Coming Of Age American: Art 1850s To 1950s

Coming Of Age American: Art 1850s To 1950s
14 March - 8 June 2008
Dulwich Picture Gallery

The exhibition Coming Of Age American: Art 1850s To 1950s gives visitors to Dulwich Picture Gallery a rare opportunity to examine the development of American art from the mid nineteenth century to the mid twentieth century. What makes this show interesting is not its comprehensiveness but the fact that the artistic journey is much larger than the physical journey that the viewer undertakes as he or she meanders through the galleries, captivated by the works of artists like Homer, Hopper, O’Keefe and Pollock. This journey begins with depictions of nature in the form of landscapes and seascapes and moves on to images of modernity where we see the subject matter is the city and concludes with abstraction.

The first section is devoted to artists such as Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins who in the main represent the American wilderness and American life. Homer’s Eight Bells is a seascape which portrays two sailors using a quadrant to calculate their location from the noonday sun. In the background the clouds are grey, hectic and hurrying. Simultaneously the waves appear to be getting bigger and stronger; a storm is on the horizon. George Inness’s The Coming Storm is a landscape that dwarfs the lone figure of a farmer and his livestock. As in Eight Bells the sky suggests a future storm. Both these dramatic scenes of Homer and Inness produce an atmosphere of gloom and foreboding that strikes a powerful emotional chord within the viewer.

The next section is devoted to those American artists who looked to Europe for inspiration and training. The artist Theodore Robinson worked alongside Monet at Giverny. Sargent’s painting A Man Fishing depicts two men sitting on a bank alongside a river; we can only see the legs of one of the men and the scene is strongly influenced by the impressionists, particularly Degas. The off centre composition, the treating of figures in a different way, unorthodox angles, cutting off the frame, the use of pure colour to depict light and broad brush strokes are all devices employed to suggest a sense of immediacy. This painting exemplifies Degas’ dictum you give a real effect by using false means. Other prominent painters in this section include Childe Hassam and Whistler.

Robert Henri and the Ashcan school looked to painters such as Manet and Degas for inspiration. However, their subject matter was not Paris and Parisians but New York and New Yorkers. The group was set up to paint the ordinary everyday activities of the inhabitants of the city. John Sloan’s painting Sunday, Women Drying Their Hair epitomises the work of the Ashcan artists – it says what it in does in the title. Edward Hopper, a pupil of Henri, has been coined the quintessential American realist and uses the monumentality of the city to highlight its anonymity; buildings have now replaced trees. Hopper’s Manhattan Bridge Loop depicts a lone figure against the Manhattan skyline; the city has replaced nature as the defining quality of awesome power.

Georgia O’ Keefe and Arthur Dove reduce their paintings to simple designs that hold allegiance to organic forms. O’Keefe’s painting Wave Night, a rare nocturnal seascape, is the centrepiece of the show. The simple forms combine mysteriously with the palette of deep blues and purples to illustrate a nighttime seascape that evokes the power and the mystery of the ocean. O’Keefe’s painting drew me back and back again.

In the 1930s émigrés such as Josef Albers and Hans Hofman were instrumental in introducing a new generation of artists to ideas of colour, form, perception and design - from which emerged the work of abstract expressionists such as Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock and David Smith. Your attention is drawn to these artists, but in a different way say to that of Homer or Hopper. They intoxicate you, in some instances by the power of their utilization of colour and in other instances by being all paint. In the case of Pollock’s Phosphorescence the intoxication is realised through the combination of colour and paint, which combine together to suggest another level of reality.

This show is full of precious gems – be prepared for a memorable experience.

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