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 Three Base Hit, James Daugherty collapsed sequential events into one continuous image to capture what he called “the various sensations of the onlooker.” A pitcher winds up for the throw; a batter swings; and a ball rockets to an infielder’s mitt. The artist deployed the stylistic devices of Futurism—a movement initiated in Italy in 1909—by merging figures and objects with their surroundings to suggest motion and speed. Daugherty’s avant-garde depiction of this popular pastime first appeared as a cartoon in the New York Herald, where he worked as an illustrator, demonstrating how artists were blurring the lines between mass culture and aesthetic innovation during the first decades of the twentieth century.

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America Is Hard to See

Forms Abstracted

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James Daugherty (1889-1974), Three Base Hit, 1914

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On the Hour

America Is Hard to See

Forms Abstracted

2

James Daugherty (1889-1974), Three Base Hit, 1914

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection