Modern Metropolis

This exhibition explored the changing image of New York City in the years between 1913, when European modernist art made its American debut at the Armory Show, and the 1950s, when the artists of the postwar New York School of abstraction rose to international prominence. It was during these decades that New York came into its own as a center for the creating, exhibiting, critiquing, and marketing of modern art. At the same time, the city itself presented the world with the very model of the Modern Metropolis: the economic, cultural, and psychological capital of urban civilization worldwide.

As new York evolved with the times, so too did the range of artistic subjects and treatments that it inspired. With the growth of America's suburbs and the thinning of its urban populations, Manhattan's Jazz-age skyline took on a nostalgic air, evoking the prospects of an age that was passed. After World War II, artists of every medium took their cue from a city in flux, resistant to easy characterization. As an urban aesthetic took shape that was essentially abstract, challenging, and unresolved, New York's uncertain future made it, once again, the eloquent mirror of its era.

This exhibition and its publication were made possible by the generosity of The Smart Family Foundation, Inc. There are works that appeared in this exhibition that were loans to the Loeb and therefore do not appear on this website.