New York Renaissance Dal Whitney Museum of American Art

The Whitney Museum of American Art of New York holds one of the world’s most important collections of 20th-century American art. This volume is the catalogue of the exhibition made possible by the loan of nearly 100 works from the museum, for the first time in an event in Europe. The selection has a particular impact, because it combines works that marked the rise of New York as the capital of contemporary art starting in the 1950s. Readers will encounter the great names of American Realism, Pop Art, Abstract Expressionism and graffiti – Warhol, Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Wesselmann, Pollock, De Kooning, Basquiat, Haring – but also representatives of the latest trends in contemporary American art, including figures less familiar to Italian viewers: Leslie Bourgeois, John Currin, Caio Fonseca, Peter Halley, Alex Katz, Matthew Ritchie or Sue Williams. The catalogue includes a long article on the history of the Whitney Museum. The museum’s founder, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, defied the diffidence of her fellow citizens and, in particular, of the Metropolitan Museum to which she had offered, in 1929, her already substantial collection of contemporary art, just as America was entering the period of the Great Depression. In 1931 she founded the museum and gave it her name. Since then it has been a reference point for the development of contemporary art. The volume also contains a critical essay by Francesco Tedeschi and an anthology of writings by artists.