Selections from the Seventies

April 17, 1999–March 19, 2000

The 1970s witnessed a vigorous resurgence of representational art. This installation of paintings from the museum’s permanent collections highlights the eclectic approaches to this medium by American artists working in diverse cultural contexts and geographic locations. Drawing on the tradition of American realism, the works on view mine a variety of art-historical sources, genres, and styles, including Surrealism, Pop Art, landscape painting and portraiture. The narrative potential of the image allows these artists to directly explore personal eccentricities, psychological terrain, and contemporary social commentary. Included are San Francisco-area painters Joan Brown and Roy de Forest, Chicago's Jim Nutt, Philadelphian Barkley Hendricks, and New York-based artists Chuck Close, Jim Dine, Alex Katz, and Roy Lichtenstein.