Exhibit of the week: To Make a World: George Ault and 1940s America

Smithsonian American Art Museum

Washington, D.C.

Through Sept. 5

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Was George Ault the quintessential 1940s painter? asked Rex Weil in ARTnews.com. Alexander Nemerov sure thinks so. The Smithsonian’s American Art Museum has given the Yale art-history professor a rare opportunity to make the case for that bold claim, giving him an entire exhibition to do so. The result of his efforts is an ambitious, impassioned, occasionally overreaching survey of that decade. Five “eerie landscapes,” all of rural upstate New York, anchor the show. The best of these, Black Night at Russell’s Corners (1943), depicts a barn, a garage, and a dead tree all lit by a single street lamp, “giving the viewer the sense of entering a lonely, foreboding intersection from a country road.” Whether or not you buy Nemerov’s claims that Ault’s work from the period perfectly encapsulates the era’s zeitgeist is beside the point. Either way, it’s a compelling example of American primitive painting with a surrealist edge.

Certainly Nemerov has assembled an “entertaining” snapshot of the time, said Jeffry Cudlin in the Washington City Paper. He’s also included some eccentric works by Ault’s famous and obscure contemporaries that are worth the visit alone. But too often “the leaps he makes in order to explain Ault’s pictures are free-associative, dependent on affinities and not facts, and tell us far more about Nemerov’s passion for World War II–era Americana” than they do about anything the artist thought. In one particularly puzzling case, Nemerov compares Brook in the Mountains (1945)—“an invented landscape showing an eerie, stylized waterfall”—to the tears shed by Margaret O’Brien and Judy Garland in the film Meet Me in St. Louis.” Say what? There’s no evidence the artist even watched the film, much less admired it.

Give Nemerov an A for effort, said Philip Kennicott in The Washington Post. He’s a “thinker, unafraid to take big chances.” Does he overplay his hand? Sometimes. Does he ignore simple, logical explanations when a “vaguely Freudian” conjecture will do? Sure. “But Nemerov’s passion for these paintings isn’t misplaced.” Even if you refuse to follow him “every step of the way” in his earnest arguments, “he makes a compelling case that Ault had great art in him and that, in some inchoate way,” that greatness does relate to the traumas of World War II. We could all do worse than to suspend disbelief for a brief spell and just thrill in the unbridled enthusiasms of a quirky painter’s No. 1 fan.