The Geometry of Decay: Seeing America in Robert Cottingham’s Pool

There’s a peculiar silence in Robert Cottingham’s Pool, the kind that hums just after something breaks. At first glance, everything looks intact. The steel façade glows in the late light, the painted brick looks warm, and the familiar “Diet Pepsi” logo anchors the composition with corporate cheer. But then your eye drifts upward, to the wooden ball rack hanging beside the window, the one meant to cradle billiard balls. A few are gone. The wires that once held them tight have snapped, curling into the air like tiny gestures of surrender.

That’s where the painting begins to speak.

Cottingham was a chronicler of the American city, but not in the way of social realists or romantics. His landscapes aren’t crowded with people or sentiment; they’re full of reflection, scaffolding, and signage. He painted the anatomy of attention: where we look, what sells to us, how light convinces us that everything is still working. But in Pool(1973), he caught the moment that illusion starts to fray. The sign no longer does its job. It doesn’t invite you upstairs to play a game; it just hangs there, beautifully wounded, like the city itself.

The 1970s were already peeling at the edges. America’s neon optimism was dimming, its surfaces aging faster than its ideals. And yet, Cottingham found beauty in that decay. His camera, his “high-speed sketchbook,” as he called it, recorded storefronts and facades that were equal parts promise and exhaustion. When he brought those images to canvas, he didn’t clean them up. He immortalized them as they were: immaculate and imperfect, like memory itself.

Pool feels like one of those memories. The cropped window, the half-seen “POOL” reflected in glass, the immaculate Diet Pepsi sign below, it all adds up to a kind of urban poem. A study in geometry and color that appears mechanical but is deeply human. Look long enough and you start to feel the story it isn’t telling: the hands that hung that rack, the laughter once heard behind that window, the years that turned brightness into residue. Cottingham’s realism is so precise that it becomes tender. He paints not to preserve perfection, but to honor the act of looking, of noticing what others pass by.

The missing billiard balls aren’t a mistake; they’re the heart of it. Their absence pulls the painting into motion. You start imagining what fell, what rolled away, what left the frame. The sprung wires become punctuation marks, small reminders that even in steel and shadow, time has the final say. Cottingham turns that tension into grace. The scene holds together, but barely. And in that precarious balance, he finds the truth of the American city: still standing, selling, but always on the verge of collapse.

It’s tempting to call his work nostalgic, but that’s too easy. There’s no sentimental glow here. The Diet Pepsi logo isn’t a joke; the sign isn’t kitsch. Cottingham treats them with reverence because they’re relics of how we once believed in visibility, that if you could light something bright enough, it would last. The irony, of course, is that nothing does. Light fades, bolts rust, wires snap. And yet, there’s beauty in that process, the way there’s beauty in the sound of an old neon tube warming back to life after years of silence.

Standing before Pool, you feel suspended between eras. The realism is absolute, but the feeling is elegy. It’s not about the sign or the soda brand or even the missing balls; it’s about the human impulse behind all of it. The need to build, display, replace, and remember. The painting’s surface is technical perfection, but what lingers is fragility. It asks, without words: What happens to a culture built on light when the power cuts out?

And yet, for all its quiet melancholy, Pool isn’t despairing. It’s watchful. It holds its breath and invites you to do the same. In those precise edges and faultless shadows, you begin to sense something spiritual, a respect for impermanence. The way sunlight turns a bent wire into a line of poetry. The way a sign, once meant to advertise joy, now carries the weight of time.

Cottingham gives us that gift: the permission to look harder, to find grace in what’s breaking. His realism becomes something more than depiction; it’s a form of listening. The façade hums, the colors pulse, the city continues to breathe beneath its fading paint. The painting ends where our own reflection begins, in the glass of that upper window, where the word POOL is reversed and incomplete. A ghost of language, still glowing faintly, asking us to see not just what’s there, but what used to be.

Maybe that’s all he ever wanted, to remind us that the story of America isn’t written in monuments or headlines, but in the quiet evidence of what we’ve built and left behind. A missing ball. A broken wire. A perfect shadow falling across a wall. The everyday, painted so precisely, it becomes eternal.

Robert Cottingham, Pool, 1973. Oil on canvas, 78 × 78 in. Collection of Modern and Contemporary Art, Gift of Sydney and Frances Lewis (Object Number 85.375). Photograph by Drew Jaehnig, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. © Robert Cottingham. Image used under Fair Use for purposes of critical commentary and educational analysis.