The Last 100 Years of American History Told Through 50 Paintings

Balancing on the cusp of a new millennium, the show, It Was a New Century: Reflections on Modern America, brings in distinct creatives from the epoch, including George Bellows, Childe Hassam, Winslow Homer, and Maurice Prendergast. For many of the artists, the city of New York and the political and cultural climate surrounding the turn of the century influenced their work’s subject matter. George Bellow’s intense, roughly-hewn depictions of boxing played a part in categorizing the School’s perspective. The underbelly-located energy of Bellow’s portraits contrast with the metropolis watercolors by Maurice Prendergast, conjuring a more élite, high society.

“The assembled works present a compelling panorama of a new, modern America,” shares Pamela Franks, acting director and the Seymour H. Knox Jr., curator of modern and contemporary art, in an exhibit release. “A nation and its artists seeking to embrace the future, to honor the past, and, above all, to interpret the present.”

See a few selections from the show, It Was a New Century: Reflections on Modern America, below:

George Bellows, A Stag at Sharkey’s, 1917. Lithograph. Private collection 

Jerome Myers, Peddlers, Lower East Side, 1905. Oil on canvas. Private collection

Walt Kuhn, Clown in a Beaver Hat, 1944. Oil on canvas. Private collection

Mary Cassatt, Girl with Blue Ribbons, ca. 1903. Pastel on paper mounted on board. Private collection

Everett Shinn, The Plaza Looking South on Fifth Avenue (Winter Night), 1945. Gouache and pencil on paper. Private collection

George Luks, The Race, ca. 1925. Oil on canvas. Private collection

Winslow Homer, Schooners at Anchor, Key West, 1903. Watercolor on paper. Private collection

Maurice Prendergast, Piazza of St. Mark’s, ca. 1898–99. Watercolor and pencil on paper. Private collection

It Was a New Century: Reflections on Modern America here

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