The White Dam

Raphael Gleitsmann (American, 1910-1995) The White Dam, 1939 Oil on canvas Private Collection

Appearing on the Ohio art scene in the 1930s, Raphael Gleitsmann became known as an inventive painter who fused modernist and regionalist imagery. The White Dam is an entirely invented subject that combines industrial machines and bizarre distortions of scale to create a disturbingly surreal vision of modern life. The hard-edged forms and simplified, geometric shapes suggest the influence of Clarence Carter (born 1904), a leading Cleveland artist of the 1930s whose paintings are displayed later in the exhibition. Carter may have also inspired this ironic interpretation of a scene of industrial pollution in a clean, precisionist style. Gleitsmann studied informally with Paul Travis at the Cleveland School of Art and had his second solo exhibition in 1940 at Cleveland College of Western Reserve University, where the art department was head by William and Natalie Grauer. Having recently returned from the New York Worlds Fair of 1939, The White Dam was the featured painting in Gleitsmanns exhibition at Cleveland College.