Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

To Make a World: George Ault and 1940s America

October 15, 2011 to January 8, 2012

Bloch Building, Gallery L3 & L4
Free admission

George Ault Bright Light at Russell’s Corners, 1946. Oil on canvas.
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Lawrence

During the turbulent 1940s, artist George Ault (1891-1948) created eerie and evocative paintings that are some of the most original made during those years. To Make a World: George Ault and 1940s America, organized by the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., will be on view at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art Oct. 15 through Jan. 8, 2012.

The first major exhibition of Ault’s art in more than 20 years, To Make a World recreates a moment in America when the country was rendered fragile by the Great Depression and made anxious by global conflict. Although much has been written about the glorious triumph of the World War II, what has dimmed over time are memories of the tenor of life on the home front, when the country was distant from battlefields yet profoundly at risk.

The art Ault created while living in relative isolation in rural upstate New York became a personal world of clarity and composure that offset a real world he felt was in crisis.

This exhibition of 48 paintings, drawings and prints presents Ault in context with 22 of his contemporaries. Although many of these artists, like Ault, worked far from the wartime turmoil felt in large cities, they nevertheless confronted the devastating uncertainty of the times. Paintings by celebrated artists Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth as well as by those less widely known today, such as Edward Biberman and Dede Plummer, present an aesthetic vein running through 1940s American art not previously explored and reveal affinities with and contrasts to the world Ault so carefully made in his studio.

Central to the exhibition are four paintings Ault made between 1943 and 1948 depicting the crossroads of Russell’s Corners in Woodstock, New York, not far from Ault’s home. The mystery in Ault’s Russell’s Corners pictures and other paintings in this exhibition, such as the Nelson-Atkins’ own haunting January Full Moon, evoke the mood of life on the home front, while the meticulous control with which they were rendered offers a counterbalance to civilization at the brink during the war years.

To Make a World revisits 1940s America, drawing in visitors in through the least likely of places—not grand actions or cataclysmic events, not epoch-making posters and headlines, but quiet spots where some mystery seems always on the verge of being disclosed.

In honor of their service, the exhibition will be free for veterans and active duty military and their families on Veterans Day, November 11.

Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

The Photographs of Brett Weston

November 23 to March 25, 2012

Bloch Building, Gallery L11
Free admission

Brett Weston, American (1911-1993). Water Reflection, Logging, Alaska, 1973. Gelatin silver print, 11 x 14 inches (27.94 x 35.56 cm). Gift from the Christian K. Keesee Collection. Copyright The Brett Weston Archive. 2007.53.22.

This exhibition celebrates the career of Brett Weston (1911-1993). The son of famed American photographer Edward Weston (1886-1958), Brett Weston was a "natural" with the camera. After serving as his father's apprentice, Brett was a teenager when he first received high-level, international recognition as an artist.

Over his long and prolific career, Brett Weston exemplified the modernist aesthetic. He used the medium in a resolutely "purist" manner: his preference was always for sharp lenses and beautifully modulated black-and-white prints. He applied this technical precision to a sustained exploration of the idea of abstraction. In recording the details of everyday things—rocks, plants, trees, water, peeled paint, the human figure—Weston sought to balance fact and form, objective reality and the beauty of abstraction. Through the graphic language of form, Weston aimed to suggest the deeper possibilities, and mysteries, of familiar things.

While this exhibition includes key works from the Museum's Hallmark Photographic Collection, it draws primarily on—and is organized to celebrate—the generous gift of Christian K. Keesee, of Oklahoma City. The owner of the Brett Weston Archive, Mr. Keesee donated a group of 260 Weston prints to the Nelson-Atkins in late 2007. This remarkable gift gives the Museum a rare holding of this artist's work, while providing an ideal research collection for students and scholars.

In studying this single career in depth, viewers will come to a more nuanced understanding of some of the key creative currents of mid-twentieth-century photography.