press release

The Age of Anxiety

The 1930's were decisive in more ways than one for a modern art scene coming to the fore in the United States, at a particularly complex moment in its history when there could be no cut-and-dried definition of American modern art.From abstraction to "socialist" realism, the esthetic worlds of painters like Marsden Hartley, Georgia O'Keeffe, or Edward Hopper operated side by side, confronting each other in the same creative centers.

Mounted jointly with the Art Institute of Chicago, this exhibition will feature a set of fifty to sixty pictures taken from prestigious American public collections (Art Institute in Chicago, the Whitney Museum or the Museum of Modern Art in New-York...) and also private collections, whose diversity reflects the great richness of this pre-World War II period.

Curators
Judith A. Barter, Field-McCormick Chair and Curator, Department of American Art, The Art Institute of Chicago
Laurence des Cars, general heritage curator, director of the Musée de l'Orangerie