America Is Hard to See | Art & Artists

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

Breaking the Prairie

Breaking the Prairie

Floor 7

The fiery red and cool blue sky in Edward Hopper’s Railroad Sunset is a direct nod to the great nineteenth-century landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church. One of a long line of artists and writers captivated by North America’s natural grandeur, Church and others of the Hudson River School used theatrical scale, meticulous technique, and an understanding of the sublime to imbue their scenes with a sense of the mythic.

In the decades leading up to World War II, Hopper and his contemporaries picked up this thread, becoming deeply interested in America as both a real place and an abstract idea that might be expressed through stylized images of the land and its people. James Castle, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Bill Traylor invested humble, mundane subjects with a sense of mystery and symbolism. Using panoramic sweep and cinematic spatial effects, Chiura Obata and Grant Wood transformed the landscape and its inhabitants into idyllic scenes or allegories. And Marsden Hartley and Charles White turned ordinary people, such as a boxer or a preacher, into powerful archetypes whose physical presence and actions stand for countless individuals and their stories.

Below is a selection of works from this chapter.

Baptism in Kansas recalls a scene that John Steuart Curry witnessed in 1915 in the devout religious community of his childhood: the local creeks were dried up, and the only suitable site for a full-submersion baptism was a water tank. In the painting, the circle of pious hymn singers, the row of Ford Model-T cars, and the receding prairie provide a counterpoint to the dynamic postures of the preacher and young woman at the moment they begin her submersion. Hovering above the pair, and suggesting a divine presence, is a raven and a dove, the birds that Noah released from the ark after the Flood. When the painting was first exhibited in 1928 at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., critics hailed its assertive portrayal of rural American values, which marked a departure from the urban imagery and abstracted landscapes of contemporary American modernism. Curry’s vision of an idealized American heartland signaled the emergence of Regionalism, the movement that glorified grassroots rural values during the poverty-stricken years of the Great Depression.

Painting of a sunset with a silhouette of a building in front.

In Edward Hopper’s painting Railroad Sunset, a signal tower stands starkly against undulating green hills and the spectacular colors of sunset. Since his childhood, Hopper had been fascinated by trains, and after his marriage to Josephine Nivison Hopper, the couple embarked on their first transcontinental train trip, travelling to Colorado and New Mexico. The year that he painted this scene, Hopper and his wife travelled from New York to Charleston, South Carolina, as well as to Massachusetts and Maine. But rather than depicting the places they visited, Hopper here presents the lonely landscape in between, with the railroad tracks slicing through the countryside parallel to the picture plane—as if glimpsed from the window of a passing train. As was his frequent practice, Hopper painted the scene once he had returned to his New York studio, creating an image that is not an exact record of a specific place, but instead fuses his memories with imaginary details.

As a young artist in Japan, Chiura Obata trained in traditional, centuries-old painting techniques. Later he merged these skills with developments in both Japanese and Western contemporary art. Obata immigrated to northern California in 1903, and in 1921 he founded the East West Art Society, through which he sought to unite artistic styles from around the world.

These woodblock prints are based on watercolors Obata made in the summer of 1927 while on an expedition through California’s Yosemite Valley and High Sierra regions. He described that trip as “the greatest harvest for my whole life and future in painting.” The prints, which Obata made while working with master craftsmen in Tokyo, took nearly two years to complete and are virtuosic in their craftsmanship. Each finished work required more than one hundred hand-colored woodblock impressions, some more than two hundred; dozens of woodblocks might be necessary to re-create a single brushstroke.

A painting of a bull skull and flowers floating over a desert landscape.

In Summer Days, Georgia O’Keeffe suspended an animal skull and several Southwestern flowers above a barren desert landscape. The large scale of the bones and blossoms and their placement in the sky give the painting a surreal quality. For O’Keeffe, the animal skull and vibrant flowers were symbols of the cycles of life and death that shape the natural world. This composition belongs to a group of paintings in which the artist depicted the sun-bleached bones she brought back east from her summer sojourns in New Mexico. The deer, horse, mule, and steer skulls she collected, as one would gather wildflowers, became potent souvenirs of a landscape that had deeply inspired her. As she explained, “The bones cut sharply to the center of something that is keenly alive in the desert.”

Young boy standing next to a seated woman

A painting of snow falling sideways across a landscape with the dark outlines of buffalo, and a tree to the left side in the foreground.

In Horace Pippin’s The Buffalo Hunt, a buffalo moves across a snowy landscape, encircled by dogs, while a hunter waits, perched behind a hill. Pippin likely never witnessed a buffalo hunt; to make this work he may have called on his personal memories of trapping in Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains as well as images from nineteenth-century engravings of the American West and other sources.

Pippin made drawings while serving in the military during World War I—the war, he later recounted, “brought out all the art in me”—but a severe shoulder wound limited his use of his right arm. Despite the injury, he continued to make art; he decorated cigar boxes, used hot pokers to burn images onto wood panels, and by the late 1920s began to work with oil paints. The artist started his career by showing his works in local stores in West Chester, Pennsylvania, but soon attracted the attention of collectors and museums.

In the late 1930s, when Bill Traylor was in his mid-eighties, he moved to Montgomery from the rural Alabama plantation where he had been born into slavery. There he began to draw, and for the next four years he did little else. He spent his days sitting outside, under a pool hall awning, recording his observations of daily events both seen and remembered.

The artist’s late-in-life outpouring of creativity resulted in more than 1,200 pictures. Traylor scoured the streets for scraps of cast-off cardboard and used the unpredictable smudges and stains to guide his compositions. Everyday imagery such as a walking man and an unpretentious house become, through their simplified reduction, powerful and iconic signs.

A drawing of a person pointing and orating.

The Lord Is My Shepherd portrays Sabrina and George West, an elderly couple who lived near the artist on the island of Martha’s Vineyard off the coast of Massachusetts. Throughout his career, Thomas Hart Benton took a heroic view of the American people, and here he emphasized the couple’s hands, gnarled and roughened by the labor of fishing, farming, and tending sheep. He also underscored the Wests’ piety and humility, drawing the painting’s title from the needlepoint sampler hanging in their otherwise spartan kitchen. Although their interaction appears slightly awkward—he looks off into space while she gazes intently at the lower part of his face—this may be explained in part by the fact that both Wests were deaf and communicated by lipreading as well as sign language.

A brown terracotta sculpture of a woman's head down to the neck sits on a white plinth. The eyes of the sculpture are cut out.

Elizabeth Catlett believed that making art about ordinary people was a political gesture. Head is part of a series of prints, paintings, and sculpture that she made focusing on the strength and poise of black women.

Catlett made this sculpture in Mexico. While training as an artist in New York, she had learned to sculpt by vigorously pounding forms out of solid blocks of clay. In Mexico, however, she began working with pre-Columbian coil techniques, building up each piece layer by layer. This ancient method allowed her to work more directly with the tactile qualities of terracotta, resulting in the elegant and sensuously modeled Head.

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View 646 works

America Is Hard to See | Art & Artists

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

America Is Hard to See | Art & Artists

Exhibition works

Breaking the Prairie

JAMES CASTLE (1899–1977), UNTITLED (INTERIOR WITH STOVE AND WOOD BOX), N.D.

JOHN STEUART CURRY (1897-1946), BAPTISM IN KANSAS, 1928

EDWARD HOPPER (1882-1967), RAILROAD SUNSET, 1929

CHIURA OBATA (1885-1975), EVENING GLOW OF YOSEMITE FALL, 1930

GEORGIA O’KEEFFE (1887-1986), SUMMER DAYS, 1936

ARSHILE GORKY (1902-1948), THE ARTIST AND HIS MOTHER, 1926-C. 1936

HORACE PIPPIN (1888-1946), THE BUFFALO HUNT, 1933

BILL TRAYLOR (1854-1949), WALKING MAN, 1939-42

CHARLES WHITE (1918-1979), PREACHER, 1952

GRANT WOOD (1891-1942), STUDY FOR BREAKING THE PRAIRIE, 1935-39

THOMAS HART BENTON (1889-1975), THE LORD IS MY SHEPHERD, 1926

ELIZABETH CATLETT (1915-2012), HEAD, 1947

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection

On the Hour

America Is Hard to See | Art & Artists

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

America Is Hard to See | Art & Artists

Exhibition works

Breaking the Prairie

JAMES CASTLE (1899–1977), UNTITLED (INTERIOR WITH STOVE AND WOOD BOX), N.D.

JOHN STEUART CURRY (1897-1946), BAPTISM IN KANSAS, 1928

EDWARD HOPPER (1882-1967), RAILROAD SUNSET, 1929

CHIURA OBATA (1885-1975), EVENING GLOW OF YOSEMITE FALL, 1930

GEORGIA O’KEEFFE (1887-1986), SUMMER DAYS, 1936

ARSHILE GORKY (1902-1948), THE ARTIST AND HIS MOTHER, 1926-C. 1936

HORACE PIPPIN (1888-1946), THE BUFFALO HUNT, 1933

BILL TRAYLOR (1854-1949), WALKING MAN, 1939-42

CHARLES WHITE (1918-1979), PREACHER, 1952

GRANT WOOD (1891-1942), STUDY FOR BREAKING THE PRAIRIE, 1935-39

THOMAS HART BENTON (1889-1975), THE LORD IS MY SHEPHERD, 1926

ELIZABETH CATLETT (1915-2012), HEAD, 1947

Artists

Explore works from this exhibition in the Whitney's collection

Explore works from this exhibition
in the Whitney's collection