National Gallery of Art NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART ONLINE EDITIONS American Paintings, 1900–1945 American Paintings, 1900–1945 Published September 29, 2016 Generated September 29, 2016 To cite: Nancy Anderson, Charles Brock, Sarah Cash, Harry Cooper, Ruth Fine, Adam Greenhalgh, Sarah Greenough, Franklin Kelly, Dorothy Moss, Robert Torchia, Jennifer Wingate, American Paintings, 1900–1945, NGA Online Editions, http://purl.org/nga/collection/catalogue/american-paintings-1900-1945/2016-09-29 (accessed September 29, 2016). American Paintings, 1900–1945 © National Gallery of Art, Washington National Gallery of Art NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART ONLINE EDITIONS American Paintings, 1900–1945 CONTENTS 01 American Modernism and the National Gallery of Art 40 Notes to the Reader 46 Credits and Acknowledgments 50 Bellows, George 53 Blue Morning 62 Both Members of This Club 76 Club Night 95 Forty-two Kids 114 Little Girl in White (Queenie Burnett) 121 The Lone Tenement 130 New York 141 Bluemner, Oscar F. 144 Imagination 152 Bruce, Patrick Henry 154 Peinture/Nature Morte 164 Davis, Stuart 167 Multiple Views 176 Study for "Swing Landscape" 186 Douglas, Aaron 190 Into Bondage 203 The Judgment Day 221 Dove, Arthur 224 Moon 235 Space Divided by Line Motive Contents © National Gallery of Art, Washington National Gallery of Art NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART ONLINE EDITIONS American Paintings, 1900–1945 244 Hartley, Marsden 248 The Aero 259 Berlin Abstraction 270 Maine Woods 278 Mount Katahdin, Maine 287 Henri, Robert 290 Snow in New York 299 Hopper, Edward 303 Cape Cod Evening 319 Ground Swell 336 Kent, Rockwell 340 Citadel 349 Kuniyoshi, Yasuo 352 Cows in Pasture 363 Marin, John 367 Grey Sea 374 The Written Sea 383 O'Keeffe, Georgia 386 Jack-in-Pulpit - No. 2 398 Jack-in-Pulpit Abstraction - No. 5 410 Jack-in-the-Pulpit No. 3 423 Jack-in-the-Pulpit No. IV 436 Jack-in-the-Pulpit No. VI 448 Line and Curve 456 Pippin, Horace Contents © National Gallery of Art, Washington National Gallery of Art NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART ONLINE EDITIONS American Paintings, 1900–1945 459 Interior 464 Sheeler, Charles 468 Classic Landscape 494 Sloan, John 497 The City from Greenwich Village 510 Steichen, Edward 513 Le Tournesol (The Sunflower) 522 Weber, Max 525 Rush Hour, New York Contents © National Gallery of Art, Washington National Gallery of Art national gallery of art online editions American Paintings, 1900 – 1945 American Modernism and the National Gallery of Art: “The Perfect Place” The story of how the collection of modern American paintings at the National Gallery of Art was formed is a rather curious and little known one within the Gallery’s larger institutional narrative.[1] When the Gallery opened in 1941, there were only a few American paintings and no contemporary or modern art of any kind on view. It was considered a conservative institution mainly devoted to the art of the European past. And yet, in stark contrast to the older, more established 19th-century institutions on the East Coast, like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, or the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the National Gallery of Art, founded in the midst of two of the 20th century’s most devastating maelstroms — the Great Depression and World War ii — was markedly a child of the modern era.[2] From its inception, the Gallery’s institutional identity was both inherently modern and, as the nation’s gallery in the nation’s capital, inherently American. Another important context for understanding the evolution of the American modernism collection is the debate regarding the museum’s organization that took place over the course of the 1920s and 1930s, before its official opening in 1941, and more specifically how that debate related to pressing issues regarding the role of contemporary art museums. The discussion of what a national gallery of art in the United States should collect and display took place in tandem with a consideration of what museums of American and modern art should collect and display. Then, as now, complex, dynamic problems surrounding the relationship of present to past and of modernism to nationalism and internationalism resisted easy answers, with theoretical ideals and strict divisions giving way to the evolving practical demands of running museums. Given the Gallery’s conservative reputation, it is surprising to learn that the primary sources for the collection of American modernist paintings can be traced back to a coterie of its most influential early supporters. Almost every major development in the field of American modernism at the Gallery is indebted American Modernism and the National Gallery of Art: “The Perfect Place” 1 © National Gallery of Art, Washington National Gallery of Art national gallery of art online editions American Paintings, 1900 – 1945 in some way to either its first chief curator, John Walker, or to one of three early trustees: Chester Dale, Duncan Phillips, and Paul Mellon. If American modernism was not a particularly high priority for the Gallery in its first years, these “conservative” modernists nonetheless helped to establish at a very early stage a commitment to the field that proved to be persistent and effective. One of the most significant examples of this falls outside the parameters of this catalog: the gift of over 1,600 photographs by Alfred Stieglitz known as the Key Set given to the Gallery in 1949, at Phillips’s urging, by Stieglitz’s widow, Georgia O’Keeffe.