Painting Between the Wars: 1918–1940” by Daniel Robbins, 1964

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Painting between the Wars: 1918–1940” by Daniel Robbins, 1964

DANIEL ROBBINS Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. It’s very brave of you to come out in this weather. I thought seriously of staying in bed myself, and I only hope that, when I am finished, [00:01:00] we won’t all have wished that I had.

This is the second and last in a series of two -- I don’t know if that makes a series or not -- called “Painting Between the Wars.” Those of you who were here in the first lecture may recall that we covered very interesting subjects. We’re discussing a period roughly between 1920 and 1940, specifically between 1918 and 1939, showing occasionally a canvas that was painted before or a painting that was made after those dates.

Last time, we talked about the betrayal of cubism and the return to reality that took place shortly after the end of the First World War, and the awful consequences [00:02:00] of this betrayal of cubism in a gradual decline of painting, particularly in France, as it became more and more sentimental. We also rapidly discussed the development of surrealism, probably the most potent force and movement to develop in the period under consideration, out of Dada, and even touched on its extremely important involvement with political tendencies. We also touched briefly on those few French cubist painters who did not return to reality and struggled to lead their art from cubism to a purely abstract art. Today we must very rapidly try and summarize the rest of what was going on [00:03:00] in this extremely complicated period, a period which, I will stress again, has more historical unity, and, indeed, more historical interest, than it does specific artistic interest, because everything in this period, as I said last time, can be considered either as a weakening and continuation of what had come before or else as a preparation for what has come afterwards. And it’s only by making the assumption that you are well acquainted with what came before, and that you are all cognizant of the developments in contemporary, particularly American, art since the end of the Second World War that we can proceed smoothly and calmly.

I show you these two paintings from the middle ’30s, [00:04:00] both from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, by a French painter named Charles Dufresne, whose name is probably not very familiar to you, and with some justification. But I show it to you to remind you of this return to reality that characterized painting in the ’30s. Whole sections of books that were written in the ’30s describe this effort, this return to reality, and in the movement the painter Charles Dufresne held a very important place.

In his still life on the left you see a rather conventional painting that has obviously benefitted from those innovations that came before -- a kind of Dufy-like color and treatment, a kind of ambiguous space which is neither realistic nor cubist, and a kind of soft and gentle atmosphere, and, above all, a sweet, and easy, and easily comprehended subject matter.

More characteristic of Dufresne’s work, [00:05:00] and more characteristic of the French effort for a coherent return to reality having a kind of eternal meaning behind it, would be this painting called The Judgement of Paris. In it, you can see how the subject matter, the classical subject matter, a favorite of Renaissance and Baroque painters, a favorite for a thousand years, has been transcribed to life on a French farm. To [comprehend?] the idyllic nature of abundance, the farmer, even in his hat, is transposed into Paris, who holds out his arm, in which a circular shape

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Painting between the Wars: 1918–1940” by Daniel Robbins, 1964

-- conceivably the traditional apple -- is being presented to two nudes and one semi-nude woman, presumably Juno, Athena, and Venus. There is no hint of the cataclysmic Trojan War that, in classical mythology, [00:06:00] dates from this event. There’s simply the use of an old and, one might even say, worn out theme, a theme, in many ways, not proper to contemporary art, or certainly not thought proper to contemporary art in the two decades prior to the painting of this picture into a lush and realistic French provincial setting. This, then, is a reminder of our departure point.

Now let us consider what happened in this period in terms of a very strong and important movement, important particularly because its effect on American painting was paramount. It, too -- this movement -- is characterized by a strong affinity with cubism in the sense that the derivation of the forms entirely comes out of the artist’s acquaintance with cubism.

On the right is a painting [00:07:00] [by?] the French artist Marcel Gromaire, who also enjoyed a very considerable reputation in the ’30s, was considered one of the major painters of the time, and I suppose there are people today who still think of him in that sense. On the left, a painting by Diego Rivera from 1935 called Flower Vendor. Now the important thing to remember is that both Gromaire and Rivera -- Rivera, of course, a Mexican; Gromaire French -- were involved in a peripheral sense in the Paris just before the First World War. Both of them had direct, if peripheral, cubist experience, and that cubist experience was fundamental to the determining of their style. You can see in the handling of the realistic shapes in both of them [00:08:00] the same kind of overall simplification that you might expect from people who would have this broad familiarity with cubism. But although both of them stylize the figures according to easily comprehensible principles of simplification -- reducing hip to a movement and limbs to simple cylindrical shapes -- so that you can easily make an association with Léger if you want, the nature of the stylization, because of the way in which the subject itself is treated, becomes very different.

And we look, in the Gromaire from the mid-’30s, at a kind of anecdotal nude, a subject devoid, really, either of plastic interest [00:09:00] or, finally, of anecdotal interest. It isn’t a nude satisfying as a nude in the same sense that a nineteenth century painting might be -- that is, lush and sensual -- and it isn’t a study for its spatial tension or the beauty of the interacting forms. On the other hand, the subject matter in the Rivera claims our attention in a much more ready fashion. Clearly, we are encountering simplification here for purposes of bringing out force, pathos, sensitivity, and a certain kind of obvious and perhaps touching message. That is, the poor peddler is bent down on his hands and his knees, with an enormous basket, all treated in a [00:10:00] very flat way, in a very shallow space. His arms, too, reduced to cylinders, making the connection obvious with Léger. The basket shape, for all its intricate pattern, not treated for the texture of straw. Here he is bent under this weight and he is selling flowers. How pathetic, in a sense, that he should suffer in carrying such a beautiful load. And this, in a rather banal way, is the difference between two kinds of stylization. The one on the right leading, as I pointed out last time, to a picture of such utter triviality as Gromaire’s Tramp from 1939, a forerunner in its lack of emotion and lack of plastic interest and in its emphasis on [00:11:00] apparently bold black lines -- a forerunner of the easy style and popular style of a Bernard Buffet.

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Painting between the Wars: 1918–1940” by Daniel Robbins, 1964

Now with our introduction of Rivera, we must confront what was one of the most important historical phenomenon to take place in our period, and that is the development of Mexican painting and the meaning of Mexican painting, its engagement of the mural, and, finally, its influence on our own American painting in the 1920s and 1930s.

On the left, you see another painting by Rivera, just a detail of a huge mural in Cuernavaca, called Cane Workers. Now, once again, the cubist influence in the overall organization is evident, although perhaps less evident than even in the last painting. [00:12:00] And we note other influences that seem pertinent to the development of the large mural art, that is the kind of stylized patternization of the white figures of the cane works, and the white horse, the trapping of the saddle, that may remind us, and should remind us, of fifteenth and even fourteenth century Italian painters. Fifteenth-century painters such as Paolo Uccello, who was clearly studied by the very cultivated and very competent technician, Rivera. But more than that, we notice the broad emphasis on the social nature of the subject matter. We note, even in the detail where the top of the horse and the rider is cut off, that the rider carries arms, a rifle is slung. He holds a whip in his hand, and the cane workers, just like, presumably, Cuban sugar workers under Batista, are suffering, working very hard, that their clothes are clearly tattered, [00:13:00] the elbows are out. They’re in rags, and the meaning of this, on a giant vast scale, was altogether clear.

On the right, we see a painting perhaps more Expressionistic. More German Expressionistic, indeed, in its origin of forms. No less clear in its emotional overtones. A painting called Zapata, relating to the great Mexican revolutionary leader, by Jose Clemente Orozco, painted in 1930. This, too, in the treatment of forms, in the tragic figure of the woman in blue, recalls more than its twentieth century antecedents. The lessons of the Old Masters, the really Old Masters, the early Renaissance masters as Giotto or Lorenzetti. [00:14:00] These broad simplified sort of neo-primitive forms cry out in a very direct and easy way.

One of the most famous of the Orozcos of the early ’30s is this one, Zapatistas, the army of Zapata on the march, from 1931. The painting itself, in its organization, reflects the kind of collective harmonies and rhythms, the surging force of these peasants marching along, and, by the way, there is that blue, almost Madonna-like figure that you saw in the last painting. The women who march along with their men, a seemingly irresistible force to pursue the object of their revolution. Very beautifully organized. A very handsome painting. And very much, [00:15:00] as I said, indebted to early Renaissance painting.

“My one theme,” wrote Orozco in his autobiography, “is this: to paint humanity. My one tendency,” he wrote, “is to bring emotion to a maximum. My means is the real and integral representation of bodies themselves in their interrelation.” How very direct this is, and how very foreign to the concepts of a developing abstract art that existed prior to the First World War.

The third of the great Mexican muralists, and certainly the most important as a theoretician if not as a painter, is David Siqueiros, who is still alive and, [00:16:00] I think, still in prison in Mexico. This extremely powerful painting, called Ethnography, dates from 1939. One huge, massive figure in white peasant’s costume, with a white sombrero, with the textures rendered, stands rather wind-blown, almost pushing through the canvas surface, almost as in a Mannerist painting, against a very generalized landscape, which implies a kind of deep and mountainous

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Painting between the Wars: 1918–1940” by Daniel Robbins, 1964 space. His face is reduced to a kind of barbaric iron mask, and there’s nothing very specific about the meaning of the painting. Perhaps a good deal less specific than either most Siqueiros or most of the mural paintings characteristic of the Mexican School at its height. [00:17:00] And yet, in the iron quality of the face, in its barbaric, tattoo-like -- there’s a certain quality of torture, of suffering, of prejudice against such a figure, of fear, and this is the kind of strong emotion that the Mexican painters sought to produce, and produced very well with extremely capable and well thought out design elements. For example, you’ve only to look at the way the cloud forms, sweep down in a metallic fashion behind the figure into the landscape and carry the movement of the peasant’s blouse to see how extremely well put-together it is.

In black and white only, I’ll show you, on the right, [00:18:00] a detail from one of Orozco’s murals in the library at Dartmouth College. The Coming of the God Quetzalcoatl. Now this image of Quetzalcoatl, the white god who drove out the ancient Aztec deities, sums up the whole of the Mexican mural tradition as far as we need be concerned this afternoon. Against a pyramid, recalling the ancient Aztec or Zapotec Indian culture that had flourished and which deliberately was part of the program of recall in these artists, the natives, in terror, in violence, aghast, and in protestation, resent the doom of their civilization. [00:19:00] Their own god’s fall into an abyss. And the angry god, who is white, against the native population -- and how curious to be giving this lecture with all this protestation about our intervention in the Congo, because we are looking at an anti-imperialist art that traces its roots all the way back to the Spanish conquest. This frightening, strong, but bearded image, wind-tossed beard, points towards what, in the next mural, are the coming conquistadors, who will take over and trample this Indian civilization underfoot. And all this was done perhaps even less strongly by Orozco than either Rivera or Siqueiros.

Now, [00:20:00] the result of this is immediately evident in American painting, and while you ponder the evidence and, of course, the difference which makes the painting on the left almost humorous beside the painting on the right, let me read to you the manifesto that Siqueiros wrote in the early 1920s to give you the tone of this social protest art as it originated in Mexico.

He wrote, “We repudiate the so-called easel art and all such art which springs from ultra- intellectual circles, for it is essentially aristocratic. We hail the monumental expression of art because such art is public property. We proclaim that this, being the moment of social transition from a decrepit to a new order” -- and now [00:21:00] that is an expression familiar to all of us, one that perhaps we do not associate readily with a progressive and liberal regime such as Mexico after years of bloody revolution was only beginning to attain in the 1920s, but, nevertheless, it’s a word of extraordinary importance for comprehending the art of the 1930s in America, as in Mexico, as in fascist Italy, as in Soviet Russia, as in Nazi Germany. And now I’ll return to Siqueiros. “We proclaim that, this being the moment of social transition from a decrepit to a new order, the makers of beauty, the artists, must invest their greatest effort in the aim of materializing an art valuable to the people. Our supreme objective is to create beauty for all, beauty that enlightens and stirs to struggle.” [00:22:00] This was the manifesto of the Syndicate of Technical Workers, Painters, and Sculptors. And just that there should be any such syndicate is a marvelous indication to you of the spirit of that time.

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Painting between the Wars: 1918–1940” by Daniel Robbins, 1964

In America, there was never the same violence, never the same official attempt to harness art to the needs of one ideal -- (coughs) excuse me -- but there certainly was, in Regionalism and in Socially Conscious painting, an enormous reflection of precisely that.

In the figure by John Steuart Curry, of 1939, which you see here on the left, of John Brown, you see a pale reflection of Quetzalcoatl [00:23:00] on the right. The same type of monumentality. The figure thrust into the foreground of the picture plane, pressing against it as in a kind of Mannerist space, as in the Siqueiros whose position it has just assumed, but instead of a background designed to fit together the foreground, we are confronted with an image and a story that we all know very well, the John Brown instrumental in trying to free the Negroes. A Negro boy down here on the left. A covered wagon on the right. And to symbolize the violence of Harper’s Ferry, a tornado, which we all know was a very favorite theme of John Steuart Curry.

Now if this is among John Steuart Curry’s more flamboyant, and more violent, and more protesting kind of paintings, [00:24:00] we normally are accustomed to associate with him more narrative storytelling kinds of regional paintings, such as the famous Tornado Over Kansas of 1929, on the right, in which, in a Dust Bowl era, every American could recognize the problems that were on the front pages of his newspaper: poverty, the Depression, of the earth drying up, of violent natural cataclysms. The tornado rushing across the plain. The farmer and his family gathering up whatever precious possessions -- their pets, the baby -- and rushing into the storm cellar to be protected. This painting enjoyed an enormous vogue, and it was hailed by certain art critics, notably Thomas Craven, as the genuine American renaissance in painting at last. It was modern because of its [00:25:00] direct engagement of living subject matter, and it was almost totally unconcerned with any of the formal values that had existed in European painting prior to the First World War that still existed in European painting, and, to a certain extent, it derived some of its historical pedigree from the fact that the first genuinely modern American art movement -- the Ashcan School, “The Eight” -- had managed to blast into the public consciousness the fact that the subject matter of a painting did not in itself have to involve any remote or aesthetic or distant sense of beauty, but that real life -- now, this, of course, was a realization that had dawned on the French [00:26:00] about 60 years earlier -- that real life itself could provide the material for painting.

And to remind you of the Ashcan School, I’ll show you Luks’ Spielers, these two charming, obviously lower class girls of 1905, dancing on a street. A very charming painting. And I’ll show you one of Sloan’s lovely paintings of 1914, called Greenwich Village Backyards [sic: Backyards, Greenwich Village]. That is prior to the Ashcan School in American art, anyone who held up for the public to see a painting that showed wash hanging out in the backyards, backlots, was insulting the concept of beauty itself. And although to us this backyard scene with two black cats spotted delightfully against the snow and two children playing with a snowman seems innocuous enough, [00:27:00] in its day it was startling, and shattering, and shocking, and, in a way, it did provide the kind of historical backdrop out of which Social Realism and Regionalism could develop.

A painter like Bellows, who was not really a member of The Eight, not a member of the Ashcan School, a much more fashionable painter, nevertheless felt their influence and a lot of other influences, and in one of his late paintings, and a particularly beautiful one, The White Horse,

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Painting between the Wars: 1918–1940” by Daniel Robbins, 1964 which is in the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts, it’s possible to see, perhaps, in its dwelling on a kind of mystery, not a specific narrative engagement of a region, because there are no people here and no story is being told, but a certain kind of preoccupation with mystery, and a certain romantic aura, Bellows’ own quality [00:28:00] and a quality that recurs in American painting, that nevertheless may betray the influence of Metaphysical and early surrealist painting in Europe. That is, under this stormy sky, this enormous vista, these blue mountains, this vast field, this empty cabin, this house with no figure, animals -- a dog here and a white horse here -- simply stare across the horizon, and rather ominous shadows are cast by the privy and by the bushes, and an aura of strangeness is created without the use of any people.

More familiar and more in line with the elements that we’re [00:29:00] broadly tracing this afternoon is the work of Thomas Hart Benton. On the left, a characteristic work called Boomtown. Just now rounding into focus. A Southwestern town. Benton, you know, came from Missouri. Perhaps Oklahoma, perhaps Texas. Roaring. Brawling. Entirely narrative. A purely conventional space. A picture that has a certain affinity with a Saturday Evening Post cover of the ’30s. The ramshackle cars. Knots of people crossing streets, not doing anything in particular, but, in the background, the oil wells, electricity lines, and the flames or the smoke from, presumably, a well that came up uncontrolled.

