America Is Hard to See

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

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The fiery red and cool blue sky in Edward Hopper’s Railroad Sunset is a direct nod to the great nineteenth-century landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church. One of a long line of artists and writers captivated by North America’s natural grandeur, Church and others of the Hudson River School used theatrical scale, meticulous technique, and an understanding of the sublime to imbue their scenes with a sense of the mythic.

In the decades leading up to World War II, Hopper and his contemporaries picked up this thread, becoming deeply interested in America as both a real place and an abstract idea that might be expressed through stylized images of the land and its people. James Castle, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Bill Traylor invested humble, mundane subjects with a sense of mystery and symbolism. Using panoramic sweep and cinematic spatial effects, Chiura Obata and Grant Wood transformed the landscape and its inhabitants into idyllic scenes or allegories. And Marsden Hartley and Charles White turned ordinary people, such as a boxer or a preacher, into powerful archetypes whose physical presence and actions stand for countless individuals and their stories.

Below is a selection of works from this chapter.

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Baptism in Kansas recalls a scene that John Steuart Curry witnessed in 1915 in the devout religious community of his childhood: the local creeks were dried up, and the only suitable site for a full-submersion baptism was a water tank. In the painting, the circle of pious hymn singers, the row of Ford Model-T cars, and the receding prairie provide a counterpoint to the dynamic postures of the preacher and young woman at the moment they begin her submersion. Hovering above the pair, and suggesting a divine presence, is a raven and a dove, the birds that Noah released from the ark after the Flood. When the painting was first exhibited in 1928 at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., critics hailed its assertive portrayal of rural American values, which marked a departure from the urban imagery and abstracted landscapes of contemporary American modernism. Curry’s vision of an idealized American heartland signaled the emergence of Regionalism, the movement that glorified grassroots rural values during the poverty-stricken years of the Great Depression.

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America Is Hard to See

Breaking the Prairie

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JOHN STEUART CURRY (1897-1946), BAPTISM IN KANSAS, 1928

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On the Hour

America Is Hard to See

Breaking the Prairie

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JOHN STEUART CURRY (1897-1946), BAPTISM IN KANSAS, 1928

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection