WASHINGTON, DC.- International Arts and Artists has announced the availability of the exhibit Prendergast, Beckmann, Tamayo, Miro: The Century of Lost Illusions starting in November 2008. Can we look back one hundred years and follow art as a historical communication of cultural change? Prendergast, Beckman, Tamayo, Miro examines how these artists and others altered the way Americans viewed their cultural identity during the 20th century. This exhibition of 51 works of painting and sculpture traces the shift of societal life in the waning years of romantic Realism and Impressionism to the pronouncement of the integrity of the flat canvas [Cubism], absurdity of humans [Dada-ism], development of “alienist,” subconscious and overt emotional expression [Surrealism], and the validation of pure abstraction – simply for the sake of the action, the process.

History never stops happening. We are compulsive visual, audio, oral, and tactile documentarians. The Western collective conscious can be found in the visual art created during the 50 years represented in this exhibition. From a circumspect late 19th-century culture, through two physically and psychologically devastating “world” wars, massive migrations, and shift of economic power from the continent to the former colony, Western art became the visual signifier and documentary source of change as it happened, and the primary source for later deconstructive and historical revisionists.

Bracketing the exhibit between the late 1890s and the mid-1950s enables viewers to perceive the magnitude of change, in all facets of culture, as reflected in the out-pouring of art that, more than representing or illuminating the Western culture, defied its upbringing, tromped all givens, and upended everything held up to its scrutinizing light.