Now it’s more than a coincidence that Benton, with his Regionalism, [00:30:00] with his insistence that the nature of American art and modern American art was to treat specific American subjects like two cowboys shaking hands -- what could be more American than two cowboys shaking hands? -- was also interested in huge mural art. Every bit as much interested in huge mural art as Orozco, Siqueiros, and Rivera, only lacking any element of social protest. That is, as the Mexicans felt that they needed to go back to some kind of traditional root, to go back before the conquest, to find material that would unite the people, so Benton and, to a lesser extent, some of his Regionalist colleagues felt that they had to deal with an American mythology. Create it. Consequently, without much particular attention to the overall organization of this mural, which is in Connecticut, the arts of America, [00:31:00] he shows us two cowboys playing cards. He shows us fiddlers and guitarists. He shows us a horseshoe game. He shows us shooting over here. He shows us a rodeo over here, and a square dance over here, and, finally, in the background, the saloon. It’s like all of the sections of the classic grade C western movie united together in one epic of the mythos of America.

In a work like Roasting Ears here, from 1939, you can see how little his style moved over the 12 years that we’ve just looked at. The principles are the same. This is not a mural, so it doesn’t have the rather curious overall organization [00:32:00] that this painting on the right does. But the organization of space, that is, the reality of the space -- having to move back on the picture plane -- the kind of knotted simplicity of the figures, is very much the same, and the only thing that we can say about Benton stylistically that’s very provocative of the future -- that there’s a certain convoluted quality and energy in the interrelation of the figures as shapes, which may conceivably have affected his pupil, Jackson Pollock, who worked with him for many years.

Here’s another one familiar to all of you. Another two. Grant Wood. On the left, The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, from 1931, which, in many respects, is like an amalgam of Peter Breughel the Elder and Walt Disney [00:33:00] in its little villages with the lights, its stylization of tree

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Painting between the Wars: 1918–1940” by Daniel Robbins, 1964 forms. This is like the kind of village that the seven dwarfs lived in in illustrations from a few years later. The church steeple, the dark night. But in its panoramic view of a huge space, indeed, like the Breughel that undoubtedly Grant Wood loved very much. And very small here on the road, Paul Revere riding -- I think the expression is “hellbent for leather” -- across the early American landscape.

On the right, of course, a much more successful -- and deservedly very famous -- great American painting of 1930, American Gothic, where the stylization is so much more effective because the space is so much more controlled. Because the formal values which are reduced to a kind of fairy tale-like simplicity in this work on the left are held and tightened [00:34:00] with the foil of these marvelous oval, sharp faces against their Gothic farmhouse, above all by the pitchfork inverted, picking up these motifs in the background. And, indeed, in the very face we see the flat patterning in the woman’s dress so that it becomes very rich. And even her collar and cameo reflect the background. Every part of the painting has a kind of unity, and within the limits of its flat space, its straightforwardness, lies its strength.

The fact that the middle western farmer with his pitchfork was considered to bear great resemblance to the late Senator Taft has probably only enhanced its reputation as standing for something [00:35:00] enduring, valuable, and strong in American character.

Then, of course, part of the same movement but at the other extreme were the celebrations of our city, particularly New York City, as in Reginald Marsh’s Tattoo and Haircut of 1932 here. And, of course, in this raucous, packed painting, where the architecture of the Elevated and its pattern of lights and darks lends structure to the whole, where every character in a doorway, leaning [aground?], the man on his crutch, the barber pole, the girls, the -- what can you say? -- proto- narcotic addict types -- all indicate this life, this teeming life of the city, [00:36:00] and, of course, in Marsh’s fascination with signs, with numbers, with the images of popular and cheap culture, there is undoubtedly a certain prototype for our own pop art movement of today.

I’ve said before why this was considered modern painting, although it had so very little to do with the broad development of modernism as we’ve seen it in Europe. A painter like Walt Kuhn was part of this modernism in America, although never part of regionalism or social realism. It’s important for us to be aware of the fact that Kuhn was one of the organizers of the Armory Show, and had a tremendous [00:37:00] lot to do with bringing that history of European modernism to this country, even though, by so doing, he eventually displaced his own kind of art. His Clown here on the left or the Girl in White and Silver on the right -- the Clown from 1931, the Girl in White and Silver from a decade later -- both reveal how little his art moved, developed, changed over a period of time, and you have only to think of the Pagliacci motif in modern painting, and particularly to trace it back to its ultimate realization in the early Blue and Rose Periods of Picasso to see the mood that Walt Kuhn, a good and solid painter, depended on for years in his career.

