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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Marsden Hartley, Painting, Number 5, 1914–15

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Narrator: Adam Weinberg is Alice Pratt Brown Director of the Whitney Museum.

Adam Weinberg: Painting, Number Five, by Marsden Hartley, is an exuberant cacophony of color and pattern. Near the center of the canvas, two circles overlap—one contains the German Iron Cross, a medal of valor awarded to German soldiers for their courage in battle. The other contains a red cross. Look carefully and you can find references to flags, military insignia, and even an army uniform. The effect is like a collage, combining impressions of things Hartley encountered in Berlin, where he lived before the start of the First World War.

What is the real subject of this painting? Think about how you recall things that have happened to you in the past. Often, it’s hard to conjure up a sense of something in its entirety. We remember a person or an event in the details—a gesture, a smell, a color. Hartley’s paintings function that way too; it’s actually a portrait, although the literal image of an actual person is altogether absent. The painting commemorates a young German officer, Karl von Freyburg, who died in the early months of World War I. Hartley was in love with von Freyburg, and he made this painting after learning of his death.

Inspired by European avant-garde artists of the time, Hartley began to move away from direct representations of his subject matter toward more abstract, evocative imagery. Hartley once said that the artist’s challenge was to reveal what he called “the magic that is beneath the surface of what the eye sees.” In this painting, he captures a sense of an individual personality, and the emotional content of his relationship to Berlin and to von Freyburg.

The semi-abstract style of Hartley’s painting means that we have to struggle a bit to decode its meaning. If you’d like to hear about it, please tap the button to continue.

Marsden Hartley began this work before the First World War during an extended stay in Berlin, where he was captivated by the city’s vitality and imperial Germany’s military pageantry. The painting is a memorial to Karl von Freyburg, a young German military officer whom Hartley loved and who was killed in battle soon after the war began. Combining the fragmented forms of Cubism with German Expressionism’s brilliant colors, Hartley broke apart and rearranged motifs derived from German flags and such military regalia as epaulets, brass buttons, and an Iron Cross medal (awarded for bravery), as well as a chessboard recalling von Freyburg’s favorite game. The result is both an exuberant portrait and a mournful reminder of the human cost of war.

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America Is Hard to See

Forms Abstracted

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Marsden Hartley (1877-1943), Painting, Number 5, 1914-15

Marsden Hartley, Painting, Number 5, 1914–15

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On the Hour

America Is Hard to See

Forms Abstracted

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Marsden Hartley (1877-1943), Painting, Number 5, 1914-15

Marsden Hartley, Painting, Number 5, 1914–15

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection