Nickolas Muray’s photograph of Gloria Swanson, c. 1925, at the DMA. (Photo Courtesy of DMA)

Amidst the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge and the Klyde Warren Park projects that are augmenting the cultural landscape of Dallas, the Dallas Museum of Art is also taking part the city’s cultural growth and Texan history.

The Dallas Museum of Art’s two most recent exhibitions feature and celebrate artwork from an exciting time period not just in Dallas, but moreover in American history – The Roaring Twenties.

“Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties,” as well as “Texas in the Twenties: Prints, Drawings and Photographs from Lone Star Collections,” will simultaneously be on display until May 27 as they parallel similar themes.

“Where ‘Youth and Beauty’ surveys art produced in America during that decade, ‘Texas in the Twenties’ provides examples of artwork made in Texas at that same time,” said Martha MacLeod, Dallas Museum of Art’s curatorial administrative assistant of the two exhibitions.

Although the two exhibitions are similar in their historical era and the modern changes that escorted it, they are distinct in its artists and its accompanying premises.

“‘Youth & Beauty’ is focused on the cultural shifts in the American psyche brought about by the coincidence of massive changes (i.e., mechanization, industrialization, urbanization, commercialization and Freudian psychology) in the wake of the devastation brought by the First World War and the flu pandemic,” said Sue Canterbury, The Pauline Gill Sullivan Associate Curator of American Art.

“Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties” is a massive touring exhibition that includes more than 130 works of paintings, sculptures and photographs.

By including works that date from the end of World War I to the Great Depression, visitors are presented a history lesson in addition to the exhibition’s intriguing visuals.

Complementing “Youth and Beauty,” “Texas in the Twenties: Prints, Drawings and Photographs from Lone Star Collections” is more concise, including only 30 works.

“‘Texas in the Twenties’ is focused on the work of three artists that provide a look at what was happening in the arts of the state. An ancillary benefit from works by two artists (Louis Oscar Griffith and photographer Eugene Omar Goldbeck) in the Texas exhibition provide a retrospective, documentary glance of the period,” Canterbury said.

 “Mary Bonner, the third artist, reveals that the Texas cowboy remained an icon of the west and the imagination of the world.”

Already being in effect for more than two weeks, the Dallas Museum of Art’s joint exhibition has been heavily acclaimed.
“Critical feedback for the exhibition has been very positive – both in New York (where it first opened at the Brooklyn Museum) and in Texas. It is particularly lauded for widening the view of art at this period that had before this time been too narrowly focused on those artists whose modernism was pointed towards abstraction,” Canterbury said.

“The exhibition now provides a thoughtful look at the artists who chose figurative realism to express the questions and challenges posed around them.”

With both exhibitions including multiple mediums as well as renowned artists such as Georgia O’Keeffe and Charles Sheeler, the two exhibitions attributing The Jazz Age offer museumgoers insight into American and Texan art.  

Louis Oscar Griffith’s etching ‘The Old and The New’ depicts life in the American Twenties, part of the DMA’s newest exhibit on display until May 27. (Photo Courtesy of DMA)