The Steeplechase, Coney Island by Milton Avery, 1929. Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of Sally M. Avery. Image © 2013 Milton Avery Trust/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York © Metropolitan Museum of Art.
There will be four venues in the coming year for the exhibition Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland, 1861-2008. Would that there were forty more so that everyone within earshot of a carnival barker’s cry could gaze at this mirror of our nation at moral, aesthetic, and economic leisure over a century and a half. From its first stop, at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, where Robin Jaffee Frank, prime mover of the exhibition, is chief curator, to its last in San Antonio, the exhibition’s 140 objects offer what Frank describes as a “touchstone for complex ideas about the American dream.” And it is not all Weegee and freaks and funny rides by a long shot. Sanford Robinson Gifford’s 1866 The Beach at Coney Island, among the first depictions of the sandy spit of land, is a dreamlike respite with just a touch of the coming carnival in the distance. From this and a few other early seaside scenes the exhibition moves almost as rapidly as the resort itself did into every kind of excess, every iteration of cynicism and/or charm from Steeplechase Park to Luna Park to Dreamland to…the nightmare of its darkest days at the end of the last century, when the beach amounted to little more than a giant ashtray.
Every artist, every photographer found something different at Coney Island, and the curators seem to have put most of this on view and between the covers of one of the finest catalogues in recent memory.
After closing in Hartford, the show will travel to the San Diego Museum of Art (July 11-October 13), the Brooklyn Museum (November 20-March 13, 2016), and the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, Texas (May 11, 2016-September 11, 2016).
Coney Island Embrace, New York City by Morris Engel, 1938. Orkin/Engel Film and Photo Archive. © Morris Engel.
Coney Island: Visions of an American Dreamland, 1861-2008 • Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut • to May 31 • thewadsworth.org
