JOHN ZEAMAN

Americans

Sanford Gifford

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Sanford Gifford

 

I‘m not sure if we’ve had Indian summer, yet. Technically, a frost must pull the curtain before you can have the encore: a string of exceedingly mild, hazy days with a feeling of unreality about them. The frost came a week ago, so maybe we’re still due.

In the meantime, the visual experience of Indian summer can be had at the Metropolitan Museum in a show devoted to Hudson River School painter Sanford Gifford. Gifford had an affinity for those kinds of days, maybe because he had an Indian summer personality, a veneer of coolness layered over a poetic temperament.

He definitely had the technique down pat. He was a master at pulling veils of haze over receding hills and mountain peaks, tamping down the sun till it was just a bright blur in the western sky. Indian summer can have a narcotic effect, slackening muscles tensed for winter, and that’s what Gifford does to us. In fact, one critic of his time went so far as to compare his paintings to opium, an extreme allusion for Victorian times.

Gifford (1823-1880) belongs to the second generation of Hudson River School artists, and was the only one of the group actually born and raised in the Hudson Valley. Jasper Cropsey, Frederick Edwin Church, and Albert Bierstadt were near exact contemporaries, and it’s not clear from this admirable show why Gifford’s name should be less familiar than theirs. Perhaps it’s because people associate the Hudson River School with monumental scale and Gifford’s were never more than 60 inches wide or tall.

This is only the second Gifford retrospective since the Metropolitan’s memorial exhibition in 1880. Its 70 paintings – all landscapes – are of scenes in America, Europe, and the Middle East. Their touch may seem a bit fussy and academic by today’s tastes, but once you make the adjustment, Gifford exhibits a rare meditative sensibility that feels almost Eastern.

He was influenced by Thomas Cole, but not by Cole’s way of turning nature into an allegorical stage. With Cole, a pristine landscape hinted at the lost garden, a dead tree seemed portentous, and the course of a river — from stream to rapids to lagoon — could be the “Voyage of Life.”

Gifford seemed satisfied with the place itself. He could capture the sparkle and crispness of a freshly minted day on the banks of the Hudson, or the way naked winter branches look against a blood-red sunset, or the mist off an unrippled lake obscuring the line between water and sky. He could make you feel the soft give of beach sand under your feet (at Long Branch, then a fashionable resort), or that mild vertigo that comes with seeing immense cloud shadows sliding across a valley floor.

There isn’t a Gifford painting that won’t trigger a memory or teach you something about nature. Not all is so simple and straightforward, however. When he paints a black storm cloud arching like a tsunami over a quiet mountain lake, the sense is less of a natural event than some inner turmoil. And the more you look, the more that Indian summer haze begins to seem like something else, too. All manner of things lurk behind those veils: the iceberg-shaped profile of Mount Katahdin in Maine, the silver glint of Lake Champlain viewed from the peak of Mount Mansfield, or, strangest of all, the drop-away cleft of “Kauterskill Clove,” like some ancient sinkhole belching primeval smoke.

Wherever he went in the world – out West, the Holy Land, Italy – Gifford found the same duality. Each painting contains two worlds. There’s the vivid foreground world of splintery trees, rocky promontories, or mossy riverbanks. These are populated by tiny figures who innocently fish or picnic or crouch by a campfire. And then there’s another, more dimly perceived world, a poetic reality that is never within reach of the people within the picture, but which the artist shares with us. In El Greco, saints writhe and stretch in the attempt to experience union with the divine. Well, this is not so different, but it’s the more sublimated American version, that God-is-in-nature idea that was 19th century transcendentalism.

In the end, Gifford was not so different from Cole after all. His landscapes were equally concerned with the invisible. He just didn’t spell it out. It was both artistic strategy and temperament. He was a solitary, a Thoreau-like character who would pack up for a trip without telling anybody and return two years later just as unexpectedly; who secretly married at 53 and concealed it from his closest friends for months.

But he brought something back from his solitude. Just as the hazy unreality of Indian summer can seem like an afterlife, the mist-shrouded mountains and valleys of Gifford’s paintings are an unexpected portal, an intimation of something beyond the world of appearances.

 

Metropolitan Museum of Art

2003

 

Printmaking

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Printmaking

In an age of computer graphics and digital images, printmaking can seem so, well, quaint. Let’s see now, how does this work again? You make some cuts or marks on a block or a metal plate, ink it, press paper to it, and pull off the image. Simple. And, yet, there’s something enduringly magical about it. From one drawing, many.

Printmaking has a long tradition in Europe and Japan, but the techniques were slow taking root in this country. American artists either learned the craft in Europe or were self-taught. It wasn’t until 1907 that the Art Students League – the legendary Manhattan art school – set up an etching class. But the classes grew, and by 1922 a full-fledged graphic arts department was offering woodblock, lithography, and other printmaking processes.

“A Century on Paper: Prints by Art Students League Artists 1901-2001” at the PaineWebber Gallery, presents works by an illustrious roster of League artists who were either teachers or students or both. They include John Sloan, George Bellows, Reginald Marsh, Thomas Hart Benton, Romare Bearden, Isabel Bishop, Jacob Lawrence, Robert Rauschenberg, Will Barnet, and Robert Kipniss.

The show is divided into decades, and it’s interesting to see how the movements of the century – precisionism, social realism, surrealism, and abstraction – found expression through print media.

Consider the mezzotint. In this technique, the entire surface of a metal plate is roughed up, creating burrs, which are then smoothed out to varying degrees with a tool called a burnisher. The rough areas retain the most ink and print black. Hence, the drawing process is one of pulling lighter tones out of a dark background, which tends to create a mood of mystery, as in the case of Kipniss’ “Illuminata” – luminous branching forms that look like apparitions.

Something similar happens in William Behnken’s “Of Land and Sea,” although in this case it’s an aquatint, another process that also allows subtle gradations of tone. The shadow-laden objects of this still life have a pregnant fullness and a brooding presence.

Etching is about line, rather than tone. The artist draws on a wax-covered plate, then immerses the plate in acid. The acid eats into the metal only where the scratch marks have been made, and these grooves hold the ink. The process allows for very delicate and fluid lines, as can be seen in a print by Marsh (a league instructor from 1942 to 1954), with his light, airy sketch of a pair of shapely young women who look bound for Coney Island. Unlike the mezzotint, which reclaims form from darkness, etchings enclose forms with spidery black lines. Here, the white of the paper is transformed into blazing sunlight reflecting off sunglasses, thighs, and the brim of a hat.

A similar effect is evident in “Winter ’78” by Michael Pellettieri, a current instructor at the league. His bird’s-eye view of a cluster of New York apartment buildings relies on countless painstaking strokes that practically define each brick and railing, while the snow-covered roofs of the buildings – the unetched areas – are brilliantly white.

Very similar to an etching is drypoint, with one subtle but important difference. The line is cut with a tool that leaves a burr along the groove. The resulting soft, fuzzy line is used to great advantage in Martin Lewis’ “Wet Night, Rte 6,” a 1933 print of two black sedans driving down a rural road. The drypoint line imparts just the right degree of blurring to the skeletal trees and power lines to evoke the rainy atmosphere.

Woodblock printing is the opposite of etching. Instead of carving a line, the artist cuts away everything but the image that is to be printed. The raised area holds the ink, as on a rubber stamp. The execution tends to be a bit rougher than in the other media, and the image more stark and forceful, as in Howard Cook’s “Manhattan Bridge.” The 1930 print is a view of the bridge’s underbelly and the massive concrete and steel pillars that support it – a celebration of machine-age power that was a hallmark of American precisionism.

The lithograph, brought over from advertising, attracted a broad spectrum of artists in the Thirties, probably because it’s a what-you-see-is-what-you-get process that doesn’t require as much technical skill as some of the other techniques. The artist draws on a limestone block with a lithographic crayon, and those marks are made ink-retentive while the rest of the block, damped with water, rejects the ink. Will Barnet’s “Fulton Fish Market” shows how lithographs can retain the character of a chalk or charcoal drawing. The loose physical expressiveness of that kind of drawing (as opposed to the fussier process of etching or the laborious cutting of a woodblock) is evident in this rendition of the bustling fish market where an apron-wearing fishmonger cleans a fish on a barrel head, under the watchful eye of a plump housewife.

The show weaves its way through the decades. Some modernist styles, such as Miro-like abstraction – in which quirky shapes and lines cavort about the surface – worked well in the print medium, as did cubist-inspired workThe show energetically turns the corner into the 21st century, with works that express the whole artistic range of the contemporary scene, from Masaaki Noda’s free-form geometric abstractions to Barnet’s lyrical representations to the rigorous realism of Pellettieri. It’s a great refresher, or introductory course on the art of the print, and testimony to the important contribution of the Art Students League to the artistic life of this country.

 

PaineWebber Art Gallery, NYC

2002

 

 

Caricature

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We are badly in need of caricaturists. Nowadays, it seems as if the only person who ever gets caricatured is the president of the United States. But, in a society as fame-obsessed as our own, a few more caricatures might be a healthy thing.

Ralph Barton’s group caricature of the contributors to Harpers Bazaar, 1922.

But what is a caricature anyway? Does it just poke fun at a person’s physiognomy? Or is it supposed to reveal character as well? Are caricatures always funny? Are they art?

These are the questions addressed and answered in a New York Public Library exhibit that recaptures the golden age of American caricature—the 1920s and 1930s, when New York cafe society flourished and caricatures were eagerly published by The New Yorker and Vanity Fair.

The show features more than 200 works by such artists as Ralph Barton, Al Frueh, Miguel Covarrubias, Will Cotton, Al Hirschfeld, Paolo Garretto, William Auerback-Levy, and Peggy Bacon. In addition to the portraits, the exhibit reproduces a corner of Sardi’s restaurant, decorated with 24 original autographed caricatures of Broadway stars by Alex Gard. Also displayed is a reproduction of a theater curtain, which delighted audiences in 1922 with 137 hand-painted Barton caricatures of New York’s “first-nighters,” the fashionable folk who regularly attended show openings.

Caricature has been around for centuries but it took on a new form in America after World War I. Fascinated by an emerging celebrity culture, the new caricaturists were less interested than their predecessors in probing for inner corruption.

“It is not the caricaturist’s business to be penetrating,” said Ralph Barton. “It is his job to put down the figure a man cuts before his fellows in his attempt to conceal the writhings of his soul.”

It’s an interesting distinction. Not the inner man, but the persona. Why try to look behind the mask, when the mask is the interesting thing?

This whole fame thing was still new at the time, and people were fascinated with how it worked. Up until a decade or so before, only politicians, generals, or clergymen were public figures. Now, the field was open to baseball players, striptease artists, aviators, crooners or anyone else whose personalities could hold the public’s interest.

Modernism played a part in the new caricatures as well, with early contributions by Toulouse-Lautrec and the French poster artists who followed him. Mexican-born artist Marius de Zayas brought the style to the United States with his Parisian-style inked figures, such as “Consuelo, Duchess of Marlborough,” which brings new meaning to the expression “big hair.”

But Zayas also brought an air of mystery to dark symbolist-style portraits that attracted the attention of photographer Alfred Stieglitz. He believed caricature had as much claim to be art as photography and gave Zayas several shows at his famous gallery at 291 Fifth Ave. The caricature artists began to adopt more conventions from European modernists, elongating, geometricizing, and fragmenting forms, just as the expressionists, the cubists, and the constructivists did.

An almost continuous hallmark of caricature art has been the quick, sinuous line that was first brought to perfection by artist Al Frueh, whose work was also shown by Stieglitz. His caricature of George M. Cohan captures with a few swift lines the performer’s loose, straw-hat-and-cane strut.

But it was the enormously gifted Barton who took caricature to new heights, and created the vogue that inspired Vanity Fair and The New Yorker to pick up on it. He did it with the theater curtain of the “first-nighters,” which is seen here in reproduction, the original having been lost. Barton had done a similar composition on a small scale – a two-page spread for Vanity Fair captioned “A Typical First Night Audience in New York: The Scene Which Invariably Confronts the Actor.” It had recognizable caricatures of 89 figures. The curtain had 139 faces and was dropped without notice during intermission at the Century Roof theater. The audience swarmed up and spent the intermission identifying faces – hoping to find their own.

That was the thing about the era. People wanted to be caricatured. It was a sign of having arrived. When Miguel Covarrubias drew etiquette queen Emily Post taking tea with her bare feet propped on the table and the lurid Police Gazette dangling from one hand, some friends were shocked. But Post, writing to Vanity Fair, said it was “too giggle-making for words” and thanked the magazine for the “delicious publicity.”

Barton’s caricatures often had an edginess to them and a self-mocking irony. His friend, the Hungarian-born photographer Nicholas Murray, was also in the business of making likenesses of celebrities, and Barton drew him as a predator. The caricature has him in the act of snapping a picture, a tensely crouching figure with wild, spiky hair and huge, hawkish eyes, his enlarged hand gripping a pink shutter bulb that looks like a human heart. As Reaves writes, Barton brought to his art “a vague menace that suggested the unhealthy anxiety of celebrity overexposure.”

Barton was incredibly prolific. He once said that he had gone through so many figures in “La Vie New Yorkaise” that he had to wait for more to be born. But, he was no stranger to those “writhings of the soul” he saw behind the celebrity masks. Manic outbursts of creativity alternated with bouts of depression, and he was a suicide at age 39.

The caricature craze didn’t survive World War II. Fashions changed. Magazine editors began to prefer photographs. One thing that didn’t change was the cult of celebrities. It has grown steadily. Where are those caricaturists when we need them?

New York Public Library

2001

 

Wayne Thiebaud

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Say “Wayne Thiebaud” and very specific images come to mind: a big chocolate cake all slathered with frosting. A chunky wedge of lemon meringue. Some candied apples, glistening deep red.

All this junky food has been a mixed blessing for Thiebaud. It has meant fame and recognition. But, as he has said, “It’s not so much fun to be known as the pieman.”

He means he’s not sure people are taking him as seriously as he wants to be taken. Thiebaud, whose five-decade retrospective is currently at the Whitney Museum, came to prominence as a pop artist in the Sixties, and has spent much of his career since then arguing that he’s not, well, exactly a pop artist.

Pop artists are cynical and ironic, and Thiebaud portrays himself as sincere, earnest. He says he actually likes all those pies, and hot dogs, and ice cream sundaes. He’s like a kid with his nose at the bakery store window. He’s the Norman Rockwell of confections.

Hmmm. Problem is, pop artists always say things like this. It’s an unwritten law that you can’t ever admit to a put-on. It’s like Andy Warhol when he used to say he “liked being bored.”

Talking about pop art can tie people in knots. But Thiebaud’s art does show something else going on, some struggle to get beyond the narrow confines of pop.

To be sure, the Whitney exhibit has plenty of food paintings: hot dogs, cakes, sundaes, cold cuts, ice cream cones, and the like (in one of the first reviews of his work, a critic suggested that Thiebaud appeared to be “the hungriest artist in California”). These date mostly to the Sixties, pop’s heyday, and, in contrast to the emotion-laden style of the reigning abstract expressionists – who agonized over every frenzied stroke – the objects are rendered coolly, with a crisp sureness of hand.

These paintings show another hallmark of pop: a fondness for repetition. There isn’t just one gumball machine but three, not one slice of pie but a dozen. As with Warhol, there’s something being said here about consumer culture and advertising.

What gives Thiebaud’s work a different flavor than pop is his painterliness and draftsmanship. In rendering a cake, he couldn’t resist using a thick impasto to mimic the icing. His drawing still shows signs of his early aspirations to be a cartoonist. He loves imparting roundness to things. There’s this little thrill you get in seeing the plane of an object turn away from you, disappearing into an illusory third dimension. It’s one of the simplest joys that drawings offer, but we never tire of it in his work, and his objects, whether a block of cheese or a maraschino cherry, seem to quiver in space, as if pleased with their own existence.

