The Brooklyn Rail

In 1939, my father was a young doctor in a rural parish of Louisiana. He and the local preacher built a concrete dispensary and the first flushing toilet in the county. He would get a message on the telegraph line that someone needed the doctor and, with no idea what he would find when he got there, he and my mother would jump into the Jeep with his medical bag and a blanket and head up the dirt road. It was the Great Depression still, and nobody had money, so people paid him with a sack of potatoes or a chicken on the doorstep. One time somebody left a horse! (They named that chicken “Sunday Dinner” and called the horse “Bill.”) Then my dad saw newsreels of the Nazis invading Europe and he volunteered for the US Army. He was just twenty-six when he and his twenty-year-old wife moved into a little Army cottage right on the end of Hickam Field in Pearl Harbor. It was hibiscus flowers and beautiful sunshine until it wasn’t. My dad belonged to what General James Van Fleet called “The Greatest Generation”: Americans who stood up for what was right and fought for their country.¹

A spectacular exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art called Boom: Art and Design in the 1940s recreates that world for us with some 250 works selected entirely from the museum’s permanent collections. Next to iconic paintings like Lee Krasner’s oil Composition (1949), Jackson Pollock’s Male and Female (1942–43), Horace Pippin’s famous painting The Park Bench (1946), and the majestic Red Hills and Bones (1941) by Georgia O’Keeffe, are a plastic-cased red, white, and blue Patriot Radio (1940–41) designed by Norman Bel Geddes, a woman’s Red Cross volunteer uniform, Soviet war posters from the brilliant graphic designers of the Soviet news agency TASS, and a visual narrative of the ups and downs of the decade told in the magnificent couture designs of Elsa Schiaparelli and Claire McCardell. Like a graphic novel, this exhibition narrates the decade in objects, without need for heady wall texts. The show includes jewelry and furniture, graphics, photography, sculpture, and paintings by both the well-known and the scarcely-known. Taken together they create an entirely new aura around even the most famous works. We are accustomed to museum shows focused on a great artist or a specific theme, but this exhibition stands out by recreating the emotional story of this turbulent decade. It walks us through its highs and lows, from ominous beginnings to the triumph of democracy, juxtaposed with a Harold Edgerton photograph of the atomic bomb blast at the end; you’ll never look at George Nelson’s “Ball” Wall Clock (1949)—also known as the Atomic clock—the same way again. It is largely an American show and it inspires us to see what Americans standing together can do, while also warning us of other things that they will do.

The exhibition also gives us an embodied history lesson, addressing the racism of the US Army troops who refused to serve with Black soldiers during World War I, forcing them to embed with the French, who harbored no such prejudices. Horace Pippin’s shocking little canvas Mr. Prejudice (1943) points to the problem directly. Unlike my father, Americans generally ignored the movement of fascism in Europe until Pearl Harbor. In 1940, we had still not emerged from the Great Depression when—boom!—things got terrifyingly dark. Nazi troops first took Poland the year prior, then marched into Paris, and the Luftwaffe bombed London in the Blitz of 1940 and 1941. Churchill begged for help that was slow in coming. Then Hitler began a systematic extermination of Europe’s Jews, murdering six million people. “Boom” is the advent of the global war, but it is also the extraordinary flowering of creative energy in life and in the arts that followed. No one knew who might win or lose, making the “boom” of creative invention out of more and more meager means all the more poignant. It is the “baby boom” that followed V-E Day in Europe in 1945 and V-J Day in Japan in 1946, and the remarkable postwar prosperity “boom” into which we emerged. Yet we also emerged into the nuclear-armed Cold War, the founding of the pro-Nazi National Renaissance Party, and the rise of wildly popular radio demagogues who advocated for the overthrow of the government, for McCarthyism, and for Jim Crow laws throughout the American South. “Boom” is the entire rollercoaster ride of this pivotal decade.

At the beginning of the show, after Carl Van Vechten’s photographic portraits of Black intellectuals and artists and WPA (Works Progress Administration) images of farmers and workers, hangs Georgia O’Keeffe’s Red Hills and Bones. While it seems at first quite detached from then-current events, O’Keeffe’s painting expresses a majestic self-reliance that is built into the American spirit and undergirds one of the central stories of this exhibition. “I thought someone could tell me how to paint a landscape,” O’Keeffe said, “but I never found that person. I had to just settle down and try. … They could tell you how they painted their landscape, but they couldn’t tell me [how] to paint mine.”² She depicted the landscape like her own body. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his 1834 poem “Each and All” that one must become part of nature in order to fully comprehend it, and one can only represent it by replicating its process in the symbolic act of creating artistic form. The backbone in O’Keeffe’s painting obeys a sense of scale determined by its meaning rather than by appearance. Monumentalizing it in relation to the frame of the canvas allows you to understand that it symbolizes something beyond what we see. O’Keeffe heightened the palette of the hills in the same way. A great painting like Red Hills and Bones embodies the spirit, not just the form, of nature. It conveys the powerful feeling of reinventing oneself, of resilience and self-reliance, and, as the artist Elizabeth Murray commented with respect to O’Keeffe, “People love that sense of adventure. It’s like the pioneer, and it gave her a very distinct kind of character in the American imagination.”³

Jackson Pollock famously said: “I want to express my feelings rather than illustrate them.”⁴ His composition Male and Female vividly conveys that probative sense of experiment, emotion, and improvisation. The Abstract Expressionist painter Grace Hartigan reported that:

I have over my desk on the wall a picture of Jackson in his studio. What he’s always saying is: ‘courage,’ ‘dare,’ ‘go, where no man has gone before… or woman.’ … It’s just something that almost had to happen in our time. … He is the artist that went where no one had ever gone before.⁵

In this show, you look past the Red Cross volunteer’s uniform, the Soviet Thunderous Blow poster (1942), and the ensemble of period design in the furniture and textile display, down the galleries to Pollock’s painting in the distance, as though finding a character you know in a profoundly evocative period movie. But it creates a reverberation around that painting that you never saw before.

In the earliest of the two major works by Willem de Kooning in the exhibition, Seated Woman (ca. 1940), painted when the conflagration in Europe had just begun, the artist struggles to hold the figure together. Noon (ca. 1947), dating from just after the War ended, feels liberated to indulge in a gestural exploration of reality that de Kooning called “slipping glimpses” of the figure and of a more complex world.⁶ Music is left out the show, but we could readily find a parallel in jazz, when the big-band era of ballroom dance bands—like those of Count Basie, Duke Ellington, and Benny Goodman—faded away as musicians went to war, and in their wake came the genre’s revolutionary reinvention in bebop by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and other musical geniuses of the forties and fifties. In bebop, as in de Kooning’s Noon, musicians dynamically improvise with highly individual riffs, responding to the changing dynamics around them.

Today, people get their news fragmented and unverified on the internet. But we’ve seen this before. Some Americans in the 1940s read fact-checked reports in established newspapers and went to movie theaters in record numbers to see newsreels about world events, along with the spirit lifting propagandistic films of optimistic resolve and quiet resistance like Mrs. Miniver and Casablanca (both 1942). Many Americans didn’t believe or simply chose to “stay out” of all this. World War II was the deadliest war in human history, wreaking unspeakable devastation, grief, and heartache around the globe. In the end, everyone had to pay attention. For all of this—the creativity, the self-reliant determination to always start again—inspires us. Boom seems so startlingly fresh and relevant. The curators at the Philadelphia Museum pulled it together in scarcely one year, an astonishing feat for a show of this scale. But perhaps that’s why it seems so of the moment. For me, the exhibition is a “vaccination” I needed to get just now.