Depth of Being, part 2

At the Whitney Museum of Modern American Art yesterday, I was moved by the Grant Wood landscapes. He was able, through his paintings and pencil/charcoal drawings, to explore how a wide open space can be utterly, crushingly claustrophobic—antithetical, in fact, to the existence of the individual. And this was no depiction of the aftermath of cataclysm; this was an ahead-of-its-time understanding on the part of Wood of what psychology would come to realize as the depths to which the human psyche is vulnerable. Loneliness, hopelessness, a life without love, all forced to sublimate into an American-dream-ice-cream-social kind of hellscape, neatly arranged into fertile fields and trim houses. That touch of gothic in Wood's work isn't accidental.

In the explosion of Modern art in the early 20th century, it's easy to see how a "regional" artist such as Grant Wood or Andrew Wyeth was shrugged off as sentimental, shallow, old-fashioned. In the literary world, a similar critical reception dogged Robert Frost. Understanding of these depictions of depth of being comes slowly; it is so easy to miss or dismiss a depiction of our own tortured nature when that depiction is disguised as our everyday life. I just watched the movie version of Edith Wharton's brilliant The Age of Innocence; Martin Scorsese, the director, reportedly called this movie "the most violent" movie he ever made. That violence—violence that comes from without, in the hegemony of social construct, and violence that comes from within, as one attempts to warp oneself into what the social construct demands—is exactly what Grant Wood was able to capture.

How easily we—each one of us, each individual—is subsumed, broken, lost. How easily. Art's purpose is to remind us of this, to encourage us to maybe salvage something of ourselves while we still can. It's a salvage operation, people. And time's running out.