A Traveling Exhibition from The Smithsonian American Art Museum
Championing realism in the 1950s was a daring and defiant act. Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler, Willem de Kooning, and others dubbed “abstract expressionists” were the art stars of the day. Flinging and pouring paint, they created huge canvases that bore little resemblance to the natural world.
Into this milieu came Sara Roby, an heiress and painter who refused to be bound by current fads. Roby was concerned that figurative art was being eclipsed, so she established a foundation to collect art that reflected the classic principles of form and design that she had learned as an art student, first in Philadelphia and later with Reginald Marsh and Kenneth Hayes Miller at the Art Students League in New York. But Roby and her advisors recognized that the beauty and spirituality, as well as the tensions, of modern life allowed for many kinds of realism.
They bought paintings by Edward Hopper and Robert Vickrey that probe the angst and psychological dislocation associated with existential thought in the 1950s. Leavening these unsettling images are canvases by Isabel Bishop and Phillip Ever-good, whose empathy and sense of social responsibility had emerged during the Great Depression in the 1930s. Formed in the mid-1950s, the collection captures both the optimism and the apprehension of the years following World War II. Many of the works are poignant, others whimsical. Still others challenge us to decipher meaning imbedded in difficult, sometimes enigmatic scenes.
The collection is a reflection of the multivalent realities of contemporary life, of human emotion at its most elemental and universal.
Modern American Realism: Highlights from the Sara Roby Foundation Collection was organized by The Smithsonian American Art Museum with generous support from the Sara Roby Foundation.