Modern American Realism

A selection of treasured artworks from the permanent collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Modern American Realism includes 70 paintings and sculptures from the 1910s to the 1980s that encompass the range of what can broadly be called modern realism, from sociopolitical to psychological, from satirical to surrealist. 

Drawn from works collected by the Sara Roby Foundation, the exhibition includes works by Will Barnet, Isabel Bishop, Paul Cadmus, Arthur Dove, Edward Hopper, Wolf Kahn, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Jacob Lawrence, Reginald Marsh, and Honoré Sharrer, among others.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website 

Image: Edward Hopper, Cape Cod Morning, 1950. Oil on canvas, 34 1/8 x 40 1/4 inches. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Sara Roby Foundation.

Whether or not you go, the exhibition catalog, Modern American Realism, explores American realism through paintings, drawings, and sculpture and provides brief profiles of each artist. Based on the collection donated to the Smithsonian's National Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C. by Sara Roby.  Starting from the 1930s with generally high-caliber work by such well-known artists as Hopper, Sara Roby continued her collecting to her death in 1986, buying work by younger and more obscure painters in a wide variety of subject matters. Daughter of a Pittsburgh industrialist, Roby had as her adviser Lloyd Goodrich, the long-time director of New York's Whitney Museum. This book reflects the generally high quality of her collection.
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