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

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.

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America Is Hard to See

Rose Castle

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

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On the Hour

America Is Hard to See

Rose Castle

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

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection