On View
On viewObject number1999.20
Looking at the Sunshine
Maker
John Stockton de Martelly
(American, 1903-1979)
Dateca. 1938
Mediumegg tempera on linen mounted on board
Dimensionsframe: 51 3/8 × 5 × 2 3/4 in. (130.5 × 152.4 × 7 cm)
image: 38 1/8 in. × 48 in. (96.8 × 121.9 cm)
image: 38 1/8 in. × 48 in. (96.8 × 121.9 cm)
Credit LineElisabeth Claire Lahti Fund
Exhibition History"Annual Exhibition," Art Institute of Chicago (1941).
"Painting in the United States," Carnegie Annual, Pittsburg, PA (1943).
"Views of the American Landscape: Works from the Permanent Collection," KIA (Dec. 21, 2002 - Jan. 12, 2003).
"A Legacy for Kalamazoo: Works Acquired through the Elisabeth Claire Lahti Fund, 1998 - 2012," KIA (Sept. 29, 2012 - Jan. 20, 2013).
"Lasting Legacy: A Collection for Kalamazoo," Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, Kalamazoo, Michigan (Sep. 6, 2014 - Jan. 4, 2015).
"Unveiling American Genius," KIA Permanent Collection Exhibition, Traditional, Markin, Nay and Groos Galleries (March 1, 2021 - December 31, 2023).Label TextThis portrayal of an African-American man pausing in his labors was based on the artist’s observations of The Ford Brick and Tile Company in Kansas City, Kansas. The man is posed in front of a beehive kiln, where the bricks and tiles were baked. De Martelly was fascinated by the vibrancy and vitality of everyday activities, and he expressed deep appreciation for this location, writing that “such color I have never seen anywhere before or since” and that his time there was “one of the most magnificent aesthetic experiences I have ever had.” He also wrote of the challenges of the labor undertaken in and around the kilns, where workers often had to spend time in drying rooms in which temperatures neared two hundred degrees.
Looking at the Sunshine showcases de Martelly’s frequent elongation of space, a characteristic of his work shared with that of Thomas Hart Benton, his friend and colleague at the Kansas City Art Institute in the 1930s and ’40s and a fellow Regionalist painter. Benton had been inspired by 16th-century Mannerist artists like El Greco, who likewise represented elongated figures and asymmetrical, seemingly impossibly unstable spaces. Though Regionalism is most commonly associated with Benton and contemporaneous artists John Steuart Curry and Grant Wood, de Martelly’s work is an example of the broader popularity of rural Midwestern subject matter in the 1930s. The seeming dryness and barrenness of the land surrounding the kiln may be an allusion to the ecological challenges confronting rural Americans in the Dust Bowl era, as many were forced to leave the Midwest or abandon farm work for other professions – a topic also often addressed in Regionalist painting.
