11 Spiritual America Object Labels

Alfred Stieglitz (United States, 1864–1946) Spiritual America, 1923 Gelatin silver print Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Gift of Miss Georgia O'Keeffe Alfred Stieglitz created an ironic title for his photograph of the hind quarters of a harnessed and gelded horse that conveys his anger at America’s insensitivity to the arts. A wild, unfettered horse in art commonly represented freedom and the creative powers of instinct. A bound and neutered horse was Stieglitz’s metaphor for a repressed spiritless America, a country unsexed by social proprieties and the business ethic. His series of cloud photographs, called Equivalents and on view nearby, demonstrate the beauty in art and nature he felt America should nurture and advance. Alfred Stieglitz (United States, 1864–1946) Equivalent, 1923/1929 Gelatin silver print Philadelphia Museum of Art, Collection of Dorothy Norman Alfred Stieglitz (United States, 1864–1946) Equivalent, 1925 Gelatin silver print Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Alfred Stieglitz Collection Alfred Stieglitz made many abstracted photographs of clouds that he presented as his “equivalents” for his deep feelings for nature and its moods. “I have a vision of life,” wrote the photographer, “and I try to find equivalents for it.” His cloud abstractions register not only the ebb and flow of his own passions for life but also that of nature. To make his point, he always exhibited several of them together, creating an ethereal, ever-changing dance of clouds. Their beauty represented for Stieglitz, an essential Spiritual America. Alfred Stieglitz (United States, 1864–1946) Equivalent, 1925/1927 Gelatin silver print Philadelphia Museum of Art, Collection of Dorothy Norman “When I am moved by something,” Stieglitz once said, “I feel a passionate desire to make a lasting equivalent of it, but what I put

down must be as perfect in itself as the experience that has generated my original feeling of having been moved.” With the cloud photographs, Stieglitz created a transcendent art, one that he hoped would offer viewers emotional relief from the crass materialism he so disliked in American culture. Alfred Stieglitz (United States, 1864–1946) Equivalent, 1926 Gelatin silver print Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Alfred Stieglitz Collection Alfred Stieglitz (United States, 1864–1946) Equivalent, 1930/1934 Gelatin silver print Philadelphia Museum of Art, Collection of Dorothy Norman Alfred Stieglitz (United States, 1864–1946) Equivalent 27C, 1933 Gelatin silver print Philadelphia Museum of Art, Collection of Dorothy Norman Arthur Dove (United States, 1880–1946) Sunrise, 1924 Oil on plywood Milwaukee Art Museum, Gift of Mrs. Edward R. Wehr Arthur Dove, like Georgia O’Keeffe, believed that “what we call modern should go smack to nature as a source.” The ecstasy he felt in nature links him to Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Thoreau, leaders of the movement known as American transcendentalism. The transcendentalists found nature revealed a spiritual force in the world. Similarly, Dove found dawns and dusks and the magic twilight of those hours wondrous. Arthur Dove (United States, 1880–1946) Alfie's Delight, 1929 Oil on canvas Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Dr. and Mrs. Milton Lurie Kramer Collection, Bequest of Helen Kroll Kramer

Alfie was Alfred H. Maurer, a modern American painter and good friend of Dove’s. Maurer regularly visited Dove who in 1929 was living on a sailboat at Hailsite on the north side of Long Island. Dove had no desire to live in Manhattan and moved throughout his life from one rural site to another. Arthur Dove (United States, 1880–1946) Dawn III, 1932 Oil on canvas McNay Art Museum, Mary and Sylvan Lang Collection In January 1932, Dove created an extraordinary series of dawn and sunset paintings. His renderings of sun-ups and sun-downs glow with vibrancy and convey the artist’s passionate engagement with these special moments in a day. Here, a series of swollen, radiating orbs of light float across the canvas and pulsate with color. Arthur Dove (United States, 1880–1946) Sunrise IV, 1937 Oil and wax emulsion on canvas Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn Georgia O'Keeffe (United States, 1887–1986) Sunrise, 1916 Watercolor on paper Collection of Mr. Barney A. Ebsworth O’Keeffe made this very abstract watercolor when, as a young woman, she was teaching and living in rural Texas. In it, we see the wide horizon of the southern plains at dawn. She wrote at the time that she was working against her academic training and was trying to paint without consciousness for what she was doing. The task she set for herself was to render the “things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me—shapes and ideas so near to me—so natural to my way of thinking that it hasn’t occurred to me to put them down.” Alfred Stieglitz (United States, 1864–1946) Equivalent, 1931 Gelatin silver print

Philadelphia Museum of Art, Collection of Dorothy Norman Charles Demuth (United States, 1883–1935) Yellow Calla Lily Leaves, date unknown Watercolor with pencil Yale University Art Gallery, Gift of Philip L. Goodwin, B.A. 1907 Arthur Dove (United States, 1880–1946) Summer Orchard, 1937 Oil and wax emulsion on canvas Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute, Museum of Art, Utica, New York John Marin (United States, 1870–1953) Woods, 1921 Watercolor, graphite, and black crayon on paper Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York, Bequest of Mrs. Arthur Schwab (Edna Bryner, Class of 1907) John Marin (United States, 1870–1953) From Deer Isle, Maine, 1922 Watercolor with black chalk on paper Collection of Mr. Barney A. Ebsworth Georgia O'Keeffe (United States, 1887–1986) Skunk Cabbage (Cos Cob), 1922 Oil on canvas Williams College, Bequest of Kathryn Hurd Georgia O'Keeffe (United States, 1887–1986) Four Dark Red Oak Leaves, 1923 Oil on canvasboard Private collection Georgia O'Keeffe (United States, 1887–1986)

Oak Leaves, Pink and Gray, 1929 Oil on canvas Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Museum purchase Georgia O’Keeffe wrote that “it is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis, that we can get at the real meaning of things.” She regularly focused on something as small as autumn leaves to uncover the “real meaning of things.” Enlarging, arranging, and abstracting, she looked closely at nature’s microcosms to reveal something grand and transcendent. Oak Leaves conveys a quality she described as an “unexplainable thing in nature that makes me feel the world is big beyond my understanding.” Paul Strand (United States, 1890–1976) Colorado, 1926 Platinum print Princeton University Art Museum, Museum purchase, Gift of the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency, with an anonymous matching gift An anti-urbanist artist committed to the restorative power of nature, Strand wrote to Stieglitz about his disgust with those who flocked nightly to New York’s famous amusement park: “I am sure the Americans have already introduced Coney Island into heaven.” About the Rocky Mountains, where he made this photograph, he wrote Stieglitz: “it would take more than God and all the saints to stop ‘em. But here the mountains are untouched—pure and wonderful—great.” Paul Strand (United States, 1890–1976) Cobweb in Rain, Georgetown, Maine, 1927 Gelatin silver print Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Paul Strand Collection Strand said his photographic project in the 1920s was “to come to grips with the difficult reality of America, to break through the crust of mere appearance.” His unflinching up-close views of nature find American beauty in the microscopic. Paul Strand (United States, 1890–1976) Maine, 1927

Platinum print Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Paul Strand Collection Paul Strand (United States, 1890–1976) Wild Iris, Maine, about 1927–28 Gelatin silver print The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Alfred Stieglitz Collection Paul Strand (United States, 1890–1976) Iris, Georgetown Island, Maine, 1928 Gelatin silver print Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Polaroid Foundation Purchase Fund Paul Strand (United States, 1890–1976) Driftwood, Dark Roots, Georgetown, Maine,1928 Gelatin silver print Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Paul Strand Collection In the mid 1920s, Paul Strand moved away from photographing urban and industrial scenes and turned to nature for an art of spiritual sustenance. Like Stieglitz, he considered the materialism of modern America destructive of mankind’s ability to experience the subtle beauties in the natural world. Strand trained his modern camera on natural things, uncovering beauties we often do not take time to see in the world around us. This jarring close-up of weathered and tangled driftwood explores the aesthetic textures, lines, and forms of a natural object. Strand’s images help viewers discover the pleasures of concentrated looking. Marsden Hartley (United States, 1877–1943) In the Moraine, Dogtown Common, Cape Ann, 1931 Oil on academy board Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia, University purchase While a part of the artist community that spent summers in the fishing village of Gloucester, Massachusetts, Hartley discovered a glacial moraine, or ancient rock field, deep in the woods on the outskirts of

town. Made up of massive, pre-historic boulders, the locals called it Dogtown. Hartley was inspired by the desolation of the site and the majesty of the old stones. He made a series of paintings exploring its primal beauty, what he called “the pulse and secret of all that is.” Marsden Hartley (United States, 1877–1943) Dogtown 1936, 1936 Oil on masonite Private collection Hartley found the Massachusetts glacial deposit of boulders called Dogtown “a cross between Easter Island and Stonehedge—essentially druidic in its appearance.” He painted the distinctive terrain in 1931, 1934, and again in 1936. In it he found the rugged strangeness of the landscape a vehicle to convey nature’s brute power. Marsden Hartley (United States, 1877–1943) Rock, date unknown Charcoal on paper New Britain Museum of American Art, Gift of Alix W. Stanley Estate John Marin (United States, 1870–1953) Rocks and Sea: Small Point, Maine, 1931 Oil on canvas The Cleveland Museum of Art, Norman O. Stone and Ella A. Stone Memorial Fund By 1931 when Marin made this painting, he had spent part of each year in Maine for 17 years. A painter committed largely to landscape, he believed that one needed to know a place well before it could be painted. “You can not create a work of art,” he wrote, “unless the thing you behold responds to something within you.” The slashing brush strokes and hulking forms abstractly convey the violence of crashing waves at water’s edge on Maine’s austere coast.