Young and Beautiful:
The Art of the American Twenties

The Cleveland Museum of Art presents an unusual exhibition that, for the first time in history, brings together the work of more than sixty painters, sculptors and photographers who have explored a new approach to realism in the years between the First World War and the Great Depression. Youth and Beauty (Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties) will feature more than 130 works by artists including Ansel Adams, George Bellows, Thomas Hart Benton, Stuart Davis, Aaron Douglas, Walker Evans, Edward Hopper, Isamu Noguchi, Georgia O ’Kiff and Grant Forest. Organized and presented by the Brooklyn Museum, the American Twenties Art Exhibition will run from July 1 to September 16, 2012.

Thomas Hart Benton - Self-Portrait with Rita (detail), 1922 National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC

Cleveland is the last stop of the exhibition, which was already presented earlier at the Brooklyn Museum and the Dallos Museum of Art. The 1920s are often remembered as a hoarse, even bustling decade, one in which the Victorian era was replaced by modernity. It is striking that American artists of this period reacted to the rapid changes in the world with works in which clarity, order and stillness reign. Faced with an environment substantially altered by mechanization and urbanization, changes in relations between people, the artists created their own distilled reality in order to find peace and order in the midst of turmoil and fuss. Most of the artists of the “Roaring Twenties”, also called the “Jazz Generation”, were united in their pursuit of idealizing their time and art, cultivating the beauty of the human body and capturing America’s new industrial landscapes with their growing potential.

Anna Sidorova