Windham, Connecticut, 1815

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Windham, Connecticut, 1815

United States, 1957
Paintings
Oil on canvas
26 1/4 x 32 3/16 in. (66.68 x 81.76 cm)
Gift of Mr. and Mrs. John Dodds (M.70.80.2)
Not currently on public view

Curator Notes

Blair often set his historical farming scenes in a specific season of the year....
Blair often set his historical farming scenes in a specific season of the year. In Windham, Connecticut, 1815 Blair depicted a typical small New England town with its houses clustered around a simple, white clapboard church. Fascinated with the color white, the artist painted many such winter scenes. After he had been painting a few years, Blair realized that colors could be effectively rendered not only as pure hues but also in tonal gradations, which increased the apparent depth of a scene. Despite the overall soft focus, the black roofs dramatically contrast with the delicate white and gray of the snow and the houses stand out as bright geometric spots of color.
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About The Era

The beginning of every century inspires a general sentiment of endless possibilities, and the twentieth century was no exception....
The beginning of every century inspires a general sentiment of endless possibilities, and the twentieth century was no exception. A modern age marked by technological wonders had begun, and the United States was to be its focal point. Lewis Mumford, one of the country’s most brilliant thinkers, explained that, unlike Europe, “the New World expanded the human imagination.” Young American students still traveled to Europe, especially Paris, for their initiation to art, but the progressive new ideas of cubism, futurism, and surrealism that they imbibed only found their true home in the United States.
As demonstrated by the first generation of modernists in the circle of Alfred Stieglitz, American artists rarely abandoned referential ties to the physical world completely. The simplification of form, multiple perspectives, and ideas about the fourth dimension that radical proponents of cubism espoused would find their most compelling American expressions in the fishermen of Marsden Hartley, and the animal bones and skulls of Georgia O’Keeffe. To these artists, abstraction meant the synthesis of personal experience.
The introduction of psychological ideas, first in the form of Sigmund Freud’s discussion of the unconscious and later in the writings and art of the surrealists, found an enthusiastic audience in America. Such new concepts not only expanded ideas about the human mind but also encouraged the liberation of social conduct, in particular, sexual mores. Women increasingly became involved in creative aspects of the new modern age. In 1934 the Los Angeles artists Helen Lundeberg and Lorser Feitelson issued the only surrealist manifesto to appear in the United States, thereby demonstrating that in a relatively short time California had seriously challenged New York as the leader of the brave new world.
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Bibliography

  • About the Era.
  • Streeter Blair's America, 1888-1966: A Retrospective Exhibition, February 26 to March 30, 1974. Beverly Hills: Sári Hellery Gallery, 1974.
  • Fort, Ilene Susan and Michael Quick.  American Art:  a Catalogue of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art Collection.  Los Angeles:  Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1991.