Skating by

Our traveling exhibition Scenes of American Life: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum closes today in Albany, New York.

Visit the Albany Institute of History & Art today or see Scenes at its next venue—the Dayton Art Institute—beginning January 12, 2002.

Scenes showcases 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. It includes this WPA-commissioned work, Skating in Central Park, by Agnes Tait.

The lively image depicts a winter paradise and the sharp, fresh clarity of a winter's day in the city. New York's grand skyscrapers take second place to nature as city dwellers delight in the country pleasures of skating and sledding in Manhattan's most important public park. The artist was indebted not only to the linear simplicity of American folk art, but also to the animated figures in works by the sixteenth-century Netherlandish landscape painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder. With its decorative and rhythmic pattern and geometry, Skating in Central Park reveals the artist's direct yet sophisticated approach.

Source: Elizabeth Prelinger. Scenes of American Life: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum (New York and Washington, D.C.: Watson-Guptill Publications, in cooperation with the Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2001).

Pictured: Agnes Tait, 1894–1981, Skating in Central Park, 1934, oil, 33 7/8 x 48 1/8 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Transfer from the U.S. Department of Labor.