Art Eyewitness Essay: Cloud Spotting with John Constable and Alfred Stieglitz

 

Cloud Spotting with John Constable & Alfred Stieglitz

Constable's Year by Susan Owens (Thames & Hudson, 223 pages, $35)

Chasing Clouds at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Thru Feb. 28, 2027)

By Ed Voves  Original photos by Anne Lloyd

On the evening of September 12, 1821, John Constable painted a dramatic view of the sunset over Hampstead Heath.  

Constable was working outdoors. He used a palette loaded with dabs of oil paint, rather than his water color box, to create Hampstead Heath, looking toward Harrow at Sunset.

 

      John Constable,  Hampstead Heath, looking toward Harrow at Sunset, 1821

In this remarkable painting, Constable reversed the order of priority of sky and ground in landscape painting. The dramatic sky above is accorded the starring role. The soil beneath Constable's feet - and of the barely visible people traveling on the path in the foreground - is almost an afterthought.

Constable would later write of this shift of perspective. "It will be difficult to name a class of landscape in which the sky is not the key note," Constable affirmed, "the standard of scale and the chief organ of sentiment.” 

Ramsay Richard Reinagle, Portrait of John Constable, c. 1799

With this remark, John Constable, born 250 years ago, launched a hugely significant dialog with nature. In due course, our perception of the world around - and above -  us would change. Constable's "refocus" continued to resonate in works by John Singer Sargent and Alfred Stieglitz over a century later.

In this Art Eyewitness essay, I will comment on a new book from Thames & Hudson, Constable's Year by Susan Owens, a former curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum and author of a superb history of drawing. Then, we will shift our focus to the just-opened exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum, Chasing Clouds. 

To these insightful surveys, several photos by my wife, Anne, will be added, showing how sky and clouds can continue to strike an artistic "key note" - even when the vantage point is a studio or bedroom window.

Anne Lloyd, Studio Window Skyscapes, 2026

By the standards of the early nineteenth century, Constable's Hampstead Heath, mentioned above, was an oil sketch, not a finished work. Painting in the open air on the following day, September 13, 1821, Constable looked-up again at the clouds swirling overhead. Then, he made a very bold decision.

Constable decided to paint the sky.

John Constable, Study of altocumulus clouds, September 13, 1821

 No distant horizon line. No misty mountains. No path through the forest. Just sky and clouds, very accurately depicted and scientifically classified. Constable entitled his first "skyscape", Study of altocumulus clouds.

On the back of this oil on paper, Constable jotted the following notation,"13 September 1821. one o'clock. Slight wind at North West, which became tempestuous in the afternoon, With Rain all the night following."

John Constable, Cloud Study, September 25, 1821

During the remainder of the early autumn of 1821, Constable continued to paint oil sketches of the cloud-laden skies. As Susan Owens points out in Constable's Year, autumn, with its fading colors and falling leaves, little appealed to Constable. The September skies, with their "peculiar tone and beauty" were a different matter.

A year later, again in September, he was back for another season of "skying" from his favorite vantage points on Hampstead Heath. Constable painted cloud-filled skies, until he could write to his friend, Archdeacon Fisher, "I am the man of clouds."

However, another Englishman of Constable's era was also directing his attention skyward. In 1803, an amateur scientist named Luke Howard (1772-1864) published An Essay on the Modification of Clouds. In this illustrated book, Howard defined and described the cloud types with terminology still in use today: Cirrus, Cumulus and Stratus.

Constable was certainly familiar with Howard’s cloud "modification" (which then meant classification). In many respects, he was more than ready to embrace such close study of nature as an integral facet of art. In an 1836 lecture, Constable asserted:

Painting is a science, and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature. Why then may not landscape painting be considered as a branch of natural philosophy of which pictures are but the experiments?

Constable's actual practice of art was notably less definitive. He remained more a man of sentiment, rather than a practitioner of "painting as a science." 

John Constable, Hadleigh Castle, 1829

In 1829, Constable, grief-stricken over the death of his wife, painted Hadleigh Castle. Here the sky, though memorably executed, was treated as a backdrop to land and sea and the crumbling battlements erected by man.

