America Is Hard to See

May 1–Sept 27, 2015

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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.

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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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America Is Hard to See

Rose Castle

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Helen Lundeberg (1908-1999), Planets, 1937

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America Is Hard to See

Rose Castle

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Helen Lundeberg (1908-1999), Planets, 1937

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