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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As a young artist in Japan, Chiura Obata trained in traditional, centuries-old painting techniques. Later he merged these skills with developments in both Japanese and Western contemporary art. Obata immigrated to northern California in 1903, and in 1921 he founded the East West Art Society, through which he sought to unite artistic styles from around the world.

These woodblock prints are based on watercolors Obata made in the summer of 1927 while on an expedition through California’s Yosemite Valley and High Sierra regions. He described that trip as “the greatest harvest for my whole life and future in painting.” The prints, which Obata made while working with master craftsmen in Tokyo, took nearly two years to complete and are virtuosic in their craftsmanship. Each finished work required more than one hundred hand-colored woodblock impressions, some more than two hundred; dozens of woodblocks might be necessary to re-create a single brushstroke.

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America Is Hard to See

Breaking the Prairie

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CHIURA OBATA (1885-1975), EVENING GLOW OF YOSEMITE FALL, 1930

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On the Hour

America Is Hard to See

Breaking the Prairie

4

CHIURA OBATA (1885-1975), EVENING GLOW OF YOSEMITE FALL, 1930

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection