After World War I, a number of American artists turned to clarity and geometric precision either to glorify modem technology or, alternatively, to hark back nostalgically to the country's rustic past. At once elegant and impersonal, paintings of the post-war period depicted the smokestacks, factories, and skyscrapers of an industrialized metropolis as well as the barns and fields of an old-world, bucolic New England-the one a frank confrontation with the machine revolution, the other a fantasy of the calm that preceded it.
An artist who depicted the dynamism of the machine age as well as its pastoral counterpart, Peter Blume employed Precisionist sharp style and Surrealist associations of unexpected images to negotiate the place of Jewish identity in the context of the dominant culture. A Russian-born émigré raised in Brooklyn, Blume studied art at the Education Alliance, a settlement house on the Lower East Side sponsored by New York's Jewish community. His startling fantasy Pig's Feet and Vinegar was painted in 1927 in Exeter, New Hampshire, upon the artist's move from New York's "shtetl" environment to rural New England.

Blume's painting juxtaposes a still-life interior of pig's feet and a bottle of vinegar with a New England landscape in winter. The blatant presence of a symbol so impure in Jewish iconography puts Blume's confrontation with his Jewish identity (literally) on the table. It is possible that the offal and the wine gone rancid, placed in the interior of the painting, are expressions of the artist's discomfort with his religious and cultural identity-Judaism gone sour. The country outside, framed by the wooden cross of the window, represents the world of which he wishes to be a part. Yet the lugubriousness of the winter scenery hardly presents the outside world as seductive. What this landscape offers is a false promise, evoked by the unfinished house in the composition's center and the tree trunk that ends in a violent severing by the window frame. In an ambivalent confusion of "inside" and "outside," Blume renders not the countryside but the pig's feet as the seduction.

According to scholar Ismar Schorsch in a letter to The Jewish Museum about this painting, "Jewish tradition had long imagined the pig as a symbol of religious deception, displaying its cloven feet to persuade Jews that it was not counterfeit." There is most certainly a seduction at play. The pig's feet are depicted as to appear feminized: rather than the dead stumps of one of the most homely of animals, they appear as fleshly forms with pinkened tips, gracefully curved like a woman's hands, culminating in rosy points like her breasts. The disquieting presence of a symbol associated with deception encourages a reconfiguration of the earlier reading-indoor and outdoor are inverted. The pig's feet, seductive yet dangerous, may represent the temptation of America and assimilation. The barren countryside might thus serve as a representation of alienation, and the woman in the painting perhaps a figure with whom the artist empathizes-the immigrant who, from the outside, looks longingly toward the seduction within. But rather than indicate a clear narrative, Blume applies his dramatic technique with just enough restraint to call into play a variety of associations without resolving these conflicting possibilities. In a Surrealist, otherworldly landscape, in which pig's feet seem to float weightlessly above a table and trees and houses are left abruptly unfinished, Blume ambiguously juxtaposes inside and outside, barren and lush, alienation and seduction. Within the setting of New England- America's dreamland-Blume questions the Jewish artist's place in the American dream.