Painting the town dead
Exhibition America’s Cool Modernism: O’keeffe to Hopper Ashmolean Museum, Oxford ★★★★★
Walking through America’s Cool
Modernism, a new exhibition of modern US art from the first half of the 20th century at the Ashmolean Museum, is an eerie experience.
On every side, we encounter dynamic vistas of the modern metropolis. Glittering skyscrapers swoop upwards from ravine-like avenues. Factories twinkle at twilight, plate-glass windows brightly lit. There are street lamps and smokestacks, billboards and illuminated signage, barrel-like water towers and Brooklyn Bridge. And yet almost all these evocations of city life are missing a crucial element: people.
Take a look: really, there is barely a soul in sight. Charles Sheeler’s oil painting Macdougal Alley (1924), featuring red-brick buildings in New York, offers a case in point. It contains at least two dozen windows, but each is eyeless and blank. Blinds are drawn, casements boarded up. This shuttered quality creates a curious atmosphere, of alienation and desolation.
Even Georgia O’keeffe’s snowbound view of the East River, painted from Manhattan’s Shelton Hotel in 1928, which at first glance appears to be bustling, is, on closer inspection, devoid of figures. It, too, has a silent, other-worldly quality. Just where is everybody, in this wintry waste?
All this stark, singular emptiness is, we learn, a hallmark of “Precisionism”, an informal American art movement of the Twenties and Thirties.
Across the Pond, the Precisionistsin-chief, Charles Sheeler and Charles Demuth, are well known: the latter’s I
Saw the Figure 5 in Gold (1928), for instance, a tribute to the artist’s friend, the poet William Carlos Williams, is often reproduced in textbooks of American art. For the Ashmolean, therefore, securing it on loan from the Metropolitan in New York is a coup.
Over here, though, the Precisionists are less familiar: as Xa Sturgis, the Ashmolean’s director, points out in the catalogue, there are no American paintings at the Tate between the Edwardian portraits of Sargent (“an honorary European”) and the early works of Jackson Pollock.
Of course, we all know O’keeffe and Edward Hopper, a small group of whose paintings and prints close this exhibition. You may even recognise the work of Sheeler or Stuart Davis, whose streamlined, Purism-inspired depiction of a bottle of Odol mouthwash, on loan from New York’s Museum of Modern Art, is often cited as a precursor of Pop Art. But George Ault, anyone? George Josimovich? Niles Spencer? These are not household names.
This, then, is an opportunity for British audiences to make new discoveries. If only the discoveries in question didn’t prove to be quite so flat.
Eager to fashion a form of objective painting appropriate for the Machine Age, the Precisionists produced orderly, linear canvases as sleek and smooth as a piston engine. They were part of an international movement known as the “return to order”, seeking reassurance after the brutal pandemonium of the First World War.
Too often, though, their crisp art was a joyless, bloodless affair: tight and fussy, in the manner of technical drawings, with expressive brushwork conspicuously erased, and even, on occasion, straightforwardly dull (witness Sheeler’s Water, a forgettable, beige record of an industrial plant).
When, in 1920, the American collector John Quinn was invited to buy some paintings by Patrick Henry Bruce – who rubbed shoulders in Paris with the Modernist avant-garde – he declined, saying, “while it may be drawing, or it may be architecture, it certainly is not painting. It lacks the smear, the plastic quality.”
There’s no doubt that Bruce was a painter – after all, he’s represented in this show by a pretty abstract canvas from 1917-18 called, simply, Peinture (“Painting” in French).
Still, you can’t help feeling that Quinn’s intuition was correct: the frigid, smear-free execution of Precisionist paintings is consistent with the absence of people in them, their strange refusal to engage with the chaos, slop and mess of day-to-day urban life.
Like the paintings, the prints and photographs on display in Oxford share a formalistic interest in patternmaking. Clearly, it was au courant, among “progressive” American artists of the early 20th century, to turn reality into pleasing kaleidoscopes of semi-abstract geometric shapes. This airless, decorative approach, though, while easy on the eye, quickly palls. Fundamentally, it feels timid and detached, devoid of human warmth. Of course, my reaction may be overly subjective: it so happens that I prefer art with “smears”, to borrow Quinn’s phrase.
And, in fairness, there are many strong, and not merely pretty, artworks on display at the Ashmolean. Josimovich’s elegant Illinois Central
(1927) is one example; two remarkably contemporary scenes by the Africanamerican painter Jacob Lawrence are a couple more.
Meanwhile, a pair of immaculate canvases by Spencer, both on loan from the Met, were, for me, a minor revelation: mysterious and dreamlike, like something by De Chirico.
The Italian Metaphysical artist also haunts Hopper’s Dawn in
Pennsylvania (1942), which turns an empty train station into something odd and disquieting, an expression of profound yearning.
With Hopper, though, we are in new aesthetic territory. Like his Precisionist peers, he evoked a sense of alienating stillness. But his paintings, with their delicious, creamy oils, are positively gluttonous compared with the meagre rations that have come before.