Explore Art and Design in 1940s America Through These 250 Paintings, Photos, Posters and Artifacts
A new exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art examines how artistic expression evolved throughout the war years and the postwar period
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In the popular imagination, the 1940s were dominated by sacrifice at home and violence abroad as World War II raged on. But at a new exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, curators aim to examine the decade through a new lens: artistic expression.
Titled “Boom: Art and Design in the 1940s,” the show features 250 items from the museum’s collections—including posters, paintings, photographs, jewelry, clothing, furniture and household objects—that reflect 1940s culture and history.
As Sasha Suda, the museum’s CEO and director, says in a statement, the exhibition “sets out to challenge the perception that creative pursuits ground to a halt during the first half of the decade and, instead, will shine a spotlight on the remarkable creativity of 1940s America.”
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The show begins with a red, white and blue “Patriot Radio” designed by Norman Bel Geddes in 1940. In the months and years to come, the radio would have aired news from the war that the Allies were fighting in Europe—which the United States entered in 1941. But as the public radio station WHYY’s Peter Crimmins writes, the radio would have also broadcast baseball games and hit songs by artists like Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald.
“I think there’s a misconception that creative pursuits ground to a halt during World War II,” Jessica Smith, the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s chief curator, tells Artnet’s Jo Lawson-Tancred. “The 1940s is a generative moment, a moment of genesis for things that develop more maturely in the 1950s.”
The exhibition spotlights artifacts made of wartime materials, like a chair woven from parachute straps, and items made for the war, like the uniform made for the women’s branch of the U.S. Navy.
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Other fashion items on display include three outfits by the Italian designer Elsa Schiaparelli, who fled Paris for New York before the city was captured by the Nazis in 1940. Some of her design choices were the products of wartime rationing—which limited fabric in addition to food and industrial materials. “Trimly tailored with little frill and no flounce, Schiaparelli’s suits have an almost masculine line,” per WHYY.
Painters like Georgia O’Keeffe, Horace Pippin and Ben Shahn captured 1940s America with their own “modern flair,” according to the statement. O’Keeffe painted Red Hills and Bones in 1941, as she was “spending the early half of the decade in the Southwest, finding inspiration and solace from the environment around her,” Smith tells WHYY.
“The war was still there,” Smith adds. “It’s something that you’re dealing with either by moving towards and embracing with your iconography, or just the opposite.”
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Pippin, who had served in World War I, deftly captured American racism among soldiers and veterans in works like Mr. Prejudice (1943). Other artists, like Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, “abandoned recognizable forms and forged new visual languages,” per the statement. For example, Pollock’s Male and Female (1942-43) is an early example of Abstract Expressionism, the art movement that peaked in the 1950s.
“Boom” also features many objects from the postwar period in the latter half of the decade, when industries like design and manufacturing expanded. It concludes with the atomic age, which began with the United States’ bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Photographs on view captured the terror of the bomb, while Pablo Picasso’s The Dove (1949) became a symbol of world peace.
As Smith tells Artnet, “We found inspiration from this idea that people persisted and wanted to find a way forward and continued creative pursuits, despite restrictions and adversity.”
“Boom: Art and Design in the 1940s” is on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art through September 1, 2025.
