Alexander Nemerov's Questionable Religious Interpretation of George Ault's Russell's Corners Paintings

George Ault, Bright Light at Russell's Corners (1946)

Alexander Nemerov, in his To Make a World: George Ault and 1940s America (2011), propounds a cockeyed double-aspect theory that the light in George Ault’s wonderful Russell’s Corners paintings is religious. He says:

(1)  “In one sense it is Christian, the sign of a private devotion, strange as this may seem about an artist who hated religion.” He refers to Sassetta’s Journey of the Magi, a reproduction of which hung in Ault’s studio. He says that the star in Sassetta’s painting 

seems an apt model for the large and eponymous streetlight in Bright Light, making the lonely crossroads a place of religious reverence and holy guidance, even for a person like Ault who had changed his middle name from Christian to Copeland, who spent his life retreating from his mother’s piety (exemplified by Studies in Christian Character, a book she had given him as a boy), and who “denounced organized religion violently.”

(2) But in another sense, Nemerov says, “the light is also that of someone who believes God is dead.” The basis for this interpretation is that Ault’s wife “chose a quotation from Frederich Nietzsche to epitomize her husband: ‘Unless there be chaos within, no dancing star is born,’ and the Russell’s Corners lights are such Nietzschean glows.”

Neither of these interpretations makes sense to me. They’re inconsistent with each other, and they’re inconsistent with Ault’s loathing of religion. I prefer a more secular interpretation. 

In my view, the subject of Ault’s great Russell’s Corners paintings is light itself. As Sanford Schwartz says in his “Summer Nights at Russell’s Corners” (included in his 1990 collection Artists and Writers), “He [Ault] gives us the light that’s reflected on telephone or power lines at night – light that resembles strands of a necklace.” 

Schwartz’s piece memorably concludes, “When you drive down a country road at night and see, from the lights of a distant oncoming car, telephone wires turning into thin white lines, you may say to yourself, ‘An Ault!’ ”