Owen's book - compulsively readable, even for readers familiar with British art history - traces Constable's reactions to all four seasons of the year. Owens brilliantly correlates the annual rhythms of life in Regency England to Constable's creative efforts. Predictably, winter put him in a reflective, melancholy frame of mind. 

Constable had a lot more on his mind than the weather when he looked at clouds.

During the last years of his life, Constable wrestled with issues of mortality and morality. Was the sky, merely a "standard of scale" or was it "the chief organ of sentiment?” In 1839, two years after his passing, science, in the shape of photography, seemed to settle the issue. 

"From today, painting is dead," the artist Paul Delaroche exclaimed upon seeing one of the first photographs, a daguerreotype.

Delaroche's obituary for painting was premature, especially in regards to daguerreotypes. These one-of-a-kind pictures were produced from silver-coated sheets of copper, making them unsuitable for almost anything but portraits.

One of the most fascinating works of art in the Met's Chasing Clouds directly relates to the difficulties in trying to expand the range of early photography. In 1844, a pair of French "lensmen", Marie-Charles-Isidore Choiselat and Stanislas Ratel, took-up the challenge of creating a daguerreotype landscape.

Marie-Charles-Isidore Choiselat & Stanislas Ratel, Landscape, 1844

The result of this experiment is little short of miraculous. The astonishing mirror image of the cottage is a masterpiece in its own right. 

Yet, the daguerreotype of Choiselat and Ratel is an unsettling work. It is so focused on surface detail that there is little depth to the photo. And because of the slow exposure speed of daguerreotypes, not a trace of clouds can be seen. If any were in the sky at the time, these would have been moving too fast to be captured by Choiselat and Ratel! 

For artists and the scientific-minded of the Romantic era, the allure of clouds was too great to be resisted. The process of photography was still in its adolescence, when Gustave Le Gray and Charles Marville successfully addressed the problem of focusing on landscape and skyscape. 

Gustave Le Gray (1820-1884) approached this task by combining photographic negatives. This was a process already in use in studio photos, but Le Gray audaciously took it out-of-doors. Beginning in 1855, he took photos of the shoreline and the sky along France's Mediterranean coast, especially the seaport of Sète. He joined the negatives at the horizon line, almost seamlessly.

Gustave Le Gray, The Great Waves, Sète, 1857

Images like The Great Wave earned Le Gray international acclaim. He had succeeded in creating photographs with expertly focused expanses of sky and of land & sea. Moreover, he was able to evoke the pictorial interest and emotional impact of paintings like Constable's Hadleigh Castle.

While Le Gray was preoccupied with his remarkable combination technique, Charles Marville took some time-off from photographing the architecture of Paris to do a little "cloud spotting" for himself.

Marville was anything but a "romantic" photographer. His eye for precision and expert camera work would earn him the commission from Napoleon III to document the demolition of vast swathes of old Paris by Baron Haussmann in order to make way for the boulevards and public spaces of the new "city of light" Paris.

Yet, Marville was intrigued by the masses of clouds he could see from the window of his studio on the rue Saint Dominique. With the dome of the hospital, Les Invalides, as the center point, Marville adjusted the camera lens to focus on the skies, leaving the lower reaches of the scene in shadow. Since the silhouette of Les Invalides was instantly recognizable, the photo succeeded without the need to combined negatives.

Charles Marville, Cloud Study, Paris (top)1855-56; (below)1856-57

A year later, Marville tried again. This time, he achieved a more balanced focus of cloud structure and of architectural detail in the streets below. Given, the technology of the time, this ranks as one of the great achievements of early photography.

Both Le Gray and Marville were "pushing the envelope" of what was feasible for photographers during the 1850's. Though innovations in camera design and film quality were made later, a gulf continued to exist between vision and practice for much of the nineteenth century.

As Chasing Clouds at the Met shows, photography did not kill painting, even when it came to depicting clouds. Many artists continued to follow Constable's lead and kept painting the skies above. 