[00:38:00] A painter very popular in the ’20s, and the ’30s, and even in the ’40s, and a very good painter, a very honest painter like Eakins was an honest painter, was Eugene Speicher, whose portrait Polly, 1927, you see here. What made it a modern painting? Simply the fact that it was so absolutely unpretentious. It was in a reaction against the debutantes of a Sargent or the

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Painting between the Wars: 1918–1940” by Daniel Robbins, 1964 elegance even of a Whistler that painting like this was, with its directness, its simplicity, its calmness, considered modern.

And then, finally, another name that you will all recall, I’m sure: Kuniyoshi, a Japanese- American, whose Little Joe and the Cow [sic] [Little Joe with Cow] from 1923 you see on the left, and whose Strong Woman of 1925 you see on the right, perhaps one of the most interesting because of the clear [00:39:00] affinities he has with at least two elements in European painting that were constantly being felt, if in varying degrees of strength, by the American artists of the period. Namely Henri Rousseau, the primitive, who had died in 1910, seems to be reflected in this kind of distortion and simplification that you see in the Strong Woman, particularly if you can make out the odd presence of the dumbbells, the huge barbell on the floor behind them, lending a kind of note, reinforced again by the cloud behind the stage. [As if you don’t know?], a kind of ambivalent space -- is it a stage space or a real space? That bespeaks clearly the influence of European surrealism, and, at the same time, a kind of simplified graphic design in this cow, [[00:40:00] in this little boy. That gives you one of the principal sources for the now very popular illustrative style of Ben Shahn.

I think perhaps more clearly this painting, which is also by Kuniyoshi, a self-portrait as a golfer, reveals this surrealist influence, because if this is a golf course, as it is, it’s a very strange golf course, and it seems very strange to see Kuniyoshi the painter -- a painter of the ’20s and ’30s -- not a painter of the ’60s, never a part of café society -- it seems a little strange to see this man in this pose holding a golf club, because he is not our image, even now, and still less when the painting was made, is he a golfer. And against that kind of brushed sky, there are distinct recollections, positive and clear [00:41:00] reminiscences of [Tangi?].

Two more that are very familiar, to illustrate perhaps the most ironic, the most biting, the most protest kind of American painting that was produced during this period. From 1935, William Gropper’s The Senate, immediately recalling Daumier’s Legislative Belly, the great lithograph from the middle of the nineteenth century, or his caricature figures, this summed up in a very graphic way a whole kind of New Masses cartoonist approach to art. This was as close as American art came towards serving in a specific way to stimulate the struggle. [00:42:00]

The painting by Joe Hirsch dates from 1941. You might say, in a sense, that it was a late hangover of the mood, which was much sharper in 1935, and which had already waned by 1941, but you might note also that in the Hirsch painting, unlike in the Gropper painting, there is -- (coughs) excuse me -- absolutely no attempt to deal with the problem of space or the background. We are confronted exclusively with two cartoons, two caricatures of the senate, of two senators, a caricature which was fairly widespread six years earlier in the days of Hopper.

Now still another, and important, and perhaps more an elevated element -- the mystery of the American scene -- we can begin to glimpse in a painting [00:43:00] by Burchfield of 1924. A street, a muddy street at that, a broken down house, light falling on it in a curious way, a house of no particular architectural style, but with a shadow which, by its very sharpness and force, is a little ominous. And the only other element of drama in the painting: the red window. Now, lest anyone miss the mood, it’s reinforced with the title The House of Mystery. On the other hand, this kind of mood was remarkably exploited by Edward Hopper, whose recent retrospective at

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Painting between the Wars: 1918–1940” by Daniel Robbins, 1964 the Whitney, perhaps, some of you saw. And is still a valid and important part of his subject matter. [00:44:00]

On the right, a painting from 1947 called -- I’m sorry, 1949 -- called High Noon, and on the left painting, 1947, called Summer Evening. That is [against?] very simple shapes, effects of light and darkness, with solitary figures in conversation, a curious, lonely, evocative mood is created for us.

In a very famous work here on the left from 1942, Nighthawks, we see the same angle in to the composition, this darkness, the mystery of the street, this touch of light where, despite the conversation, despite contact, everyone seems terribly alone. But if we compare the 1942 painting, Nighthawks, with the 1932 painting on the right, also by Hopper, [00:45:00] Room in Brooklyn, we see how perhaps the narrative qualities in the painting on the left and in the two that we looked at first, begin to overwhelm the plastic qualities that were so abundantly present in the early, and, I think, of the four that I’ve shown you, most beautiful Hopper. Where the window shades, for example, create squares and patterns of varying height, blues, here even, here uneven, here uneven, and enable us immediately to pick up a very satisfying and rather Mondrian-esque organization of the composition from this tabletop in red to this square of yellow, these verticals, these horizontals, in which the figure and her chair conform [00:46:00] entirely, not at the expense of the mood, but really at its greater evocation.

