Recording Sound dates to 1932, a period of deep Depression, but it was a period Roszak found extremely fruitful. He had just spent two years traveling in Europe, where he had discovered the utopian constructivism of the Bauhaus and de Chirico's metaphysical surrealism. The mixture of geometry and fantasy in Recording Sound shows how he liked to mingle both tendencies. But Roszak was balancing more than two stylistic ideas. He knew that many artists were dedicating their work to social and political causes in the 1930s. Roszak, however, asked, "What could the artist do to enhance life not socially and politically, but generally for all men living under an industrial kind of civilization?"

Pictured: Theodore Roszak, Recording Sound (detail), 1932; plaster and oil, 32 x 48 x 6 3/4 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase.

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