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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Mexican-born Miguel Covarrubias arrived in New York in 1924 and quickly became an important figure of the Jazz Age. He made hundreds of sketches of the Harlem nightclub scene, which formed the basis of caricatures that he published in Vanity Fair and the New Yorker. This one originally appeared in a Vanity Fair spread titled “Enter, The New Negro,” an introduction to the sophisticated world uptown for the magazine’s primarily white readership.

There are aspects of Covarrubias’s imagery that are troubling to contemporary eyes. The facial features share some qualities with the stereotyped racist imagery that had pervaded popular culture since the nineteenth century. Covarrubias deeply admired the cultural flowering he found in Harlem and did not intend his images to be derogatory; but in exaggerating his figures for humorous effect he inevitably drew on the limiting visual vocabulary of his day. Even at the time, however, some African American scholars, including W. E. B. Du Bois, were critical of Covarrubias’s work, convinced that images of black people ought to be explicitly ennobling. At the same time, writers such as Langston Hughes and Alain Locke saw in Covarrubias’s work a great love for Harlem’s vitality.

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America Is Hard to See

The Circus

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MIGUEL COVARRUBIAS (1904-1957), SCENE: “THE LAST JUMP,” 1924

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On the Hour

America Is Hard to See

The Circus

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MIGUEL COVARRUBIAS (1904-1957), SCENE: “THE LAST JUMP,” 1924

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection