Divided we fall
From the rise of nationalism to an abandoned rural class, the Royal Academy’s finely tuned new show about art in Depression-era America has uncanny parallels to our times EXHIBITION OF THE WEEK AMERICA AFTER THE FALL: PAINTING IN THE 1930s Royal Academy,
AMERICA After the Fall, in the Royal Academy’s Sackler Galleries, explores a different side of American modernism to the RA’s recent blockbuster, Abstract Expressionism. Rather than abstraction, it’s about American society in a particular period in history as seen by artists. And while the Ab Ex show was an out-of-control, blowy mess in concept and arrangement — even if inevitably the objects in it were often powerful — America After the Fall is finely tuned. In fact, the pairing of it with the RA’s concurrent exhibition, Revolution: Russian Art 1917-1932 in the main galleries, marks a high point in the RA’s recent history.
The show is great. It’s about Depression-era America. Fift y paintings describe life in the years between the stock market crash on October 29, 1929, and America’s entry into the Second World War. The “fall” is the plunge into political uncertainty and the threat of poverty brought about by the financial crash. As might be expected, our times appear to be uncannily mirrored in the artists’ exploration of their own moment.
We’re shown nationalism, fascism, racism, dread and threat, and fear of global war. And also issues that are subtly both like and unlike our moment, including a sense of the land and farming as biblical, and Hollywood as a sort of whipper-upper of identities that are unreal but we feel compelled to try to imitate them anyway. And of course the mass media — not just the movies but also advertising and the news — as the locus of dreams and fantasies that drive day-to-day behaviour.
The exhibition’s interest comes not just in subject matter but its treatment, in the artists’ wide range of visual metaphors. In Doris Lee’s Thanksgiving, 1935, bumbling, fatty farmer wives roll out the dough for pies, arrange the crockery and check that the turkey in the oven has been basted, in a style that would be at home on a greetings card today. But the painting, in all its mawkish sentimentality, is clever in its space and lighting, and Lee’s arrangement benefits in subtle complexity from knowledge of Cubism and its use of patterning. Lee had trained in Paris and her popular style is a game. She portrays a happy family when families were threatened, in a naïve style that is simultaneously aware of the European avant-garde.
Other paintings allude to socialists fighting capitalists, and capitalists attempting to benefit from the rise in the 1930s of an extreme Right, which was often full-on fascist. Alice Neel portrays a famous hero of the unions, his large hands tense on a copy of the Daily Worker with a headline about strikes. O Louis Guglielmi pictures Lenin’s communism rising from the ashes in a blighted, death-ridden America. Guglielmi’s style owes a lot to Surrealism. In 1935, the year he painted Phoenix, Surrealism had only been going a few years.
Peter Blume, another admirer of the Surrealists, envisages the fall of Rome as an allegory of America’s fall. In his Eternal City fascists and capitalists welcome a monster Mussolini in the form of a giant green jack-in-the-box popping up from wartime trenches. A classical statue of the feminine embodiment of wisdom is smashed in pieces. A starving Christ is worshipped in lurid light in a ruined church and given offerings of weapons and cash.
America was made up of immigrants or the children of immigrants, but antagonism to foreigners and distaste for European ways went hand-in-hand with racism against African Americans. The black painter RW Johnson studied in Paris, married a Danish woman and lived much of his life in Europe. His Street Life, Harlem, 1939, portrays a youthful black, urban couple. The colours and broad shapes immediately recall any number of School of Paris abstract painters, from Serge Poliakoff to Jean Hélion.
Artists argued political positions via painterly style — if you were more Cubist or even tipped over into abstraction, you were considered to be more socialist. If you stayed realistic and illustrational, you were more conservative. But it was a matter of degree not absolutes. Stuart Davis was Left wing. He is represented here by a dynamic, decorative assembly of signs, suggesting street scenes on either side of the Atlantic, impossibly joined up. There is a comic insideout-ness as the contents of people’s front rooms are as prominent as gas pumps and lamp posts. Thomas Hart Benton loathed Davis’s Cubist style, which he called unmasculine. He thought it was infected by a decadent modernism. But Benton’s rugged