America Is Hard to See

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

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Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the United States underwent a dramatic social and cultural upheaval. The sunny veneer and conformism of the immediate postwar years gave way to skepticism and calls for social justice, particularly on behalf of women, racial minorities, and others left behind. As in previous decades, such as the 1930s, artists bravely addressed pressing issues in their work as a form of protest and call for change. This chapter shows them tackling topics including voting rights in Danny Lyon’s photographs of Selma, Alabama; the exploitation of California farmworkers in Milton Glaser’s Don’t Eat Grapes; and the relationship between American patriarchal impulses and military action in Vietnam in May Stevens’s Big Daddy Paper Doll. We find images of the slain Martin Luther King Jr., civil rights activist Angela Davis, a ghoulish President Richard Nixon as well as the smiling portraits gathered by Howard Lester of the 242 soldiers killed during a single week in 1970 in the Vietnam War. The United States, as Bruce Nauman’s blistering 1971 palindrome suggests, was literally raw with war—on many fronts.

Other works in this chapter offer a more oblique take on a troubled time. The surreal bodies presented by Chicago artists Jim Nutt, Christina Ramberg, and Karl Wirsum suggest distortion, violence, and bondage, while Nam June Paik and Earl Reilback’s television sets each transmit images that are more eerie than entertaining. And On Kawara’s somber painting July 4, 1967, mutely marks the date on which it was made—Independence Day of a year when the world felt on fire.

Below is a selection of works from this chapter.

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Painter, poet, and political activist May Stevens imbues her work with a sociopolitical consciousness. In the wake of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War, Stevens developed a symbolic figure that would feature prominently in much of her work of the late 1960s and early 1970s: Big Daddy. According to Stevens, Big Daddy is modeled after her father, “who represented to me an authoritarian and closed attitude . . . towards culture, towards politics, towards Black people and towards Jews. He was a person who had stopped thinking when he was twenty and hadn’t opened his mind to anything since.”

Big Daddy Paper Doll features the outline of a naked, bespectacled, and mustachioed man holding a bulldog in his lap. Exuding a sexual and militarized dominance, his head appears bullet-shaped and phallic. His wrinkly features echo those of his canine companion, a visual allusion implying bestial alpha-male instincts. Stevens presents him as a mere paper doll with four potential guises—a masked executioner, an army sergeant, a policeman, and a butcher with a bloodstained apron, each one a manifestation of violence and power. Presenting these roles as interchangeable costumes hints that the same white patriarchal spirit runs through a wide range of American institutions. The representation of Big Daddy as a paper doll, a widely available commercial product, also ties the painting’s style and content to Pop art, and asks the viewer to consider how authoritarian mindsets are being packaged and sold to the American public.

Excerpted from Whitney Museum of American Art: Handbook of the Collection (2015), p. 368. Published by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; distributed by Yale University Press.

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America Is Hard to See

Raw War

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MAY STEVENS (B. 1924), BIG DADDY PAPER DOLL, 1969

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On the Hour

America Is Hard to See

Raw War

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MAY STEVENS (B. 1924), BIG DADDY PAPER DOLL, 1969

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection