greatest+obstacle...,+The

Date: 1975
 * [[image:https://s3.amazonaws.com/saam.media/files/styles/x_large/s3/images/1984/1984.124.122_1a.jpg?itok=k9ARuhBU width="384" height="289" link="@https://americanart.si.edu/artwork/greatest-obstacle-being-heroic-doubt-whether-one-10952"]] || Title: ** "The greatest obstacle to being heroic is the doubt whether one may not be going to prove one's self a fool; the truest heroism, is to resist the doubt; and the profoundest wisdom, to know when it ought to be resisted, and when to be obeyed."--Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance, 1852. From the series Great Ideas. **

Artist: **Richard Hunt** Born: Chicago, Illinois 1935

Medium: chromed and welded steel Dimension: 32 x 50 5/8 x 33 3/4 in. (81.3 x 128.7 x 85.8 cm.) Smithsonian American Art Museum Gift of Container Corporation of America

Accession: 1984.124.122 || In 1950 the Container Corporation of America began commissioning artists to create works for its advertising campaign, “Great Ideas of Western Man.” For the title of this work, Richard Hunt selected a quote from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s //The Blithedale Romance//. He was drawn to Hawthorne’s tale of how a utopian commune is ruined by its members’ selfish actions and its look at the differences between living in a city and in the countryside. The artist takes the city’s “junk,” in this case car parts, and welds them together to form organic shapes that evoke what Hunt described as “the sense of freedom one has in contemplating nature.” Here, Hunt animated these discarded fenders by making them seem to struggle in all directions, as if they were trying to expand. He implied different stages of growth by giving the core a dull finish and polishing the appendages to a high shine that suggests a newborn organism.
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