America Is Hard to See

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

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The decade after the First World War brought the United States new material prosperity and unparalleled social freedom, fueling a massive appetite for entertainment that grew unabated throughout the mid-twentieth century. Cinemas and theaters opened at a rapid pace, tabloid newspapers exploded in circulation, and celebrity photographs and gossip columns became the common currency of a booming spectacle culture. “The celebrities in New York,” writer David Cort quipped in 1925, “outnumber the nonentities about 100,000 to one.”

Largely inspired by these mass amusements and their audiences, the works on view in this chapter play with the entwinement of voyeurism and exhibitionism, seeing and being seen. Nearly all are set in dim interiors or under the cloak of night, rendered in lurid colors or the high contrast lent by spotlights, signs, and the flashbulb’s glare. Some present striking portraits of great performers such as John Coltrane, Paul Robeson, and Jessica Tandy, while others depict ordinary people strutting and posing or caught unawares by one another and by us. Classes, races, and genders mix within an atmosphere of physical pleasure or menace. Photographs by Lisette Model and Weegee capture the underbelly of mainstream culture, presenting a world at once seductive and discomfiting. Alexander Calder combined live spectacle with sculpture in Calder’s Circus, a motley crew of daredevils, animal acts, and scantily clad dancers that the artist would personally bring to life to the delight of his rapt observers.

Below is a selection of works from this chapter.

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Paul Cadmus, Sailors and Floosies, 1938

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Paul Cadmus: Some of these sailors are rather sympathetic, as well as one of the girls, the one in the ridiculous hat. I don’t know where I invented that hat.

Narrator: Artist Paul Cadmus. He called this painting Sailors and Floosies. It’s set in Manhattan’s Riverside Park, near a monument called the Sailors and Soldiers Memorial. Art historian Richard Meyer.

Richard Meyer: One of the things that Cadmus did, which is quite amazing about this painting, is that he created a unique frame. . .And what he did in the painted frame is, he continued some of the graffiti that is depicted on. . .the [Sailors and Soldiers] Memorial, within the painting, that graffiti continues around the frame of the painting. So he’s sort of bringing a decorative element, but also, some part of the story, of the fiction of the painting, out onto the frame of the painting.

Narrator: Notice that the sailors here aren’t really paying attention to the floosies.

Richard Meyer: Cadmus, whenever there is heterosexual pairing in his paintings, something goes wrong. . .What he seems more interested in is a certain homoeroticism. . .

Narrator: Some critics were upset by this image when it was first shown. They called it tawdry— repulsive—unpatriotic. Ironically, it wasn’t the homoerotic content per se that caused the controversy. Rather, critics were offended by the depiction of Navy sailors drunk and carousing on the eve of World War II.

Paul Cadmus: I replied to them, "I think the picture portrays an enjoyable side of Navy life. I think it would make a good recruiting poster. I will raise my prices."

In Sailors and Floosies, Paul Cadmus employed the technical virtuosity of Italian Renaissance painting while capturing a particularly seedy aspect of modern life. The highly muscled “floosie” in the foreground leers over a drunken sailor. Although he is wearing contemporary Navy whites, the sailor’s pose echoes that of a sleeping faun or other figure of classical art; this beautiful young man appears as an object of desire. Cadmus embraced both high and low, rendering the trash and graffiti covering New York’s Riverside Park as meticulously as he did the figures. By extending the graffiti to the painting’s frame, he established continuity between the space of the painting’s narrative and the viewer’s space.

Sailors and Floosies was controversial when it was first displayed in 1940, with the nation on the verge of war, and some found it unpatriotic to portray enlisted men behaving scandalously.

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America Is Hard to See

The Circus

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PAUL CADMUS (1904-1999), SAILORS AND FLOOSIES, 1938

Paul Cadmus, Sailors and Floosies, 1938

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection

On the Hour

America Is Hard to See

The Circus

7

PAUL CADMUS (1904-1999), SAILORS AND FLOOSIES, 1938

Paul Cadmus, Sailors and Floosies, 1938

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection