America Is Hard to See

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

A mural faces the gallery windows and the Hudson River.
A mural faces the gallery windows and the Hudson River.

Running People at 2,616,216 (1978–79) by Jonathan Borofsky installed on the West Ambulatory, 5th floor, the inaugural exhibition, America Is Hard to See (May 1–September 27, 2015). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Photograph © Nic Lehoux

Drawn entirely from the Whitney Museum of American Art’s collection, America Is Hard to See takes the inauguration of the Museum’s new building as an opportunity to reexamine the history of art in the United States from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present. Comprising more than six hundred works, the exhibition elaborates the themes, ideas, beliefs, and passions that have galvanized American artists in their struggle to work within and against established conventions, often directly engaging their political and social contexts. Numerous pieces that have rarely, if ever, been shown appear alongside beloved icons in a conscious effort to unsettle assumptions about the American art canon.

The title, America Is Hard to See, comes from a poem by Robert Frost and a political documentary by Emile de Antonio. Metaphorically, the title seeks to celebrate the ever-changing perspectives of artists and their capacity to develop visual forms that respond to the culture of the United States. It also underscores the difficulty of neatly defining the country’s ethos and inhabitants, a challenge that lies at the heart of the Museum’s commitment to and continually evolving understanding of American art.

Organized chronologically, the exhibition’s narrative is divided into twenty- three thematic “chapters” installed throughout the building. These sections revisit and revise established tropes while forging new categories and even expanding the definition of who counts as an American artist. Indeed, each chapter takes its name not from a movement or style but from the title of a work that evokes the section’s animating impulse. Works of art across all mediums are displayed together, acknowledging the ways in which artists have engaged various modes of production and broken the boundaries between them.

America Is Hard to See reflects the Whitney’s distinct record of acquisitions and exhibitions, which constitutes a kind of collective memory—one that represents a range of individual, sometimes conflicting, attitudes toward what American art might be or mean or do at any given moment. By simultaneously mining and questioning our past, we do not arrive at a comprehensive survey or tidy summation, but rather at a critical new beginning: the first of many stories still to tell.

America Is Hard to See is organized by a team of Whitney curators, led by Donna De Salvo, Chief Curator and Deputy Director for Programs, including Carter E. Foster, Steven and Ann Ames Curator of Drawing; Dana Miller, Curator of the Permanent Collection; and Scott Rothkopf, Nancy and Steve Crown Family Curator and Associate Director of Programs; with Jane Panetta, Assistant Curator; Catherine Taft, Assistant Curator; and Mia Curran, Curatorial Assistant.

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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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Helen Lundeberg (1908-1999), Planets, 1937

Helen Lundeberg (1908-1999), Planets, 1937. Lithograph: sheet (irregular), 16 × 12 1/2 in. (40.6 × 31.8 cm); image, 11 15/16 × 9 in. (30.3 × 22.9 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the M. Anthony Fisher Purchase Fund 81.17 © The Feitelson/Lundeberg Art Foundation

To accompany an exhibition of their paintings in 1934, Helen Lundeberg and her teacher (and later husband) Lorter Feitelson published an artistic manifesto that called their style “Postsurrealism.” At a time when French Surrealist painters were gaining prominence in New York, Lundeberg’s paintings presented a different take on the movement. Like Surrealism, her paintings represented the inner workings of the mind through pictorial allegory, but instead of privileging the often-chaotic unconscious, she focused on the rational and scientific mind. With their poetic use of symbols, her paintings pose intellectual puzzles. The unexpected presence of flat, abstracted geometric forms within three-dimensional perspectival space lends her work a sense of visual mystery and a distinct style that would later garner the term “hard-edge” painting.

In Planets, a monochromatic print Lundeberg made under the auspices of the Federal Art Project, a circular table sits in the center of a room with a door open behind. A marble rests near the edge of the table, adjacent to a rounded doorknob, and together these spherical forms resemble celestial bodies in orbit. In the foreground an image of a comet is propped atop a stack of books, the word PLANETS visible on the cover of the bottommost one. The stark contrast of light and dark turns swaths of illumination or shadow into spatial planes. This image is a mystical interplay between two- and three-dimensional space, abstraction, and representation. Evidently modeled after Lundeberg’s painting The Red Planet from 1934, the composition is nearly identical but is a mirror reflection, with the stack of books and door on opposite sides of the image.

Excerpted from Whitney Museum of American Art: Handbook of the Collection, (2015), p. 240. Published by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; distributed by Yale University Press.

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Audio guides

People gathered for a talk in the gallery.
People gathered for a talk in the gallery.

Carol Mancusi-Ungaro addresses Jay DeFeo's The Rose (c. 1958–1966)

99 Objects

Listen to selections from the in-gallery programs series named in honor of the Whitney’s new address, 99 Gansevoort Street. Artists, writers, Whitney curators and educators, and an interdisciplinary group of scholars focus on individual works of art from the Museum’s collection on view in America Is Hard to See.

View guide
A mural faces the gallery windows and the Hudson River.
A mural faces the gallery windows and the Hudson River.

Running People at 2,616,216 (1978–79) by Jonathan Borofsky installed on the West Ambulatory, 5th floor, the inaugural exhibition, America Is Hard to See (May 1–September 27, 2015). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Photograph © Nic Lehoux

America Is Hard to See

Hear directly from artists and curators on selected works from the exhibition.

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In the News

“2015 was the Year of the Whitney…the cross-disciplinary approach taken by America Is Hard to See and Collected by Thea Westreich Wagner and Ethan Wagner, is becoming the model for a new generation of curators.”
—Hyperallergic

“2015 belonged to the Whitney…both my museum—and my show—of the year.”
—Adrian Searle in The Guardian

"Best of 2015: Our Top 20 NYC Art Shows"
—Hyperallergic

"The museum’s inaugural show in its new building, America Is Hard to See, tells a different story of modern and contemporary American art than the lily-white version we’re used to"
—The New Yorker

Interview: Curator Scott Rothkopf speaks about America Is Hard to See on Slate's Culture Gabfest
—Slate

"New Whitney Museum Signifies a Changing New York Art Scene"
—The New York Times

"With its abundantly sumptuous holdings, the museum tells us how we got where we are, offering a teeming lineage of the art of this country"
—Hyperallergic

"The Whitney Opens With a Winner"
—Artnews

"Review: New Whitney Museum’s First Show, America Is Hard to See"
—The New York Times

"Curators at the Whitney Museum of American Art discuss their largest exhibition to date at their new downtown location, designed by architect Renzo Piano"
—The Wall Street Journal

"The exhibition will include plenty of crowd-pleasers—Hopper, O’Keeffe, Calder’s “Circus”—but, with the Whitney’s brilliant chief curator, Donna De Salvo, at the helm, expect major twists in the conventional art-historical plot."
—The New Yorker

"The Whitney Museum, Soon to Open Its New Home, Searches for American Identity"
—The New York Times

"One of this year's most anticipated art world events"
—Huffington Post

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