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| “Sixteen Americans” exhibition | |
|---|---|
| Title | Sixteen Americans |
| Venue | Museum of Modern Art |
| City | New York City |
| Country | United States |
| Dates | 1959 |
| Curator | John Bernard Hejduk |
| Type | Group exhibition |
“Sixteen Americans” exhibition
"Sixteen Americans" was a 1959 survey exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City that presented emerging postwar United States artists. Curated to highlight a generation of practitioners associated with Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Minimalism, and related movements, the show introduced American painters and sculptors to a broader public and to collectors from institutions such as the Guggenheim Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It is often cited alongside exhibitions like the Armory Show revivals and the Paris Salon retrospectives for reshaping mid‑20th‑century art narratives.
The exhibition was organized during the late 1950s amid debates that included figures from the Museum of Modern Art staff, critics at the New York Times, and curators from the Whitney Museum of American Art. Influences on its selection ranged from earlier surveys such as the 13 Americans presentations and the prominence of galleries like Stable Gallery, Greenwich Village venues, and commercial spaces in SoHo. Funding and acquisition policies intersected with patrons including trustees from the Rockefeller Foundation and collectors active at the Federal Art Project, while press coverage invoked curators and critics tied to the Art News and the New Yorker.
The roster featured artists whose careers intersected with peers, critics, and institutions: painters and sculptors such as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, Al Held, Ellsworth Kelly, Kenneth Noland, Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, Ad Reinhardt, John Chamberlain, Louise Nevelson, David Smith, Alexander Calder, Claes Oldenburg, Sam Francis, Richard Diebenkorn, Lee Krasner, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, Allan Kaprow, Robert Motherwell, Hans Hofmann, Clyfford Still, George Segal, Isamu Noguchi, Tony Smith, Brice Marden, Larry Poons, Adolf Gottlieb, Nicolas de Staël, Antoni Tàpies, Cy Twombly, Piet Mondrian, Kazimir Malevich, Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Alberto Giacometti, Jean Dubuffet, Arshile Gorky, Georges Braque, Wassily Kandinsky, Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, David Hockney, Yves Klein, Eduardo Paolozzi, Giorgio Morandi, Max Ernst, Fernand Léger, Paul Klee, Hans Arp, Giorgio de Chirico, Robert Indiana, Helen Levitt, Dieter Roth, Anselm Kiefer, Gerhard Richter, Joseph Cornell, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Walker Evans, Dorothy Townsend]. The works included paintings, reliefs, sculptures, and assemblages that demonstrated a range from gestural abstraction to proto‑Pop imagery. (Curatorial lists and wall labels at the institution recorded specific works by many of these artists.)
Contemporary reviews appeared in publications such as the New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, and the New Yorker, where critics debated the exhibition’s definition of Americanness and modernity. Responses ranged from enthusiastic endorsements by advocates of Abstract Expressionism to skeptical takes by commentators aligned with European modernist traditions like Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. Collectors and museum directors at the Guggenheim Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art responded by accelerating acquisitions, while academic critics referenced exhibitions at the Tate Modern and the Centre Pompidou in comparative essays.
The exhibition influenced curatorial practice at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and regional museums across the United States. It contributed to the market emergence of artists later represented by galleries such as Leo Castelli Gallery and Gagosian Gallery, affected scholarship at universities like Columbia University and Yale University, and informed later surveys at the Tate Modern and the National Gallery of Art. Its legacy is invoked in histories of postwar art alongside movements tied to figures such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, and in debates over canon formation involving institutions like the Smithsonian Institution.
Following its opening in New York City the show was referenced in touring programs and influenced later traveling exhibitions organized by institutions such as the Guggenheim Museum and the Walker Art Center. Loans, exchanges, and reproductions traveled to venues in Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Boston, and internationally to exhibitions in London, Paris, Berlin, Tokyo, and Rome.
The exhibition produced a printed catalogue and wall labels circulated among scholars, critics, and collectors; archival materials reside in the institutional records of the Museum of Modern Art and in private collections associated with galleries like Leo Castelli Gallery and collectors affiliated with the Rockefeller Foundation. Subsequent bibliographies and monographs published by university presses at Columbia University Press and Yale University Press have cited the show in studies of Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, and mid‑century exhibitions.
Category:1959 exhibitions Category:Museum of Modern Art exhibitions