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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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.

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America Is Hard to See

Rose Castle

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

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America Is Hard to See

Rose Castle

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

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

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