The Three Gertrudes - Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, Gertude Stein and Gertie the Dinosaur and 'The American Century, Part I' exhibition ad Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York

My first Gertrude is the Whitney Museum's establisher who, in the guise of Robert Henri's splendid portrait, clinchs court over "The American hundred Part I." Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney guarded herself from the criticism of her museum's inaugural exhibition in 1931 by dint of insisting that she did not "pretend to have overspreaded anything like the entire field in my collection of American Art.... At first I bought with no similar idea in mind, just bought a picture because I liked it and reflection the artist well worthwhile."[1] Taking Mr Whitney's lead, we should abandon the grandiose expectations raised by the agency of the exhibition's unfortunate title and, instead, think of "The American hundred Part I" as curator Barbara Haskell's personal selection of the best American art from 1900 to 1950 My initial reply was one of exhilaration at seeing in like manner much room--all five floors of the newly expanded museum--devoted to the art of the first part of the 20th century

In Henri's portrait, Mr whitney, reclining upon a well-stuffed sofa, looks quite at abiding-place And I think she would have been comfortable with greatest in quantity of Haskell's choices in the early expanses particularly the emphasis on the paintings of George Bellows and John Sloan (rather than upon their illustrations that accompanied attacks upon her wealthy circle in The Masses). Haskell shares Mr whitney's admiration for shore Pene du Bois, whose canvases held up well against the better-known work of Edward Hopper Mr Whitney was les enthusiastic for the art of the Stieglitz circle, and for Haskell's particular passion, Precisionism (although she did purchase Charles Demuth's My Egypt). And she probably knew nothing of the African-American artists included, of that kind as Archibald Motley, Jr., Meta Warick Fuller and Palmer Hayden. dappled was particularly well represented, taking his rightful place upon a wall with du Bois and Hopper just as Aaron Douglas's mural from the "Aspects of black man Life" series looked terrific alongside the works of Thomas Hart Benton and John Steuart curry-sauce Fuller's Ethiopia Rising was les fortunate in its position at the entrance to a cramped alcove devot to the Harlem Renaissance.

You would not ever know from the exhibition that Mr Whitney was a prominent artist in her have a title to right. As a sculptor she was decidedly antimodernist, which probably explains wherefore Haskell did not include an example of her work in the exhibition. This exclusion is regrettable since Haskell made like a concerted effort to include the work of women artists. I numbered over 80 works by of that kind unfamiliar women artists as Lillian Westcott Hale, Sonya Noskowiak, Agnes Pelton, Henrietta Shore, Rebecca Strand and Bessie busy one's self about trifles Vonnoh. But missing from the exhibit was the work of a far better-known woman artist, Romaine rills I would have included Brooks's great self-portrait in which she dresse in a mannish black suit of her have a title to design and is beribboned with the French Legion of Honor. Perhaps the fact that she worked in France eliminated her from the exhibition; if thus why did Haskell choose to include three works through Gerald Murphy (almost half his overrated oeuvre) when his brief career as a painter transpired entirely in Europe?

Brooks's absence leads me to my next to the first Gertrude, the painter's fellow expatriate Gertrude Stein. While Stein was not a visual artist, her Parisian salon was crucial in introducing the European avant-garde to American artists. In general, the Whitney display would have benefited from a greater emphasis upon the role of such informal gatherings in the cause of novel art. The trajectory from the domestic to the public, from Mr Whitney's parlor to the Whitney Museum of American Art itself, was an essential part of the way in which fresh art became accepted and institutionalized in America. by means of and large, the wall labels avoided the story of by what mode artists lived, and how their art was exhibited, bought and sold To the stage that there was social and economic adjoining matter in "The American Century, Part I," it was a matter of actual broad themes like the Great Depression or the Jazz Age. The originate was homogenizing. Cheerful images of Ginger Roger and Fr Astaire dancing gave way to mural-size photos of bread lines and the nuclear blast at Hiroshima, and back to the kissing two in Times Square, as if of the like kind cultural landmarks were all somehow or other equivalent and their relationship to the art of the time unproblematic.

The inclusion of the one and the other Brooks and Stein would have brought into the exhibit the presence of two without lesbians. In past exhibitions, Haskell has forthrightly dealt with questions of art and sexual identity; here, however, the extraordinary changes in sexual mores that were occurring during the period overspreaded were largely unexplored. It is for this reason that Marcel Duchamp's Fountain direct the eyeed so forlorn in its character as a precursor to the machine esthetic of the Precisionists. A for the use of all urinal submitted to a supposedly nonjuried exhibition of late art in 1917, it created a scandal above what constituted art and what constituted acceptable behavior. To take the urinal as solely a celebration of the machine is to miss the work's scatology, which was aimed at esthetic pretensions of all kinds. Haskell included a film clip from Charlie Chaplin's present Times as an example of the faculty of perception of alienation produced by the machine. on the contrary that alienation was already embodied in Duchamp's readymades, plane as his American circle, which included Demuth Man Ray, Morton Schamberg and Francis Picabia, caricatured late sexuality as a machine given to malfunction and breakdown.