America Is Hard to See | Art & Artists

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

Rose Castle

Red building with green storefronts, a barber pole, and a fire hydrant on a sunny day with long shadows.

Rose Castle

Floor 7

In the 1930s and 1940s, many American artists explored the interconnections between the real and the imagined, making the familiar unsettling and strange. They were particularly influenced by Surrealism, a literary and artistic movement that originated in Paris in the 1920s, whose practitioners tapped into the subconscious to create dreamlike narratives and scenes. American artists especially favored the work of Salvador Dalí and René Magritte, Europeans with strong ties to the tradition of figurative painting.

The term “realism” has many connotations but broadly refers to believable depictions of the observable world. Most of the artists represented here were academically trained and therefore had full command of traditional techniques. Peter Blume and Louis Guglielmi, for example, used the tools of illusionistic representation to conjure fantastic realms. Others, including Edward Hopper, more subtly tweaked the conventions of realism, turning the everyday into something psychologically charged and even sinister. Between these poles, Magic Realist artists Jared French and George Tooker precisely rendered situations that at first glance appear ordinary but ultimately prove unfamiliar and often disturbing. Others, such as Man Ray and Joseph Cornell, used collage and found images and objects to create intricate tableaux, like Cornell’s Rose Castle, directly drawn from our world and yet removed from it.

Below is a selection of works from this chapter.

A painting of four people looking up at a cloudy sky in a plaza.

Peter Blume’s Light of the World delivers an allegorical critique of modernity and the unquestioning embrace of progress. The four figures are transfixed by the bright light of a fantastical lamp whose brilliance contrasts with the darkening sky overtaking a cathedral based on Notre Dame in Paris—a juxtaposition implying that the faith once reflected in Gothic architecture’s soaring spires had been transferred to modern technologies. Blume identified the mustachioed figure as a ventriloquist’s dummy— his personal symbol for the voiceless and impotent American worker—another hint of the societal pressures that keep us in thrall to technological progress, often against our best interests.

Like many American artists of his generation, Walker Evans made the pilgrimage to Paris, in his case, shortly after dropping out of college in the mid-1920s. When he returned to New York in 1927, Evans all but abandoned his earlier ambition of becoming a writer and instead began photographing his newly adopted city. Over the course of the next decade, he would become one of the most well-known photographers in the United States, establishing a documentary style within a fine arts practice.

Around 1929, Evans became acquainted with Lincoln Kirstein, a brilliant Harvard undergraduate who had already founded the esteemed literary journal Hound & Horn and the pioneering Harvard Society for Contemporary Art—Evans’s early work would be included in both venues. In 1931 Kirstein commissioned the photographer to document decaying nineteenth-century houses in the Northeast. During a break, Evans spent the month of September in Provincetown and Martha’s Vineyard, where he made a series of photographs of weather-beaten posters that Kirstein described as “ripped by the wind and rain, so that they look like some horrible accident.” The resulting images, including Torn Movie Poster, combine Evans’s emerging interests in the American vernacular and Surrealism. By recording the poster head-on and cropping out the surrounding context, Evans ably conflates the surface of the photograph with that of the poster itself and exploits the photographic image’s inherent status as a fragment. The couple’s terrified faces as they look out at the unidentified menace, along with the torn shreds over the woman’s forehead, perfectly allegorize the economic ruin and anxiety of the Great Depression.

Excerpted from Whitney Museum of American Art: Handbook of the Collection, (2015), p. 133. Published by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; distributed by Yale University Press.

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Jared French, State Park, 1946

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Narrator: Jared French’s painting of a day at the beach seems straightforward enough at first. But the painting’s narrative is ambiguous. Art historian Richard Meyer is the author of Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art.

Richard Meyer: The figure in the foreground is holding up a billyclub or nightstick and the figure in the background is holding up his fist. And it's almost as though even though they're distanced from each other by the family they're engaged in some kind of combat or confrontation with each other. And what stands between– … what stands between…them is the family. But the family does not look at each other.

