America Is Hard to See

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

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New York, N.Y., 1955

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In the aftermath of World War II, a number of artists experienced an existential crisis: How could art be meaningful in the wake of such tragedy? What visual language could describe inner and outer worlds so irrevocably transformed? Artists in the United States felt compelled to make art that was unmistakably new. In 1948, Barnett Newman wrote of himself and his peers: “We are freeing ourselves of the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth, or what have you, that have been the devices of Western European painting.” By largely abandoning European influences, they invented what came to be known as Abstract Expressionism, the first American art movement to gain international acclaim.

European Surrealism, nevertheless, offered crucial inspiration, especially its exploration of the psyche through automatic drawing, anthropomorphism, and personal symbolic languages—elements that can be seen in the work of Arshile Gorky, Lee Krasner, and Richard Pousette-Dart. Others, including Alfonso Ossorio and Jackson Pollock, focused on how the spontaneous interaction between materials and radical processes, such as spraying and pouring, might convey authenticity and immediacy. This art evinced an unprecedented sense of scale, tied not only to the size of the canvas but to the muscular strokes and broad fields of color that dominated it. Critic Edwin Denby recalled that for him and Willem de Kooning this expansiveness came from their culture and surroundings: “At the time we all talked a great deal about scale in New York, and about the difference of instinctive scale in signs, painted color, clothes, gestures, everyday expressions between Europe and America. We were happy to be in a city the beauty of which was unknown, uncozy, and not small scale.”

Below is a selection of works from this chapter.

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LOUISE BOURGEOIS (1911-2010), QUARANTANIA, 1941

99 Objects: Alhena Katsof on Quarantania by Louise Bourgeois

In 99 Objects

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99 Objects: Alhena Katsof on Quarantania by Louise Bourgeois

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After emigrating from Paris to New York in 1938, Louise Bourgeois made Quarantania, one of her earliest carved and painted sculptures. Comprised of five rough-hewn, upright wood forms on a low base, Quarantania resembles standing figures huddled together. Bourgeois’s three-dimensional works from this period, which she called “Personages,” offered her a way to reimagine people she had left behind in her native France. Specific echoes of her past appear here: the five elements might also evoke sewing needles or weaving shuttles, tools used in her family’s tapestry restoration trade. At the same time, the forms have a totemic quality that gives them a wider resonance, a reflection of efforts by Bourgeois and her contemporaries to develop abstract, universal languages that would transcend time and national boundaries.

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

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