Andover, MA - In the one hundred years between the 1850s and 1950s, American art evolved from the provincial to the international and moved from literal depictions of the particular to abstract interpretations of universal ideals.  Focusing on the key movements during the time when American art took its place in the international arena, the Addison Gallery of American Art presents Coming of Age: American Art, 1850s to 1950s, on display through January 7, 2007.  The show is a central element of the Addison’s 75^th anniversary and displays many of the gallery’s greatest paintings and sculptures.

Drawn exclusively from the Addison’s internationally acclaimed collection, Coming of Age includes approximately seventy iconic paintings and sculptures that reveal the complex and often contradictory impulses faced by artists seeking to define a new art form – an “American” art – identifiably their own.  Beginning with masterworks of the Hudson River School and continuing to the mid-20^th century abstract works of Hans Hofmann, Franz Kline and Jackson Pollock, Coming of Age chronicles the major developments in a period marked by the rise of modernity and a dramatic change in the physical and social landscape.

In works by Albert Bierstadt, Asher Durand and Frederic Church, Coming of Age considers the influence of the American landscape on mid-century artists as they began to establish an idiom reflecting their uniquely American experiences and values.  By the late 19^th century, artists such as Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, and Eastman Johnson would portray the power and growth of America through native subjects while American expatriate painters John Singer Sargent and James McNeil Whistler created European-inspired paintings of European scenes.  The next generation of Ashcan school artists, including Robert Henri, George Luks, and John Sloan, concentrated on the American city which they portrayed through a painterly style based on European models.

The Armory Show of 1913 in New York exhibited the latest innovations in European and American modernism, opening Americans’ eyes to the expressive power of abstraction.  Artists such as Arthur Dove and Georgia O’Keeffe relied on organic forms, shapes, and lines, creating a new visual language of abstraction based on color, space, and texture.  In the 1940’s, Abstract Expressionist painters like Jackson Pollock, Hans Hofmann, and Franz Kline shifted the art world’s focus from Paris to New York and American art became the avant-garde.  Coming of Age concludes with works by such twentieth-century leaders as Jasper Johns, John McLaughlin, Ad Reinhardt and Frank Stella who developed radical ways to interpret color, shape and line, assuring that American art moved to the vanguard in international art movements.

“From the beginning, Americans struggled to define the special character of their culture and understand its relationship to European traditions,” said Addison Director Brian Allen.  “The century from 1850 to 1950 represents a watershed period in this struggle, a time when American artists solidified the theory and practice of artistic expression and defined a unique artistic language.  Our great collection has never been interpreted from this point of view, and we will be presenting our very best works to tell the story.”

Coming of Age: American Art, 1850s to 1950s is organized by the American Federation of Arts, New York, and the Addison Gallery of American Art, and is accompanied by a major publication distributed by Yale University Press.  It will be on display at the Addison Gallery September 9, 2006 – January 7, 2007.  Starting in November, 2007, the exhibition will travel to the Meadows Museum of Art in Dallas, the Dulwitch Picture Gallery in London, England, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, Italy, and the Museum of Art/ Fort Lauderdale, Florida through March 2008.

The Addison Gallery of American Art located on the campus of Phillips Academy in Andover, MA; visit the website at www.addisongallery.org