NEW YORK CITY - At the Whitney Museum of American Art through August 22 is part one of the two part exhibition, "The American Century: Art & Culture 1900-2000." The show was organized by the Whitney Museum and is presented by Intel Corporation, who have collaborated on the Internet-based program. This collaboration includes an online extension of the exhibition, an Internet-based national education program and research into the use of in-museum computer technologies as exhibition information resources.

"The American Century" explores the evolution of the American identity as seen through the eyes of America's artists over the last century. It examines the impact of such forces as immigration, technology and the mass media on art and culture. The exhibition is comprised of more than 1,200 works of painting, sculpture and photography, with related materials in architecture, decorative arts, music, dance, literature and film culled from the Whitney's Permanent Collection, private collections and public institutions around the country.

Presented in two consecutive parts, "The American Century" will fill the entire Whitney Museum for nine months. Part I (1990 to 1950), was organized by Barbara Haskell, curator of prewar art at the Whitney Museum. Part II (1950-2000), curated by Lisa Phillips, curator of contemporary art at the Whitney Museum and director-designate of the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and Whitney Museum associate curators Susan Harris and Karl Willers, will be presented from September 26, 1999, to mid-February, 2000. A team of more than 60 advisors on art history and American culture from the fields of architecture, decorative arts, music, dance, literature and film have consulted on the project.

Intel provided the largest corporate contribution ever made to an art museum exhibition to support the organization and presentation of "The American Century" at the Whitney. It drew on its educational, engineering and technological resources in the development of these programs.

"The American Century" exhibition explores how Twentieth Century American art and culture reflect and define America's changing sense of self, and can serve as a window into national values and aspirations. Painting, sculpture and photography are presented in the context of related materials in architecture, design, music, dance, literature and film to illustrate other artistic perspectives that have shaped and reflected a changing American identity and culture. Related materials include magazine illustrations and books, advertisements, fashion photography, movie posters, comics, architectural drawings, decorative art objects, music recordings, news, film and theater clips and a retrospective film program.

The first installment (1900-1950) traces the evolution of the American identity from the turn of the century to just after World War II. The exhibition presents icons of American art, including such landmark works as Thomas Eakins' "The Thinker: Portrait of Louis" (1900); Alfred Stieglitz's "The Steerage" (1907); Joseph Stella's "Battle of Lights, Coney Island" (1912-14); Man Ray's "Revolving Door Series" (1916-17); Edward Hopper's "Chop Suey" (1929); Grant Wood's "American Gothic" (1930); Ben Shahn's "The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti" (1931-32); Georgia O'Keeffe's "Summer Days" (1936); Jacob Lawrence's "War Series: The Letter" (1946); and Jackson Pollock's "Number 27" (1950).

Haskell and exhibition designers Lana Hum, Chris Muller and Matthew Yokobosky have created an installation in which painting, sculpture and photography will be interspersed with small clusters of related cultural materials. The galleries dedicated to the period 1900-1919 capture America as it entered the Twentieth Century with a youthful confidence about its place in the world. Visitors will see artistic expressions in many mediums that explore a range of themes, including: genteel society and the Dadaists who flouted it; the rise of industry countered by the Arts and Crafts movement; and artists finding inspiration both in the daily lives of Americans and in symbolist and Orientalist fantasies.

Part I features film clips on more than 35 monitors interspersed within the galleries. Matthew Yokobosky, Whitney Museum consulting curator, also organized a retrospective of important American achievements in filmmaking for Part I. Each week in the series highlights a different theme or important genre. More than 200 films are being shown chronologically during Part I.

Maxwell Anderson, director of the Whitney, and David Ross, former Whitney director who helped develop "The American Century," co-produced the online extension of the exhibition with Intel and the Whitney. Ross is currently director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Currently planned to be available online for three years, this technology will extend the impact of the exhibition. The online extension of the exhibition is accessible through the Whitney Museum's Web Site: www.whitney.org that links to www.artmuseum.net a new Internet-based museum gallery produced by Intel that will showcase online versions of exhibitions like "The American Century."

America In The Age Of Confidence, 1900-1919

The growth of big cities, the shift of populations from rural areas to urban centers, from Europe to the United States, along with the advent of modern industry and transportation were transforming America into a complex, diverse, and cosmopolitan country in the first two decades of the Twentieth Century. Artists responded to these profound changes in ways that were equally complex and diverse. Many painters, photographers, sculptors, and illustrators, as well as songwriters and filmmakers, celebrated the dynamism and novelty of the urban and industrial spectacle. The Ashcan artists - George Bellows, Robert Henri, William Glackens, George Luks, Everett Shinn, John Sloan - found inspiration in the daily lives and entertainments of ordinary Americans; and photographers such as Jessie Tarbox Beals, Arnold Genthe and Lewis Hine documented the opportunities and hardships encountered by new immigrant populations.

Others, turned away from the raucous energy and commercialism of the modern city to embrace private pleasures enjoyed in genteel, domestic settings. Still others - the pictorialist painters and photographers and "aesthetic" dancers - invented symbolist and Orientalist fantasies, while Modernist artist such as Arthur Dove, Joseph Stella and Paul Strand embraced experimentation and abstraction to transform traditional subject matter into avant-garde statements of personal expression.

