Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Terence Duren
American; 20th-century
Omaha, NE: Joslyn Art Museum
42%
The Badlands. 1947. Oil on canvas
It’s probably safe to say that surrealism simply doesn’t work well as a vehicle for social commentary (Ernst’s Europe After the Rain being the notable exception). A genre devoted to oneiric reveries and strange juxtapositions has a hard time speaking to things in the real world. Here, Duren scatters an assortment of symbols of the Old West around an appropriately strange landscape and attempts to make a point about the excesses of settlement. But it doesn’t work. His catalog of vices is too obvious, and the landscape itself (a typical Nebraskan badlands vista) is already so bizarre that he struggles to render it more so, as Dalí did with the Cap de Creus rocks. What is the point of equating a burning saloon with the observation that a horse’s mane looks like flames? It’s all too forced, too didactic; there is no room for the observer to be properly disturbed. That scrap of cloth fluttering in the breeze in the center of the painting has potential. A picture full of that kind of thing, and only that kind of thing, would have been better. (WC, 2025)