America Is Hard to See

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

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Rose Castle

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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.

Below is a selection of works from this chapter.

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

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.
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, The Subway, 1950. Egg tempera on composition board, 18 1/8 × 36 1/8 in. (46 × 91.8 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with funds from the Juliana Force Purchase Award 50.23. © George Tooker

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.”

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Maya Man, A Realistic Day In My Life Living In New York City

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