Jazz Age America, 1920-1929

America emerged from World War I into an era of unparalleled social freedom, material prosperity and mass communication. Much of the visual art of the 1920s reflects a fascination with advertising and consumer products and with the glamorous icons of America's first truly national popular culture: the flapper, nightclubs, jazz, skyscrapers and the movies.

The fashionable socialites and celebrities portrayed by Guy Pene du Bois, Archibald J. Motley, Jr, and Florine Stettheimer and photographed by Edward Steichen and James VanDerZee personified a new American dream of youthful sophistication, wealth and leisure, a theme echoed in the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Anita Loos and the music of Cole Porter and George Gershwin.

America in Crisis, 1930-39

On October 29, 1929, the New York stock market crashed, and along with it the prosperity and euphoria of the Jazz Age. The Regionalist artists - championed a nationalist art of renewal and reaffirmation that celebrated agrarian values and folk traditions values and themes drawn from the collective national past. Federal arts programs promoted the creation of a socially meaningful art by funding public murals and works projects, theater and dance programs, and documentary archives of American folk music and decorative arts. Modern dancers also developed choreography based on indigenous themes. Under the auspices of the Farm Securities Administration, photographers created an indelible record of the human and economic toll of the Depression. The urban American Scene painters and photographers found renewal and stability in images of contemporary everyday life. More polemical writers and artists held up a mirror to the racial, political and labor struggles that threatened national unity.

Other artists turned away from the turmoil of the 1930s to posit alternative realities. Architects and industrial designers used streamlined forms to suggest the promise of new technological progress and efficiencies. Hollywood invited moviegoers to escape, if only briefly, to a world of luxury and romance.

The American Abstract Artists group modeled a utopian vision of universal harmony using a geometric, nonobjective art of order and stability, devoid of references to the real world. Other abstractionists, a biomorphic, associative and playful imagery. By the late 1930s and early 1940s, a new generation of abstract artists including Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock were beginning to explore the expressive potential of more open, gestural configurations and archetypal themes.

America in the 1940s

With democracy threatened on all sides, the search for American roots was transmuted into an adamant defense of those native values most endangered by war in Europe - freedom, democracy and community. Many artists created overtly propagandistic posters, illustrations and paintings. The film industry also responded to the war effort with zeal, issuing "Victory" newsreels and documentary training films by well-known directors such as Frank Capra, while Life magazine reported the war from Europe and the Pacific as documented by photojournalists such as Robert Capa and W. Eugene Smith, who were working on the front lines. At home, popular music, films and Broadway theater rallied the nation to a sense of common purpose. Musicals and ballets brought formal innovation to a fascination with America's pioneer past.

The arrival of European artists, designers, and architects exiled by the war, and the return of American expatriates shifted the geographic center of the art world to New York. The emergence of the new generation of painters and sculptors who would later be called Abstract Expressionists - made it the cultural center as well and for the first time brought American art world-wide acclaim.

America after the war faced new opportunities and challenges brought by its status as the richest and most powerful nation on earth. The trauma of the Holocaust and the atomic age was given voice by the disillusioned protagonists of novels and plays. At the same time, military victory brought material prosperity and unleashed the pent-up desires of young families for new housing, mobility and modern conveniences. Architects and designers responded by exploiting new materials and technologies to create high-quality, affordable homes and objects for the mass market.

A two-volume book entitled The American Century: Art & Culture 1900-2000 was published by the Whitney Museum in association with W.W. Norton & Company. This publication serves as a sourcebook on Twentieth Century American art and culture and features more than 700 images in each volume. Each volume includes a comprehensive essay on American art and its historical context by the exhibition curators, plus texts by leading specialists in a variety of fields. Volume I was published in April 1999; Volume II will be available fall 1999.

Tickets for "The American Century" are $12.50 for adults and $10.50 for seniors, students, and groups of 15 or more. For the first time at the Whitney, the public can purchase timed tickets in advance (for a $2 service charge) by calling 1-877/WHITNEY or by ordering online at www.whitney.org.

The Whitney Museum of American Art is a leading advocate of Twentieth Century and Contemporary American art. Founded in 1930, the Whitney Museum emerged from Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney's active role in supporting the American artists of her day and, over the course of 69 years, the museum's holdings have grown to include approximately 12,000 works of art representing more than 1,900 artists.

The permanent collection is a preeminent collection of Twentieth Century American art and includes the entire artistic estate of Edward Hopper, as well as significant works by Marsh, Calder, Gorky, Hartley, O'Keeffe, Rauschenberg, Murphy and Johns among other artists.

The Whitney Museum and its two corporate-funded branch facilities - at Champion International Corporation in Stamford, Conn., and at Philip Morris, New York - bring a diverse range of exhibitions from historical surveys to in-depth retrospectives to an annual audience of nearly 500,000. The Whitney Museum also organizes the Biennial exhibition - an invitational show of work produced in America in the preceding two years.

The Whitney Museum is at 945 Madison Avenue in New York.