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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RUTH ASAWA (1926-2013), NUMBER 1 – 1955, 1954, REFABRICATED 1958

Mesh wires shaped into a long, fluid blob, like lava in a lava lamp.
Mesh wires shaped into a long, fluid blob, like lava in a lava lamp.

Ruth Asawa, Untitled (S.270, Hanging Six-Lobed, Complex Interlocking Continuous Form within a Form with Two Interior Spheres), 1955, refabricated 1957–1958. Brass and steel wire, 63 7/8 × 14 15/16 × 14 15/16 in. (162.2 × 37.9 × 37.9 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of Howard Lipman 63.38. © Estate of Ruth Asawa

As the child of Japanese immigrants living in California, Ruth Asawa was placed in an internment camp for several years during World War II. Because of lingering discrimination after the war and bleak job prospects, Asawa abandoned her pursuit of a teaching degree and in 1946 she enrolled instead at the experimental, non-accredited Black Mountain College in North Carolina. She planned to study painting and drawing with the influential artist Josef Albers, but the institution’s cross-disciplinary emphasis soon led her to sculpture. This nascent interest flourished after a summer in Toluca, Mexico, where she learned from the local craftspeople how to make the crocheted wire baskets she had admired. The crochet technique requires looping wire around a wooden dowel to produce what the artist described as “a string of e’s.” By repeating this one motion—with adjustments made for the weight of the material or the space between loops—Asawa created undulating, voluminous forms. “The shape comes out working with the wire,” she explained. “You don’t think ahead of time, this is what I want…You make the line, a two-dimensional line, then you go into space, and you have a three-dimensional piece.” 


Number 1–1955 (which the artist had to re-create in 1958 because of faulty metal in the original), like many of Asawa’s abstract wire sculptures, is comprised of an outer, vertical structure, inside of which she nestled smaller shapes, often of a differing metal. Suspended from the ceiling, the biomorphic, semitransparent structure creates a multidimensional play of interior and exterior spaces and a constellation of shadows on the wall. The work, according to Asawa, “does not hide anything . . . and inside and outside are connected. Everything is connected, continuous.”


Excerpted from Whitney Museum of American Art: Handbook of the Collection, (2015), p. 46. Published by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; distributed by Yale University Press.

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