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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DAVID SMITH (1906-1965), HUDSON RIVER LANDSCAPE, 1951

David Smith, Hudson River Landscape, 1951

In America Is Hard to See

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David Smith, Hudson River Landscape, 1951

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Candida Smith: I am Candida Smith. I'm reading from a passage my father David Smith wrote on points of departure, in particular points of departure for the sculpture Hudson River Landscape.

"Hudson River Landscape started from drawings made on a train between Albany and Poughkeepsie. A synthesis of drawings from ten trips, going and coming over this seventy-five mile stretch. On this basis I started a drawing for a sculpture. As I began, I shook a quart bottle of India ink. It flew over my hand, it looked like my landscape. I placed my hand on the paper, and from the image this left, I traveled with the landscape to other landscapes and their objectives, with additions, deductions, directives which flashed past too fast to tabulate but whose elements are in the finished sculpture. No part is diminished reality. The total is a unity of symbolized reality, which to my mind is far greater reality than the river scene.

Is my work Hudson River Landscape, the Hudson River, or is it the travel, the vision, the ink spot? Does it matter? The sculpture exists on its own. It is the entity. The name is an affectionate designation of the point prior to travel. My objective was not these words or the Hudson River, but to create the existence of a sculpture. Your response may not travel down the Hudson River, but it may travel on any river, or on a higher level."

David Smith based Hudson River Landscape on drawings he made while looking out the window on train rides between New York City and his home in Bolton Landing in upstate New York. The open frame, which suggests a window, positions us to look at the sculpture head-on, viewing its thin contour lines as a drawing in space. Like the sculptures by Smith on view on the terrace, Hudson River Landscape is welded together. Smith liked welding—a modern industrial process invented in the late nineteenth century—in part because it freed sculpture from the historical burden of such traditional techniques as carving and casting.

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