There’s something unrealistic-and off-putting-about Edward Hopper’s scene. It’s what America was like and what America liked in the ’30s and ’40s.īut look closer. The salt shakers, the heavy-duty porcelain mugs. The Americanness is in many of the details: The ‘Phillies Cigar’ ad above the diner. ‘Nighthawks’ is a really fascinating painting. Judith Barter, Field ¬McCormick Chair & Curator, American Arts. And every artist after ‘the Grande Jatte’ had to reckon with what a painting should be, and how can we now accept this new technique.
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And that is what is his completely different approach to painting. So purple and yellow, and blue and orange, and red and green.And when you lay them down next to each other, and you don’t blend them,they have a flickering quality.Īnd so he breaks up the surface with these little dots of pigment. If you were an avant-garde artist in late 19th century, you would be thinking about complementaries on the color wheel. He painted in tiny little dots, often in complementary colors. Seurat used a technique called ‘pointillism,’ and it’s what he’s famous for. And that, I think, is the sign of a great painting. Because you’re always finding something else that is unusual, that makes you think differently about what you thought you knew. It’s one that we return to again and again. Why is the little girl in orange the only one captured in movement? What are those two orange shapes at the far right?įor us,it’s an enigmatic painting. There are mysteries here: on the left, the boater with the cap seems disproportionately large in relation to the couple seated next to him. And to make it, as he said, like the Parthenon frieze, but using modern people in all their traits. Seurat wanted to extract from modern life, to distill it. It seems very alive, because of the color. They’ve gathered here on the banks of the Seine on a Sunday afternoon, and they’re in their Sunday best, most of them. And these figures represent different walks of life. What you see are a lot of different figures. Gloria Groom, David and Mary Winton Green Curator and Chair of European Painting and Sculpture. This may be the most iconic work of art in the Art Institute. And they found it rather exotic and fun, and so it was quite popular. It was certainly an American scene, but it wasn’t something that people lived in big cities could relate to very well. People in Chicago loved this picture because it was something so foreign to them. This work reads both like a satire of the American dream…and a celebration of a way of life that was quickly disappearing. This couple would have been sort of left behind in the dust. And particularly in the early 1930s, at the depth of the Depression, young people were leaving the farms. In 1920, this country was predominantly urban, and no longer rural. Ironically, in 1930, this neat, tidy little farm couple was already a dying breed. And she wears her best apron and the family cameo.
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Over his bib overalls, which mark him as a farmer, he wears a dress shirt and probably his only suit jacket, dressing up for this picture. He is on the right, with his pitchfork, probably headed to the barn, which is also on the right side of the picture. She’s wearing her apron, and on the left side of the painting are her flowerpots and the domestic chores. Grant Wood never said whether this was a husband and wife or a father and daughter. I imagined American Gothic people with their faces stretched out long to go with this American Gothic house. And so he engaged his dentist and his sister to pose for this picture. And he said he wanted to paint the perfect couple that would live in a house like that. And it is a wonderful house-I’d buy it in a heartbeat. Well, he was riding around in the country one day, and he found this wonderful Gothic Revival house.
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Judith Barter, Field-McCormick Chair and Curator, American Arts, tells the story. Artist Grant Wood discovered the house in this painting by accident.