John Singer Sargent, Clouds, 1897

One of my favorites in the Chasing Clouds exhibition is a watercolor by John Singer Sargent. Sargent's Clouds was painted in 1897, exactly one year before a major technological innovation which would change photography and cloud spotting forever.

A new hand-held camera, the Graflex single-lens-reflex, was introduced by the Folmer and Schwing Manufacturing Company of New York City in 1898. Though bulky-looking to modern eyes, the Graflex had a rapid-shutter speed and portability that Gustave Le Gray and Charles Marville could only have dreamed of using.

In the hands of a skilled photographer, the Graflex was capable of producing masterpiece-caliber pictures. In the hands of Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946), it did. 

Clara Sipprell, Alfred Stieglitz, 1932

Stieglitz used a Graflex to create his iconic The Steerage in 1907. A decade and a half later, Stieglitz tilted his Graflex upward and began taking cloud photos. Initially, he called this series, Music - a Sequence of Ten Cloud Photographs. Then, as the number of cloud photos escalated, the title was changed to Equivalents. 

 Alfred Stieglitz, Equivalent,1924

Stieglitz prints of the Equivalent photos are prized possessions of a number of American art museums. But they cannot be shown on a long-term basis. Thus, Metropolitan Museum is doing art lovers a great service by presenting twenty-one Equivalents for their close inspection. Opportunities like this do not often occur.

In a short essay, published in 1923, Stieglitz explained his motivation for taking cloud photos:

I wanted to photograph clouds to find out what I had learned in 40 years about photography. Through clouds to put down my philosophy of life—to show that my photographs were not due to subject matter—not to special trees, or faces, or interiors, to special privileges—clouds were there for everyone. 

Thus, in looking toward the clouds, Stieglitz was grappling with Constable's dilemma. When depicting the skies, is the artist's goal to establish a "standard of scale" or to gain access to "the chief organ of sentiment?” 

Stieglitz' answer was one of ironclad certainty, nothing is "due to subject matter... clouds were there for everyone." 

Perhaps unconsciously, this assertion provides a clue for the way that the clouds became less-and-less identifiable and the images more cryptic as the Equivalent series evolved. Some of the cloud-filled skies look the ripples in a stream of water or a crust of ice on a frosted window in winter.

Alfred Stieglitz, Equivalent, 1926

Alfred Stieglitz, Equivalent, 1926

Other photos bore little resemblance to anything, including clouds. This ambiguity would lead to applause for Stieglitz from the connoisseurs of modern art and the embrace of the Equivalents as an important addition to the growing body of Abstract art. 

Stieglitz' effort to use cloud study to open a portal to personal feelings and insights was certainly a heroic endeavor. It took place over an extended period, 1922 to 1931. Over four hundred sky and cloud photos were taken, some of which were quickly presented in exhibitions such as Seven Americans in 1925 at the Anderson Galleries in New York. Others were not published or exhibited until many years later. 

Stieglitz' cloud photography was something of an on-going venture during his lifetime. Might we then interpret the Equivalents as an open-ended, never officially closed endeavor? Might we not add some of our own renderings of the ethereal realm above our heads?

Here to answer these questions and to conclude our essay is a selection of Anne's cloud studies. 

                                                                                   

                                                                                        

Anne Lloyd, Sky & Cloud Studies, 2022, 2024 & 2025  

There is no doubt in my mind, reflecting on Anne's photos, that Constable was correct in stating that the sky supplies the "keynote" of landscape art.

And clouds? Stieglitz was right, too. The clouds are "there for everyone."

***

Text: Copyright of Ed Voves, all rights reserved                                                                                          

Original photography, copyright of Anne Lloyd, all rights reserved

Book Cover of Constable’s Year by Susan Owens Courtesy of Thames & Hudson

Promotional Image for the Chasing Clouds exhibition, Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC

The Equivalent photos by Alfred Stieglitz, used in this review, are from the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. These are comparable to those on display in the Metropolitan Museum’s exhibition, Chasing Clouds. The Met’s Stieglitz photos are currently embargoed for use in Internet articles and reviews.

Introductory Image:

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2014) A cloud study made at Haworth, Yorkshire, UK, near the Bronte Parsonage Museum.

John Constable Hampstead Heath, looking toward Harrow at Sunset, 1821 Oil on paper: 24.1 x 29.8 cm. (9 ½ x 11 ¾ in.) Private collection. Courtesy of Thames & Hudson

Ramsay Richard Reinagle, Portrait of John Constable, c.1799 Oil on canvas: 76.2 cm × 63.8 cm (30.0 in × 25.1 in) National Portrait Gallery, London.

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2026) Studio Window Skyscapes, 2026.

John Constable, Study of altocumulus clouds, September 13, 1821. Oil on paper: 24.8 x 30.3 cm. (9 7/8 x 11 ½ in.) Yale Center for British Art. B1981.25.156

John Constable, Cloud Study, September 25, 1821. Oil on paper: 24.8 x 30.3 cm. (9 7/8 x 11 ½ in.) Yale Center for British Art. B1981.25.156 Courtesy of Thames & Hudson

John Constable, Hadleigh Castle, 1829. Oil on canvas: 122 x 164.5 cm. (48 1/8 x 64 7/8 in.) Yale Center for British Art. B1977.4.42Courtesy of Thames & Hudson

Marie-Charles-Isidore Choiselat & Stanislas Ratel, Landscape, 1844. Daguerreotype: 16.4 x 21.7 cm (6 7/16 x 8 9/16 in.) Metropolitan Museum of Art. #1994.417J

Gustave Le Gray, The Great Wave, Sète, 1857. Albumen silver print from two glass negatives: 33.7 x 41.4 cm (13 1/4 x 16 5/16 in.) Metropolitan Museum of Art. #1976.646

Charles Marville, Cloud Study, Paris (top) 1855-56. Albumen silver print from glass negative: 15.4 x 21 cm (6 1/16 x 8 1/4 in.) Metropolitan Museum of Art. #2005.100.353; (below) 1856-57. Albumen silver print from glass negative: 16.7 x 20.6 cm (6 9/16 x 8 1/8 in.) Metropolitan Museum of Art. #1987.1094

John Singer Sargent, Clouds, 1897. Watercolor on white wove paper: 35.6 x 25.2 cm. (19 x 9 15/16 in.) Metropolitan Museum of Art #50.130.30

Clara Sipprell, Alfred Stieglitz, 1932. Gelaton Silver Print: Image Sheet: 22.3 x 17.6 cm. (8 ¾ x 6 15/16 in.) National Portrait Gallery, Washington D.C. NPG 82.196

Alfred Stieglitz, Equivalent, 1924.Gelatin silver print: Image: 9.6 × 12.1 cm (3 13/16 × 4 13/16 in.); Paper: 10.1 × 12.7 cm (4 × 5 in.): Art Institute of Chicago. Alfred Stieglitz Collection. #1949.793

Alfred Stieglitz, Equivalent, 1926. Gelatin Silver print. Image: 11.9 × 9.3 cm (4 11/16 × 3 11/16 in.) Art Institute of Chicago. Alfred Stieglitz Collection. #1949.809

Alfred Stieglitz, Equivalent, 1926. Gelatin Silver print: Image: 11.6 × 9.2 cm (4 5/8 × 3 5/8 in.)Art Institute of Chicago. Alfred Stieglitz Collection. #1949.809

Anne Lloyd, Photos. Sky & Cloud Studies, 2022, 2024 & 2025

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2025) November Clouds, 2025.

   

Modern Times: American Art 1910-1950 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Modern Times: American Art 1910-1950

Philadelphia Museum of Art

April 18—September 3, 2018

Reviewed by Ed Voves

Modern art in the United States came of age between 1913 and 1951. These two years were highlighted by art exhibitions of seminal importance, both held in New York City.  The controversial Armory Show of February 1913 shocked an America still clinging to the moral certitudes of the Victorian Age. Nearly four decades later, the Ninth Street Show, held between May 21-June 10, 1951, marked the triumph of the Abstract Expressionism of the New York School.

A great deal of American art was created in between these two red-letter dates. The range and variety of art produced during those crowded decades is truly impressive, as can be seen in the  recently-opened exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Modern Times: American Art 1910–1950.

