Whitney Acquires Archibald Motley Work

The Whitney has acquired a work that is on loan for the current show of Archibald Motley’s paintings from the Jazz Age:

The newly acquired painting, “Gettin’ Religion,” from 1948, is an angular, people-packed nighttime Chicago street scene that Dana Miller, a Whitney curator and the director of the museum’s collection, compared to the contemporaneous urban visions of Edward Hopper and Reginald Marsh, “who captured the everyday life of the city in their works.”

“We are thrilled that we can now hang this crucial acquisition, ‘Gettin’ Religion,’ alongside such mainstays of the collection,” Ms. Miller said. “We expect that within a very short period of time it will come to be regarded as one of the icons of the Whitney’s collection.”

Adam D. Weinberg, the Whitney’s director, added: “For the last several years we have been working to bolster our holdings of works by key figures associated with the Harlem Renaissance and at the top of the list was bringing a major Motley painting into the collection.”

Whitney Museum Acquires Major Work by Archibald Motley  (The New York Times)