Finally, there were those Americans who were more specifically more than their colleagues, much more than their colleagues, influenced by the developments of European modernism. This group of painters, which is very large, has been called the Precisionists. We see on the left a painting by Demuth called My Egypt, 1927, characterized by an absolute lack of any sensuous quality to the pigment. By a kind of logic and discipline, but a kind of relentless exploitation of the American industrial scene. [00:47:00] And in such a painting (coughs) and to a lesser extent in his 1928 fascinating painting called I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold, which I hasten to caution you as you look at it is not masked, and all of this and all of this is not part of the painting. We see how the Precisionist painters attempted, with varying degrees of success, to harness to the American scene the methods of picture construction and the dynamism of compositional necessity that they were perfectly well aware had already taken place in Europe.

Another one of these painters who is very familiar to you is Charles Sheeler, whose Upper Deck of 1929 you see on the left. And in this cold, finished [00:48:00] machinery on a boat, and its intricate patterns, its light, and its shadow, a certain affinity with Léger is clearly evident. But in the carefully worked sky, its effect of smoke [in the?] atmosphere, it is, to a certain extent, negated.

And then, of course, we must remember Joseph Stella whose Brooklyn Bridge of 1922, one of many such paintings that he had made ever since 1917, also attempts to integrate the scene into a dynamic fabrication of pattern and excitement that would incorporate the compositional excitement and discoveries of European painting.

John Marin, one of our best painters of the period, did the same sort of adaptation of cubist style to the New York scene. Here is a painting of his [00:49:00] from 1932 called Up Fifth Avenue in

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Painting between the Wars: 1918–1940” by Daniel Robbins, 1964 which, in the tilting planes of the tall buildings, and yet the specific reminiscence of a church steeple, in lights that flash, in figures that work their way up the street, a clearly recognizable is felt, and yet some of the dynamism, including a green light, of the specific city, is very much retained. And I contrast it with you for you to look at with a 1917 painting by the French cubist Albert Gleizes called Building Construction, that is a painting of some 16 years earlier. Also made in New York, in which, in an overall pattern of strong, geometric forms, there are yet reminiscences of the building patterns [00:50:00] from which they derive, as in here and as in the scaffolding here. And yet the force of the composition communicates this kind of sense of growth and vitality perhaps to a greater extent than in the painting on the left.

It’s curious to observe that, in American painting between the wars, the strongest artists, like Marin, and those who, like Marsden Hartley, had had very direct European experience, all felt to varying degrees the pull of the socially conscious, the regional, the painting for a new order that characterized art all over Europe, Mexico, and America. [00:51:00]

For Marsden Hartley, whose Portrait of a German Officer on the right dates from 1914, a really wild and far out painting, produced, in 1938, (coughs) on the left, one of several paintings called the Fishermen’s Last Supper, in which a kind of mystical realism -- the handwriting on the tablecloth, the words familiar to you from the Bible, the stars over the heads of the men who are about to go out for the benefit of all of we who eat seafood, and who will die, toilers of the sea, (coughs) that this mood and this simplification, and this kind of neo-primitivism affected someone who had participated form the very beginning [00:52:00] in the development of modernism.

To conclude -- (coughs) excuse me -- I think I’m going to have to conclude. There is but one really significant American painter who was avant-garde during the First World War and immediately after the First World War, who pursued a steady goal and managed to create from the post-cubist methodology, an art that was uniquely his own and, at the same time, uniquely American, and that, of course, was Stuart Davis, whose Lucky Strike, a collage, (coughs) of 1921 you see on the left, and whose painting called Colonial cubism you see on the right dating from 1954. And with that, [00:53:00] I’m afraid I’m going to have to leave you, because I don’t think I can talk anymore. Thank you very much. (applause)

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Painting Between the Wars: 1918-1940 / Daniel Robbins, 1964/12/4. Reel-to-Reel collection. A0004. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Archives, New York