• This is the first occasion to exhibit the Collection of Whitney Museum, one of the four major museums of New York, in Asia.
• The exhibition will present 87 artworks by 47 eminent artists, from Man Ray to Jeff Koons.
• The works on view represent the quintessential part of American contemporary art - New York Dada, Neo-Dada, Pop Art, Conceptual Art, Hyperrealism, and Postmodernism.
• The exhibition, as part of the Art of the World series that is specially organized by National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea, will provide an opportunity to observe American society and culture via American contemporary art.
The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea will present The American Art; Masterpieces of Everyday Life from the Whitney Museum of American Art, at the National Art Museum, Deoksugung from June 11th to September 25th, 2011. The Whitney Museum of American Art is one of New York's four prestigious museums, and this is the first occasion to exhibit the Whitney Museum Collection in Asia.
The exhibition The American Art brings together 87 works based on the theme 'the Object', which were created by 47 distinguished contemporary artists, such as Man Ray - one of the most influential New York Dadaist of the 20th century - Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, Dan Flavin, and lastly, Jeff Koons.
The Whitney Museum of American Art, true to its name, is reputed to have been dedicated to supporting American art and artists, which is the museum's primary concern. This is differentiated from the Museum of Modern Art, New York(MoMA) that represents international art. In the spirit of engaging a broad audience, the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Korea aims to organize the exhibitions in collaboration with major international museums by featuring their art collections. It will provide the audience with the opportunity to experience the outstanding international contemporary art per se. In turn, the audience will be able to appreciate Korean contemporary art from a more wide and comprehensive perspective.
In conjunction with the exhibition, the museum will organize various education programs and cultural events. The gallery talk with docent will be prepared to assist the general audience to better understand the exhibited works, and the exhibition guide by the museum docents will be run everyday: three times during the week, four times at weekend, English talk for foreigners at 3pm and the special talk for kids will be run twice. On June 11th 2011, at 2pm, a presentation on "Whitney Museum of American Art and its Collection" is scheduled at the AV room of the National Art Museum, Deoksugung. As part of the program in connection with the show, the museum is planning to organize the international conference inviting the renowned art historian Dr. Cécile Whiting as the keynote speaker under the theme of 'Globalization and the Object Art'. She is the 2009 Eldredge award winner for her excellent research on "Pop L.A: Art & the City in the 1960s". At the same time, there will be pop music performances and a jazz concert, livening up the ambience of the museum.
Furthermore, as part of museum's ongoing effort to widen the museum-visiting audience and reach out to those who are excluded from the cultural participation, the museum will invite about 5,000 multi-cultural families, foreign workers, underprivileged kids, as well as the physically-challenged. They will be given free entrance to the exhibition, assisted by the special guides program.
1. About Whitney Museum of American Art and the Exhibition
The Whitney Museum Collection comprises America's prominent contemporary art works created, along with the development of American contemporary art for the last hundred years. The Museum was founded by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney in 1931 under its primary purpose of supporting American art and artists, contrasting to the conservative stance of the Museum of Modern Art, New York which opened at a similar time, advocating European mainstream art. By embracing and promoting the American artists, the Whitney operated as a vehicle to transfer the centre of the contemporary art world from Europe to America. The ethos of the Museum is reflected in the Whitney Biennale. The precursor of the Whitney Biennale was the Biennale Exhibition of American contemporary art which started in 1932, presenting paintings and sculptures twice a year that unearthed and patronized the nation's artists. After 1973, the Biennale Exhibition was changed to the Whitney Biennale, establishing itself as one of the most prestigious Biennales, together with the Venice Biennale and the São Paulo Biennale. In 1993, the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea organized a Whitney Biennale in Seoul, a milestone exhibition in the history of Korean contemporary art, which brought a sensational response in the local art scene especially through its features of diverse genres and themes of artworks.
The exhibition The American Art will observe the dynamic unfurling of American contemporary art starting from the beginning of the 20th century through the theme of 'the Object'. The show will explore how the artworks using the 'Object' reference the prevalent society and its culture, and simultaneously reflect and engage with the lives of ordinary people and their thoughts.
The show will conjure up a moment to pause and contemplate the contextual significance of the epoch-making artistic formulation of American art from the Whitney collection. In liaison with French Contemporary Art Exhibition in July, 2011 at the main premise of the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Korea, the show will offer the Korean audience a fresh ground to refurbish artistic interests and the profound potential of art in relation to contemporary culture.
2. Artworks on View
Under the auspicious debut of the term 'Object' and its notion in the art world by Marcel Duchamp's anti-art action, the 'Object' was stripped off of its banality that was associated with everyday usage, and instead was suggested as something that held artistic value. As opposed to the abstraction tendency of Cubist artists, the various earlier techniques such as papier collé or collage incorporating the fragments of real life, were the precedents of the practice to employ the 'Object' in art. The run-of-the-mill object made its presence felt through Surrealism, Neo-Dada, and Pop Art, expanding the artistic territory and asserting its intrinsic value that was incubated from the prevailing societal characteristics.
The exhibition is composed of three different sections: American Icon and Everyday Life, Object and dentity, and Object and Perception. Complementing the three main exhibitions, the museum will mount a special show titled American Modernism.
The first section of the exhibition American Icon and Everyday Life brings together artworks that use images representing capitalist consumer culture, conveying them as a metaphor of the American society of the time. The artworks by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Wayne Thiebaud, Tom Wesselmann and Jeff Koons, are deluged with the familiar and iconic logos or images of American products such as Coca-Cola and Marlboro branded cigarettes, fast food, celebrities and cartoons. They heavily reflect the culture of the mass consumption that was derived from the American society's shift to materialistic affluence.
In the second part of the exhibition Object and Identity, the artworks displayed are projected as images of the object relevant to the issue of the identity rather than artistic comments on the culture of mass consumption. Clad in the mantle of Neo-Dada, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg engaged with real objects with the intention to pursue the objectivity repudiating the subjectivity of the Abstract Expressionist. Marisol's combination of real objects with wooden blocks and Enrique Chagoya's depiction of America's powerful influence on the world map are included in this section of the show.
The exhibition Object and Perception shows works that stimulate surrealistic illusion or that relate to the visual and spatial perception. Man Ray's use of objects in an unimaginably surrealistic way, and Claes Oldenburg's anthropomorphic objects derived from his powerful imagination, and Sylvia Plimack Mangold's hyper-realistic rendering of objects with the trompe l'oeil element, will all be on view in this section.
Finally, a special exhibition is prepared for the purpose of showcasing the development of American Modernism in the early 20th century. John Sloan, Marsden Hartley, Edward Hopper, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Oscar Bluemner capture their individual vision of American modern life in their works.
