Boom: Art and Design in the 1940s

The demands of the war machine, seismic societal shifts and the work of émigré artists inevitably transformed the way Americans saw art, design and fashion during the Second World War. This exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art assembles more than 250 items from the museum’s collection – including paintings, prints, photographs, clothes and household objects, some of which have never been shown – to convey the sheer scale of this change (12 April–1 September). In addition to work by the major painters of the time, including Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner and Georgia O’Keeffe, more unusual objects are on show: a chair designed by Jens Risom that incorporates woven parachute straps, or – in an instance of the curators looking beyond American shores – a women’s jacket designed by Elsa Schiaparelli in Paris, with pockets deep enough to carry a gas mask in case of emergency.

Find out more from the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s website.
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Male and Female (1942–43), Jackson Pollock. Philadelphia Museum of Art

Woman’s dinner jacket (1941) designed by Elsa Schiaparelli. Philadelphia Museum of Art

The Park Bench (1946), Horace Pippin. Philadelphia Museum of Art