Intimate Modernism at the Amon Carter, part four

Earlier this week I wrote that none of the artists in the Fort Worth Circle brought anything particularly new to post-war painting, but that the Circle provided an interesting look at how American artists were synthesizing European modernism. Continuing about Intimate Modernism at the Amon Carter...

It's easy -- almost too easy -- to see which artists most influenced artists in Fort Worth in the early 1940s. George Grammer's Oil Wells at Night (1950) is a beautiful painting, but it's also straight out of Paul Klee. Bill Bomar's portraits of his friends and neighbors are deeply indebted to Modigliani. The surrealistic biomorphism that seemingly took over American painting in the late 1940s influenced Bror Utter and Bomar in Texas. Several Dickson Reeder paintings borrow heavily from de Chirico.

What to do with so much borrowing? I found myself thinking about many of the paintings in Intimate Modernism as artist-driven historical documents. Grammer's Oil Wells at Night would have fit right into a chapter in David Halberstam's The Fifties as an example of how Americans mixed their awareness of their newfound economic might with equally-newfound confidence in the cultural sphere.

Grammer's painting is essentially an industrial scene set at night. As Grammer surely would have known, there was a particularly rich history of American industrial paintings going back to the 1920s and 1930s: Sheeler, Demuth, etc. While those painting certainly owe something to cubism, they're inescapably American, too. But instead of continuing in Sheeler's tradition, Grammer chose to borrow from Europe.

It was an entirely fitting choice: For almost a decade the relationship between the U.S. and Europe had been front page news in just about every American newspaper just about every day. By 1950, two years into the Marshall Plan, Europe was finally beginning to recover from the hunger and unemployment that plagued the continent after the war. The world's ascendant economy -- and visual arts scene -- was America's. The country, and her artists, were asserting themselves as never before, measuring themselves up against the artists they'd been trained to follow.

And so Grammer mixed a quintessentially modern American scene -- a Texas oil field -- with European painting. Just as American money, grain and ideology rushed into Europe, so too did America's artists.

Related: Intimate Modernism at the Amon Carter part one, two, three.