Early Abstract and Modernist Painting

Passing Show, 1951
Object-Philip Evergood, Passing Show
In the early years of the Great Depression, Philip Evergood associated with members of the so-called Fourteenth Street school of artists and others who championed the lower classes through images that were often unsettling. These artists favored a highly graphic style of painting that reflects both their training as artist-reporters and their use of popular media images as sources. Evergood’s Passing Show juxtaposes a down-and-out African American man, seated on a street curb, with a crowd of fashionably dressed women passing in and out of a five-and-dime, a kind of inexpensive variety store once a fixture in urban America. The shop windows offer a disparate assortment of tools, kitchenware, and wigged mannequin busts that mimic the shoppers’ garish makeup. Evergood used brittle lines and jarring colors to evoke the superficial allure of the “passing show” while emphasizing the man’s exclusion from it. The painting reveals a humorous, ironic understanding of the delusions of modern consumer society.
Learn more about this painting on the Terra Foundation website.
Early Abstract and Modernist Painting

Telegraph Poles with Buildings, 1917

Construction, 1915

Peinture, 1917–18

Painting No. 50, 1914–15

Nature Symbolized #3: Steeple and Trees, 1911–12

Sails, 1911–12

Welcome to Our City, 1921

Boy with Cow, 1921

Super Table, 1925

Purple and Green Leaves, 1927

Boat Going through Inlet, c. 1929

The Green Chair, 1928

Politics, 1931

Brooklyn Bridge, on the Bridge, 1930

Sailboat, Brooklyn Bridge, New York Skyline, 1934

Red Amaryllis, 1937

Room Space, 1937–38

Adolescence, 1947

Highway, 1953

Topcat Boy, 1970

Untitled (Village Street Scene), 1948

Passing Show, 1951

Kalounna in Frogtown, 1986