Woodmere presents Arc of Promise

Race is one of several bedeviling issues the exhibition addresses. The Civil War is depicted by Max Rosenthal, a Polish immigrant who, with his four brothers, founded a successful Philadelphia lithography business. Rosenthal’s Battle of Antietam (1865) and The Soldier’s Dream of Home (1864) depict the intensity of the war’s bloodiest day, and the yearning of a sleeping soldier for his family.

Visions from the aftermath of the Civil War

After the war, Constitutional amendments sought to ensure the rights of the formerly enslaved. In The Fifteenth Amendment (or Civil Rights) (c. 1875), George Bacon Wood envisions an encounter in Washington Square, a gathering spot for Philadelphia’s Black community. Two well-dressed pipe smokers pause at a fruit stand to share a light. A Black man is at the center of the canvas, facing viewers as he accepts the lit pipe of a white man. In this simple exchange, Wood foreshadows equality.

The post-Civil War world also appears in Charles V. Brown’s Untitled (1874). A Black servant fills the glass of a grimacing white man sitting before a fire with a gouty, heavily bandaged foot. Perhaps, Brown implies, the man’s pain is recompense for luxury obtained at others’ expense. Francis Coates Jones’s depiction Left in Charge (1882) is sweeter, showing a somewhat befuddled but pleased Black grandfather cuddling an infant.

Thomas Hovenden’s painting of neighbor Samuel Jones playing the banjo, I’s So Happy (1882), might seem stereotypical, but gallery notes indicate that disrespect was not intended. Dox Thrash inverts the motif in Played Out, Intermission (c. 1937-1938) in which a tired musician leans over his instrument. Thrash’s composition draws attention to his somber face, making us see the person, instead of an anonymous player.

A tumultuous America

Allan L. Edmunds’s lithograph American Bicentennial (2008) neatly summarizes Black American history in images of a slave-stacked Middle Passage ship, Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr., handcuffed wrists, a photograph of a World War II soldier, Barack Obama, and handwritten excerpts that include this: “By the 1780s they had a thousand-year history in West Africa.” Edmunds, a Philadelphian, is founder of the Brandywine Workshop and Archives.

Murray Dessner similarly encapsulates the Vietnam era, which roiled American politics and society through the 1960s and ‘70s. Viet Nam (1992) stitches together visual elements and phrases that resonate with anyone who experienced the period, whether as a soldier, potential draftee, protester, college student, conscientious objector, military parent, or youthful consumer of the shocking, unavoidable images that came into American living rooms on television and in magazines.

The fragility of American power

Gerry Tuten and Harvey Finkle address chronic challenges. Tuten’s 1975 Untitled (Christmas 1970 superimposes giant dollar bills over a picture of mother and child with hands extended, while Finkle’s Steve Robertson Advocating for More Health Care Funding for the Disabled, Harrisburg (1992) frames the tension between money and power.

Foreign policy receives an unexpected treatment in Twins Seven Seven’s Barefoot President in a Fragile Boat While the World Tears Apart (2006-2007). Seven, a Nigerian who settled in Philadelphia, depicted George W. Bush navigating the Iraq War in the guise of a tribal figure. Bush stands astride a tiny boat holding the globe on his shoulders, as a tiny man paddles him down the river. Notes indicate this is a commentary on both the fragility of American global power and the environment. Considering the continuing relevancy of Seven’s themes, and his comparison of W with George Washington and Atlas, I wish the artist were still alive, to see what he’d make of the current state of affairs.

Optimistic visions

Arc of Promise is more than a catalog of national sins. It celebrates America in images of admirable individuals and heroic deeds. In paintings commissioned by armchair travelers, it revels in towering mountains, peaceful sunsets, and cascading waterfalls. Some may be surprised by canvases, tureens, and vases depicting Philadelphia’s water works, both the 1801 original and the 1815-1909 successor. As the first major municipal water system in the United States, delivering potable water to urban neighborhoods from elegant neoclassical headquarters, the water works were a potent symbol of American democracy and technical progress.

Master illustrators are well represented, including Charles Santore, whose watercolor series Paul Revere’s Ride (2002) presents Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 19th-century poem with cinematic drama.

More perfect is the promise

Contributions by Jerry Pinkney, who illustrated more than 100 books, include the watercolor portrait Jackie Robinson as a Brooklyn Dodger (1982) and illustrations for

I Want to Be (1993) by Thylias Moss. The late artist also provided the title for Arc of Promise when he acknowledged America’s endless capacity for reinvention, despite its faults.

Pinkney understood the nation had not fulfilled commitments articulated in the Declaration and codified in the Constitution, yet believed the arc of American history moves toward those promises. Pinkney believed that through her people, America could, and would, continue to form a more perfect union.

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