Tag Archives: American Art

July 7, 2026

What I Want Now: to return to these perspectives

By daseger

I haven’t written a What I Want Now post for a long while: this one is another expression of earnest materialism but also of a desire to return to a world and a nation in which “corporate art” was not a contradiction in terms and could also possess civic goals, there was no AI, and renderings of regional views could still capture something regional. What I want now is a portfolio, or prints (or even just torn-out magazine pages) of compositions commissioned by the Container Corporation of America in the 1940s of every US state and territory as part of its United States series. I’m obsessed. The Container Corporation was a national manufacturer of paper boxes founded in the 1920s which developed a reputation for artistic and modernist advertising quite early on. For a quarter of a century, from 1950 to 1975, the Corporation published nearly 200 advertisements featuring quotes from historical figures in scenes depicted by very notable avant-garde artists under the title Great Ideas of Western Man, following its post-war series the United Nations and the United States. You can see a range of all the Container Corporation art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. During our current climate of frenzied commemoration and Trumpstopian farce, the images of the latter series seem so appealing, even therepeutic. And I love that the Corporation chose artists who were natives of the state (or territory) in question—like Jacob Lawrence of New Jersey. The end results seem both simultaneously national and regional, which is truly American to me.

James F. Minnicks, Washington DC, from the United States Series, 1949, gouache and pencil on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Container Corporation of America

Arthur Williams, Massachusetts, from the United States Series, 1946, gouache and pen and ink on paperboard,Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Container Corporation of America, 1984 (the published image—below— was in color, as were all the CCA ads).

E. McKnight Kauffer, Montana, from the United States Series, 1946, gouache on paperboard, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Container Corporation of America

Morris Graves, Oregon, from the United States Series, ca. 1948, pastel and ink on paper mounted on plywood, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Container Corporation of America

5 Comments | tags: advertising, American Art, Art, Commemoration, Smithsonian Institution, What I Want Now | posted in Art, Culture

April 6, 2022

The Power of Juxtaposition

By daseger

The Peabody Essex Museum has opened a new integrated exhibit of items from its American and Native American collections entitled On This Ground: Being and Belonging in America and I made my first visit last weekend. This is an “ongoing” exhibition, which I guess means permanent, and I’m glad it is going to be on view for some time as it offers quite a lot to take in and think about: there are new things to see but even familiar items are cast in a new light through their arrangement. While the exhibition explores various themes relating to “being and belonging in America” its overall curation is what captivated me on this first viewing: it seemed as if there were a succession of cascading vignettes crafted from the artful juxtaposition of both like and unlike objects. Juxtaposition is a powerful way to engage and to teach: I use contrast and comparison quite a bit in class but I wouldn’t call my efforts artful. In contrast, On This Ground’s presentations cross genres and time very fluidly, right from the beginning when a video featuring Elizabeth Solomon, a member of the Massachusett Tribe at Ponkapoag, is contrasted with the original Massachusetts Bay Charter of 1628-29 through which King Charles I claimed the land of her ancestors (I have to say that the Charter actually belongs to the Salem Athenaeum, which placed it in storage at the Essex Institute long ago; the PEM seemed to develop an interest in exhibiting the Charter only when the Athenaeum was seriously considering selling it in 2006, so it’s great to see it as one of the opening exhibits of this important new exhibition.)

The juxtapositions are not always so jarring: each culture gets the opportunity to tell its own stories as they cycle through history, as exhibit text proclaims that “history is not linear” repeatedly. Then there is convergence, but there are intra-cultural juxtapositions too: I particularly liked the contrast of proximity between the works of two of Salem’s most well-known sculptors, William Wetmore Story (Marguerite) and Louise Lander (Evangeline), as the latter was explicitly slandered by the former. And the Hawthornes are in close proximity, as they also shut their doors to Miss Lander. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a work of Salem’s even more famous “people’s sculptor,” John Rogers, in real life (clay), so it was great to see The Wounded Scout: its sentimentality was a good match for what I think is a new acquisition by the PEM (in honor of recently-retired curator Dean Lahikainen), Tompkins Harrison Matteson’s The Pillory Scene from The Scarlet Letter (chap. 12, p. 185-188), 1860.

But there are also some starker contrasts which are illuminating: with context but also aesthetically, including two “political teapots” placed side by side (“Stamp Act Repeal’d, 1760s & Nuclear Nuts Teapot Variation #13 by Richard T. Notkin, 2001), a very fancy dressing table paired with some equally fancy boots, and so many aligned portraits. The internal “windows” of the gallery space open up some interesting juxtapositions as well.

There were two aspects of the exhibition that remain rather “unsettled” in my mind, one very general and the other very particular. So of course I have to go back and settle them! It seemed to me as if the Native American objects came from a much broader geographic region, but that just might be my parochial perspective. And once again (for the 99,000th time) I am troubled by the Salem Witch Trials. I was really excited when I read the thematic label for the “Heroes & Histories” section of the exhibit, especially the opening line if the same stories are repeatedly told, whose stories are we missing? That’s Salem in a nutshell: we just keep telling the same story! So I kept going, and there’s the same old story of the Salem Witch Trials in (very familiar; TOO familiar) images, objects and texts. I just don’t understand how a(nother) Tompkins Harrison Matteson painting represents a “new way of looking at the past.” The most recent historiography of the Salem Witch Trials has focused on Salem as a “frontier” society: wouldn’t this be a relevant perspective to explore here?

This was just one discordant corner of this sweeping exhibition, which otherwise struck a pitch-perfect balance of the familiar and the new for me. The two paintings which captured my attention for the longest time were one which I was quite familiar with (Alvan Fisher’s Salem from Gallows Hill, 1818) and one which was brand-new to me (Bahareh and Farzaneh Safarani’s Twilight Reincarnation, 2018). I like to orient myself in the past through the former, while the latter simply delighted me with its fleeting window shadows, so much so that I forgot to contextualize the painting altogether.