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2018) Gallery view of Modern Times: American Art 1910–1950 

The works of art on view in Modern Times are almost entirely drawn from the collection of the  Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA). A few come from a private collection which has been promised to the PMA, but there can be little doubt about the exceptional caliber of the museum's holdings of American art. 

Many of these works came to the PMA during the cash-strapped 1930's and 1940's. The head of the PMA at that time, Fiske Kimball (1888-1955), used his limited resources to buy or to encourage donations of then contemporary art. The payoff for Kimball's astute collection strategy can be seen in this excellent exhibit.

Modern Times is a comprehensive and thoroughly enjoyable examination of how American art reflected, rejected  and retooled the accepted ideals of society in "these United States." It is brilliantly curated by Jessica Todd Smith. As an added touch, period clothing and artifacts, such as flapper dresses and Prohibition-era cocktail shakers, are used to complement the art on display.  

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2018) Jessica Todd Smith, Curator of the Modern Times exhibit

A key work of the exhibit is Georgia O’Keeffe's Red and Orange Streak. Painted in 1919, shortly O’Keeffe moved to New York City, it is both an abstract and a realist work of art. O'Keeffe painted it as an homage to the Texas plains where she had lived prior to moving to the East Coast. O'Keeffe took nocturnal walks, observing the dazzling displays of lighting above the darkened expanse of the prairie. 

Such "special effects" in nature are impossible to depict in terms of absolute realism. In fact, no such state exists is nature because the real impact is felt, indeed co-created, in the imagination of the viewer. 

Georgia O'Keeffe, Red and Orange Streak, 1919

O’Keeffe acknowledged this in letter to a friend, noting that “the whole thing—lit up—first in one place—then in another with flashes of lightning—sometimes just sheet lightning—and sometimes sheet lightning with a sharp bright zigzag flashing across—I . . . sat on the fence for a long time—just looking at the lightning.”

Here we can see the process at work that informed O'Keeffe's often-quoted belief that, "nothing is less real than realism. Details are confusing. It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis, that we get at the real meaning of things."

O’Keeffe's Red and Orange Streak came to the PMA in 1949, part of her generous endowment of art works by herself and by her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, who had died in 1946. The PMA is rich in works by both artists and this no doubt helped the museum recently secure a vast archive of photos by Paul Strand, Stieglitz' versatile colleague.

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2018) Gallery view of the Modern Times exhibit, showing works by Georgia O'Keeffe, Red Hills and Bones (1943) and From the Lake, No. 3 (1924)

With several of her works on view, we are able to appreciate O'Keeffe's trajectory as an artist and that of twentieth century American art as a whole. More famous for her landscapes of New Mexico, such as Red Hills and Bones (1943), O'Keeffe also painted works evoking the backwoods feel of Stieglitz' summer home at Lake George, New York. What makes this 1924 painting, From the Lake, No. 3, so significant is that O'Keeffe pointed in the direction that American mainstream art would take, leading to the Ab-Ex paintings at the Ninth Street Show of 1951.

The transition from realism to abstraction was but one of the seismic shifts which occurred in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. The Armory Show certainly led to the efforts of Stuart Davis during the 1930's to "strip a subject down to the real physical source of its stimulus" and then to the 1950's abstraction of Barnett Newman and Jackson Pollock.

Stuart Davis, Something on the Eight Ball, 1953-1954

Realism, however, never entirely lost out to Abstraction. Edward Hopper, Andrew Wyeth and O'Keeffe herself maintained figurative art as a force to be reckoned with. The truth about America's search for an answer to the challenges of the twentieth century, in art and in society, is that there was no one solution, no defining creed of Modernism. Rather, there were many.

During this period of bewildering change, American society crossed the divide from regionalism to a nationalistic identity, from a solidly White Protestant moral code to an acceptance of diversified ethnic ideals. For the first time, the creative talents of African Americans and women secured a beachhead on the New York-East Coast art scene.

