January 22 - March 14, 2008
The exhibition, Capturing the Spirit: Virginia Snedeker and The American Scene is a major retrospective of works by the 20th Century Urban Realist and explores the decades of the 1920s, 30s and 40s, when the creative life of America experienced the vibrancy of the Jazz age, the drama of the Great Depression and the turbulence of World War II.
Virginia Snedeker challenged abstract modernism that was gaining popularity in Europe and the United States during those times. Among a group of other American artists, she gave prominence to the reality of daily experience. Working in oils, inks and watercolors, she produced cityscapes, portraits, drawings of civilian and wartime life, as well as extraordinary illustrations for The New Yorker magazine.
Snedeker, like her contemporaries Thomas Hart Benton and Edward Hopper, saw the romance and beauty in the everyday lives of Americans, particularly those in the city. She embraced urban realism as a means of visual storytelling, infusing each spare line and simplified color palette with emotion, drama and humor. She found inspiration in light, texture and the grit of American life; the interaction of neighbors, street vendors and the inventiveness of city kids creating games on sidewalks; these were all things that excited Snedeker’s eye.
During the Depression, Snedeker, like other artists, was helped by commissions from President Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (the WPA) to execute public art, most notably murals for the nation’s post offices. Her mural depicting the voyage of John James Audubon along the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers still hangs in the Audubon, Iowa Post Office.
Her illustrations for The New Yorker magazine earned her a growing reputation. In the tradition of the magazine’s legendary illustrators (Rea Irving, James Thurber, Otto Soglow, William Steig), Snedeker rendered sophisticated, often humorous views of American life. She explored themes of artists and their community, and, during World War Two, the lives of American servicemen and women. In her “spot art” (black and white drawings interspersed throughout the magazine), she continued to explore her fascination with the intimate moments of the lives of soldiers and civilians in the city.
Shortly after her marriage to fellow artist William Lindsay Taylor, Snedeker found herself in the position of having to maintain a steady income while he was drafted overseas. With art commissions few and far between, she, like many other American women, was forced to find full-time employment in the wartime aircraft production. The long hours and the scarcity of artists’ supplies during the war took their toll on her career.
Upon her husband’s returned home in 1945, the duties of marriage, the birth of her two children and the family’s move to Brooklyn, New York and eventually to Ridgefield, New Jersey, took Snedeker far from the creative center of the New York art scene.
Much has been written about the fate of post-War American women, their relegation to hearth and home upon the return of their husbands from the war front. It had never been easy for women to gain prominence in the arts; the prevailing social order in America in the 1950s made it even more difficult. This seems to have been the fate of Virginia Snedeker. Her artwork found no audience, and her name disappeared from serious discussion of the arts.
Through the efforts of Anne Gossen, curator of exhibitions at the Morven Museum and Garden in Princeton, New Jersey, Snedeker’s art has reappeared. Working with Snedeker’s brother Richard, and her son Robert Taylor, a stunning exhibition from their extensive collections of Snedeker’s work was presented at the Morven in 2006.
In cooperation with Gossen and the Morven Museum, the Morris Museum Curator of Exhibitions Ann Aptaker has assembled a strong exhibition highlighting the artist’s major achievements, featuring personal ephemera from Snedeker’s poignant life.
February 24, 2008
1-4 p.m.
FREE
Join us for a reception celebrating the opening of four new exhibitions! |
