Eugène Delacroix
French, 1798-1863
The Justice of Trajan, 1858
Oil on canvas
Purchase, 1941 (4954)

Amédée Ozenfant
French, 1886-1966
Accords, 1922
Oil on canvas
Gift of John Gregg Allerton, 1967 (3478.1)
© 2009 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris

A New Look at some Old Favorites:
Modern Art at the Academy
Gallery 10 and Clare Boothe Luce Gallery (27)
Opens November 19, 2009

For the past year, the Academy has given new focus to its permanent collection with a series of exhibitions and special installations that bring to light treasures long hidden from view.  Francisco Goya: The Disasters of War (through January 10, 2010) and Hokusai’s Summit:  Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (through January 3, 2010) highlight two of the 19th century’s most important print series, while the forthcoming From Whistler to Warhol: Modernism on Paper (opening February 2010) will chart the course of modern art through a survey of 19th- and 20th-century prints and drawings.

Gallery 10 has reopened and on Nov. 19 the Clare Boothe Luce Gallery will reopen, both with a new look and a major reinstallation showcasing the Academy’s significant holdings in modern and post-modern painting.

Gallery 10 focuses on 19th-century Europe, offering a comprehensive overview of the key artistic movements that shaped the cultural climate of this dynamic era. Romanticism and Realism is newly present in rarely shown paintings by Eugène Delacroix and Gustave Courbet, while works by Camille Pissarro and Maximilien Luce enliven the Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism more familiarly on view. Vincent van Gogh’s Wheat Field (1888) and Paul Cézanne’s Thicket (c.1895)—both back from major exhibitions in Switzerland and Japan—have been brought out of storage for the first time in months, joining Paul Gauguin’s Two Nudeson a Tahitian Beach (1892) to illustrate the state of the avant-garde as the 19th century came to a close.

Gallery 27 will be devoted to the 20th century. Little-seen paintings by Georges Braque, Robert Delaunay, Amédée Ozenfant, and Gino Severini will take their place alongside works by Fernand Léger and Pablo Picasso to examine Cubism in its numerous early 20th-century manifestations, while Surrealist paintings by Giorgio de Chirico and Yves Tanguy will elucidate the contemporaneous impulse towards extreme subjectivism. Paintings by Elmer Bischoff, Leon Golub, and Alex Katz will hang alongside works by Morris Louis, Robert Motherwell, and Richard Pousette-Dart to illustrate the competing forces—figuration and abstraction—that enlivened modern art at the middle of the 20th century. The latter 20th-century will be represented in pieces by John Baldessari and Nam Jun Paik, who demonstrate the Conceptualist liquidation of the object in favor of the underlying idea. The exhibition will also include works by Lee Bontecou, Alexander Calder, Philip Guston, Neo Rauch, and others.
—Theresa Papanikolas, Curator of European and American Art