Morris Kantor, Baseball at Night, 1934, oil on linen, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mrs. Morris Kantor, 1976.146.18
What can paint on canvas do better than a photograph?
Baltimore Orioles's Camden Yards
A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of attending a night game at Camden Yards in Baltimore. It was a beautiful evening—lingering twilight, happy crowds, and cool spring air sweetened with the textures of BBQ and sauerkraut; it was every baseball cliché come to life.
Sitting up in the stands I hauled out my camera and tried to take a snapshot that captured the essence of it all. And I was utterly thwarted. The angles were all wrong, the field too big, the faces too dark, and the lights too bright. If I shot details I lost the big picture. If I shot the big picture I lost the details … I couldn’t get essence of squat.
A few days later I recalled Baseball at Night by Morris Kantor from SAAM’s collection. Everything in this painting looks so natural as a self-contained composition, yet when I compared it to my snapshot I realized how brazenly the artist distorted space to fit it all in. The infield is so compressed that it looks like the pitcher could practically hand the ball to the catcher from the mound, and the diamond is kind of skewed right, maybe to make room to paint the whole arc of the stands. It’s a manipulation of Euclidian geometry that baffles my camera, but it let Kantor show us the wind-up to the pitch, the crowd, the stands, the flag, and the lights in a way that my camera will never understand.
Chief curator Eleanor Harvey points out that Kantor painted Baseball at Night in 1934 in the middle of the Great Depression. Night baseball was a new phenomenon then: the first major league night game didn’t occur until the following summer (1935), but in 1934 fifteen of sixteen minor leagues (not teams, leagues) had at least one ball park with lights. We don’t have any evidence that Kantor was a fan or that this painting was modeled after a specific park, but the scene is to Eleanor and many others a depiction of “Everywhere, USA” – - a pleasant summer evening watching baseball with friends, savoring America’s pastime during rocky times.
When we open in July, Baseball at Night will be on view on our second floor in the north lobby, along with Thomas Hart Benton’s mural Achelous and Hercules and WPA works from the 1930s.
Related Story: NPR interviews Elizabeth Broun, Director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, on Baseball at Night