Although the cartoonishness smacks of pop, it might also be argued that we live in a cartoonish culture (especially Thiebaud’s native California), and that, like some other artists – Philip Guston, for example – Thiebaud has pushed cartoonishness into high art. He could make the contents of a candy counter or an array of cosmetics seem as stark and as lonely as anything in Edward Hopper. His light is the harsh light of a diner’s illuminated pie carousel at 3 o’clock in the morning. And beneath every pie plate or bowl of soup is a puddle of blue shadow.

Also contributing to the pregnancy of the mood is Thiebaud’s way of setting his objects against monochromatic backgrounds. He resists the draw of anecdotal painting, never gives us a sense of a room or a specific table top, or lets us see a bite taken out of one of the pies. It’s part of the pop aesthetic – like Warhol’s iconic soup can – but, in Thiebaud’s case, the blank background sets the subjects in a kind of rarefied ether in which liquidy brushstrokes caress the contour of the object, creating a halo effect.

There are probably too many food paintings in the show. You can quickly tire of all these confections, and fortunately Thiebaud found other subjects. His only real misfire was his attempt at figure painting in the Sixties. His subjects, under the same harsh spotlight, have the emotional flatness of all pop portraiture. His “Girl With Ice Cream Cone” has the scathing condescension of one of Duane Hanson’s tourist sculptures. His “Revue Girl,” with her plume headdress and fringe-adorned costume, is the human equivalent of one of his gaudy cakes.

The happiest surprise of this show are the landscapes. Some are from the Sixties, when he began doing cartoonish pastel sketches of towering Northern California cliffs and knife-edge ridges. These gave way in the Seventies and Eighties to precipitous views of San Francisco streets. These are packed with realistic details, but the verticality is exaggerated, so that streets flow straight down like waterfalls. Others are industrial and highway scenes, nightmarish nests of overlapping and coiled freeways with smokestacks poking up between the cloverleafs. These, with their smog, congestion, and gigantic scale, are the closest that Thiebaud has come to straightforward social comment.

The Eighties saw the evolution of these cityscapes into the realm of fantasy, in which buildings gaily huddle and cling to the tops of impossibly steep hills as in some Disneyesque view of Oz, or a futuristic world in which the monstrousness of overbuilding has somehow been transformed into fairy-tale grandeur.

Thiebaud’s most recent paintings are aerial views of the California countryside, the delta of the Sacramento River. These have a sense of serenity and order, like the world seen from a hot-air balloon. They are certainly his most fully composed paintings, with every part of the canvas treated with equal importance. They are also beautiful, with sinuous roads and rivers meandering gracefully across the canvas and played against sharply defined triangles and rectangles of farmland, orchards, and terraced land. The color is intense, almost psychedelic, and the parallel furrows of the fields and the ruler-straight irrigation ditches create busy patterns. Trees caught in the glow of the setting sun look like small gaseous explosions.

You can sense the pull toward pure abstraction in these pictures. Indeed, there is something of fellow Californian Richard Diebenkorn’s work in these, but unlike Diebenkorn, Thiebaud maintains a stronger grip on the visible world. He loses none of the formal power in doing so, and proves, perhaps, that finding the balance point between abstract and representational demands may be the highest art of all.

 

Whitney Museum of American Art

2001

Walker Evans

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When Walker Evans began taking photographs in the late 1920s, America’s most famous photographers were Edward Steichen and Alfred Steiglitz, both masters of a highly polished and poetic style, a photography of mist and soft edges that seemed to mimic painting.

Evans, a frustrated writer who admired the lean, plain prose of Ernest Hemingway, resolved to go another way. “I felt angry, and anxious to go in the opposite direction of these two men.” He set out to create a style that shunned artifice and allowed his subject to reveal itself directly and simply.

Now some 175 vintage prints are on display in the Metropolitan Museum’s “Walker Evans,” the first comprehensive retrospective of the photographer. It includes work from every period of his career, beginning with his earliest street scenes, taken in New York City and Italy in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and ending with Polaroids he took near the end of his life in the 1970s.

