For the Public
Up to 30 works
D. Wigmore Fine Art
152 W. 57th Street, Third Floor
New York, NY 10019, (212) 581-1657 www.dwigmore.com
an exhibition that explores public art during a crucial period of American art history.
This fascinating period between the Great Depression and the end of World War II served as the backdrop for the Whitney Museum’s hugely successful exhibition Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 19251945, which itself helped offer context to the D. Wigmore show.
“…[Vida Americana] made me wonder how the Mexican muralists, who were all revolutionary, helped America reimagine itself. To examine that question, I have put together an exhibition of American murals and paintings from the 1930s and 1940s for consideration,” says Deedee Wigmore, owner of the gallery. Wigmore uses the Works Progress Administration, or WPA, to frame her own show. “The American public art program, like its Mexican counterpart, elevated artists to wage earners making murals, easel paintings, prints and sculptures. Mural commissions, particularly for post offices, were awarded by competition. If a mural commission was won, it elevated an artist’s stature. For every mural commission granted, a great many artists submitted an oil, watercolor, gouache or drawing of their interpretation of a specified theme or location.”
Works in the show include many of the great 20th-century American artists—reginald
Marsh, Charles Burchfield, Jan Matulka and
Dale Nichols—as well as numerous artists who painted in and around the West. Examples include Adolf Dehn’s 1948 casein work Colorado Mining Town, Philip Latimer Dike’s 1934 watercolor Copper Mine, Arizona, and Paul Sample’s 1933 oil
California Goldmine, with its towering peaks that rise above the dusty fields and its workers.
“Regardless of their subject and style, American artists felt pressed to negotiate a way between the national identity claimed by the realist style and modernism’s connection to Europe,” Wigmore says. “The modernists had to adapt to the dominance of realism caused by the Mexican mural movement. To unite themes of work with modernism, artists used the structural design of factory machinery to depict industry as ordered and pristine. Streamlining of shapes in a painting suggested American efficiency and were perceived as patriotic. This blending of realism and modernism can be seen most clearly in works of the 1940s as America entered World War II and there was great pride in manufacturing.”
The exhibition will remain on view through February 12.