Whitney Museum exhibit provides a "landmark assessment of American culture" -- and a major investment for Norton

New York City's Whitney Museum of American Art will usher in the next century with a blockbuster two-part, nine-month retrospective on 20th-century American culture and it is joining forces with W.W. Norton to do so.

This month the museum will open "The American Century: Art &Culture 1900-2000," an encyclopedic exhibition that will examine the cultural impact of everything from painting, film and literature to technology, urbanity and immigration. The exhibit will be accompanied by a equally exhaustive, lavishly illustrated, two-volume reference work that W.W. Norton immodestly claims to be the "most comprehensive display of 20th-century American art ever assembled."

But it's no idle boast. The show has been in the works for three years and received a reported $6-million grant from computing giant Intel corporation. Mary Haus, director of publicity at the Whitney, also noted that Intel will mount a multimedia Web site about The American Century through artmuseum.net, an Intel venture that licenses exhibition content to create a lush and informative cybermuseum experience.

The material in the exhibition and the books is so extensive that both must be presented in two parts. The first section of the exhibit, organized by the Whitney's curator of prewar art, Barbara Haskell, who also wrote the initial volume's principal essay, will open April 23 and cover the years 1900 to 1950. The second section, focusing on the second half of the century, has been organized by former Whitney curator Lisa Philips (she has since moved downtown to direct the New Museum) and will open in September 1999, also the pub date for the second volume of the book.

The book will likely generate extensive media coverage; longtime Norton editor James Mairs, who edited the book, said Norton will publish the book in hardcover ($60) and paperback ($40) and he expects sales far beyond the usual for a survey reference title. The initial printing of the first volume was 32,000 copies and Norton went back to press for another 10,000 hardcover copies before the first printing reached stores.

The Whitney itself store has ordered 20,000 softcover copies (which will be sold exclusively by the museum) and 1600 hardcover copies. The book will also be available through the Whitney's online store (at www.Whitney.org) and marketed in a package deal along with show tickets and an audio guide.

Why Norton, rather than an experienced artbook publisher like Abrams? "I've worked with the Whitney for a quite a long time," Mairs told PW, pointing to a variety of book projects, among them an Edward Hopper catalogue raisonné, that Norton has done, in conjunction with the Whitney Museum since 1979.

The cost of producing the books, said Mairs, is "out of sight." Norton not only paid a "very large royalty advance," said Mairs, but also gave "a $125,000 grant to the Whitney to help pay for reproduction rights for illustrations." Permissions rights alone, said Mairs, were "in excess of $250,000, to say nothing of paying the authors and essayists." Intel is not supporting the book, said Mairs, but it is bankrolling a "large advertising campaign to support the show" and "that will help us indirectly to promote the book."

Other Unofficial Tie-ins

The media hoopla likely to be generated by the Whitney exhibition may help a few art books besides Norton's. For instance, in June ("it's just serendipity," said Phaidon publicist Katherine Tomlinson) U.K. art book publisher Phaidon is releasing The American Art Book ($39.95), a giant alphabetical compendium of American art that surveys the major American artists, beginning in colonial Virginia and ending in postmodern downtown New York. It's the first book released through Phaidon's U.S. office.

Megan McFarland, Phaidon senior project editor, told PW that like its predecessor, Phaidon's wildly successful 1994 title The Art Book (more than a million copies in print), The American Art Book "is comprehensive and authoritative." It presents images of 500 important artworks chosen by contributing editor Jay Tobler and a group of scholars and curators from around the country.

Harry N. Abrams has several spring titles that survey American art, including American Abstract Art of the 1930s and 1940s ($49.50), with an essay by Robert Knott, which collects 162 images covering every abstract art movement of the period; and An American Century of Photography ($95) by Keith F. Davis, a revised edition of a classic work that adds 120 new photographers to the text and nearly 200 images. Abrams is also releasing The Essential Willem de Kooning by Catherine Morris, Essential Norman Rockwell by Collier Shor and The Essential Pablo Picasso by Ingrid Schaffner, part of the Essentials series.

Finally, there's It Hurts: New York Art from Warhol to Now ($29.95) by Matthew Collings, a quirky survey of the contemporary New York art scene by a very unconventional and funny art critic. The book is the latest release from 21 Publishing Ltd., the cheeky U.K. artbook house co-founded by rocker and sometime art critic David Bowie.