Art After Dark

Best known today as a pioneer collector of modern painting and sculpture who founded the Whitney Museum of American Art, during her lifetime Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875-1942) was better known as a sculptor. She was trained in Paris and won prestigious commissions for her work. At the start of the First World War, she voyaged to France to establish a field hospital at the front, where she nursed dying and convalescent soldiers. On her return to the States, Whitney began a series of bronze figural sculptures that, under the collective title Impressions of War, depicted the military and medical scenes she had witnessed herself or heard about from patients. Join us to explore Whitney’s remarkable life and career with David Lubin, art historian and author of Grand Illusions: American Art and the First World War.

Lecture to begin at 6pm. Cocktails, Book sale & signing to follow.

Tickets: $10 Members, $15 non-members

Grand Illusions: American Art and the First World War

A vivid, engaging account of the artists and artworks that sought to make sense of America’s first total war, Grand Illusions takes readers on a compelling journey through the major historical events leading up to and beyond US involvement in WWI to discover the vast and pervasive influence of the conflict on American visual culture. David M. Lubin presents a highly original examination of the era’s fine arts and entertainment to show how they ranged from patriotic idealism to profound disillusionment. Well-known figures such as Marcel Duchamp, John Singer Sargent, D. W. Griffith, African American outsider artist Horace Pippin, mask-maker Anna Coleman Ladd, the sculptor Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, and the combat artist Claggett Wilson are all considered. Armed with rich cultural-historical details and an interdisciplinary narrative approach, David Lubin creatively upends traditional understandings of the Great War’s effects on the visual arts in America.

David Lubin, the Charlotte C. Weber Professor of Art at Wake Forest University, has published six books on American art, film, and popular culture. His latest, Grand Illusions: American Art and the First World War (Oxford University Press), features a study of the sculptor Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. Lubin has lectured at universities and art museums throughout the United States and Europe, as well as China and Australia. He has been interviewed on National Public Radio, BBC Radio, and C-SPAN, among other media outlets. His awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship and research residencies at Harvard, Stanford, and the National Gallery of Art. In 2016-17, he was appointed the inaugural Terra Foundation Visiting Professor of American Art at Oxford University.