13 April 2017
America After the Fall
Royal Academy*
reviewed by Lynda Goetz
Painting in the 1930s
This exhibition is not going to fill you with the joys of spring. Its mood is sombre and downbeat – possibly appropriate for the way many feel in the current climate. The styles are varied, but almost universally the palette used by the artists is dull, the interiors dingy, the exteriors dark and the faces dour. The celebrated painting by Grant Wood used to advertise the exhibition, American Gothic, says it all. A grim-faced couple stand in front of what we assume to be their house; he, priest-like in a white shirt with dark jacket holding a pitch-fork reminiscent of the devil’s trident; she, possibly his wife, but apparently his daughter, (and posed by Wood’s sister and his dentist!) beside him, sour-faced and bitter, life’s disappointments, past or future, written all over her face; between them the church-like gothic upper window of the clapboard house. Puritanical rural lives exposed or explained?
These were tough times everywhere. The devastating and much-studied Wall Street crash of 1929 ruined many and the effects were felt beyond the end of the 1930s. The phenomenon of the Dust Bowl, which affected much of America and Canada during this same decade, impacted those in rural America and exacerbated what was already a dire situation. This despair and desperation is everywhere evident in this exhibition; in the moodiness of Edward Hopper’s solitary figures; in the beiges, sage greens and dryness of the landscapes in the room dedicated to Country Life; in the darkness of many of the paintings in the Industrial Life section; in the grim determination and purposefulness of the Irish-American union leader and Communist Party member, Pat Whalen, so powerfully portrayed by Anna Neel in her 1935 portrait and in the paintings of rather crazed ‘good times’ which appear sporadically throughout the exhibition.
Georgia O’Keefe’s Cow Skull with Calico Roses was another image which stayed in the mind after the exhibition. Calico roses were apparently put on rural graves as, not only were flowers hard to come by, the intense heat of the Dust Bowl states meant they faded within hours. This is a portrait of a long-vanished America, an America which was both looking back to an idealised rural past and looking forward to a different ‘machine age’, viewed with a mixture of awe and alarm. Early abstract paintings, including a Pollock, hint at the next phase in American art. It was interesting to view these paintings following the impressive exhibition of Abstract Expressionism featured by the RA at the end of last year, although perhaps in an ideal world this collection would have been the one to see first.
*The Exhibition continues in the Sackler Wing at the Royal Academy, Burlington House Piccadilly until 4th June.
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