Modern Art in Technicolor: Art, Film, and American Identity

Focusing on post-war American art and film, this series examines the formation of national identity. Each screening pairs a work from the museums’ modern and contemporary art collection with a film that speaks to its concerns. As in any dialogue, the conversation goes both ways: as the chosen artworks reveal hidden complexities in apparently simple films, the selected films use narrative to tease out and make apparent the aesthetic and social ambitions of art. The series is programmed by Harmon Siegel, a Ph.D. student in the History of Art and Architecture program at Harvard.

About today’s film:
Fritz Lang
Secret Beyond the Door, 1948 (99 min.; black and white)

Before the screening, view Louise Nevelson’s Total Totality II (in Gallery 1110, on Level 1).

Louise Nevelson’s Total Totality II (1959–68) distributes fragmentary everyday objects throughout a black wall, reconceiving modernist abstraction as haunted by the specter of domestic life. The work belongs to a moment when the artist transformed her own apartment into a dimly lit installation, lining her walls with these black crates. Living with her work, she made herself into a gothic heroine, drawing on the narrative tradition embodied by Fritz Lang’s Secret Beyond the Door, in which the female protagonist works to face the terror of domestic confinement embodied by her haunted house. When seen together, these works raise vital issues about the patriarchal institutions of American modern art, which repress the domestic realm as merely decorative. Nevelson’s gothic sculpture thus confronts her position as a woman artist making abstract art.
 
The screening will take place in Menschel Hall, Lower Level.

Free admission

Support for this program is provided by the Richard L. Menschel Endowment Fund. Modern and contemporary art programs at the Harvard Art Museums are made possible in part by generous support from the Emily Rauh Pulitzer and Joseph Pulitzer, Jr., Fund for Modern and Contemporary Art.