This is by no means a picture of the American dream. And there is a kind of alienation which is also. . .very much a part of postwar American culture. This idea that maybe things aren't so great in the suburbs or, and maybe, you know, things aren't so happy with the nuclear family—mom, dad, and little boy.

There is a real strangeness about the issue of relationality, about what it means to be with another person or persons and what it means to be alone. And I think that that's part of what's strange and compelling about the picture.

Narrator: The muscular men are somewhat threatening. But their heavily muscled physiques are also very much eroticized. The scene is probably meant to be set on Fire Island, a popular destination for gay men. French spent the summers there with two other artists—his wife Margaret and his lover, the painter Paul Cadmus. To hear about this unconventional arrangement, press the “play” button.

Although Jared French began State Park during a summer on Fire Island, a beach community off Long Island’s south shore, he did not consider it a painting of a particular location. Instead, his austere, dreamlike scene is evocative of Surrealism’s patently unreal settings. Likewise, the entranced figures refer to Greek, Egyptian, and Renaissance art (for instance, the tanned lifeguard in the foreground has fixed, lidless eyes and the mannered stance of a Greek kouros). The overall effect is unsettling, despite the fact that there are no visible threats pictured: the sky is clear, the ocean calm, the beach unpopulated. The image’s mysterious figure groupings and sense of tension may reflect the fact that it was painted during a period in which French was conflicted between his marriage and a homosexual relationship.

Although Edward Hopper described Early Sunday Morning as “almost a literal translation of Seventh Avenue,” the painting actually removes many of the street’s particulars, leaving it difficult to identify as a New York thoroughfare. The lettering in the signs is illegible, architectural ornament is loosely sketched, and human presence is merely suggested by the variously arranged curtains differentiating apartments. The long early morning shadows in the painting never appear on Seventh Avenue, which runs northsouth. Yet these very contrasts of light and shadow, coupled with the composition’s series of verticals and horizontals, create the charged, almost theatrical atmosphere of an empty street at the beginning of the day. This could be any Main Street in the country, and the uncanny sense of disquietude Hopper distilled here and in other paintings has come to be identified as part of the collective American psyche.

In Joe Jones’s American Farm, a dark cloud hanging ominously over an unforgiving, windswept terrain captures the imperiled existence of American farmers in the 1930s. Jones completed this painting after observing severe conditions while working for the Resettlement Administration, a New Deal initiative aimed to alleviate rural poverty during the Great Depression. The ruined countryside offers a dramatic illustration of the combined effects of drought, poor land management, and soil erosion that devastated Midwestern farms.

Yet Jones did more than simply paint his observations for the historical record. He pointedly exaggerated the scene, lending it an almost mythic sense of struggle. The sun peeking through the clouds over the lone farmhouse and listing barn perched resolutely on the ridge all hint at the unbowed resilience of American farm life.

To accompany an exhibition of their paintings in 1934, Helen Lundeberg and her teacher (and later husband) Lorter Feitelson published an artistic manifesto that called their style “Postsurrealism.” At a time when French Surrealist painters were gaining prominence in New York, Lundeberg’s paintings presented a different take on the movement. Like Surrealism, her paintings represented the inner workings of the mind through pictorial allegory, but instead of privileging the often-chaotic unconscious, she focused on the rational and scientific mind. With their poetic use of symbols, her paintings pose intellectual puzzles. The unexpected presence of flat, abstracted geometric forms within three-dimensional perspectival space lends her work a sense of visual mystery and a distinct style that would later garner the term “hard-edge” painting.

In Planets, a monochromatic print Lundeberg made under the auspices of the Federal Art Project, a circular table sits in the center of a room with a door open behind. A marble rests near the edge of the table, adjacent to a rounded doorknob, and together these spherical forms resemble celestial bodies in orbit. In the foreground an image of a comet is propped atop a stack of books, the word PLANETS visible on the cover of the bottommost one. The stark contrast of light and dark turns swaths of illumination or shadow into spatial planes. This image is a mystical interplay between two- and three-dimensional space, abstraction, and representation. Evidently modeled after Lundeberg’s painting The Red Planet from 1934, the composition is nearly identical but is a mirror reflection, with the stack of books and door on opposite sides of the image.

