America Is Hard to See

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

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Breaking the Prairie

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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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HORACE PIPPIN (1888-1946), THE BUFFALO HUNT, 1933

A painting of snow falling sideways across a landscape with the dark outlines of buffalo, and a tree to the left side in the foreground.
A painting of snow falling sideways across a landscape with the dark outlines of buffalo, and a tree to the left side in the foreground.

Horace Pippin, The Buffalo Hunt, 1933. Oil on canvas, 21 5/16 × 31 5/16 in. (54.1 × 79.5 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase 41.27

In Horace Pippin’s The Buffalo Hunt, a buffalo moves across a snowy landscape, encircled by dogs, while a hunter waits, perched behind a hill. Pippin likely never witnessed a buffalo hunt; to make this work he may have called on his personal memories of trapping in Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains as well as images from nineteenth-century engravings of the American West and other sources.

Pippin made drawings while serving in the military during World War I—the war, he later recounted, “brought out all the art in me”—but a severe shoulder wound limited his use of his right arm. Despite the injury, he continued to make art; he decorated cigar boxes, used hot pokers to burn images onto wood panels, and by the late 1920s began to work with oil paints. The artist started his career by showing his works in local stores in West Chester, Pennsylvania, but soon attracted the attention of collectors and museums.

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On the Hour

A 30-second online art project:
Maya Man, A Realistic Day In My Life Living In New York City

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Learn more at whitney.org/artport

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