Where We Are: Selections from the Whitney’s Collection, 1900–1960

Apr 28, 2017–June 2, 2019

Of Eros and Dust

Of Eros and Dust

Searching for alternatives to what many saw as a culture of materialism and war, some American artists sought recourse in spirituality and mysticism. Rather than making particular declarations of faith, the artists represented in this gallery embraced the spiritual through the symbolic, the sublime, the natural, and the abstract. Charles Burchfield, who worked in Ohio and upstate New York, looked to nature for feelings of ecstasy and dread similar to those that religion stirred in him. Painted at the scale of a Renaissance altarpiece, with Gothic elements that evoke medieval churches, Joseph Stella’s 1939 meditation on the Brooklyn Bridge endows the secular with divinity. Clyfford Still, whose monumental painting from 1956 is on view in this gallery, once said: “I never wanted color to be color. I never wanted texture to be texture, or images to become shapes. I wanted them all to fuse into a living spirit.” For Still and the others whose work is shown here, art and the world remain domains of mystery, awe, and wonder.