Global War and the New American Landscape, 1939–48

FAIN: FT-259499-18

Cecile Whiting
Regents of the University of California, Irvine (Irvine, CA 92617-3066)

Research and preparation of a book on U.S. landscape painting during and after World War II.

During World War II, photographs and newsreels documenting death and destruction in theaters of war around the world prompted a change in painted representations of landscape in the United States. As a well-established genre in American art, landscape painting had a long tradition of celebrating the local, both bucolic settings and topographical wonders. The wider geographic scope of World War II challenged the regional focus of American landscape painting, especially as it had been practiced in the 1930s. My book examines the ways in which artists struggled to acknowledge an environment now understood to be global and interconnected, and also felt compelled to address the sheer scale of carnage caused by the war. Together these artists recast the terms of landscape painting, broadening its scope from the local to the international, and from the pastoral to the anti-pastoral.

Associated Products

Peter Blume's The Rock (1944-48) and the Post-war Landscape (Article)
Title: Peter Blume's The Rock (1944-48) and the Post-war Landscape
Author: Cecile Whiting
Abstract: Peter Blume's The Rock, a painting that preoccupied the artist for the duration of the war (although he did not complete it until 1948), combines evidence of death and destruction alongside signs of renewal. In tune with a future-oriented ethos of that time, The Rock acknowledged destruction in the past but nevertheless held out hope for what lay ahead by reasserting the possibility of rebuilding through human cooperation. This article examines how Blume's painting spoke to an emergent global consciousness that in its most idealistic form presaged a future of liberal humanism, but that, in its most crass form, eventually led to the development of global commercial networks and the exhaustion of natural resources.
Year: 2021
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: RANAM (Recherches Anglaises et Nord Americaines) no.54
Publisher: Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg

Andrew Wyeth and Birds of War (Article)
Title: Andrew Wyeth and Birds of War
Author: Cecile Whiting
Abstract: Demonstrates the ways in which two temperas painted by Andrew Wyeth in 1942 that feature birds were haunted by wartime killing and death. Exploring avian vision both in theme and technique, these paintings entered into a complex visual dialogue with Wyeth's father, N.C. Wyeth, and brother-in-law, artist Peter Hurd, both of whom produced pictures explicitly on behalf of the war effort featuring birds of aerial viewpoints. Providing an alternative to more obviously patriotic and celebratory wartime pictures, Wyeth's temperas develop interspecies contact between birds and humans, enabling viewers to imaginatively empathize and experience death with the birds.
Year: 2021
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Panorama v.7 n.2
Publisher: Journal fo the Association of Historians of American Art

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