LONDON, ENGLAND.-Whitechapel presents Faces in the Crowd - Painters of Modern Life from Manet to Today, through February 27, 2005. Taking Edouard Manet as its starting point and moving through master figures such as Umberto Boccioni, Edward Hopper, Francis Bacon, Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, Cindy Sherman and Jeff Wall, this exhibition traces a history of avant-garde figuration.

The great revolutions in 20th century art tend to be associated with abstraction. Yet there is a parallel history, which is equally radical. Manet’s vividly realist scenarios or Jeff Wall’s cinematic tableaux offer a compelling snapshot of the modern. By contrast, Edvard Munch or Francis Bacon present a tortured or exhilarated inner life. And for Alexander Rodchenko, Joseph Beuys or Chris Ofili, the figure can be a harbinger of change: symbolic, revolutionary or transgressive.

This exhibition will include not only masterpieces of painting, but also sculpture, photography and the moving image, with each work pivotal to the story of Modernism. Structured into broadly themed sections, representations of the human figure will be seen as expressions of modernity, becoming ciphers for the experience of modern life; as images of modern life, picturing both the epic and the everyday; or as agents of social change, where avant-garde realism proposes new world orders. Other artists experiment in understanding and
furthering a modern self-consciousness in the viewer. Underpinning the whole is the relationship between the individual and society.

Artists whose work will be represented in this major art historical survey include Eve Arnold, Eugene Atget, Francis Bacon, Stephan Balkenhol, Rene Burri, Umberto Boccioni, Christian Boltanski, David Bomberg, Sophie Calle, Robert Capa, James Ensor, Valie Export, George Grosz, Andreas Gursky, John Heartfield, Seydou Keita, William Kentridge, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Käthe Kollwitz, Fernand Legér, Helen Levitt, Rene Magritte, Edouard Manet, Edvard Munch, Eduardo Paolozzi, Pablo Picasso, Gerhard Richter, Thomas Schütte, Cindy Sherman, Jeff Wall, Andy Warhol and Jack B. Yeats.