What's Cooking?
Hurry to the Westmoreland Museum of American Art in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, or you will miss our traveling exhibition Scenes of American Life: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum!
Scenes of American Life features sixty-two paintings and sculptures that showcase the exhilaration of the Roaring Twenties, the stark drama of the Great Depression, the common cause of the War years, and the country's new confidence after World War II and beyond. Images of jazz and street life, farms and factories, workers and families captured a changing America, from Thomas Hart Benton's Midwest to Jacob Lawrence's Harlem.
The show "cooks" with works like Peter Blume's Vegetable Dinner. At first glance this painting seems an informal, if unconventional, still life. But the uptilted table and figures cut off at the edges of the painting signal a modern, almost surreal approach. Several details—the way the smoker's eye just aligns with the landscape outside or the way the vegetable peeler's knife is poised at the thumb—reveal an underlying tension in this domestic scene.
Source: Virginia Mecklenburg. Scenes of American Life: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum (exhibition text, Smithsonian American Art Museum, 1999).
Pictured: Peter Blume, 1906 Russia–1992 USA, Vegetable Dinner, 1927, oil, 25 1/4 x 30 1/4 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase.
Hurry to the Westmoreland Museum of American Art in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, or you will miss our traveling exhibition Scenes of American Life: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum!
Scenes of American Life features sixty-two paintings and sculptures that showcase the exhilaration of the Roaring Twenties, the stark drama of the Great Depression, the common cause of the War years, and the country's new confidence after World War II and beyond. Images of jazz and street life, farms and factories, workers and families captured a changing America, from Thomas Hart Benton's Midwest to Jacob Lawrence's Harlem.