Horace Pippin, The Getaway, 1939

Major African American artists like Beauford Delaney, Dox Thrash and Horace Pippin figure prominently in Modern Times. These pioneering artists were literally heroic figures. Pippin, crippled in his right arm by a wound suffered in World War I, taught himself to paint in a vigorous folk style. His works, evoking the rural atmosphere of West Chester in the Philadelphia suburbs, offer an interesting counterpoint to a very different painter from that area, Andrew Wyeth, who is represented in the exhibit by farm scene as well.

Dox Thrash, likewise wounded in World War I, was a gifted painter and a superlative print maker. His powerful images, especially in this latter medium, celebrated African American life at a time when it was all but marginalized by the dominant White culture .

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2018) Beauford Delaney's Portrait of James Baldwin, 1945

Beauford Delaney (1901-1979) was possibly the most talented of the African American artists on view in the PMA exhibit, as his striking portrait of the writer James Baldwin testifies. Delaney however had the bad luck to begin his career just as the glory days of the Harlem Renaissance were cut short by the Wall Street Crash. After years of struggle and hardship, he eventually emigrated to France in the 1950's.        

The role of women in the visual arts is also surveyed in Modern Times. However, the numerous works by Georgia O'Keeffe dominate this aspect of the exhibit and the absence of talented female photographers such as Dorothea Lange and Berenice Abbott is a further weak point. 

A more questionable feature of Modern Times is the lack of art related to the World Wars and the economic collapse of the 1930's. In terms of the impact on the lives of America's people between 1910 to 1950, the global conflicts had powerful and enduring effects. So too did the Great Depression. Yet, there are few direct references to these events.

Man Ray, A.D. 1914, 1914

World War I does figure in two major paintings in the exhibit. Both, however, require considerable effort to interpret before their allusions to the horrors of 1914-1918 can be appreciated. In A.D. 1914, Man Ray posed the combatants, men and horses, in a cubist style which directly acknowledges works from the 1913 Armory Show, especially Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase.

More indirectly - and ultimately more emotionally affecting - is Painting No. 4 (A Black Horse), created by Marsden Hartley in 1915.

Marsden Hartley, Painting No. 4 (A Black Horse), 1915

Hartley lived in Berlin at the outbreak of 1914-1918 war. Berlin was both the capital of the militaristic German Empire and the leading city of Gay culture in Europe. Hartley's lover, Lieutenant Karl von Freyburg, was killed in the opening campaign of World War I. In homage to his fallen companion, Hartley created a series of brightly-hued works, masterpieces of human sentiment and of skillful layering of meaning. 

These paintings are essentially painted colleges, grouping examples of German military insignia, patriotic memorabilia, cult-like symbols and cryptic allusions to von Freyberg's identity. The toy horse for instance refers to von Freyberg's branch of the army, the cavalry. 

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2018) Detail of Marsden Hartley's Painting No. 4 (A Black Horse)

Von Freyberg was killed on October 7, 1914 at a small French town called Gommecourt, not far from the English Channel. The German and Allied forces were engaged in an attempt to outflank each other called the "Race to the Sea." Neither won and both armies, upon reaching the Channel, began digging trenches. The horror of the Western Front had begun.

This excursion into military history is significant because it reminds us how all of the trappings of military glory, which were held to be important before 1914, were now utterly useless. The medals and insignia, which Hartley painted with such vibrant energy, served no purpose except as talismans to cherish the memory of the dead.  

Hartley's Painting No. 4 did exactly that, offering a testament to the Lost Generation of World War I - and II. The lack of similar examples of art from World War II is not such a great omission after all. In fact, World War II produced few great works of visual art, just as the poetry of the 1939-1945 conflict never equaled the verse of 1914-1918.

The theme of Modern Times: American Art 1910–1950 transcends the specific events of the twentieth century, even such an important one as World War II. How the people of the United States conceptualized the industrialized, urban culture which increasingly pervaded every aspect of their lives is the theme of this provocative exhibit.

Wharton H. Esherick, Of a Great City, 1923

The Philadelphia artist Wharton Esherick created a memorable expression of the challenges posed by the sensory overload of modern life. In the wood engraving, Of a Great City, Esherick shows the novelist Theodore Dreiser almost buried by an avalanche of cultural objects, books, music, works of modern art. Below in the concrete canyon is an ant-like stream of humanity. How can we preserve our individuality under such circumstances?

