MUSEUMS

The history of American 20th century painting reveals a changing America through the competing forces of tradition and innovation in painting and printmaking. This exhibition represents a selection of more than 100 paintings, drawings and prints representative of American art between the 1920s and 1960s.This sampling of American art between the World Wars introduces works by well-known artists such as John Sloan and Raphael Soyer, and works by under-appreciated talents such as Vaclav Vytlacil and Richard Florsheim, as well as a canon of fascinating unknowns.

As this exhibition traces the evolution of American art from the 1920s into the 1960s, it includes examples of American urban and rural scene painting, and political and social realism. Social realism became an important art movement during the Great Depression in the United States in the 1930s. As an American artistic movement it is closely related to American scene painting and to Regionalism. American Social Realism includes the works of such artists as those from the Ashcan School, and Reginald Marsh and John Sloan. It also extends to the art of photography as exemplified by the works of Walker Evans, Margaret Bourke-White, Lewis Hine, Edward Steichen, Berenice Abbott and Aaron Siskind. Together, these works capture the essence of a dynamic period of artistic vitality in American art.

This exhibition has been organized by the Boca Raton Museum of Art.