Swirls of sound. Booms of color. “At the Dawn of a New Age: Early Twentieth-Century American Modernism” explores the vivid intersection between abstraction and figuration, industry and art. In the early 1900s, the accelerating pace of economic and cultural shifts often eluded society’s capacity to express them; American artists responded by rejecting realism in favor of representing emotional truths. While the Whitney Museum has long collected vanguard art, its acquisitions largely excluded work by women and artists of color. Now, the Whitney presents Modernist works that captured the sociopolitical zeitgeist of their time, rendering a more vibrant picture of human experience at the dawn of the 20th century. —Sonya Ribner