The American 1930s have been read so often as a decade of social documentary — the Depression photographers, the Mexican muralists — that we sometimes forget what was happening inside the rooms the camera didn't enter.
In those rooms, Edward Hopper was painting hotel lobbies that look like waiting rooms for an event no one names. Georgia O'Keeffe, having largely left New York, was reducing the New Mexico landscape to the geometry of a single bone. Charles Sheeler, in Pennsylvania, was treating the Ford River Rouge plant with the still patience that earlier painters had reserved for cathedrals.
None of the three knew the others well. None of them claimed a movement. What links them — and what this exhibition argues — is a shared discipline of quietness: a refusal of the rhetorical, an attention to what holds still long enough to be seen.
Twenty-three works, drawn from twelve private collections, reconstruct that discipline across the years 1925 to 1939. The exhibition is presented in three sequential rooms — one per artist — and concludes with a single comparative wall.