“Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties” at the Brooklyn Museum

By Juliet Helmke

This is your forewarning: Youth and Beauty – Art of the American Twenties on at the Brooklyn Museum until January 29 is not a small or simple overview of the twenties best offerings. It contains everything; the failures and the successes. Know this beforehand and your subsequent visit will be an enjoyable exploration of 20s experimentation. If you’re looking to see what you’ve already seen before, a slick and successful narrative of Hoppers, Strands, Demuths, Hart Bentons and O’Keefes, then either stay away or be prepared to hunt through over 60 others.

Youth and Beauty is then perhaps a confusing title as it’s not only the ‘beauties’ of the twenties that we see hung across five large galleries. Rather it is a demonstration of these artists’ pursuit of the new beautiful. They were the pioneers of emerging art practices in a decade that roared with economic prosperity and brought radical political change and shifting social mores. It was the era of speakeasies, and the Charleston; Babe Ruth and Cole Porter; and when women in the United States embraced a boyish fashion and their newly granted power to cast a vote. Here in Brooklyn the twenties ushered in paved roads and saw the construction of the largest promenade in the world at the time, the Coney Island Boardwalk.

George Ault, Brooklyn Ice House, 1926

These heady historical moments run underneath all the work exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum. The show attempts to address all of these changes, in themes running from “Body Language,” “The Erotic Natural,” and “Modernity at the Kitchen Table,” through “Heroics,” “Silent Pictures,” and “Uneasy Peace,” among others. But the size and amount of work in the show makes the sections a little confused, you end up not quite sure if you’re being directed toward the plants, people, or buildings in the artwork before you. Grant Wood’s 1929 Woman with Plants, the direct precedent to his enshrined American Gothic, hangs far away from the portraiture section, though surely the meticulous painting of his proud mother set against a frontier-scape is more than just still life. The points made in the text panels in all of these categories are quite perceptive, but in a show this large brevity should be key. Provide the background information and let the works illustrate the decade from which they sprang.

Peter Blume’s Flower and Torso in a section titled “The Erotic Natural” captures much of what was at stake in art at the time and would have slipped nicely into any or all of the aforementioned sections. An angular nude cropped at chin and pelvis clasps two flowers to her chest. It’s a still life, female nude, and landscape. It’s figurative and folk, yet has a long, slopping greyscale triangle cutting the image diagonally off at the bottom which seems to betray a modernist inclination.

Peter Blume, Flower and Torso, 1927

George Ault’s Brooklyn Ice House (1926) is painted in the reductive modern style with nary a living soul to clutter the scene. The only movement comes from a black plume of smoke rising from the stark factory building against heavy steel colored clouds. The simplicity and naïve rendering of this dreary sky is like much of the imagery in the surrounding industrial scenes hanging on adjacent walls. And though it is quite beautiful in its strong greens and grays, the tone is ominous. A prophesy of the approach of an age where these buildings would take over the greenery that is still present in the foreground? Though he chose it as his subject matter, Ault was not so swayed by the marvel of urban progress that dominated thinking at the time. “The tombstones of capitalism” was how he referred to the skyscrapers that were rising up from New York’s horizon. They weren’t yet signifiers of global warming, rapidly receding greenspace and the squandering of precious resources.

It’s a youthful idealism that glints from around the sharp corners and off the sleek surfaces of most the art of the American twenties, but what the Brooklyn Museum can be congratulated for is showing the artists whose ideas did not align with either the overriding mentalities or conform entirely to the twenties aesthetic.  Elsie Driggs’s trimotor aluminum airplane (an invention that recurs at least three times in the following rooms), Joseph Stella’s The Birth of Venus, and Yasuo Kuniyoshi’s Self-Portrait as a Photographer are some decidedly odd offerings in technique, composition or subject matter. But what they—along with the other works in the show—have in common is their pursuit: to create an image of beauty from the new and preexisting landscape of American life.

Advertisement