Evans once said of his work that he considered anything fair game for his camera “as long as it was man-made.” He wasn’t interested in nature or the abstract beauty of the human body. His landscapes were layered with human activity. Like an archaeologist probing a dig, he gathered as much evidence as possible into each photograph: papers strewn on the street, reflections in windows, signs, street furniture, telephone poles.

Evans showed us that anything could be art, that the most mundane objects, the most seemingly insignificant people had poetry and meaning.

His human subjects were as plain, as ordinary as he could find them; dockworkers, subway riders, and, of course, his most famous subjects: the Alabama sharecroppers of the book he did with writer James Agee, “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.”

His celebration of the ordinary required a plain style, too. He perfected a style that has come to be seen as artfully neutral and calculatedly dispassionate. It was as far from what he called the “overstatement” of Steiglitz and Steichen as he could get.

The project with Agee had started out as an essay for Fortune magazine about tenant farmers. Although Fortune ultimately rejected Agee’s long text about three families of Hale County, he and Evans developed it into a 500-page book. When it was finally published in 1941, it sold only 600 copies and went out of print. It was reissued in 1960 to an enthusiastic new generation of Americans in search of a national identity.

Agee’s text – hyperbolic Whitmanesque prose alternating with tracts about farming – has not stood up as well as Evans’ pictures. In one portrait, a farmer rests in the doorway of a simple shack while his barefoot daughter sits gracefully on a chair, hands folded in her lap. Both look directly at the camera without a trace of self-consciousness.

His portrait of Allie Mae Burroughs, the “Alabama Tenant Farmer Wife,” has been called a Depression Madonna or Mona Lisa, because of the ambiguity of its expression, a tight-lipped set of the mouth that somehow straddles grimace and brave smile. Critic Lionel Trilling called it “one of the finest objects of any art of our time.”

Some criticized Evans for not being a true documentarian because pictures such as this one were posed, not candid. Evans did his share of candid work – at one point hiding his camera in his shirt to snap subway riders sitting right across from him – but he also recognized that a person who is aware of being photographed reveals no less of himself, and often more.

He trusted his camera to capture the person by carefully recording every detail that presented itself to the eyes. By keeping his spaces shallow Evans was able to keep everything in sharp focus – the swirl of grain in a floorboard, the tattered fringe of old work jeans, the stubble on a chin. In his portrait of sharecropper Bud Fields, you can see the scab of a skin cancer on his lip and you can see, by the way his hair is damp and flat on the top of his head, that he has taken his hat off for the picture.

These pictures exposed an American tragedy, the terrible exploitation of a class of people who refused to surrender their dignity, but they also revel in the nobility of facts. He could bring that same passion for detail into a picture of an Alabama contractor’s storefront. The cheap metal building with the pile of dirt out front, is about as bleak and unpromising as a subject could be, but Evans’ composition, with its subtle shades of gray, makes the texture of the corrugated metal look as elegant as a pin-striped suit.

Although these scenes are not devoid of some social content – Evans never quite stopped being a writer – they are more striking because of the dignity they instill in ordinary reality. It’s right there in front of your eyes, Evans seems to tell us. You just have to look.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

2000

The American Century Part I

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The countdown to the end of the century and the millennium has begun, and with the excitement about a new age dawning comes the obligation to sum up the past. It’s a big assignment, the term paper to end all term papers, but someone has to do it, and in art, the unexpected volunteer is the Whitney Museum.

Yes, the Whitney, the trendiest, the most rooted-in-the-present of our major museums, has put aside its bad-boy persona and donned its scholarly mantle to mount “The American Century: Art & Culture 1900-2000.”

Grant Wood’s “American Gothic.”

The mammoth show, which opened this weekend, fills the entire museum, and this is only Part 1, covering the first five decades in 20th century American art. It has acres of wall text and more than 600 things to look at, watch, and listen to, for this is a multimedia presentation, with snippets of music, film clips of dancers, and a program of Hollywood movies as well as paintings, photographs, sculpture, furniture, and architectural models.

