But there’s also a familiarity to the lesser-known works adorning the walls. Not because British audiences have seen them before; they haven’t—nearly half of the eighty-odd paintings, photographs, and prints in this relatively small, three-room show have never previously been exhibited in the UK, and the yawning gap between the John Singer Sargents and the Jackson Pollocks in the Tate’s collections has left us sorely deprived. All the same, we know exactly what we’re looking at: representations of the mythologies of an “America” that has long inhabited the popular global imagination, from the towering structures of the archetypal modern metropolis to the rustic barns, uniform fields of corn, and white picket fences of prairie farmland. [...]
An education in the work produced by the precisionist artists of the 1920s through the 1940s, the “cool” of the exhibition’s title is a reference to both form and content. The images use sharp, well-defined lines and striking applications of pigment (whether as bold blocks of color or in arresting monochrome). They speak to a desire for a sanitized version of reality that tries to master the anxieties and ambivalences associated with modern life, a need more keenly felt in America, a country then synonymous with certain signifiers of modernity—industrial and technological development on an epic new scale in the form of dams, bridges, factories and skyscrapers—to a degree still alien to her European cousins.
Strange then, or perhaps fitting, that human figures are so often absent in these scenes. They present a remarkably consistent vision of a country eerily devoid of its inhabitants: factories, mills, and water plants without workers, apartment blocks without tenants, cityscapes minus the bustling populace, farms without farmers. Endless images of man-made edifices reduced to hollow testaments to human endeavor and hard labor. It’s the realization of the American Dream without the mess and confusion of actual human life.
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