In political terms, the answer was provided by the title of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Depression-fighting program, the New Deal. Bold legislative and economic initiatives were tried, but never a fundamental realignment of political power. 

Art in the United States emphasized similar concepts, ideals that espoused the "new", the "efficient," the "visionary."  When you look at the PSFS Building in Philadelphia, the first International-style "skyscraper" built in the U.S., you see all these Modernist attributes in place.

Lloyd Ullberg, PSFS Building, Philadelphia, c.1932 - 1933

Yet, when you reflect upon the clean, austere lines and the soaring reach of the PSFS building, you realize that this treasure of American architecture has more in common with the wide-open prairie sky that Georgia O'Keeffe saw than with the European ideals of the Bauhaus.

This is the great lesson of the Philadelphia Museum of Art's superb exhibit. No matter how "thoroughly modern" America became during the first decades of the twentieth century, it remained America First.

***
Text: Copyright of Ed Voves, all rights reserved                                                                Photos courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Anne Lloyd

Introductory Image
Charles Sheeler (American, 1883 - 1965) Pertaining to Yachts and Yachting, 1922. Oil on canvas, 20 x 24 1/16 inches. Philadelphia Museum of Art: Bequest of Margaretta S. Hinchman, 1955-96-9.

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2018) Gallery view of Modern Times: American Art 1910–1950 exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Georgia O'Keeffe (American, 1887 - 1986) Red and Orange Streak, 1919. Oil on canvas, 27 x 23 inches. Philadelphia Museum of Art: Bequest of Georgia O'Keeffe for the Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1987-70-3. 

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2018) Gallery view of Modern Times exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Arts, showing works by Georgia O'Keeffe, Red Hills and Bones (1943) and From the Lake, No. 3 (1924)

Stuart Davis (American, 1892 - 1964) Something on the Eight Ball, 1953-1954. Oil on canvas, 56 × 45 inches. Philadelphia Museum of Art: Purchased with the Adele Haas Turner and Beatrice Pastorius Turner Memorial Fund, 1954-30-1. © Estate of Stuart Davis / Licensed by VAGA, New York

Horace Pippin (American, 1888 - 1946) The Getaway, 1939. Oil on canvas, 24 5/8 x 36 inches. Philadelphia Museum of Art: Bequest of Daniel W. Dietrich II, 2016-3-3.

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2018) Beauford Delaney's Portrait of James Baldwin, 1945. Oil on canvas, 22 x 18 inches. Philadelphia Museum of Art: 125th Anniversary Acquisition. Purchased with funds contributed by The Daniel W. Dietrich Foundation in memory of Joseph C. Bailey and with a grant from The Judith Rothschild Foundation, 1998-3-1

Man Ray (American, 1890 - 1976) A.D. 1914, 1914. Oil on linen: 36 7/8 × 69 3/4 inches (93.7 × 177.2 cm) © Man Ray Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris Philadelephia Museum of Art # 1944-90-1 A. E. Gallatin Collection, 1944

Marsden Hartley (American, 1877 -1943) Painting No. 4 (A Black Horse), 1915. Oil on canvas, 39 1/4 x 31 5/8 inches. Philadelphia Museum of Art: The Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949-18-8

Anne Lloyd, Photo (2018) Detail of Marsden Hartley's Painting No. 4 (A Black Horse), 1915.

Wharton H. Esherick (American, 1887 - 1970), Of a Great City, 1923. Wood engraving, image: 9 15/16 x 6 5/16 inches, sheet: 11 7/16 x 7 1/2 inches. Philadelphia Museum of Art: Purchased with the Lola Downin Peck Fund from the Carl and Laura Zigrosser Collection, 1979-12-11.

Lloyd Ullberg (American, 1904-1996) PSFS Building, Philadelphia, c.1932 - 1933. Gelatin silver print, image and sheet:10 x 7 3/8 inches. Philadelphia Museum of Art: Purchased with the Lola Downin Peck Fund, 1999-121-3.