Intimate Modernism at the Amon Carter, part three

Continuing from this morning's post...

Migrations such as Kelly Fearing's journey from Louisiana to Fort Worth were repeated thousands of times all over America: Young men and women moved to participate in World War II as soldiers, plant workers, and so on. 'Intimate Modernism' reminds me that many questions about American art in the 1940s are ripe for consideration (but weren't, alas, considered in the show's catalogue which treats the Fort Worth Circle on narrow terms, failing to contextualize the artists or their work beyond their North Texas environs): What impact did World War II have on art and on the artists who served in the military or who worked in the war industries? What did the increased mobility of Americans, especially the migration of Americans from rural areas to urban areas, mean for American art in the 1940s and 1950s?

From about 1935-36 on, the threat of American involvement in another European war was in the news practically every day. Americans were overwhelmingly opposed to US intervention in Europe. How did American isolationism impact artists -- especially those away from New York -- who were increasingly looking to Europe for inspiration?

There's a Fearing print in 'Intimate Modernism' that serves as a bookend to his 1941 Attic Piece. Titled The Birds (faintly above, sorry but it's the best I can do), Fearing made it after the war, in 1946. It shows two abstracted birds plummeting into a similarly abstracted pool of water. The birds look like bombs, diving before violently making contact with water. Abstract lines shoot across the picture plane like cracks across broken glass.

If Fearing's Attic Piece fears the coming horrors of war, The Birds remembers them. During WW2 Fearing was a draftsman/production-illustrator for Consolidated Vultee Aircraft, which produced the B-24 bomber at its Fort Worth plant. (The 'noses' of the 'birds' in Fearing's print bear a plain resemblance to the nose of the B-24.)

The Birds seems like a clear reference to the war, and to Fearing's own contributions to the Allied victories: During the final years of the war the American firebombing of Germany (by B-24s) and later Japan was big news. In August the US dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, effectively ending the war. I think The Birds shows Fearing working through the violence that America dropped from its planes. His work reminds me that that American art of the 1940s is ready for re-examination.

Related: Aerial bombardment WWI-style.