America after the Fall: Painting in the 1930s
Royal Academy, London W1 (www.royalacademy.org.uk). Until 4 June
The 1930s was a “terrible decade” for America, said Laura Cumming in The Observer. The Great Depression plunged millions into poverty, and the ecological disaster known as the Dust Bowl forced scores of “poverty-stricken” farmers to flee their homes. Meanwhile, war loomed large on the horizon. Yet as a new show at the Royal Academy demonstrates, this tumultuous period was “evidently great” for American painting. The exhibition brings together 45 works by 32 artists created between the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and America’s entry into the Second World War, in 1941. Mixing household names including Georgia O’keeffe, Jackson Pollock and Edward Hopper with overlooked artists, many of whom are unheard of outside the US, it illustrates the “terrific variety” of the American avant-garde of the period. This revelatory exhibition is “not to be missed by anyone with the slightest interest in painting”.
The star attraction here is Grant Wood’s “hugely famous” painting American Gothic, said Philip Hensher in The Mail on Sunday. The work, which has never previously left the US, has been “reproduced and parodied” countless times, but seeing this “haunting” painting up close is “quite a new experience”. Other highlights include Charles Sheeler’s “exquisitely precise” industrial scenes, and Paul Cadmus’ The Fleet’s In! – a “lewd” scene portraying drunken sailors on shore leave. Best of the lot are New York Movie and Gas, two “masterpieces” by Hopper, said Martin Gayford in The Spectator. However, a fair few of the works here are “simply terrible”. In a decade of social upheaval, some US artists – many with communist sympathies – made “clumsy” attempts at “overtly political” painting. A case in point is Peter Blume’s The Eternal City, a “crass” depiction of Mussolini as a “glaring, green-faced jack-in-the-box”.
This is not “a show of great paintings”, said Michael Glover in The Independent. But it is full of “highly significant” works by many painters struggling to define the nature of a changing US during a “momentous decade”. It demonstrates how painters such as Pollock and Philip Guston, who later became famous as abstract expressionists, experimented restlessly with style. While an early work by Pollock is a great disappointment, Guston’s depiction of the bombing of Guernica in the Spanish Civil War as a “swirling tondo of stricken figures” is terrific. “Inconsistent” though it is, this exhibition is a bold attempt to explain how American art forged a distinct identity for itself in the 1930s.