Foundation); Edward P. Moran’s The Unveiling of the Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World (1886, Museum of the City of New York); Jackson Pollock’s The Moon-Woman (1942, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, Italy) and Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle (1994–2002, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum) and more.

A fully illustrated colour catalogue published in both English and Chinese will accompany the exhibition. Michael Leja, professor of Art History at the University of Pennsylvania, contributes a main essay outlining the major movements in American art. Additionally, each section contains an overview essay written by a leading scholar of the period. A full-colour brochure will be available to museum visitors free of charge.