Making Sense of America

The American Century: Art & Culture, 1900-2000. Organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and presented by Intel Corporation. Part I, 23 Apr.-22 Aug. 1999; Part II, 26 Sept. 1999-13 Feb. 2000. Part I, Barbara Haskell, curator; Susan Cooke, associate curator. Part II, Lisa Phillips, curator; Susan Harris and Karl Willers, associate curators; Chrissie Iles, film and video curator; Maurice Berger, guest curator, cultural sites; and Stephen Vitiello, guest curator, sound program. Exhibition website at <www.whitney.org>.

The American Century: Art and Culture, 1900-1950 [Part I]. By Barbara Haskell. New York: Whitney Museum of Art with W.W. Norton & Company. 406 pages. $60.00 (cloth).

The American Century: Art and Culture, 1950-2000 [Part II]. By Lisa Phillips. New York: Whitney Museum of Art with W.W. Norton & Company. 398 pages. $60.00 (cloth).

THE BILLBOARD FOR THE WHITNEY MUSEUM'S EXHIBITION, The American Century: Art & Culture, 1900-2000, caught me by surprise. I was walking through midtown Manhattan, on my way to the show, barely ten blocks from the museum. Superimposed over a large photograph of the Brooklyn Dodgers was a smaller reproduction of Joseph Stella's The Brooklyn Bridge: Variation on an Old Theme (1939)--a modernist painting of the bridge that makes it a soaring icon of twentieth-century America: a cathedral of lights, cars, skyscrapers. Like a bull's-eye in the center of the advertisement, The Brooklyn Bridge made an arresting juxtaposition to the Dodgers. Positioned above and below the images was the advertisement's tag: "Make Some Sense of America. The American Century at The Whitney." It was an enticing invitation. What did the Dodgers have to do with Stella's painting? How could they "make sense" of "America"? The billboard implied that the museum had configured a cultural landscape that placed modernist art on the same playing field as the symbols of popular culture. "Context" and "art" did indeed occupy wall spaces throughout both halves of the exhibition, with photographs, industrial objects, posters, movies, music, and television suggesting the complex formation of American culture over the last hundred years. Here, with the Dodgers and the Bridge cheek to cheek, was what was the best, the most compelling and intriguing about this exhibition.

But, it was also the oddest. Vying with the pictured icons in the billboard was that charged phrase, "The American Century," Henry Luce's famous 1941 paean to America as a world power. The billboard's declarative grammar promised that the "sense" to be made of America lay not in the leveled playing field of Brooklyn Dodgers and modernist painting, but in Luce's American Century. In its promotion, layout, wall texts, and catalogue, the exhibition systematically repeated Luce's triumphalism. It's a familiar, Irving Sandlerish narrative of twentieth-century American art. ¹ The exhibition eagerly pointed us to Jackson Pollock, with an edge of disappointment that it took half the century for him to appear and more than a pang that Abstract Expressionism's moment of hegemony lasted only a decade or so. In fact, the Whitney prioritized Joseph Stella over the Dodgers. The "sense" to be made of the American Century lay in modernism. European modernism, rather than American popular culture, was the reference point for the show. Maxwell Anderson, director of the Whitney Museum, explained why the second part of the exhibition was "a history of the avant-garde": "This focus is warranted . . . by the leading role [that] American art has played on the international scene since 1950." ² The avant-garde stood for American cultural hegemony which in turn stood for American culture in the twentieth century.

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The American Century: Art & Culture, 1900-2000 was a two-part exhibition on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York for the past year. Curated by Barbara Haskell, curator of prewar art at the museum since 1975, and Susan Cooke, an associate curator at the museum, Part I covered the first half of...