NEW ACQUISITIONS
Celebrating American Tradition
Kyra Markham, 1891-1967, Square Dance (detail), 1945.
Tempera on masonite. Gift of Bruce and Susan Lueck,
Camden, South Carolina
Will South, chief curator
Now on view in the Andrew Kerns Gallery
is a truly great American Scene painting,
Square Dance (1945) by Kyra Markham,
given by generous CMA patrons Bruce and
Susan Lueck of Camden.
What makes an American Scene painting
different from other American paintings?
American Scene is what art historians call
those images made mostly in the mid-20th
century that sought to define American
values and ways of living. After World War
I, many painters were disenchanted with
foreign culture and wished to celebrate
the virtues of home. Artists Grant Wood,
Thomas Hart Benton, and John Steuart
Curry, known as Regionalists, gave us
paintings of farmers, railroads, and wild
horses—American subjects. Often, their
paintings had a not-so-subtle political
point of view and a large degree of
romanticism as they exaggerated the idea
of Americanness.
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A peer of those more famous artists, Kyra
Markham painted Square Dance at the end
of World War II when Americans were
delirious with victory. In this painting,
we see the average American—a farmer of
simple means and simple dress—enjoying
the equally simple pleasure of dancing
to live folk music. What could be more
traditional and homespun than a good oldfashioned square dance? The brilliant color,
the muscular, dynamic figures, and the
overall compositional movement speak to a
joy unleashed and expressed by something
distinctly American: the square dance.
Markham has placed a single figure at the
center of this painting that does not move
or smile. A woman, eyelids down and lips
still, functions visually as the calm in the
middle of the storm. She is a symbol of
the mother who worries that while we are
happy now, another war will come. This
silent knowledge is present in the middle
of an otherwise giddy painting, making the
image one of great subtlety and wisdom.
Markham was born Elaine Hyman, the
daughter of a Chicago jewelry merchant.
Around 1907, she left high school to study
drawing at the Art Institute of Chicago;
two years later, she was acting in Chicago’s
experimental Little Theater. In 1913,
Markham met author Theodore Dreiser
and the following year she moved to New
York to live with him and to pursue acting.
Later, she began to achieve success as a
printmaker: one lithograph won a prize
at the Philadelphia Print Club’s annual
exhibition and her work was acquired by
the Whitney Museum of American Art,
the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the
Library of Congress. In 1936, she joined
the Federal Arts Project of the Works
Progress Administration, which sponsored
her lively lithographs of backstage scenes.
The prestigious annual publication Fine
Prints of the Year cited her prints in 1937
and 1938. L ]H[