O Beautiful for Spacious Skies

An edition of the nineteenth-century poem that was later set to music Read more From Publishers Weekly Yoked together like a pair of contrary mules, Bates' s 19th-century patriotic poem and Thiebaud's 20th-century irony-tinged art tug in opposite directions.

At first, Thiebaud's bold, representational paintings complement "America the Beautiful" with reasonable artistic license: two trees against a fiery sunset represent "spacious skies" and "amber waves of grain"; blue-black cliffs suggest the "purple mountain majesties." But the struggle to match subsequent verses with appropriate imagery intensifies as RV' s and semis zipping through a salt flat signify "a thoroughfare for freedom beat across the wilderness" and rather macabre women's masks illustrate "God mend thine every flaw." The components here seem diminished, not enhanced, by their pairing.

All ages.