It’s a surprisingly good overview, a documentary, really, that drew on the expertise of some 60 scholars under the direction of the Whitney’s curator for prewar art, Barbara Haskell. It puts American art in the social contexts that shaped it, and, in the process, tells a story. Viewers accustomed to roaming the Whitney galleries bemused and disoriented, their logical processes subverted at every turn, will find themselves guided by a steady, coherent intelligence that takes such disparate cultural threads as social realism, abstract art, jazz, and film noir and weaves them into a tapestry of which the larger themes include prosperity, industrialization, immigration, the Great Depression, World War II, and the Atomic Age.

Gordon Parks’ “American Gothic.”

And, this being the late 20th century, when every enterprise has a Web site, the Whitney and its sponsor, Intel Corp., have created an elaborate on-line extension of the show that will give computer users access to more than 200 pixelated versions of the works as well as window upon window of background and historical information.

It’s a show that begins with the last flourishes of the Gilded Age, in which prosperity shines in the faces of confident and attractive society women painted by John Singer Sargent and Cecilia Beaux, and in the steely gaze of financier J.P. Morgan photographed by Edward Steichen. The sense of incredible change seems foretold by Thomas Eakins’ brooding 1900 painting “The Thinker: Portrait of Louis N. Kenton.” From there, we are off, plunging into the honky-tonk arcades and burlesque houses of Reginald Marsh, drawn into the loneliness of Edward Hopper’s automats and movie theaters, witnessing the birth of a crudely animated Mickey Mouse in Disney’s “Steamboat Willie,” staring at the parched land of Alexandre Hogue’s Dust Bowl, marveling at the campy spectacles of Busby Berkeley musicals, and feeling the terror of Robert Capa’s GI crawling through the surf on Normandy Beach.

The social history is only half of this exhibit, however. In that first gallery, among the wealthy society women, is one who looks different, who, instead of a gown with a cinched waist and a pushed-up bosom, wears what look like silk pajamas; a wealthy bohemian reclining in an artsy, affected pose with an open, vulnerable expression. She is Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, painted in 1916 by Robert Henri, a leader of the Ashcan School of painting. At a time when her wealthy compatriots were buying as many masterpieces of European art as they could get their hands on, Whitney was a booster for American art, and founded the museum that bears her name.

Reginald Marsh: “Twenty-Cent Movie”

Over the years, the Whitney has retained its founder’s devotion to art that is new, but has never done much of a job of telling the history of 20th century American art. Now, in this temporary exhibit, it does for American art what the Museum of Modern Art has long done for modernism, showing the connections between, and the progressions of, various schools of art.

The development of American abstraction, for example, is an important theme in this show, culminating, as it does with abstract expressionism, in the postwar style that made New York the center of the art world. This subplot, more difficult and intellectually challenging than the social history, could easily have been pushed aside by Mickey Mouse and Buster Keaton. But the Whitney tells it well, returning to this theme with every decade, reminding us of this thread in American art and its various manifestations – precisionism and hard-edged geometric art, organic abstraction, semi-scientific experiments with color perception, and the interest in symbol and surrealism.

These galleries present a more detached, cerebral side of the American sensibility, a world apart from bathtub gin, Charlie Chaplin’s hapless everyman, “The Great Gatsby,” or strident leftist posters. In these galleries, the big developments are the flattening and breaking up of space in John Marin’s watercolors, the careful, cautious cubist borrowings of Charles Demuth, the chromatic “synchromies” of Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Morgan Russell, the erotic botany of Georgia O’Keeffe, the interlocking symbols of Marsden Hartley, the buoyant pop imagery of Stuart Davis, and the dynamic energy of Jackson Pollock.

“American Radiator Building – Night,” by Georgia O’Keeffe.

The danger in trying to go beyond art and embrace all of American culture is superficiality, and there are times, perhaps, when it feels as if the net has been cast too wide. In choosing to include film clips of jitterbuggers and big band performances, of excerpts from the “Maltese Falcon” and “Citizen Kane,” in playing George Gershwin in the stairway and Johnny Mathis outside the bathrooms, the curators risk sensory overload. There’s a limit to how much people can absorb. Likewise, the inclusion of a few pieces of furniture and one or two architectural models makes it possible to list design and architecture among the disciplines covered, but it doesn’t do justice to the careers of Frank LLoyd Wright or Mies van der Rohe.

