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Home>Exhibitions>2023>American Places: Featuring Selections from the Corcoran Collection

American Places: Featuring Selections from the Corcoran Collection

Now on View

Ongoing from November 3, 2023
East Building, Ground Floor - Galleries 106 A-C

Being alone and being in a crowd: these may be opposite experiences, yet both are essential parts of modern life. See how early 20th-century American artists captured this opposition, from isolated mountaintops to crowded cities. Paintings by Grant Wood, Hale Woodruff, and Georgia O’Keeffe evoke the solitude of rural places. Others by George Bellows, Stuart Davis, and David Park conjure the chaos and vibrancy of city life. Numerous works on view come from the Corcoran Collection.  

Trace the transformation of the modern workplace in the 20th century in an adjoining installation. Works on paper highlight how jobs and the American workforce changed with advances in technology, migration, and major events like World War II. Artists represent the fast pace of assembly lines and illuminate industrial working conditions. Others depict the often-overlooked jobs of street vendors, musicians, and barbers.  

Explore Selected Works

A brown-skinned man stands on a beach among poles driven into the sand, near a line of six rowboats pulled onto the shore near a slate-blue body of water in this horizontal painting. The scene is loosely painted in some areas so brushstrokes are visible, especially in the landscape. The man stands to our left, facing away from us with his head bowed. He has broad shoulders, muscled arms, and a narrow waist. His left arm is bent so that hand tucks into the waistband of his olive-green pants. His right elbow is bent so his body obscures his hand. He wears a white, sleeveless undershirt tucked into his pants. Wind blows the wide cuffs of his pants to our right. Seventeen gray, irregularly spaced poles, at least half again as tall as the man, stand upright around the man and along the beach. Pink ribbons hang between the poles, connecting many of them. The six rowboats sit in a line to our right, with the far end of the boats slightly tipped up so we can look down into them. The beach is made of rough mounds of peach and caramel-brown sand, with oyster-white rocks casting dark shadows. Beyond the shore, the flat surface of the water stretches to the horizon, which comes just over halfway up the composition. Horizontal strokes of flint-gray along the right half of the horizon could be distant hills or land. The sky above is streaked with dove gray against slate blue, with a few touches of pale, butter yellow. The scene is lit low from our left, highlighting the white stones, the man’s white shirt, and the front ends of the rowboats. The artist signed and dated the painting in the lower right: “Lee-Smith ‘57.”
American Places

Hughie Lee-Smith, Reflection, 1957, oil on particle board, Corcoran Collection (The Evans-Tibbs Collection, Gift of Thurlow Evans Tibbs, Jr.), 2015.19.207
A six-story, narrow building stands alone in an otherwise unoccupied lot under the deck of a high bridge, with a river and cityscape in the background in this horizontal painting. Dozens of people, small in scale, are each painted with a few swipes of black and some with peach-colored faces. They gather at the foot of the building and around a fire to our left, near the lower left corner of the composition. The fire is painted with a dash of orange, a few touches of canary yellow, and a smudge of gray smoke. Several more people stand and sit against the building, which has a streetlamp near its entrance. The back end of the building angles away from us to our right, so we see the narrow, front entrance side to our left. Each of the six floors of the building has two windows with fire escape ladders on the narrow side we can see. Some strokes in red and white on the lower levels of the long, flat side of the building suggest signs or posters. The top story glows a warm sienna brown in sunlight, while the rest of the building and the scene below are in shadow. More people walk along a grayish-violet fence that encloses the lot beyond the building. The ground is painted thickly with slate gray, pale, sage green, and one smear of white to suggest snow. To our right and a short distance from us, a white horse pulls a carriage near the foot of the bridge. The ivory-white, concrete piling rises up and off the right edge of the canvas and supports the deck of the bridge above. Only a sliver of the brick-red underside of the bridge is visible, skimming the top edge of the painting in the upper right corner. Two twiggy, barren trees grow up beyond the muted purple fence, and the landscape beyond is bright in the sunlight. A terracotta-orange building rises along the left edge of the painting, with the area between it and the lot under the bridge filled with thickly painted patches of butter yellow, amethyst purple, and sage green. Beyond that, an ice-blue river flows across the composition. The shore beyond is lined with patches of beige and tan paint that could be buildings. A black tugboat puffs bright white smoke in the river. The sky above is frosty white. The artist signed the work with dark blue in the lower left corner of the painting, “Geo Bellows.”
American Places

George Bellows, The Lone Tenement, 1909, oil on canvas, Chester Dale Collection, 1963.10.83
This nearly square painting shows an industrial area with buildings, storage silos, a smokestack, and railroad tracks. A mound of brown dirt or other material is in shadow in the lower left corner of the painting. Next to the mound, railroad tracks extend diagonally from the lower center of the painting into the distance to our right. The tracks end at a white building with staggered gray rooflines to our right in the distance. A tall terracotta-red smokestack rises high beyond the white building, smoke pouring out of its top and blending into the clouds above. Just beyond the mound of dirt, piles of white material, perhaps in unseen bins, line the railroad track to our left and lead back to a row ten interconnected, coral-orange silos. The horizon comes about halfway up the painting, and it is lined with a row of long white and gray warehouses. The artist signed and dated the work with brown paint in the lower right corner: “Sheeler 31.”
American Places

Charles Sheeler, Classic Landscape, 1931, oil on canvas, Collection of Barney A. Ebsworth, 2000.39.2
A landscape seen through sheer lace curtains that billow in toward us from an open window nearly fills this horizontal painting. The window is angled slightly downward as it extends off the right side of the composition, so it does not line up with the edges of the rectangular painting. The narrow strip of dove-gray wall to the left of the window casement is cracked near the simple, deep gray molding that surrounds the window. Slivers of light peek through rips in the dark shade that covers upper third of the window. The right curtain panel surges toward us as the left panel flutters lightly off to our side. The inner edges are trimmed with subtle lace birds and flowers. The window looks down onto an expanse of olive-green grass and dark green trees line the far edge of the field. Tire tracks cross the field from near the lower left corner of the painting to our left, and into the distance to meet a sliver of white, perhaps a body of water.
American Places

Andrew Wyeth, Wind from the Sea, 1947, tempera on hardboard, Gift of Charles H. Morgan, 2009.13.1
From a high vantage point, we look down ontp a group of dozens of boys who stand, sit, stretch, sprawl, or dangle their legs off a rough wooden pier that juts out from the lower left corner into a dark river in this horizonal painting. Their gangly bodies are loosely painted and brightly lit from the upper left. Most are nude, their skin tones ranging from cream white to medium brown. There are gaps between some of the planks of pier, and some of the boards hang off the sides, as if laid loosely across the supports beneath. One boy dives into the river near the center of the painting while another bends over to pull a boy back onto the pier. Several splash in the water near the right side of the painting. The river is emerald green near the brightly lit pier and becomes almost black across the upper half of the painting. An empty, small rowboat painted in stripes of white, white, and blue floats in the shadows along the top center edge of the canvas.
American Places

George Bellows, Forty-two Kids, 1907, oil on canvas, Corcoran Collection (Museum Purchase, William A. Clark Fund), 2014.79.2
A hilly terrain with ridges, bushes, trees, and rocks outlined in dark brown and filled in with earthy tan and pecan brown, goldenrod yellow, and moss and emerald green almost fills this nearly square, stylized landscape painting. Framing the scene is a steel-gray, broken tree trunk to our left and a small grove of leafless bushes, with vertical, nearly straight branches to our right. Another grove of tightly spaced tree trunks is clustered near a smoky, plum-purple ridge at the back center, and a touch of clear blue toward the lower right corner suggests a winding stream. A narrow band of sapphire-blue sky along the top edge of the canvas is streaked with white clouds painted with long swipes of the brush. The artist signed the work in the lower left corner, “Hale Woodruff.”
American Places

Hale Woodruff, Landscape, 1936, oil on canvas, Corcoran Collection (The Evans-Tibbs Collection, Gift of Thurlow Evans Tibbs, Jr.), 2014.136.160
American Places

David Park, Sophomore Society, c. 1953, oil on canvas, Corcoran Collection (Gift of Lydia Park Moore, wife of the artist), 2015.19.139
Vividly colored, curved and straight-edged geometric shapes are piled and layered against a background of chalk white in this horizontal abstract composition. The paint is applied thickly with visible brush strokes. The shapes that fill the canvas are painted in flat areas of canary and buttercup yellow, cobalt blue, beet and brick red, pumpkin orange, kelly green, white, or black. Three vertical, cinnamon-brown bands are spaced along a sky-blue square, which nearly spans the left half of the composition. The tall brown forms can be read as masts while some of the other shapes can be the water, sails, rigging, anchors, and the forms of ships.
American Places

Stuart Davis, Study for "Swing Landscape", 1937-1938, oil on canvas, Corcoran Collection (Museum Purchase and exchange through a gift given in memory of Edith Gregor Halpert by the Halpert Foundation and the William A. Clark Fund), 2014.79.15
A light-skinned man and woman and a collie dog are outside a white house at the edge of a pale peach field of grass in this horizontal painting. Taking up a bit more than the top right quadrant of the composition, the house is white with pale blue shadows. Near the back, left corner of the house, the door has two tall, inset frosted glass panels and a shallow roof supported with scrolling, carved corbels. The door is flanked by a bay window on the left and a single window on the right. A shadowy grove of blue-green trees grows to the left of the house with one branch reaching toward the bay window. The woman faces us and stands between the bay window and door with downcast eyes and folded arms. Her blond hair is pulled or brushed back, and she wears a snug fitting, calf-length teal-blue dress. The man sits on the doorstep so his knees are angled to our left. His near arm drapes over his left knee and his far hand reaches toward the dog, his fingers and thumb touching. He has short blond hair and a ruddy face, and he wears a white t-shirt and olive-green pants. The dog stands in the middle of the field with its body angled to our right, its pointed ears and tail pricked up as it swivels its head to look to our left. It has an auburn-brown coat with white belly, chest, and tip of the tail. There are a few areas of spearmint green in the otherwise peach-colored grass, which is tall enough to brush the belly of the dog. The artist signed the lower right, “EDWARD HOPPER.”
American Places

Edward Hopper, Cape Cod Evening, 1939, oil on canvas, John Hay Whitney Collection, 1982.76.6
We look slightly down onto a crush of pedestrians, horse-drawn carriages, wagons, and streetcars enclosed by a row of densely spaced buildings and skyscrapers opposite us in this horizontal painting. The street in front of us is alive with action but the overall color palette is subdued with burgundy red, grays, and black, punctuated by bright spots of harvest yellow, shamrock green, apple red, and white. Most of the people wear long dark coats and black hats but a few in particular draw the eye. For instance, in a patch of sunlight in the lower right corner, three women wearing light blue, scarlet-red, or emerald-green dresses stand out from the crowd. The sunlight also highlights a white spot on the ground, probably snow, amid the crowd to our right. Beyond the band of people in the street close to us, more people fill in the space around carriages, wagons, and trolleys, and a large horse-drawn cart piled with large yellow blocks, perhaps hay, at the center of the composition. A little in the distance to our left, a few bare trees stand around a patch of white ground. Beyond that, in the top half of the painting, city buildings are blocked in with rectangles of muted red, gray, and tan. Shorter buildings, about six to ten stories high, cluster in front of the taller buildings that reach off the top edge of the painting. The band of skyscrapers is broken only by a gray patch of sky visible in a gap between the buildings to our right of center, along the top of the canvas. White smoke rises from a few chimneys and billboards and advertisements are painted onto the fronts of some of the buildings. The paint is loosely applied, so many of the people and objects are created with only a few swipes of the brush, which makes many of the details indistinct. The artist signed the work with pine-green paint near the lower left corner: “Geo Bellows.”
American Places

George Bellows, New York, 1911, oil on canvas, Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, 1986.72.1


 

The Corcoran Collection

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Banner detail: Andrew Wyeth, Wind from the Sea, 1947, tempera on hardboard, Gift of Charles H. Morgan, 2009.13.1