America Is Hard to See

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

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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.

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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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America Is Hard to See

Rose Castle

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

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America Is Hard to See

Rose Castle

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

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
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