Excerpted from Whitney Museum of American Art: Handbook of the Collection, (2015), p. 240. Published by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; distributed by Yale University Press.

A billiards table sits in the desert angled towards a sky filled with with clouds of starkly different colors. There is a blue mountain range in the distance.

Man Ray was the only American artist to play a leading role in the Dada and Surrealist movements, spending much of his career in Europe. The son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, he was born Emmanuel Radnitzky and adopted the pseudonym Man Ray at the outset of his career. After collaborating in New York with French Dadaists Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia, Man Ray moved to Paris in 1921. During the following decade, he focused on photography, using the medium to portray members of his avant-garde Parisian milieu as well as to transform everyday objects into strange and disconcerting Surrealist compositions.

He shifted to painting in the 1930s, creating Surrealist canvases such as La Fortune, which he produced shortly before fleeing Nazi-occupied Paris for Los Angeles. The composition is dominated by an oversized pool table, which looms over an uninhabited landscape and a sky filled with rainbow-hued clouds. Man Ray described the painting in relation to a string of personal associations: “I distorted the perspective of that table on purpose, I wanted it to look as big as a lawn. I could have had two people playing tennis on it.” The pool table also alludes to the Surrealist fascination with games and chance as creative springboards, while the spectrum of clouds evokes a painter’s palette, suggesting an allegory of artistic creation. The table’s lack of pockets indicates that the game, like all Surrealist propositions, will not follow rational rules or logic—but the painting’s title, meaning wealth or luck, seems to augur rewarding possibilities.

Adapted from Whitney Museum of American Art: Handbook of the Collection (2015), p. 245. Published by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; distributed by Yale University Press.

Painting of a subway station filled with people. At the center of the image stands a woman in a red dress with a fearful expression.

George Tooker used a claustrophobic, labyrinthine subway station to portray the alienation and the isolation of contemporary urban life. These urban dwellers—all of whom seem to have the same face— seem frozen, trapped by the architecture of the subway station. Tooker rendered this distinctly modern subject in egg tempera, a medium associated almost exclusively with the Renaissance. The technique creates a smooth, matte surface and is ideal for making sharp, clear lines, which together lend the anxious scene an eerie placidity. The artist said that he attempted to paint reality in a way that would impress it “on the mind so hard that it returns as a dream.”

A black bird lies still in tall grass on a quiet, empty field with distant farm buildings.

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America Is Hard to See | Art & Artists

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

America Is Hard to See | Art & Artists

Exhibition works

Rose Castle

Peter Blume (1906-1992), Light of the World, 1932

Joseph Cornell (1903-1972), Rose Castle, 1945

Walker Evans (1903-1975), Torn Movie Poster, 1931

Jared French (1905-1988), State Park, 1946

Edward Hopper (1882-1967), Early Sunday Morning, 1930

Joe Jones (1909-1963), American Farm, 1936

Helen Lundeberg (1908-1999), Planets, 1937

Man Ray (1890-1976), La Fortune, 1938

George Tooker (1920-2011), The Subway, 1950

Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009), Winter Fields, 1942

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection

On the Hour

America Is Hard to See | Art & Artists

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

America Is Hard to See | Art & Artists

Exhibition works

Rose Castle

Peter Blume (1906-1992), Light of the World, 1932

Joseph Cornell (1903-1972), Rose Castle, 1945

Walker Evans (1903-1975), Torn Movie Poster, 1931

Jared French (1905-1988), State Park, 1946

Edward Hopper (1882-1967), Early Sunday Morning, 1930

Joe Jones (1909-1963), American Farm, 1936

Helen Lundeberg (1908-1999), Planets, 1937

Man Ray (1890-1976), La Fortune, 1938

George Tooker (1920-2011), The Subway, 1950

Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009), Winter Fields, 1942

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection