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American Art

I INTRODUCTION

American Art, painting and sculpture in colonial America and then the United States, from the late 16th century to the present. Until the early 19th century, painting in America was confined largely to portraiture, sculpture to utilitarian objects. But in that century American artists took up the full range of subjects in painting—still lifes, landscapes, history paintings, and scenes of everyday life. Sculptors began to produce large-scale works in marble. In painting landscape emerged as the dominant subject. The earliest landscape painters in America, the Hudson River School, conceived of the land as wild and intractable, reinforcing America's view of itself as something new, a kind of Garden of Eden. At first most artists in America lived along the Eastern seaboard, but starting in the 1830s and 1840s some artists from the East pushed westward, a move reflected in paintings of Native Americans by George Catlin and paintings of animals and Native Americans of the Rocky Mountain region by Albert Bierstadt. These painters helped Americans envision the vast land to the west.

A core of realism, a reluctance to depart from the facts of existence, continued in painting until the end of the 1800s, even when painters conveyed a somewhat romanticized view of nature. We can see this adherence to realism in unidealized portraits by colonial painters such as John Singleton Copley and in mid-19th-century landscapes by the so-called luminist painters, who explored the effects of light. And when Childe Hassam and other American painters turned to European impressionism in the late 1800s, they kept the figures and objects in their paintings fairly intact, in contrast to the Europeans who dissolved objects into patches of color. Opposing this realist mainstream were a few imaginative approaches, such as the mystical landscapes by Albert Pinkham Ryder and Ralph Albert Blakelock. In sculpture, neoclassicism—a revival of ancient Greek and Roman styles that was popular in Europe—became deeply ingrained, persisting into the late 1800s.

Until World War II (1939-1945), Americans saw their art as provincial compared to the best that Europe had to offer. In the 1950s the United States—New York City in particular—took the lead with its own movement, abstract expressionism, and American art remained dominant into the 21st century. In the last decades of the 20th century, art in America and elsewhere embraced new materials, including industrial metals; vinyl, cloth, and other soft materials; fluorescent lights; and even the earth itself. No one could have dreamed of these developments when American art was young.

For information about the history of architecture in the United States, see American Architecture. For a discussion of photography as an art form, see History of Photography. For information about the arts of Native Americans, see Native American Art. See also Folk Art and Decorative Arts, as well as articles on individual decorative arts such as Furniture and Metalwork.

II COLONIAL AMERICA

The first works of art created in America after European arrival were probably watercolor drawings made by English artist John White from 1577 to 1590. They show the animals, plants, and Native Americans in and about English settlements in Virginia. Not until the last half of the 17th century did the American colonies produce a sizable body of paintings—all portraits. Sculpture in the round—sculpture meant to be seen from all sides—did not exist in the colonies in the 17th century. Carved gravestones were abundant, however, and their sculpted motifs of skulls or skeletons with scythes reminded of the inevitability of death.

A Portraiture and Other Painting

The early colonial portraitists, known as limners (from the English word limn, meaning “to draw”), moved from town to town and supplemented their income through carpentry, sign painting, and other crafts. These traveling artists, who made their own paints and other supplies, had little status or honor. Their names, with very few exceptions, are unknown. Some of their portraits were crude, but masterpieces did appear, such as Mrs. Elizabeth Freake and Baby Mary (about 1674, Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts), by an unknown artist from Massachusetts. The painting is notable for its sympathetic portrayal of maternal concern; its skillful arrangement of flat, patterned forms; and its harmony of grays, pale flesh tones, and greenish-yellows. The two chief regions of artistic activity in the colonies were eastern Massachusetts, where English models that emphasized the outline prevailed, and New York and surrounding regions, where a more realistic, Dutch-influenced tradition that sometimes included bits of landscape with the figure was evident.

As the population increased (by 1720 there were nearly half a million settlers in the colonies) and commerce spread, prosperity and the pursuit of fashion came to Boston, Massachusetts; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Williamsburg, Virginia; and other communities. In the decades preceding the American Revolution (1775-1783), painters such as Robert Feke from Oyster Bay, Long Island, caught the elegance of the wealthy merchants of Boston; Newport, Rhode Island; and Philadelphia. In Feke's portraits, the men stand with their knee-length coats opened slightly to reveal their waistcoats, beneath which parts of their white shirts are tastefully displayed. Many of the men have protruding stomachs, indicating the prosperity that kept them well fed. The women show even less individuality than the men: All are in their prime, young, amply bosomed, and small of waist.

In the decade before the Revolution, it was Boston-born John Singleton Copley who focused most on the character of his portrait subjects. While still retaining something of the linear (outline) approach of the Massachusetts limners, he gave his subjects a fuller three-dimensional reality. From his portraits we have come to recognize the faces of American political leaders who advocated separation from Britain, including Sam Adams, Paul Revere, and John Hancock. Because Copley himself opposed the separation, or at least did not strongly support independence, he settled in England. There he painted pieces dealing with English history, such as The Death of Major Peirson (1783, Tate Gallery, London). The work is an emotionalized re-creation of the death of the English commander who had fought against a French invasion of the English island of Jersey on January 5 and 6, 1781. While living in Boston, Copley valued history painting above portraiture. However, he found no market for such painting, because the colonists felt they had not undertaken any noteworthy exploits of their own, beyond fighting the battles on their soil started by the European powers.

American-born painter Benjamin West, who came from Delaware County near Philadelphia, spent most of his career in England as official painter to King George III. In England West's scenes of historic events on American soil were viewed as part of British history, such as Penn's Treaty with the Indians (1771-1772, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts). Today, both the English and the Americans claim West as one of their own.

B Sculpture

During the 1700s the colonists began creating sculpture apart from gravestones. Among the items that appeared were copper weather vanes, carved wooden figureheads for the fronts of ships, and wooden figures placed outside shop doors to identify the trade found inside. Woodcarvers generally based ship figureheads on mythical figures such as mermaids. The workshop of Simeon Skillin and his three sons in Boston turned out some of the best of these. Wooden shop figures included cigar store Indians to identify a tobacconist (Native Americans had introduced Europeans to tobacco) and sailors to identify a ships' supplier. Woodcarvers continued to make these figures throughout the 19th century.

III FROM INDEPENDENCE TO CIVIL WAR: 1783-1861

After the colonies won independence from Great Britain in 1783, the training of artists in the United States became more professional. Academies that offered art training also held exhibitions. In 1794 painter Charles Willson Peale organized the Columbianum, the first society of American artists, in Philadelphia, and the society held its first exhibition in 1795. In 1805 Peale became one of the founders of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the nation's first art school as well as the repository of its first permanent public collection. In 1817 painter John Trumbull became the first head of the New York Academy of Arts (later American Academy of the Fine Arts). Despite the presence of Peale and Trumbull, businessmen rather than artists played the main role in founding and running both institutions.

A Painting: New Subjects, New Places

The subject matter of painting broadened considerably after independence to include history scenes, landscape, still life, and genre (scenes of ordinary people partaking in everyday life), in addition to portraiture. The new nation was in the process of forging an identity, and artists helped in the process by portraying American heroes, depicting important events, and giving visual expression to unfamiliar landscapes. Yet Europeans still provided the models that American painters sought to equal. Peale, a far-ranging scientist and inventor as well as a painter, was among the most important figures of the post-revolutionary period. In 1786 he established a museum of natural history in Philadelphia, which featured stuffed animals and birds of the United States, set up in cages containing bits of their natural habitats. The museum also displayed relics of the land's prehistoric past in the form of mastodon bones. In his Exhumation of the Mastodon (1806, Peale Museum, Baltimore), Peale depicted the digging up of two mastodon skeletons on an upstate New York farm. Peale also was a competent portraitist who had studied with West in London in 1767. He fathered 17 children, some of whom went on to become artists in their own right, notably Raphaelle Peale, who with his uncle James Peale became America's first professional still-life painter.

After the American Revolution, George Washington, who had led American forces to victory, was the most celebrated man in the Western world. Gilbert Stuart, who ironically had avoided the war by fleeing to London and studying there with West, became the most noted portraitist of Washington upon his return. Having studied in London, Stuart used the then-current English approach of loosely applying paint in broad strokes, as opposed to the hard linear approach of Copley and other colonial painters. Stuart endowed Washington with a sense of noble imperturbability by glossing over small details of the face, giving his flesh a ruddy glow, and eliminating unattractive aspects such as the protuberance of his jaw misshapen by false teeth.

The United States, a sovereign nation after the Revolution, finally had its own history distinct from that of the European powers. It fell to painter John Trumbull to leave a visual record of the tumultuous events in the fight for independence. Trumbull had served as Washington's aide-de-camp before resigning because of a perceived slight, and he traveled from New Hampshire to North Carolina to observe the topographies of battlegrounds and to visit participants. His battle scenes are filled with action and his surrender scenes have the stamp of authenticity. The observer comprehends the events as having been set in motion by shared resolve rather than by the decision of a single authoritative figure. Trumbull's approach can be seen in his Surrender of General Burgoyne at Saratoga (1817, U.S. Capitol Rotunda). The painting shows the red-coated Burgoyne approaching the tent of American major general Horatio Gates, with a number of American officers amassed in front of the tent. In another spirit is Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851, Metropolitan Museum of Art) by German American artist Emanuel Leutze, which was painted in Düsseldorf and shipped to the United States. Like an actor in a stage melodrama, the general stands erect and resolute in his flimsy craft.

Americans were aware that their country marked something new in the Western experience—a political entity born free, entirely removed from the dynastic struggles of the European powers. Painters represented this vision of America in different ways. In their landscapes American painters showed nature untouched by human beings, as a kind of Garden of Eden. In Kindred Spirits (1849, New York Public Library), Asher B. Durand portrays painter Thomas Cole and poet William Cullen Bryant, dressed in their Sunday best, on a ledge in a gorge in the Catskill Mountains as they commune reverently with the grandeur before them. Durand belonged to the Hudson River School—so-called because its members started out by painting the Catskills and other sites along the Hudson. Thomas Cole, an accomplished landscape painter who had emigrated from England to America, settled in Catskill, New York, and his fame drew others to the area. The painters of the Hudson River School held an almost religious view of nature's majestic grandeur, in which craggy mountains and lofty trees overwhelm humankind and human concerns.

Another approach to landscape and to seascape avoided the portrayal of dramatic beauty in nature favored by Durand and others of the Hudson River School. A group of painters called luminists, whose scenes featured large areas of light-filled sky, favored instead a calm and reassuring nature. In paintings by luminist Fitz Hugh Lane, such as Gloucester Harbor (1848, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond), everything in the scene seems frozen in time.

Genre paintings were plentiful before the Civil War. William Sidney Mount, George Caleb Bingham, and other genre painters of this period typically placed figures out-of-doors, energetically engaged in some group activity. Bingham specialized in scenes of frontier life, such as Fur Traders on the Missouri (1845, Metropolitan Museum of Art). This painting depicts an old trader, his son, and a bear cub tied to their boat—all bathed in a diffuse, poetic light.

Some artists held the idea that history moved in cycles marked by the rise and fall of empires, cycles they believed—or at least hoped—would not control America's destiny. Landscape painter Thomas Cole painted a series called The Course of Empire that deals with this imagined historical process. The work consisted of five canvases: The Savage State, The Pastoral State, The Consummation of Empire, Destruction, and Desolation. In Cole's view, America with its largely untouched wilderness presented a sharp contrast to Europe, home to many ruins. Washington Allston, who spent much of his life as a painter in Italy and England, was also interested in the idea of youthful and aging civilizations. He labored for years on Belshazzar's Feast (1817-1843, Detroit Institute of Arts). This painting is based on a story in the biblical book of Daniel that tells of a feast given by the Babylonian king, during which a disembodied hand writes on the palace wall a message foretelling the end of his kingdom.

In the decades before the American Civil War, European settlers and their descendants continued to push westward, displacing Native Americans. The West offered artists new subjects, with its dramatic landscapes and unfamiliar inhabitants. Some painters and sculptors presented Native Americans as dangerous marauders; others, as undeveloped peoples standing in the way of civilization's progress. George Catlin, however, whose mother had been briefly kidnapped by Native Americans when he was a child, lamented the imminent disappearance of native folkways and wished to preserve a record of them through his art. Closely studying the Native Americans of the Great Plains during the eight years he spent among them, he recorded their dances, hunting expeditions, and other activities as a kind of visual anthropologist.

Another artist to take an interest in colorful and unfamiliar aspects of America was John James Audubon, who was fascinated with birds. Born in Santo Domingo (now Haiti) and educated in France, Audubon came to the United States at the age of 18 and unsuccessfully operated general stores in Kentucky, where he began drawing American birds. In his drawings of birds, the great naturalist combined a sense of design with detailed observation of the characteristics of the various species. After living in poverty and receiving rejections from American publishers, his four-volume Birds of America, from Original Drawings, with 435 plates showing 1,065 figures of birds, was published in England from 1827 to 1838.

B Sculpture: Classical Models

American sculptors became more ambitious in style and subject matter as they moved beyond the utilitarian pieces of the crafts tradition to what they considered a higher artistic level. In the early 1800s they began to carve large pieces in marble that carried associations with classical culture. The loftiness of the subject matter was of paramount importance. Many of these high-minded sculptors worked in Italy where they could see for themselves examples of the classical art of ancient Greece and Rome, which they used as prototypes for their own art. In Italy they could also associate with classically oriented European artists, locate quarries of the finest marble, and find teachers and assistants competent in marble carving. Like other Americans of their time, these sculptors found a fitting model for their own young republic in ancient Greece and Rome, civilizations in which all citizens shared equally in the rights conferred by the state.

The man generally considered America's first professional sculptor, Horatio Greenough, was born in Boston but settled in Florence, Italy. He carved for the Capitol in Washington, D.C., an enormous seated George Washington (Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., 1832-1840). (If standing, the figure would be 3.7 m (12 ft) tall.) Washington, who is shown draped in a Roman toga and wearing Roman sandals, has the pose of an ancient Greek statue of the god Zeus. Though greeted with derision in America for its portrayal of Washington half-naked and as a mythological god, the work was significant in being the first major sculptural commission given to an American. Previous commissions for large-scale statues of Washington had gone to French sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon and Italian sculptor Antonio Canova.

Hiram Powers, a sculptor from Vermont, also settled in Florence. His Greek Slave (modeled 1841-1843, Smithsonian Institution) was the most admired American sculpture produced before the Civil War. The nude manacled woman has the posture of a classical Roman sculpture of Venus and represents virtue or chastity. Nudity was acceptable in art if it represented a higher ideal rather than a specific woman. In this case the figure represented a Greek woman taken captive by the Turks, thus calling attention to widespread fear of Ottoman (hence non-European) victory in the Greek War of Independence in the 1820s.

IV CIVIL WAR TO THE 20TH CENTURY

The Civil War (1861-1865) marked a major turning point in American painting and sculpture. The mood of optimism and assurance that had prevailed in America earlier in the century became for the most part a thing of the past. Artists no longer considered it sufficient to achieve a likeness; they began to probe into the national or individual psyche.

A Landscape

The landscapes of the Hudson River School, such as Durand's Kindred Spirits, carried religious connotations, a sense that the blessings and goodness of God are discernible through the contemplation of nature. Nature became far grander in the vast earthscapes of Frederick E. Church, who was a pupil of Cole's. In Church's painting Cotopaxi, Ecuador (1863, Reading Public Museum and Art Garden, Pennsylvania), the vista is so overwhelming that the viewer feels utterly lost within it. One senses the beginnings of Earth's formation through awesome geological processes beyond human comprehension. Church traveled the world in search of spectacular natural phenomena: erupting volcanoes in the Andes, icebergs off the coast of Labrador, great mountains of the Bavarian Alps, and the aurora borealis near the Arctic Circle. Historians have linked Church's canvases with Manifest Destiny, the belief that it was the inherent right of the United States to expand to the Pacific Ocean. Astute spectators would have understood these scenes as resembling some of their own country's natural wonders. And Americans were indeed pushing westward, following exploratory expeditions commissioned by the federal government.

Painters such as Albert Bierstadt helped people living in the Eastern states envision U.S. territory in the West. Bierstadt was part of an expedition sent in 1858 to explore the North Platte River, in the west-central United States, and the Wyoming Territory. In 1863 he made a second trip to the West, visiting the Yosemite Valley and the Sierra Nevada in California. His painting Among the Sierra Nevada Mountains, California (1868, Smithsonian American Art Museum) shows a group of deer grazing at the edge of a lake in the foreground, with the peaks beyond so grand that Easterners could not have imagined them.

Another painter to turn the West into a colorful spectacle was Thomas Moran. Although he started out as a member of the Hudson River School, Moran traveled West and produced dozens of watercolors of Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon that he later used as the basis for paintings. Yet he also satisfied the desire of Easterners for paintings of landscapes familiar to them. As did many other landscape artists, Moran chose times of day with dramatic light—sunrises, sunsets, and twilight—as in Sunset (1901).

In his Sundown (1894, Smithsonian American Art Museum), landscape painter George Inness also departed from the reassurance provided by Durand's Kindred Spirits, although Inness was influenced by the Hudson River School. The scene in Sundown is not an attractive gorge in the Catskills or a grand mountain vista, but a rundown farm. The mood that prevails is one of stillness, even sadness, a response to the devastation and social disruption brought about by the Civil War. This mood was found in much American painting at the end of the 19th century. Inness was a follower of the religious philosophy of Swedish scientist and theologian Emanuel Swedenborg, who taught that God was present throughout nature. The mystical aspects of Swedenborg's beliefs may have contributed to the quiet, poetic tenor of Inness's late work.

B Portraiture

During the last three decades of the 19th century, American portraitists aimed for more than the mere recording of likenesses. Thomas Eakins of Philadelphia, who had studied anatomy with medical students, depicted the distinguished surgeon Dr. Samuel David Gross as he directed an operation before onlookers in the surgical amphitheater of Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia (The Gross Clinic, 1875, Jefferson Medical College). Gross appears as the great leader of a team of healers. All action occurs around him as he stands at the center, unperturbed. Light appears to flow from his brightly lit, high forehead, expressing the surgeon's wisdom and kindness as well as his scientific knowledge.

The artist John Singer Sargent received many portrait commissions from wealthy patrons, and he also portrayed social climbers. His portrait of Madame Pierre Gautreau (1884, Metropolitan Museum of Art) reveals to the viewer the vanity and self-indulgence of its subject, Virginie Avegno Gautreau. Gautreau, from New Orleans, Louisiana, married a wealthy French businessman and aspired to advance in European society. Her haughty bearing and shockingly low-cut gown made the painting so scandalous that it came to be known simply as Madame X. The extreme whiteness of the skin is accurate, for Gautreau covered her body with a lavender powder to make it look whiter, and hardly ever exposed her skin to the sun. In the Sargent portrait Madame Gautreau Drinking a Toast (1882-1883; Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston), Gautreau's shoulders are covered by chiffon but her haughty demeanor remains.

Another American painter, who like Sargent worked mainly in Europe, was Mary Cassatt. An independent woman who came from a wealthy Pennsylvania family, Cassatt settled in Paris, became a close friend of French painter Edgar Degas, and exhibited with the French impressionists, whose style she adopted. She often portrayed her sister Lydia and other members of her family on outings, in theaters, and in quiet domestic situations. Cassatt did not depart from the actual colors of objects or dissolve form as much as Claude Monet and other French impressionists did. But like them she showed figures in a moment of time, apparently caught off-guard, as in Mrs. Cassatt Reading to Her Grandchildren (1880, private collection).

Of the variety of approaches to portraiture, none in this period was more advanced than that of James Abbott McNeill Whistler. He was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, but denied it because he felt it lacked distinction. Most of his life was spent in Europe, where he adopted the slogan “art for art's sake.” By this Whistler meant that art need have no other purpose than to please through its beauty. Art, according to Whistler, need not have an instructive or morally elevating subject matter, as most painters before and during his lifetime believed. Whistler called his paintings by the musical terms symphony, nocturne, arrangement, and composition because he claimed that “as music is the poetry of sound, so is painting the poetry of sight, and the subject matter has nothing to do with harmony of sound or of color.” The primary title of the portrait of his mother, Anne Matilda McNeill Whistler, which he painted when she visited him in London, was An Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 (1871, Musée d'Orsay, Paris). It is a nearly monochromatic (single-color) composition of rectangles—the baseboard, the curtain, the picture frames, the rug—that is broken by the asymmetrical profile of the woman. Whistler's adherence to basic geometric forms in this painting anticipated the minimal art of the 1960s. It is ironic that the portrait of Whistler's mother, noted in its day for its lack of sentimentality, is regarded today as a glorification of motherhood.

C Genre Painting

The pre-Civil War American genre painters, such as Bingham, were more concerned with portraying a way of life than with exploring the inner life of their subjects. But after the war a moodiness appeared in some genre paintings, as it had in the late landscapes of Inness. This meditative atmosphere surrounds the disconnected figures in dimly lit, largely empty interiors painted by African American artist Henry Ossawa Tanner, as in Interior with Woman Spinning (private collection). From Pittsburgh, the son of a bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Tanner also painted religious subjects, such as the otherworldly Angels Appearing Before the Shepherds (about 1910, Smithsonian American Art Museum). He studied under Thomas Eakins from 1880 to 1882, and in 1891 went to live in Europe, where he felt people would accept an artist of his color more easily.

Winslow Homer is best known for his seascapes, such as High Cliff, Coast of Maine (1894, Smithsonian American Art Museum), and his scenes of men struggling against the sea, which emphasize the power of the sea. But he also worked as a genre painter from the end of the Civil War to 1881. During the war he had made illustrations from the battlefield for the magazine Harper's Weekly. His Veteran in a New Field (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1866), painted just after the war, is full of meaning. An ex-soldier, now a farmer, harvests his wheat with a scythe. But unlike the reaper with a scythe who typically signifies death, the farmer brings forth life and renewal. The painting suggests that swords have been beaten into plowshares. A reaper painted by Homer 12 years later (Reaper, 1878, private collection) is far sunnier in mood and without the symbolic overtones, like the many farm scenes Homer created during the 1870s.

As the frontier began to disappear toward the end of the 19th century, scenes and sagas of the Old West became more popular than ever. But nostalgia had set in. Where Catlin, in paintings of the 1840s and 1850s, had sought to record a way of life, Frederic Remington, who hailed from Canton, New York, revealed a different interest in the West about 50 years later. Remington had gone West and worked as a clerk, then a cowboy and a ranch hand. But he ignored in his art the suffering and hardship undergone by settlers and Native Americans, even at a time when most Native Americans were being sent to reservations. Instead, Remington evoked for people in the Eastern states the sense of a West that never fully existed, a place of never-ceasing romantic excitement.

D Impressionism

Childe Hassam from Dorchester, Massachusetts, became known as the American Monet because his sensitivity to the effects of light was reminiscent of the French impressionist. Hassam studied in Paris in 1883 and 1884 and lived there from 1886 to 1889, yet his impressionism was really home-grown. He painted primarily American subjects and, unlike European impressionists, stuck to descriptive color, although he borrowed the impressionist technique of cutting off figures and objects by the edge of the painting, much as a snapshot might. After returning to the United States, Hassam helped found an American impressionist group called The Ten. Summers spent on the Isles of Shoals, a group of small rugged islands just off the coast of Maine and New Hampshire, provided subjects for many of his paintings. He was drawn especially to tiny Appledore Island, where well-known figures in the arts and literature came to stay. Among those who visited the island were American writers James Russell Lowell, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, and James Whitcomb Riley, and actor Edwin Booth. They stayed at a hotel maintained by Celia Thaxter, whose greatest pride was her garden, a plot planted with hollyhocks, poppies, larkspur, crimson phlox, and many other flowers. Hassam painted her as an ample figure in white confidently surveying her garden next to the sea, before a hazy but unbroken sky (Celia Thaxter in her Garden, 1892, Smithsonian American Art Museum). The bright colors, the loose brush strokes used to paint the flowers, and the dappled light display Hassam's impressionist manner.

Other noted impressionists in America were William Merritt Chase and John Twachtman. Chase favored dark tones and a loose, almost slap-dash application of paint. This approach contrasted with the muted palette of whites and grays of Twachtman. In Fishing Boats at Gloucester (1901, Smithsonian American Art Museum), Twachtman represented the sky, water, boats, and buildings along the harbor of Gloucester, Massachusetts, in silvery-blue and soft pink tones, unlike the bright colors favored by Monet and other Europeans.

E Visionary Painting

A group of artists known as the visionaries was united neither by style nor by subject, but by a general approach, a certain cast of mind. Their images evoked an inner dream world conjured from the imagination. Visionary painter Albert Pinkham Ryder grew up in New Bedford, Massachusetts, when that city was one of the world's chief whaling ports. Even after he moved to New York City, memories of whaling boats setting forth on dangerous waters seem to have haunted him. He painted lone boats beneath a strangely luminous sky in which the moon appears to emit an eerie glow, as in Moonlight (1887, Smithsonian American Art Museum). Ryder once compared himself to an inchworm crawling upon a leaf, “revolving in the air, feeling for something to reach something.”

Ralph Albert Blakelock, another visionary painter, gave up his medical studies in 1869 when he was 21 and journeyed to California, crossing Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and Nevada. He was not part of an expedition, as Bierstadt and Moran had been, and is said to have lived among Native Americans. In 1872, back in New York City and living in poverty, Blakelock began to depict the Native Americans he had seen on the Great Plains as tiny passive figures within a vast mysterious, moon-drenched realm, as in Moonlight (1880s or early 1890s, Brooklyn Museum of Art). These figures were very different from the active people in the paintings of Catlin and Remington. Blakelock spent the last 20 years of his life, except for a few months, in a sanitarium for the insane.

F Sculpture

Fewer changes occurred in sculpture after the Civil War than took place in painting. Neoclassicism, the style that had prevailed earlier in the century, did not entirely disappear. The subject of most sculpture was still the human figure, generally a hero or heroine or an allegorical personage. One of the most skillful sculptors of the period was William Rimmer, an eccentric born in Liverpool, England, who came with his family to Massachusetts when he was two years old and was brought up to believe he was the rightful heir to the French throne. No sculptor in his time was better at rendering human and animal anatomy, yet Rimmer gained little popular acceptance because of the disturbing nature of his nude figures. Based on models from classical antiquity, his figures are invariably presented as wounded or dying, as in Falling Gladiator (1861, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston).

Sculptor Edmonia Lewis had a no less remarkable background than Rimmer. Born near Albany, New York, to a Chippewa mother and a black father, Lewis lived for many years among the Chippewa after the death of her mother, then attended Oberlin College. One of her best-known works is the carved marble Hagar (1875, Smithsonian American Art Museum). This biblical figure is dressed in a classical tunic and stands with her hands clasped in gratitude. In the Book of Genesis, Hagar was Abraham's concubine, who, through the wish of Abraham's wife Sarah, was sent out of his house into the desert. The subject has special meaning for Lewis, who professed that she had “strong sympathy for all women who have struggled and suffered.”

The foremost American sculptor after the Civil War was Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who broke from neoclassicism and the limitations it imposed. Born in Ireland, he came to America as an infant. Saint-Gaudens studied in Paris in 1867 and in Florence and Rome from 1870 to 1875, where he became an admirer of the art of the Italian Renaissance. After returning to the United States he set up a studio in New York City. One of his most unusual sculptures is the Adams Memorial (1891, Rock Creek Cemetery, Washington, D.C.), a monument for the grave of Marian Hooper Adams, wife of the writer Henry Adams. The heavily draped seated figure on the monument seems emotionless yet at peace. (Marian Hooper Adams had taken her own life.) The contemplative sculpture was not based on any European memorial, although it may have been influenced by Michelangelo's figures on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Years later Adams observed that while the figure was a mystery for most Christian clerics, “any Asiatic would have understood its meaning.” Adams was referring to its representation of peacefulness and remoteness rather than an overt outpouring of grief and mourning.

Sculptor Daniel Chester French from New Hampshire, who worked on some commissions with Saint-Gaudens, was responsible for some of America's best-known statues commemorating historic events and personages. These include The Minute Men (1875, Concord, Massachusetts) and John Harvard (1884, Harvard Yard, Cambridge, Massachusetts). Church is best remembered for his colossal marble statue of a seated Abraham Lincoln, authorized by Congress in 1911 for the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. An earlier sculpture of a standing Lincoln (1912, Lincoln, Nebraska) is similar to a statue of Lincoln by Saint-Gaudens (1887) in Chicago's Lincoln Park.

V THE 20TH CENTURY: DISTURBING THE STATUS QUO

The history of 20th-century American art consists of an accelerating series of revolutions against the status quo. Movement followed movement at an ever-faster pace and with growing profusion, until at the century's end it had become impossible to identify a dominant trend in American art.

A Before World War I: 1900-1914

The first artistic rebellion of the 20th century saw the emergence of The Eight, a group of eight artists who showed their work together in 1908 in New York City's Macbeth Gallery. The Eight were linked by their rebellion against the subjects considered proper for painting at the time, but their approach to style remained basically impressionist. Later rebellions were aided and abetted by a major exhibition of modern painting, the Armory Show of 1913.

A1 The Eight

Five members of The Eight were later dubbed the Ashcan school, a reference to their brand of realism drawn from the city streets. They were Robert Henri, William Glackens, George Luks, Everett Shinn, and John Sloan. Painters Edward Lawson, Arthur B. Davies, and Maurice Prendergast also belonged to the Eight. Other names for The Eight were Apostles of Ugliness and the Revolutionary Gang.

The Eight featured as their subject matter the life of the people of New York's Lower East Side, which by the first decade of the 20th century was teeming with immigrants from Italy, eastern Europe, and elsewhere. These artists viewed the paintings of Whistler as elitist (appealing only to a select few), the paintings of the visionaries as too private in meaning, the subjects of the impressionists as irrelevant to modern city life, and the late seascapes of Homer as escapist. The Eight's spokesman, Henri, contended that the working classes were the most suitable subjects for art and that the artist was a social force whose “work creates a stir in the world.” And The Eight did indeed capture the grittiness of New York life.

The best-known members of The Eight are Luks, Sloan, Glackens, and Prendergast. The first three had worked as illustrators or journalists at urban newspapers, where they encountered the rougher aspects of city life. Luks, who came from a Pennsylvania mining district though from a home of more-than-average culture, passed himself off as a working-class tough. For a while he took up a career as a boxer, a pastime that must have influenced the choice of subject—physically active, straining figures—in paintings such as The Wrestlers (1905, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston). Luks worked with dark tones and expressed disdain for all artists of the past except for the 17th-century Dutch artist Frans Hals, who also depicted the low-life types of his time. Sloan was adept at showing the seamy side of city life—in the streets, inside tenements, and even on rooftops. His etching Turning Out the Lights (1905), which gives the viewer a glimpse of a drab, dimly lit interior, is part of a series titled New York Life.

Glackens, who used bright colors closer to those of the French impressionists, preferred scenes of crowds in parks, in theaters, or at beaches, as in Beach Umbrellas at Blue Point (1915, Smithsonian American Art Museum). Prendergast grew up in Boston and lacked the newspaper background of the others. The large spots of vivid color in his beach, park, and city scenes gave an abstract tapestry-like effect to his paintings, such as Summer, New England (1912, Smithsonian American Art Museum). For Glackens and Prendergast, the city was a place of camaraderie and fulfillment, regardless of the economic situation of its inhabitants.

A2 The Armory Show

Many historians regard the so-called Armory Show as the most important art exhibition in the United States in the 20th century, and credit it with having helped to bring the modern movement in art to the United States. The exhibition was held from February 17 to March 15, 1913, at the 69th Infantry Regiment Armory in New York City. It featured some 1,300 European and American works of art, beginning in time with a miniature from 1799 by Spanish master Francisco de Goya and continuing to 1913. Modern European artists in the show included Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Wassily Kandinsky, and Marcel Duchamp. The American artists represented included Hassam, Twachtman, Ryder, Luks, Sloan, Glackens, and Prendergast. Record-keeping was not exact, but more than 250,000 people saw the Armory Show in New York City, Chicago, and Boston, and they thereby became acquainted with the latest tendencies in art. Moreover, some American painters, notably Stuart Davis, converted to modernism as a result of seeing the exhibition. Purchases made from the show became the starting point for important collections of modern art by museums in Baltimore, Chicago, and Philadelphia.

B Between the Wars: 1918-1939

In the decades following the Armory Show the views of the city put forth by The Eight would appear rosy, and the ability of artists to find beauty in crowded city life disappeared for the most part. Differences between rich and poor became noticed and resented. World War I (1914-1918) proved the terrible destructiveness of modern weapons. The stock market crash of 1929 marked the beginning of a terrible economic crisis: the Great Depression. By the end of 1931 almost 10 million wage-earners were out of work, and the next year from 4 million to 5 million more were added to their number. In addition to addressing economic hardships, artists observed that loneliness existed in crowded cities and that psychological barriers arose between people in close physical proximity. Enormous government spending during World War II (1939-1945) finally brought an end to the Great Depression.

B1 Urban Scene Painters

The revelation of urban loneliness was the special province of Edward Hopper. A gruff, taciturn man, he studied under Robert Henri and Kenneth Hayes Miller from 1900 to 1906, spent the years from 1906 to 1910 in Europe, and exhibited in the Armory Show. His etching East Side Interior (1922, Museum of Modern Art, New York) shows a woman seated at her sewing machine next to a window in a crowded interior. The artist has placed a chair and other objects in the room so that they hem the woman in as she looks dreamily out of the window, hoping (we are led to assume) to escape her unhappy existence. This is not the active, self-sufficient woman in Sloan's Turning Out the Lights. Motion pictures attracted Hopper as a subject—not as spectacle so much as a darkened place of escape from the boredom and harsh realities of life. In his New York Movie (1939, Museum of Modern Art), the audience sits in a darkened, extravagantly decorated interior, while in the hall outside the auditorium a young, harshly lit usherette, her head bowed, laments her state. The loneliness of city life is also evident in Hopper's From Williamsburg Bridge (1928, Metropolitan Museum of Art). In this painting nothing is alive, and the bridge railing in the foreground blocks our view of the street and the lower stories of the buildings beyond, leaving a view of vacant upper-story windows.

If Hopper's figures are passive, those in the works of Reginald Marsh are boisterous, overwhelmed by the crowds of which they are a part. In many cases these crowds lie on Coney Island's beaches or promenade about its amusement parks, stopping to look at freak shows and other displays. Marsh also depicted the urban poor during the Great Depression. His etching Tenth Avenue at 27th Street (1931) shows unemployed men loitering about New York's streets with nowhere to go. Two artists who created less obviously dramatic urban scenes are Isabel Bishop, who came from Cincinnati, Ohio, to New York City to study under Marsh and Miller, and Raphael Soyer, who came to the United States from Russia at age 12. Bishop and Soyer showed the quiet day-to-day struggles of ordinary people, often women, trying to get along in the city. In Bishop's Waiting (1938, Newark Museum), a haggard woman, her packages beside her and her child asleep on her lap, waits in a station for a train or a bus. In Soyer's Office Girls (1936, Whitney Museum of American Art), young working women pass alertly though tensely along a crowded street.

B2 Modernism

During the period between the two world wars, modernism burst upon the American scene. Painters discarded realism, choosing instead to break up forms or overlay transparent planes in the manner of European cubism, to distort objects in the manner of European expressionism, and even to paint canvases in which nothing was recognizable. The latter choice was in keeping with the work of Europe's early nonobjective (completely abstract or non-representational) artists, such as Piet Mondrian from The Netherlands or the Russians Kasimir Malevich and Wassily Kandinsky.

Arthur Garfield Dove, who came from upstate New York near Rochester, was one of America's first nonobjective painters. He embarked upon nonobjectivity in 1910, independently of Kandinsky who made the leap to abstraction in Europe that same year. While Kandinsky kept to this course, Dove moved back and forth between realism and abstraction. Some of Dove's nonobjective paintings suggest—without actually picturing—landscapes with moons or suns. In the late work Sun (1943, Smithsonian American Art Museum), he comes closest to representing a recognizable solar disk.

Skyscrapers quickly became symbols of modernism in America. Philadelphia's City Hall was the country's tallest building until the second decade of the 20th century, when the Woolworth Building and other tall buildings were built in New York City. America's early modernist artists tilted and merged these tall buildings in their work to suggest urban dynamism and convey something of the dizzying sensation pedestrians experience while walking by a skyscraper. Max Weber used this device in Rush Hour, New York (1915, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), and John Marin incorporated it in Lower Manhattan (Composing Derived from Top of Woolworth) (1922, Museum of Modern Art).

Dove, Marin, Weber, and another American artist, Marsden Hartley, received emotional and, at times, financial support from the photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who also exhibited their work in his gallery. He called his influential New York gallery at 293 Fifth Avenue 291 after its former address down the hall. Hartley's work featured objects that were flattened in the manner of cubism. Stuart Davis was another American modernist who, under the influence of cubism, flattened objects, rearranged their parts, and changed their relative sizes. By the time Davis painted Abstraction (1937, Smithsonian American Art Museum), the objects in his paintings had become quite unidentifiable, although in this work a ladder-back chair, lettering, and a few other objects can be deciphered.

Another modernist group in New York city found its chief mentors in French artists Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia, both of whom challenged traditional notions of what constituted art. Duchamp claimed to be “interested in ideas—not merely visual products.” One of his most shocking artistic actions was to exhibit objects that he acquired rather than made himself. These objects, which he called readymades, included a snow shovel, a hat rack, and even a urinal. In the United States, Philadelphian Emmanuel Radenski, who took the name Man Ray, assimilated Duchamp's ideas, as demonstrated in Object to be Destroyed (1923). This work by Ray consisted of a metronome with a paper image of an eye attached to the pendulum, which, when swinging, was meant to have a hypnotic effect on the spectator. Today it exists only in a 1964 replica entitled Indestructible Object in the Museum of Modern Art. The original was destroyed in 1957.

B3 Precisionism

The French artist Picabia, who was fascinated by machinery, painted precise but imaginary mechanical objects. He paved the way for a more moderate approach to modernism called precisionism, which prevailed in the United States during the 1920s and 1930s. Instead of the distortions, rearrangements, and merging of forms of the previous generation of modernists, precisionism featured simplified but recognizable forms reduced to their essential geometry. Many of the subjects of precisionist art had a distinctly American character—factory buildings, Pennsylvania barns, early American churches, and other structures that were plain and sturdy. The turn to American subject matter can be attributed largely to the growing isolation of the United States after World War I, demonstrated by the end of the country's involvement in European wars and its refusal to join the League of Nations. An additional factor was the emergence of popular homegrown heroes such as Babe Ruth, Charles Lindbergh, and Jack Dempsey.

Charles Demuth and Charles Sheeler are the best-known American precisionist painters. After All (1933, Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach), Demuth's painting of parts of factory complexes in his native Lancaster, Pennsylvania, demonstrates the simplification of forms that the precisionists favored. Demuth most likely took the title of the painting After All from a stanza in Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1855), a volume that marked the beginning of a uniquely American poetry. Sheeler lived for a while in the rolling hills of Bucks County, north of Philadelphia. In some of his paintings of the area's barns, he set the building back in space, omitted doors and windows, and left the foreground bare, as in Bucks County Barn (1923, Whitney Museum of American Art). In a later painting showing New England barns, Connecticut Barns in Landscape (1934, Smithsonian American Art Museum), the sharply focused, hard-edged barns contrast with the soft, slightly out-of-focus landscape around them.

Stieglitz's wife Georgia O'Keeffe applied her precisionist vision to the American Southwest. She became enamored of the look and feel of the region from visits to New Mexico, where she settled permanently after Stieglitz's death in 1946. O'Keeffe painted desert stones and flowers, cows' skulls bleached white by the sun, crosses left by Spanish Catholic missionaries in the 1600s and 1700s, and old adobe churches. An example of the latter is Ranchos Church (1930, Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas).

B4 Realism

Despite the arrival of modernism, realism persisted in American art in the 1920s and 1930s, chiefly in the form of regionalism and social realism. Most of the regionalists were white, American-born, of European ancestry, and antiurban in their outlook. They celebrated in their art the culture of small towns and rural life, which they regarded as authentically American. The social realists, on the other hand, consisted mostly of Jewish and black artists and were urban in their orientation. They saw the United States as a place of discrimination and injustice, of privilege vested in a wealthy upper class. Both groups sought to portray American subjects in a way that could be understood by all people, not just by an elite few.

Thomas Hart Benton, the leader of the regionalists, painted vast surveys of different industries and histories of particular regions, including those of his native Missouri. He peopled his canvases with vigorous horseshoe pitchers, country fiddlers, cowboys, star-crossed country lovers, hay mowers, and cotton pickers. For the Missouri state capitol he painted a large mural entitled A Social History of Missouri. Grant Wood from Iowa was exceptional among the regionalists in two respects. First, he drew inspiration from Flemish and German paintings of the 14th and 15th centuries, which he had seen in Europe. Like these artists, he painted some areas of his canvases meticulously in minute detail. Second, he lampooned some of the country folk he pictured, as in his American Gothic (1930, Art Institute of Chicago). The couple taken for man and wife in this painting are actually Wood's sister and a dentist, and their clothes were purposefully acquired for the suitable "hayseed" effect.

Ben Shahn, a Lithuanian-born Jew, was a leading social realist. When he heard of the arrest of two Italian immigrants, who were professed anarchists, for a holdup and murder in South Braintree, Massachusetts, he exclaimed, “Ever since I could remember, I wished that I'd been lucky enough to be alive at a great time—when something big was going on, like the Crucifixion. And suddenly I realized I was. Here I was living through another crucifixion.” Liberal interests maintained that the two—Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti—were innocent victims of the upper-class establishment. When Sacco and Vanzetti were finally put to death in the electric chair (seven years after the original arrest in 1920), Shahn painted The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti (1931-1932, Whitney Museum of American Art). In the painting he shows them as Christian martyrs with their final accusers standing next to their coffins like attending saints.

African American artist Jacob Lawrence was born in Atlantic City and raised in poverty in New York City's Harlem. In his paintings he focused on the history and sufferings of his race. His painting Tombstones (1942, Whitney Museum of American Art) is marked by irony. It shows a black family living in a rickety building above a shop for tombstones. The implication is that families for whom death comes early and often find it convenient to live above such a shop. William Henry Johnson, from Florence, South Carolina, spent the years from 1926 to 1938 in Europe, moving through various styles. During the 1940s he worked with simplified shapes in a deliberately awkward manner to paint works that dealt with experiences of African Americans, such as Ferry Boat Trip (1943-1944, Smithsonian American Art Museum).

B5 Original Visions

Several notable American painters fit in none of the groupings mentioned so far. Charles Burchfield, who is sometimes grouped with the regionalists, may be considered part of the visionary tradition of Ryder and Blakelock. From Ashtabula, Ohio, he was sensitive to the frightening appearance and impact of old, decaying buildings in backwater towns. In his Church Bells Ringing, Rainy Winter Night (1917, Cleveland Museum of Art), he encases human faces within the facades of houses and makes the church steeple suggest the semblance of a human head. Ivan Le Lorraine Albright had served as a medical draftsman during World War I. This training informed him in painting old and decrepit people, whose wrinkles, cracked skin, blemishes, and protruding veins he recorded in great detail, as in The Farmer's Kitchen (1933-1934, Smithsonian American Art Museum).

B6 Sculpture

Sculptor Gaston Lachaise was born in Paris and settled in America in 1906 when he was 24. He pursued relentlessly and finally married Isabel Dutaud Nagle, with whom he was obsessed. Over and over he sculpted parts of her body—especially her breasts and buttocks. In some works these looked like huge clods of earth; in other works, like voluptuous pieces of fruit. A complete figure of his wife, Standing Woman (1930-1933, Philadelphia Museum of Art), improbably combines the gargantuan proportions of a powerful female with a light gracefulness of stance.

Paul Manship, for whom Lachaise worked from 1913 to 1920, drew inspiration from early Greek Art but infused his figures with stylized patterns and carefully repeating curves. His bronze statue Day (1938, Smithsonian American Art Museum), an allegory of time, shows a fleet figure, nearly horizontal in his hurry, carrying a stylized sun. Elie Nadelman, born in Poland, came to America in 1917 when he was 32. His elegant and witty figures of dancers, men with bowler hats and bow ties, and fashionable bathers remind distantly of early American folk carvings. It is worth noting in terms of his art that he amassed a large collection of European and American toys and dolls. John Flannagan carved stone sculptures whose small size and roughness to the touch may not impress at first glance. But these sculptures have a wonderful compactness and sense of coiled tension. His figure of Jonah embedded in the whale suggests a fetus about to spring forth (Jonah and the Whale (1937, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond). Remarking on his preference for fieldstone, the sculptor observed that “its very rudeness seems to me more in a harmony with simple direct statement.”

C The War and Postwar Period: 1940 to 1975

The United States emerged after World War II as the strongest nation in the world. New York City became the world's major art center, and American artists no longer saw themselves as following in the shadow of European art. A number of painters who would become noted abstract expressionists had immigrated to the United States before the war. They included Arshile Gorky, who arrived from Armenia in 1920; Mark Rothko, from Russia in 1913; Willem de Kooning, from The Netherlands in 1926; and Hans Hofmann, an influential teacher as well as painter, from Germany in 1930. During the war Mondrian, Marc Chagall, and other important European artists sought refuge in the United States. Abstract expressionism was the first art movement to originate on American soil and gain an international following. Later 20th-century American art movements, such as pop art and minimal art, also had an international impact.

C1 Abstract Expressionism and Its Followers

Abstract expressionism was the foremost modernist direction of the 1940s and 1950s, producing the most daring, adventurous, and forceful art. Stylistically, painters associated with the movement fell into one of two groupings. Artists in the first grouping applied paint in a rapid, gestural way—flinging, splattering, or dribbling it, or laying it on in slashing, dramatic brushstrokes. This branch of abstract expressionism is sometimes called action painting. Artists in the second grouping applied paint in broad areas, and their branch is sometimes referred to as color-field painting. Painters in both groups, and the critics sympathetic to them, insisted that these abstract paintings were not merely decorative, but had content and referred to universal concepts, feelings, or ideas. Writers saw a link between abstract expressionism and the then-current philosophy of existentialism, which emphasized individual freedom and choice and maintained that one cannot go back to the past for guidance to the present.

The best-known action painters are Jackson Pollock, Gorky, Franz Kline, and de Kooning. Pollock developed a method of dripping paint onto canvas in intricate webs from which an image or emotion might—or might not—eventually emerge. His Cathedral (1947, Dallas Museum of Fine Arts) suggests vertical extension, as in a cathedral, that defies the pull of gravity. The glowing colors and network of forms in Gorky's Waterfall (1943, Tate Gallery, London) are meant to suggest the landscape near his Connecticut home. This painting is one of a series of waterfalls and landscapes that he painted in the 1940s. Kline's black-and-white Meryon (1960-1961, Tate Gallery), its black streaks pushing outward at the edges of the canvas, implies an essentially American idea of boundlessness. In de Kooning's Marilyn (1949, Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.), the broken forms and lines seem to assert the figure of a woman within a pervasive chaos. “Art,” de Kooning wrote in 1951, “never seems to make me peaceful or pure. I always seem to be wrapped in the melodrama of vulgarity.”

The best-known artists in the second group—color-field painting—are Rothko, Clyfford Still, William Baziotes, and Robert Motherwell. The floating rectangles of color in Rothko's paintings evoke a sense of calmness and surrender rather than the feeling of ceaseless activity conveyed by the action painters. The flamelike jagged forms in Still's paintings bring to mind both constructive and destructive processes in nature, such as burning forests that clear the way for new growth. In Baziotes's paintings, such as Primeval Landscape (1953, Philadelphia Museum of Art), semitransparent floating shapes resemble primitive, single-celled organisms. Motherwell created a series of black-and-white paintings titled Elegies to the Spanish Republic, in which he placed egg-shaped forms between vertical bars, presumably with the intention of recalling the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s.

A second generation of abstract expressionists, including Grace Hartigan and Joan Mitchell, carried the movement into the 1960s and 1970s. But by the mid-1950s other directions in avant-garde art had emerged, for example in the work of Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Larry Rivers. Johns's paintings of common objects—including flags, targets, numbers, and maps—mystified the art world, coming as they did during the heyday of abstract expressionism. What Johns wished to do was to subvert the meanings of these objects. Is a painting of a flag still a flag? Or when an entire painting is the image of a flag, does the sense of a flag as a symbol of the country then slip away? Does the flag become simply a pattern? Where abstract expressionists had sought to express meaning through abstract form, gesture, and color, Johns aimed to remove the meaning from objects that are laden with connotations. Rauschenberg retained something of abstract expressionism in the streaks of paint applied to his work Estate (1963, Philadelphia Museum of Art), but he composed most of the surface of images from photographs and newspapers that he silk-screened onto the canvas. Some of the images he chose for this composition refer to freedom and control: traffic signs, the Statue of Liberty, and the Sistine Chapel during Second Vatican Council—a period of openness in the Roman Catholic Church. Rivers, too, stands at the edge of abstract expressionism, having retained its splatters of paint while deriving his images from cigar box lids and famous paintings of the past. His gift for facial characterization is evident in Parts of the Face (1961, Tate Gallery).

C2 Postwar Sculpture and Assemblage

Austrian-born Chaim Gross emerged as a figural sculptor during the 1930s; for almost 60 years he carved blocky human figures of wood, such as Judith (1960, Smithsonian American Art Museum). Isamu Noguchi made smooth abstract sculptures of wood and marble with elegant curves respectful of the material, such as Grey Sun (1967, Smithsonian American Art Museum). But while these two artists worked, an entirely new concept took over American sculpture: assemblage. Assemblage involved putting together different elements to create sculpture—for example, by soldering metal parts—rather than working directly on the sculptural medium through hacking, carving, or molding.

The metal assemblagists of the 1940s and on included David Smith from Decatur, Indiana, and Richard Stankiewicz and Alexander Calder, both from Philadelphia. Smith learned his craft by working in automobile factories and on ships with dockworkers. For some pieces he used sharp, angular shards, and for others, gracefully flowing metal strips. In his Cubi XIX (1964, Tate Gallery) and other burnished metal sculptures in the Cubi series, he used simple geometrical shapes, including cubes. Stankiewicz made his sculptures of discarded remnants—pipes, parts of radios, boilers, and such—that he found by rummaging through junkyards, as in Untitled (1959, Smithsonian American Art Museum). Calder made a serious enterprise of the mobile—a sculpture whose parts are set in motion by air currents—although he was not the first to make sculptures with moveable parts. (Duchamp with his spinning Bicycle Wheel and other pieces had preceded Calder). Calder's Horizontal Yellow (1972) is a standing version of the mobile.

Louise Nevelson created assemblages of wood, starting in the 1950s. She collected pieces of wood and door handles, architectural decorations, chair legs, and other discarded wooden objects, which she assembled in boxes and then painted in a single color—black, white, or gold. With their careful arrangements of shape and pattern, these works appear related to abstract art. Joseph Cornell made assemblages of glass boxes in which he placed tattered labels, bits of newspapers, shells, old movie posters, reproductions of European paintings, or other odds and ends that he carefully collected. His ingenious combination of things often alluded to Europe, whose culture he yearned to experience for himself, though he never managed to do so.

C3 Post-Painterly Abstraction

In the 1960s and 1970s artists and critics began to classify abstract art as hard-edge or soft-edge, and influential New York art critic Clement Greenberg dubbed both varieties post-painterly abstraction. The term covers a broad group of artists who rejected the gestural effects and expressive brush strokes of the abstract expressionists. Much of their painting was done with acrylic paints rather than with oils, and forms in the paintings could have either clearly defined outlines (hard-edge) or blurred outlines (soft-edge). But both varieties shared a flat quality that gave no evidence of the artist's manipulation of the paint, a manipulation evident in abstract expressionism. And while abstract expressionists alluded to ideas or emotional states beyond the painting, post-painterly abstractionists wished to produce paintings that had no meanings or allusions beyond what was on the canvas. As hard-edge painter Frank Stella succinctly put it, “What you see is what you see.”

