America Is Hard to See

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

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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.”

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Joan Mitchell evoked landscape environments in many of her paintings, usually by conjuring physical sensations such as light, sound, and movement. In Hemlock, the variations of short and long brushstrokes as well as the alteration between flashes of blue or green paint and larger areas of milky white create a sense of rhythm and movement. The white paint appears both behind and on top of the other colors, which blurs the definition of foreground and background—a stylistic hallmark of Mitchell’s work throughout her career. Although the horizontal green slashes in Hemlockmight bring to mind a hemlock tree, Mitchell titled the work after it was completed. The title derives from a passage in a 1916 Wallace Stevens poem, Domination of Black, which contains several references to hemlock, including: “Out of the window, / I saw how the planets gathered / Like the leaves themselves / Turning in the wind. / I saw how the night came, / Came striding like the color of the / heavy hemlocks. . .”

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America Is Hard to See

New York, N.Y., 1955

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JOAN MITCHELL (1926-1992), HEMLOCK, 1956

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On the Hour

America Is Hard to See

New York, N.Y., 1955

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JOAN MITCHELL (1926-1992), HEMLOCK, 1956

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection