Terror in Brooklyn
Artist: Louis Guglielmi (American, 1906-1956)
Date: 1941
Medium: OIl on canvas
Collection: Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, NY, United States
Description
Terror in Brooklyn, Louis Guglielmi’s best-known work, is a highly enigmatic and personal response to social conditions. Guglielmi was associated with a group of American artists who used the language of European Surrealism to evoke the social and political climate of the Great Depression and the war years that followed. Here, in a realistic style, he portrays three women in nuns’ habits huddling inside a bell jar; they gaze up at a configuration of pelvic bones suspended on the side of a building on a desolate street. First exhibited in a group show at the Downtown Gallery the year that it was painted, the canvas was then-titled Pelvic Beatitudes, Brooklyn, calling attention to the nuns’ cowering reaction to the pelvis bones, which resemble a crucifix or holy relics. Asked to explain the composition, Guglielmi said that it contained “associative ideas and images determined by mood caused of irrational events in the objective world - murder in the streets, war - subjective reality.” Instead of explicitly depicting the war into which he would soon be conscripted, Guglielmi envisioned a mysterious scene that invoked the period’s anxious, ominous atmosphere.