Although the space (or depth) in an abstract expressionist painting is difficult to read, in general the paintings create the impression of a container with objects or images within it. In post-painterly abstraction, by contrast, artists scrupulously avoided giving any sense of depth to their paintings, thus further removing the canvases from any allusion to three-dimensional reality.

Some of the hard-edge artists exploited the repetition of certain shapes. Stella, for example, who had noted the equal spacing of the stripes in Johns's flags, used brightly colored stripes in his work. He gave many of his canvases non-rectangular shapes and let the stripes follow the outline of the canvas, as in Rozdol II (1973, Seattle Art Museum). Kenneth Noland used circles or chevrons in works such as Split (1959, Smithsonian American Art Museum). Helen Frankenthaler and other soft-edge painters did not prime (use an undercoating on) their canvases; as a result the paint would seep directly into the cloth. Frankenthaler's thin washes of color seem reminiscent of water or mists moving of their own volition, as in Mountains and Sea (1952, National Gallery of Art). Morris Louis used gravity to create soft-edge bands of color in various formats that he called florals, veils, or columns. He would tilt an upright canvas, allowing the paint to run down it at angles he could control, as in the floral painting Beta Upsilon (1960, Smithsonian American Art Museum).

The profusion of styles during the 1960s and 1970s included op art, whose practitioners aimed at producing pulsating optical aftereffects through the repetition of shapes in their paintings. The best-known American op artist is Richard Anuszkiewicz. Many critics consider op art a branch of post-painterly abstraction.

C4 Representational Art

Representational art (art that portrays recognizable objects) continued alongside abstract expressionism, primarily outside New York City. On the West Coast, the Bay Area Figurative School emerged in the 1950s and became known for its landscapes and paintings of the human figure. One of its leading members, San Francisco Bay artist Richard Diebenkorn, created softly colored grids whose compositions suggest boulevards or, in View of Oakland (1962, Smithsonian American Art Museum), the rooftops of a city. Wayne Thiebaud, who came to California from Mesa, Arizona, painted pastries and other foodstuffs, taking care to emphasize their gooey and shiny qualities.

Andrew Wyeth, the son of a renowned illustrator, came from farming country near Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and painted country scenes, some marked by a sense of disquieting solitude. One of his most poignant works, Christina's World (1948, Museum of Modern Art), is set in Maine and shows a physically disabled young woman as she struggles to reach a distant house at the top of a hill. Morris Graves, from Fox Valley, Oregon, was a follower of Zen who painted birds and other aspects of nature. He regarded his birds, which he often showed as blind, to have moved beyond their physical presence to become symbols of the inner life, as in Raven in Moonlight (1943, North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh).

Romare Bearden and Betye Saar dealt with their identities as African Americans, but unlike social realist Jacob Lawrence, they did not focus on the sufferings of their race. Bearden focused on the solidity of the family and the community (Family, 1988, Smithsonian American Art Museum), and Saar, on the mystical aspects of her people's collective past (Black Girl's Window, 1969, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York). Painter Robert Colescott recast the figures in famous paintings of the past with blackface stereotypes of African Americans, thereby satirizing the paintings and pointing to the absence of African Americans in white histories.

C5 Pop Art

The representational art movement that emerged in New York City in the 1960s was pop art, which followed Johns and Rauschenberg in its use of images drawn from popular culture. But unlike Johns and Rauschenberg, who incorporated mass-produced objects and images in their art, the pop artists re-created commonplace objects and images—soup cans, comic strips, advertising—as works of art in their own right. The pop art movement began in part as a reaction against abstract expressionism, which pop artists believed was too intellectual and divorced from real life. Rather than glorifying the creative process and the artist's personal touch as abstract expressionism had done, pop art embraced mechanical creation and the impersonality and repetitiveness of the mass media. As with post-painterly abstraction, there seemed to be a lack of involvement on the part of the artist, an absence of allusions or possible interpretations. The writer Susan Sontag characterized the avant-garde art of the 1960s and 1970s as “a flight from interpretation.”

The leading pop painters include Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and James Rosenquist. Warhol, who had enjoyed a successful career as a commercial illustrator, showed as single images or rows of images objects so frequently seen and so immediately recognizable that people never stopped to examine them closely. These objects included dollar bills, the face of Marilyn Monroe as displayed on billboards or in magazines, and Campbell's soup cans. Warhol's attitude toward these objects, positive or negative, cannot be discerned. Surfaces were everything, he claimed. “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and me, and there I am. There's nothing behind it.” Critics found more behind images of an electric chair or a car crash Warhol re-created from news photos. By repeating the static images, reproducing them in altered colors such as silver and black, and displaying them as art, Warhol restored shock value to the images and what they depicted.

Lichtenstein made paintings from greatly enlarged frames of comic strips dealing with dramatic situations, such as war and romantic entanglements. His large, colorful paintings, such as Whaam! (1963, Tate Gallery), purposefully pointed to their inherent vicariousness. If actual fighting in war constituted the experience in Whaam!, and a photograph that captured that experience was a step away from the reality, then a comic strip based on the photograph would be still another step removed. Finally, a painting based on the comic strip would be at the furthest remove from the actual experience of war.

Rosenquist began as a billboard painter, and his pop paintings reveal this background with their oversized images and enormous size. Advertising also influenced his art, and his fragmented images in unrelated juxtaposition capture the visual overload of a consumer culture. Jim Dine, another pop artist, used as his subjects items found in catalogs, such as ties, bathrobes, and heart-shaped objects (Putney Winter Heart, 1971-1972, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris).

Of the pop sculptors, none is more intriguing than Claes Oldenburg. While dealing with the mass-produced objects of pop art, he avoided the movement's hard and mechanical qualities. Oldenburg used vinyl and other flexible materials to create his so-called soft sculptures such as Soft Drum Set (1972, Musée National d'Art Moderne). The soft sculptures sag as though they are going to sleep or deflating and "dying," thereby evoking the human condition more poignantly than a representational but hard and unyielding figure of a person in a traditional sculpture material. Oldenburg also constructed giant replicas of tools, such as Trowel I (1971-1976, Kr?ller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, The Netherlands), and other common objects, including clothespins, a baseball bat, and a lipstick. Placed out of context, on a city sidewalk or college campus, or in a sculpture park, the pieces elicit from the pedestrian a sense of shock and disassociation. Sculptor George Segal, who is sometimes grouped with the pop artists, made plaster casts of neighbors and friends from New Jersey standing about or engaged in everyday activities. The white figures placed in settings with actual objects seem ghostlike and estranged from their surroundings. In The Curtain (1974, Smithsonian American Art Museum), for example, a plaster nude woman stands behind a wooden window frame, pulling back a cloth curtain.

C6 Conceptual Art and Minimal Art

The conceptual approach to art gained wide application in the last decades of the 20th century. In this approach, introduced by Duchamp in the second decade of the century, the concept or novel idea becomes more important than the art object. The conceptual art movement took off in the 1960s, spearheaded in America by artists Sol Lewitt, Joseph Kosuth, and others. Lewitt's concepts were so straightforward that he could telephone the instructions for others to execute. Among his works are three-dimensional grids of open cubes and geometric drawings based on straight lines. Kosuth explored language and meaning, exhibiting, for example, an object (such as a chair), its photograph, and a printed dictionary definition of the object, leaving the observer to ponder the reality of each.

Some conceptual artists worked with industrial materials. Carl Andre employed bricks, squares of metal, and other materials that spread over the floor or ground, usually in flat, rectangular patterns as in 144 Magnesium Squares (1969, Tate Gallery, London). Explaining what he had done, Andre wrote that his work “is atheistic because it is without transcendent form, without spiritual or intellectual qualities; materialistic because it is made out of its own materials without pretension to other materials; and communistic because the form is equally accessible to all men.” Dan Flavin used fluorescent light tubes in different colors, displayed vertically or in various configurations, to transform visually the space they illuminated. These works, as a result, extend beyond the physical object into the onlooker's space, as in Monument for V. Tatlin (1969, Tate Gallery), which pays homage in its composition to the Russian constructivist sculptor Vladimir Tatlin. In some of Flavin's works, the lights flash rhythmically on and off. The work of Andre and Flavin also falls into the category of minimal art, sculpture and painting based on geometric modules or other simple units. Sculptor Donald Judd, who created elegant and austere metal boxes of polished metal and Plexiglas, was a leader of the minimal movement.

Conceptual art even encompassed nature and natural forces, and some artists brought art out of the gallery through what became known as earthworks or earth art. Earth art was constructed within and in harmony with the landscape and ordinarily lasted only a limited time before natural processes wore it away. One of the best-known earthworks is Spiral Jetty, created in Utah in 1970 by Robert Smithson. After having 6,000 tons of earth deposited in the Great Salt Lake, Smithson built upon this layer a graceful, narrow coil out of black rock and salt crystals. This coil or spiral jetty, which extended into the lake, was 4.6 m (15 ft) wide and 457 m (1,500 ft) long. The presence of the jetty altered the viewer's experience of the lake. Although rising water submerged the jetty soon after its completion, photographs and drawings of it remain as documentation.

D The Late 20th Century: 1975-2000

Many of the art movements of the 1970s continued into the latter part of the 20th century. Some artists altered the outdoor environment in ways related to earth art. Others moved their environment-altering art indoors and created room-size artworks. Artists worked in an ever-greater variety of media, including electronic media, especially videos. Some took their art online. A number of artists sought to raise public consciousness by confronting issues such as racism and feminism. Some critics predicted a return to more decorative and less argumentative art as the 21st century began.

D1 Sculpture

Perhaps the most exciting development in late-20th-century sculpture came from the use of new media. Minimal and conceptual artists had begun this trend by using industrial rather than traditional artistic materials. Earth artists had advanced this notion by incorporating nature into their sculptures.

Bulgarian-born artist Christo altered the landscape and our experience of it, in many cases by wrapping buildings, trees, or other large objects. In 1995 he covered all surfaces of the Reichstag in Berlin, Germany, with 100,000 sq m (120,000 sq yd) of reflective silver fabric. The home of the German parliament, a building that had stood dark and empty from 1945 until the early 1990s, became bright and shiny through Christo's intervention, changing the pedestrian's perception of the building and its surroundings. Christo's art, like Smithson's, is of short duration but is documented in models, photographs, and drawings. Other Christo projects include Surrounded Islands (1980-1983), in which he floated pink polypropylene fabric around 11 islands in Biscayne Bay near Miami, Florida, and The Umbrellas, which placed umbrellas along the coasts of California and Japan in 1991. Christo's intrusions into the landscape relate to earth art.

Some late-century sculptors transformed interior spaces rather than the out-of-doors. Known as installation artists, they used a variety of materials to create works that the viewer could walk by or through. Judy Chicago created one of the earliest installations, The Dinner Party (1979, collection of the artist). Each of the 39 place settings in the work represented a different woman in history. Installations by British-born American artist Judy Pfaff referred to specific urban environments and to the natural world. She installed enormous constructed reliefs of fruits and vegetables along a brick wall in Supermercado (1985, Whitney Museum of American Art). She also created imaginative gardens of glass, colored tubing, wire, and other materials in works such as Moxibustion (1994, Exit Art, New York City). Ann Hamilton sought to overwhelm the spectator's senses in her sculptural installations of the 1980s and 1990s, many of which involved sound, smell, or taste.

Korean-born artist Nam June Paik created sculptural installations from multiple television sets. In these works, an array of rapidly changing images flashes across the TV screens, conveying the fleeting nature of information and the quick cut of television pictures and subjects. The sculpture of Bruce Nauman incorporated flashing neon lights and videotaped images that assault the onlooker with disturbing and disagreeable words, thoughts, images, and sounds.

Duane Hanson created extraordinarily lifelike sculptures of working-class people that he cast life-size in synthetic resins and painted. Caught in mid-stride and decked out in actual (usually mismatched) clothing, these figures stare vacantly ahead. In an exhibition, viewers find it easy to confuse Hanson's super-realistic figures with other gallery-goers.

Perhaps the most acclaimed U.S. public monument of the last decades of the 20th century is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1982, Washington, D.C.), designed by Maya Lin. It consists of two highly polished black granite walls 150 m (493 ft) in total length on which are inscribed the names of more than 58,000 American men and women killed or missing as a result of the Vietnam War (1959-1975). The monument was created to harmonize with its setting on the National Mall. As earth art transforms the environment, the memorial focuses attention not only upon itself, but also changes one's perception of the Mall in its length. Yet the memorial also demands a close-up view: relatives, friends, and other visitors can see their own faces reflected as they search for names. Lin also designed a Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, to honor those who died in the struggle for civil rights.

D2 Painting

In the late 1970s and the 1980s a number of artists rejected the constraints of conceptual and minimal art, returning instead to image-based painting. Among the first to do so were Susan Rothenberg and Jennifer Bartlett. Rothenberg used thick, expressive strokes of paint, usually in a single color, to depict indistinct human and animal forms in a spectral atmosphere, as in Vertical Spin (1986-1987, Tate Gallery). Bartlett created multipart compositions that explore the relationship between light and color. The Study for Swimmers Atlanta series (1979, Smithsonian American Art Museum) comprises 11 colorful paintings on two of Bartlett's favorite themes: water and swimmers.

The human figure took on greater importance in a movement known as neoexpressionism, which gained strength in Europe in the 1970s and had a great impact in America in the 1980s. Among its leaders in the United States were Julian Schnabel, David Salle, and Eric Fischl. These artists broke with the cool and impersonal approach of the minimal and conceptual artists. Like Rothenberg, they used energetic brushwork to raise the emotional temperature and expressiveness of their work. Schnabel painted on various surfaces, including broken crockery that he attached to his canvases. Salle borrowed imagery from past art and from comics and other mass media. Fischl painted suburban life with a loose brush in a realist manner, but with a disturbing, often sexual, subtext.

Other artists depicted figures in almost cartoonish ways. Philip Guston, who had gained prominence as an abstract expressionist, began painting human figures and body parts in a deliberately awkward manner. These distorted images were rendered in unpleasant hues of red and pink, as in Transition (1975, Smithsonian American Art Museum). Keith Haring in the 1980s worked cartoonlike outlines of human figures into colorful all-over patterns that drew on many sources, including graffiti.

A group of artists known as photorealists carried on the cool, detached attitude of post-painterly abstraction and pop art. They created detailed paintings that look like huge photographs. Richard Estes depicted cityscapes, often reflected in plate-glass windows or on shiny car fenders. The city scenes he chose were not especially picturesque or identifiable as rich or poor; they did not offer an overview of a part of the city. Nor did they have a focus; they appeared as fragments, cropped and shown with full clarity, as an unseasoned photographer would do in a snapshot, as in American Express Downtown (1979, private collection). Chuck Close concentrated on the human head in enlarged close-up views. To transfer the image, he created a grid on the original photograph, then painted each section of the grid on the canvas. Close's portraits, such as Lucas II (1987, Pace Wildenstein Gallery, New York), also mimic the three-color separation technique or computer techniques of photography. Audrey Flack, another photorealist, created brightly colored still-lifes by projecting slides onto canvas and then painting the projected images.

D3 Issue-Oriented Art

Much of the art of the 1990s was issue-oriented and explored gender and identity through the experiences of women, gays, African Americans, and other groups. Among the important feminist artists were photographer Cindy Sherman, who took on different female roles in her art, and conceptual artists Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger, who questioned clichés and advertising images. African American artist Melvin Edwards worked on a series of metal sculptures called Lynch Fragments, which deal with violence against African Americans. Faith Ringgold commented on the plight of African Americans through her story quilts, which narrate tales of fictional characters through painting, stitchery, and handwritten texts. Some gay artists followed the lead of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and treated the nude male body as a kind of still life.

A few artists of the late 20th century used their own bodies as art. Sherman featured herself in various guises and roles. In the 1990s she began to re-create famous works of art, using herself as the subject. Sculptor Jeff Koons challenged the limits of taste. He began in the 1980s by re-creating clichéd items of popular culture, such as ceramic sculptures of animals. In the 1990s Koons started making sexually explicit photographs of himself and his wife, an Italian pornography star turned politician.

Other artists explored issues through language. Holzer used words in various ways, especially statements that appear to express obvious truths with authoritativeness. She called these statements truisms. In presenting these truisms, as carved in marble in the 1987 work Untitled, she forces the viewer to consider these statements and decide whether he or she agrees or disagrees with them. In an online work entitled Please Change Beliefs, Holzer invited people to read a stream of truisms, choose among them, and add their own. Kruger, formerly a layout designer at Mademoiselle magazine, presented words together with mass media images in the format of a magazine layout. The words function as commentary on the cultural underpinnings of the image, as in Untitled (No), a 1985 work that shows a child thumbing its nose. Each image in this series of untitled prints illustrates a single word. Many of her images are angry or aggressive.

D4 At the Millennium

At the turn of the 21st century, no one or two main trends dominated American Art, as happened in the earlier 20th century. American art was in a period of pluralism that encompassed a bewildering variety of styles and techniques. It remains for future art historians to determine what formed the mainstream of American art in the late 20th century—and what were its tributaries.

Contributed By:

Abraham A. Davidson

Catlin's Iowa Medicine Man

When American artists pushed westward, beginning in the 1830s and 1840s, they offered people in the Eastern United States a vision of the nation's inhabitants and landscapes. Iowa was named for Native American peoples who inhabited the area when white settlers arrived. This portrait, See-non-ty-a, an Iowa Medicine Man (1844-1845), is by American painter George Catlin.

Paul Mellon Collection/National Gallery of Art