Cécile Whiting, University of California, Irvine

During World War II, maps that pictured troops advancing and retreating across national borders, along with photographs and newsreels documenting death and destruction in locations around the world (including the naval base of Pearl Harbor, the tropical rain forests of Guadalcanal, and the beaches of North Africa), prompted a change in painted representations of landscape in the United States. Cécile Whiting's research focuses on how American artists recast the terms of landscape painting as it had been practiced in the 1930s, broadening its scope from the local to the international and from the pastoral to the antipastoral. The lecture analyzes the ways in which artists depicted landscapes joining the national and the international. In particular, it examines paintings by Thomas Hart Benton and John Steuart Curry, who adopted a panoramic mode, literally and metaphorically widening the horizontal scope of their paintings to encompass both the United States and Europe. As a counterpoint, it discusses The Rock, the painting in which Peter Blume attempted to fit the globe into his landscape.