Boom: Art and Design in the 1940s
Philadelphia Museum of Art
2600 Benjamin Franklin Pkwy.
Philadelphia
April 12 - Sept. 1, 2025
Seen June 28
A week after the U.S. dropped 30,000 pound bunker busters on Iran, I visited the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s latest exhibit, “Boom: Art and Design in the 1940s.”
The explosive show title hits on the loud artwork inspired by the atomic age and alludes to the adjacency of the 1940s to the 2020s through the immediacy of onomatopoeia: "Boom! Here we go again."
Wartime innovation is the show's central theme. On display are 250 works of sculpture, painting, fashion, photography and furniture influenced by World War II. Abstractionism is the best known genre of artwork to have developed during the decade. While the raging war lead to military couture, propaganda posters and patriotic sculpture fashioned from scrappy materials, its conclusion fostered a sense of societal fracturing and alienation that found a voice through a “free-swinging, spattery fashion, with only vague hints at subject matter.”
Those are the words New Yorker art critic Robert M. Coates used in a 1944 article to describe the burgeoning style “of painting gaining ground in this country” that he would two years later name “abstract expressionism.” Abstract expressionism started to find its footing during WWII. It got a label and traction after the war's conclusion.
Abstraction is about the elimination of literal representation. Throughout the ‘40s, painting took to kinetic spontaneity and robust colors in order to convey ideas and emotion while photography turned towards form, light and composition as its new subjects.
"Hieroglyphs," by Less Krasner and "Male and Female" by Jackson Pollock.
Some of the works on display include Less Krasner’s 1949 piece “Hieroglyphs,” which drenches a paint-caked canvas with sharp white geometric forms that look like secret code; Jackson Pollock’s 1942 “Male and Female,” which juxtaposes a ruler-straight figure dressed in mathematical equations and a curvier, Cubist-inspired shape; and Alfonso Ossorio’s 1950 “Time Present,” a scarlet depiction of racial discrimination and stigmatized sexual identity told through fiery scribbles.
The advent of abstraction and a broadening interest in subjectivity made room for more specific visual conversations about identity. “Time Present,” in particular, expresses the messy, hard-to-articulate strife of a queer, Filipino man brought up in the Roman Catholic church. Ossorio communicated his inner conflict by melting wax between layers of watercolor before scraping it all off to reveal layers of intersecting markings, with a rough outline of a kneeling man in the foreground.
Many of these works show artists at war with themselves and societal status quo. This is contrasted to the black and white abstract photography from the time, which translated the disorder of war into elemental forces of light and time.
“Emanation 1,” by Barbara Morgan; “Air Rad over the Kremlin,” by Margaret Bourke-White; and "Atomic Bomb Explosion" by Harold Edgerton.
“Emanation 1,” by Barbara Morgan encapsulates the spirit of this new approach. She drew with a beam of light in a black-out room, then opened her camera shutter to capture her own fleeting designs. Wartime photographer Margaret Bourke-White relied on the light of parachute flares, tracer shells and other streaks of ammunition in order to seize her skyline photo “Air Rad over the Kremlin,” which documents when Germany invaded Russia in 1941. She took pictures not of decimated buildings or affected people, but of the dark fireworks forged by weapons through the sky.
Inside the museum is also one of Harold Edgerton’s photos of an atomic bomb detonation; the outcome is a gelatin silver print of what looks like a UFO, or some sort of alien entity. Through the science of a rapatronic camera — which can record a still image with an exposure time as short as 10 nanoseconds — Edgerton encapsulated the profound power of man made technology that is impossible for most of us to even conceive of.
What struck me about these wide-ranging works of abstraction was how quiet and fundamental the photographic documentations of a world war were in comparison to the crowded chaos of painters portraying their personal outlooks at postwar American life. Abstraction was in part understood as a fragmented metaphor for the broken supply chains and changing roles and migration of women and minorities amid the industrial restructuring of the '40s. From today’s perspective, this dichotomy could mirror the way our country’s collective culture has become wildly fractured and dotted by distracting culture wars, while our nation’s imperial power abroad is often less talked about, sustaining our widespread execution of innocent lives through mass weapons manufacturing and deployment.
Last week, from inside the neoclassical shelter of the Philly Art Museum, I wondered whether our attacks on Iran would tip the scales towards a possible World War III. The parallels between the modern art of today and the 1940s only heightened my paranoia. While some argue that artistic innovation in America is already existentially dead, the maximalist absurdism of digital conceptual art, hyper pop and even meme culture seem to me like a natural evolution out of postwar abstraction. It feels, unfortunately, like foreshadowing.
Pop art and minimalism had their time to shine, but the evocative and often over-stimulating experimentalism of abstract expressionism has undeniably returned in recycled form to meet the myriad anxieties of this moment. There’s no telling what will come next; we can understand only in retrospect.
