On View Now: America’s Evolving Identity at the Whitney

George Tooker’s most famous figurative painting is a lonely one, even though more than ten figures crowd the canvas. Each person depicted seems lost in their own world, their expressions downcast—though the painting portrays a single still moment, we get the sense there is reluctant trudging, a slow monotony.

At the center of the underground subway scene, a woman clutches her stomach, her features corked up in unmistakable anxiety. Though the composition is visually light, with bright shades of red and white, there’s a grim darkness in the tableau. Geometric utilitarianism is a hallmark of the painting—rigidly angular stairs and turnstiles helping society function—but are these people functioning? They wander through this passage, but do they have a destination? Tooker deftly captures postwar isolation and existentialism in The Subway, one of many twentieth-century works currently on display on the seventh floor of the Whitney in New York.

“‘Untitled’ (America)” thematically organizes figural, abstract, photographic and sculptural works created from 1900 through the 1980s, including several pieces by celebrated household names like Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Georgia O’Keeffe and Mark Rothko. The open-ended gallery layout lets museumgoers forge their own spatial chemistry with the exhibit, as opposed to being locked into a fixed narrative arc. It’s a smart choice, given the eclectic array of works.

It’s difficult to consider America as a totality—the idea and the entity and the theory—in a single exhibit, but “‘Untitled’ (America)” does a solid job of tracing a path through a nation’s collective psyche, interested in place and pop culture, memory and media, abstraction and urban living. (The show’s title pays homage to a work of the same name made of forty-two lightbulbs by Felix Gonzalez-Torres.)

Celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Whitney’s downtown location, the exhibition pairs long-held works from the museum’s collection with newer acquisitions, spotlighting art that attempts to make sense of the American identity. The individual works exist in conversation with the pieces around them while making their own implicit, though often abstract, argument or statement about some American ideal.

Cherokee painter Kay WalkingStick’s April Contemplating May stands out for its off-kilter coloration. Acidic hues of green and orange alongside murky swatches of blue hint at a sense of environmental collapse. Coloration also takes center stage in Mark Rothko’s Four Darks in Red from 1958. A stark black occupies the top of the canvas, outlined in a crimson so bright it seems bodily. Beneath it, different swatches of red mingle in Rothko’s trademark rectangular regions. They couldn’t be more different.

How does a canvas of colors fit into an exhibit centered on the American identity? It’s certainly not as inherently and obviously “American” as a Rosalyn Drexler painting of Marilyn Monroe, Robert Henri’s portrait of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney or Fritz Scholder’s abstract rendering of the Wounded Knee Massacre—all of which are in “‘Untitled’ (America)”—but the resonances are individual and abundant. The colors evoke a screaming America, a doom, a violence and sublimity. We feel how hard it is to be human here or anywhere.

I found myself particularly touched by the humanity of Alice Neel’s 1970 portrait of Andy Warhol. Like her other portraits of distinctive figures, the composition trades flattery for honesty. Warhol sits, vulnerable, surgical scars crawling up his stomach from beneath the corset he had to wear after being shot. He looks tired, his eyes shut as if at rest, his lips shut and frowning. Neel’s intentionally incomplete brushwork on Warhol’s pants and in the space surrounding his body evokes loss and loneliness.

The Whitney notably featured Edward Hopper’s Second Story Sunlight in exhibition materials—perhaps because its scene feels quotidian and quintessentially suburban. Two women occupy a patio, one reading and the other basking in sunlight. The representation of neighboring twin homes, as well as a third peeking out from the left, gives a universality to the sunlit figures.

Contrast the golden hour of Second Story Sunlight with the fluorescent nighttime of Archibald John Motley Jr.’s Gettin’ Religion, which depicts a street scene in Chicago’s Black community. “Both sardonic and affectionate,” the label suggests, was Motley’s representation of caricaturized stereotypes that draw on the iconography of minstrel shows. The scene feels bright and alive. People peer out their windows onto the street, where a series of figures are in motion, dancing and blowing trumpets, around a larger-than-life figure who might be real, or could be a statue, posed atop a platform.

As much as these paintings differ in color, style and scope, each is visually stimulating and each speaks to a motif of our shared America. Driving that home are the figurative and abstract representations of iconic American architectural wonders like the Brooklyn Bridge, Pittsburgh steel mills and city streets. Decorative arts, mixed media and sculpture feature in “‘Untitled’ (America)” as well, many of these works probing mass media and its effects. One canvas by Yayoi Kusama collages Air Mail stickers; an acrylic, plastic and wax work by Robert Watts piles up rainbow eggs; and a filled brass plate sparkles with glass beads, ceramic and coral in Dinner #15 by Lucas Samaras. There really is something here for every American.

“‘Untitled’ (America)” will be at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York indefinitely.