Images of Tension: City and Country in the Work of Charles Sheeler, Thomas Hart Benton, and Edward Hopper
- ISBN-10
- 1124479856
- ISBN-13
- 9781124479859
- Pages
- 272
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2010
- Publisher
- University of Delaware
- Author
- Sarah G. Powers
Description
In the years between World Wars I and II demographic changes in the United States disturbed the traditional political, economic, and cultural balance between metropolis and countryside, leading such definitions to become increasingly unstable. In this dissertation I investigate how the discourses and debates surrounding city and country during the interwar years affected the visual arts. I will explore how cultural issues that arose from this economic, political and demographic shift impacted the situation of American art through case studies based on three American artists: Charles Sheeler, Thomas Hart Benton, and Edward Hopper. In chapter one, I focus on a little known and understudied painting of 1924 by Charles Sheeler entitled Vermont Landscape. This painting presents an interesting new context for Sheeler's development of a rural Precisionism, and his own position as a "nostalgic modernist." Through my research into the making of Vermont Landscape, I have found that Sheeler's interest in rural subjects extended beyond the modernist formal appropriation of early American artifacts, and was instead engaged in a larger national discourse over the character of rural America. The subject of chapter two is Thomas Hart Benton's second major mural project, The Arts of Life in America, which he made in 1932 for the library reading room of the newly opened Whitney Museum of American Art. In particular, I focus on a section of the mural entitled "Political Business and Intellectual Ballyhoo," which, as I will argue, represents Benton's declaration of his frustrations with, and ultimate withdrawal from, the forces of the urban-controlled American art world. Through a careful analysis of the imagery contained in this mural, I argue that the "Ballyhoo" panel contains not just a general indictment of urban intellectual elitism (as has been suggested by previous studies), but rather a specific attack on powerful art world personalities in New York. Ultimately, the critique presented in the "Ballyhoo" panel foreshadows the development of Benton's Regionalist view, his rejection of the urban art world, and his search for an artistic vocabulary and a popular audience to help him circumvent the city environment he had left behind. In the final chapter, I focus on a small group of works by Edward Hopper from the beginning of his rise from obscurity through the years of his national recognition in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Through the examination of these works, which include Manhattan Bridge Loop, 1928, House by a Railroad, 1925, and the series of Maine watercolors leading up to the painting Lighthouse Hill, 1927, I explore how the act of constant travel between city and country, the two sites of the artist's activity, was embedded within Hopper's work. Against a backdrop of a modern society that now regarded the boundaries between urban and rural spaces as fluid due to recent advances in transportation and increased mobility, Hopper employed modern symbols of travel - such as roads, bridges, railroad tracks and train stations, gas stations, and hotel rooms - in long, horizontal canvases that evoked a sense of endless movement. In these paintings, depictions of the "pass-through" spaces of an infinite journey contributed to a critical rhetoric that described Hopper's work as evocative of the modern American experience.