The only other problem has to do with the influence of European art on American styles. The great “isms” of the 20th century – cubism, dadaism, surrealism, abstractionism, art nouveau, and the arts and crafts movement – all originated overseas.

If painting were literature, Burgoyne Diller’s Piet Mondrian-derived grids would be considered plagiarism, but since everything in the show is American, Diller’s paintings look like innovation. The catalog corrects this problem, and the Web site presumably will, too, but those who see only the show may leave with a mistaken impression about the originality of American art.

A show like this needs symbols and icons to drive home its points about American identity. The Brooklyn Bridge, late 19th century engineering marvel and symbol of progress, appears in paintings and photographs from every angle, transformed in the 20th century (like the Eiffel Tower) to a source of romantic and poetic inspiration. This culminates in Joseph Stella’s ecstatic, semiabstraction of the great bridge, a painting filled with the sound of brass, harp strings, and tugboat whistles.

Joseph Stella: “Brooklyn Bridge.”

And what better American icon is there than the skyscraper, the phallic symbol of American energy and ambition, testimony to our technological know-how? And so, skyscrapers proliferate like man-made stalagmites: Alfred Stieglitz’s and Steichen’s mist-shrouded skylines, O’Keeffe’s mystical visions of the Shelton Hotel, the precisionist’s love letters to the Chrysler Building and the Empire State, and the almost sinister architectural fantasies of Hugh Ferriss, showing the maximum masses of buildings permitted by the 1916 New York zoning law.

America as the melting pot is another iconographic theme, evidenced in the hopeful faces of Jewish and Italian immigrants photographed by Lewis W. Hine, and, conversely, in the wretched slum conditions these immigrants found, as documented by reformer-photographer Jacob Riis, whose invasive style was to burst into a room and take a picture before the occupants could pose or cover up. Tapping into the simple poetry in the everyday lives of the urban lower classes were the painters of the Ashcan School, such as John Sloan, with images of back-of-the-building clotheslines, rooftop idylls, and strolls beneath the clattering el trains.

John Sloan’s scene of a tenement clothesline.

One of the interesting lessons of this show is that for every action in art there seems to have been an equal and opposite reaction. While one set of photographers were eager to capture the here and now with photos of airplanes and automobiles, others used this extroverted medium for introversion, clouding and softening prints into dreamlike images of naked maidens contemplating glass spheres or setting them afloat in pools.

While one set of artists – the precisionists – celebrated technology and industry with Platonic idealizations of factories and machines, another set – the bio-morphic abstractionists – found something equally powerful and evocative in the shapes of plants and flowers.

While one group, the regionalists, idealized small-town life and mythic American values during the Thirties, other groups, including the urban realists, depicted the harshness of the Depression and the cruelties of capitalism. Out of this emerged a leftist tradition in American art, artists devoted to social change, such as Ben Shahn with his “Sacco and Vanzetti” series, Philip Evergood with his “American Tragedy” (a massacre of striking workers), and Jacob Lawrence’s storybook saga of black migration.

Sometimes icons seemed to give birth to anti-icons: Grant Wood’s “American Gothic” with its virtuous, pitchfork-holding Midwestern farmer was countered by Gordon Parks’ photograph of a black cleaning woman with mop and broom.

Again and again we see the faces of those whose lives were broken by the Depression: Jerry Bywaters’ dour sharecropper in front of his dying cornfield, Dorothea Lange’s quietly desperate “Migrant Mother” still clinging to hope and dignity, and Raphael Soyer’s paintings of hollow-eyed, sunken-cheeked men in soup kitchens and on unemployment lines.

In many ways, this show is like one of Thomas Hart Benton’s murals, a panorama of workers and capitalists, floozies and Midwestern moms, preachers and con men, politicians and outlaws. At the same time, it’s a tribute to American creativity, to artistic inventiveness born of the same ambitions and energy that gave rise to skyscrapers. It ends, conveniently at midcentury, with the artistic triumph of Pollock and Willem de Kooning, which put American artists in the same position of dominance as American scientists, inventors, and filmmakers.