[3] While the Stieglitz photographs sometimes lay fallow at the Gallery as the status of the medium waxed and waned, O’Keeffe’s gift eventually led to the establishment of an independent department of photographs in 1990.[4] In the case of the painting collections, the masterpieces by George Bellows given by Dale in 1944 and 1963, the oils in the Alfred Stieglitz bequest directed to the Gallery by O’Keeffe with the encouragement of Walker and Phillips in 1949, and the construction of I. M. Pei’s East Building, erected in 1978 with the informed patronage of Paul Mellon, were all crucial to the development of the American modernist holdings at the Gallery. Dale’s and Phillips’s interest in the followers of Robert Henri and Stieglitz respectively assured that a critical body of work by the artists associated with these progenitors of American modernism was put in place. The East Building catalyzed an active dialogue between modern art and the past, and established an effective architectural and conceptual framework for further developing the Gallery’s American modernist collections. This essay provides an institutional history of American modernism at the National Gallery of Art and demonstrates how, gradually, unevenly, and at times idiosyncratically, the Gallery’s holdings of American modernist paintings have coalesced around the basic structural elements established by Walker, Dale, Phillips, and Mellon. These broader historical perspectives are intended to complement the primary content of this online publication: the detailed entries on individual paintings by the catalog’s lead author, Robert Torchia, and other scholars. NATIONAL AND MODERN The great modernist patron and poet Gertrude Stein posited the dilemma museums faced in the interwar period succinctly: “You can be a museum or you can be modern, but you can’t be both.”[5] One of the premises underlying early American Modernism and the National Gallery of Art: “The Perfect Place” 2 © National Gallery of Art, Washington National Gallery of Art national gallery of art online editions American Paintings, 1900 – 1945 20th-century modernism was that the new movements represented a break from the past and in many ways from history itself. Ezra Pound’s famous imperative to “make it new,” rather than preserving the old, carried the day. The emerging institutions devoted to modern, contemporary, or, to use a period term, “living art,” which came of age at that time, had to either accept or challenge that premise.[6] Further complicating matters was the uncertain status of American modernism during the 1920s and 1930s, when a general belief still prevailed that American art of any period was derivative and of secondary importance to that of Europe.[7] Founded in 1929, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) initially took the position that it would not form a permanent collection but instead deaccession works more than 50 years old.[8] It would regularly jettison the past in favor of the present. A decade later, the National Gallery of Art self-consciously distanced itself from contemporary art by adopting policies that prohibited the Gallery from including and exhibiting paintings in the permanent collection until 20 years after an artist’s death, and from deaccessioning.[9] At the time, these kinds of restrictions were a way for both of these young institutions to more sharply define themselves in relation to each other and to differentiate their missions from other museums. Such clear-cut collecting and exhibiting rules were, however, ultimately futile attempts to resolve dilemmas that 20th-century museums were constantly being confronted with in multiple forms, with new styles rapidly superseding each other and the present receding into the past at an ever faster rate. In time such rules would prove arbitrary and unworkable for both the modern museum and national gallery alike. The formation of the National Gallery of Art was a particularly complex undertaking. By the early 1920s there was a growing consensus that the current display of works at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Gallery of Art, a disparate collection then consigned to rooms at the National Museum of Natural History, was inadequate and that funds needed to be raised to erect a separate building for the nation’s art.[10] The powerful Pittsburgh banker and financier Andrew Mellon, who had arrived in Washington in 1921 as Secretary of the Treasury under Warren B.