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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In 1904, Virginia-born Patrick Henry Bruce moved to France, where he would reside for most of his life. Encountering the fractured forms of Cubism there and the color experiments of his friends the Orphist painters Sonia and Robert Delaunay, Bruce soon adopted bold hues and a geometric style. By 1912 he was painting abstracted still lifes, a genre that would occupy him for the rest of his career. Though he was one of the few American artists to be embraced by the Parisian avant-garde of the era, Bruce nonetheless became increasingly disillusioned and reclusive over the course of the 1920s and destroyed much of his work before committing suicide in 1936.

Painting is emblematic of the architectonic style that Bruce developed in his last series of still-life paintings, produced in the years following World War I. Like other works from this period, it focuses exclusively on objects from the private world of the artist’s apartment studio. The image is composed of quotidian objects—including a vase, a drinking glass, and a sliced orange—that have been organized into flat planes of color and geometric volumes, formed with the aid of mechanical drawing tools. The white vertical bar on the left-hand side—a device Bruce used frequently in this period—creates the illusion that the objects are set into a deep space, even as it simultaneously calls attention to the flatness of the canvas surface. With its sharply articulated forms and bold, unmodulated color, Painting anticipates the hard-edged geometric abstraction adopted by successive generations of American artists in the 1930s and again in the 1950s.

Excerpted from Whitney Museum of American Art: Handbook of the Collection (2015), p. 79. Published by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; distributed by Yale University Press.

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America Is Hard to See

Forms Abstracted

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Patrick Henry Bruce (1881-1936), Painting, c. 1921-22

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America Is Hard to See

Forms Abstracted

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Patrick Henry Bruce (1881-1936), Painting, c. 1921-22

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