America Is Hard to See

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

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Please note: Floor 8 is no longer on view.

In 1913, the French avant-garde artist Francis Picabia proclaimed his admiration for New York: “You of New York should be quick to understand me and my fellow painters. Your New York is the cubist, the futurist city. It expresses its architecture, its life, its spirit, the modern thought. You have passed through all the old schools, and are futurists in your word and deed and thought.” Yet if Picabia saw New York— and the United States more broadly—as the great embodiment of modernity, the development of modern art was not so straightforward in a country still bound by more traditional aesthetic norms.

The European avant garde jolted American artists who encountered it through reproductions and exhibitions in New York or through travel to Paris and beyond. Some artists sought to emulate its stylistic advances, while others adapted European Modernism to images of America’s fast-changing culture and surroundings. In several of the works on view in this chapter, we see artists doing just what Picabia predicted—bending Cubism and Futurism to meet their own needs, including the depiction of such quintessentially American subjects as baseball and the cocktail. Other artists responded more philosophically to modernism by breaking away from the description of recognizable subjects to invent new abstract forms.

Below is a selection of works from this chapter.

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Nancy Elizabeth Prophet carved Congolais at the height of the New Negro Movement of the 1920s and 1930s, when intellectuals like W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain Locke were encouraging fellow black artists to look to their African roots. This sculpture was inspired by African busts that Prophet saw in an exhibition in Paris, where she lived from 1922 to 1934. In a letter to her good friend Du Bois, she described them as “heads of thought and reflection, types of great beauty and dignity of carriage.” Rather than depicting a specific individual, Prophet streamlined the form to focus on its expressive power and sense of interior life. The contrasts between the smooth face, rough-hewn base, and areas of intact bark emphasize the sculptor’s process and her keen sensitivity to materials.

Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney purchased Congolais in 1932, making it among the earliest works acquired for the Museum’s permanent collection.

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America Is Hard to See

Forms Abstracted

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Nancy Elizabeth Prophet (1890-1960), Congolais, 1931

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America Is Hard to See

Forms Abstracted

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Nancy Elizabeth Prophet (1890-1960), Congolais, 1931

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection