,
Dom in Halle, 1931, Cathedral of
Halle, Germany ,
American Gothic (1930),
Art Institute of Chicago ,
Dempsey and Firpo, 1924,
Whitney Museum of American Art , ''Ram's Head White Hollyhock and Little Hills,'' 1935, the
Brooklyn Museum ,
Painting No. 48, 1913,
Brooklyn Museum Controversy soon became a way of life for American artists. In fact, much of American painting and sculpture since 1900 has been a series of revolts against tradition. "To hell with the artistic values," announced
Robert Henri (1865–1929). He was the leader of what critics called the
Ashcan school of painting, after the group's portrayals of the squalid aspects of city life.
American realism became the new direction for American visual artists at the turn of the 20th century. The Ashcan painters
George Bellows,
Everett Shinn,
George Benjamin Luks,
William Glackens, and
John Sloan were among those who developed socially conscious imagery in their works. The photographer
Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) led the
Photo-Secession movement, which created pathways for photography as an emerging art form. Soon the Ashcan school artists gave way to
modernists arriving from Europe—the cubists and abstract painters promoted by Stieglitz at his
291 Gallery in New York City.
John Marin,
Marsden Hartley,
Alfred Henry Maurer,
Arthur B. Carles,
Arthur Dove,
Henrietta Shore,
Stuart Davis,
Wilhelmina Weber,
Stanton Macdonald-Wright,
Morgan Russell,
Patrick Henry Bruce,
Andrew Dasburg,
Georgia O'Keeffe, and
Gerald Murphy were some important early American modernist painters. Early modernist sculptors in America include
William Zorach,
Elie Nadelman, and
Paul Manship.
Florine Stettheimer developed an extremely personal faux-naif style. After
World War I many American artists rejected the
modern trends emanating from the
Armory Show and European influences such as those from the
School of Paris. Instead they chose to adopt various—in some cases
academic—styles of
realism in depicting American urban and rural scenes.
Grant Wood,
Reginald Marsh,
Guy Pène du Bois, and
Charles Sheeler exemplify the realist tendency in different ways. Sheeler and the modernists
Charles Demuth and
Ralston Crawford were referred to as
Precisionists for their sharply defined renderings of machines and architectural forms.
Edward Hopper, who studied under Henri, developed an individual style of realism by concentrating on light and form, and avoiding overt social content.
The American Southwest Following the
first World War, the completion of the
Santa Fe Railroad enabled American settlers to travel across the west, as far as the
California coast. New artists' colonies started growing up around
Santa Fe and
Taos, the artists' primary subject matter being the native people and landscapes of the
Southwest. Images of the Southwest became a popular form of advertising, used most significantly by the Santa Fe Railroad to entice settlers to come west and enjoy the "unsullied landscapes."
Walter Ufer,
Bert Geer Phillips,
E. Irving Couse,
William Henry Jackson,
Marsden Hartley,
Andrew Dasburg, and
Georgia O'Keeffe were some of the more prolific artists of the Southwest. Georgia O'Keeffe, who was born in the late 19th century, became known for her paintings featuring flowers, bones, and landscapes of
New Mexico as seen in ''Ram's Head White Hollyhock and Little Hills''. O'Keeffe visited the Southwest in 1929 and moved there permanently in 1949; she lived and painted there until she died in 1986.
Harlem Renaissance (1920s–1930s) The
Harlem Renaissance was another significant development in American art. In the 1920s and 30s a new generation of educated and politically astute African-American men and women emerged who sponsored literary societies and art and industrial exhibitions to combat racist stereotypes. The movement, which showcased the range of talents within African-American communities, included artists from across America, but was centered in
Harlem. The work of the Harlem painter and
graphic artist
Aaron Douglas and the photographer
James VanDerZee became emblematic of the movement. Artists associated with the Harlem Renaissance include
Romare Bearden,
Jacob Lawrence,
Charles Alston,
Augusta Savage,
Archibald Motley,
Lois Mailou Jones,
Palmer Hayden and
Sargent Johnson.
New Deal art (1930s) ,
People of Chilmark (Figure Composition), 1920,
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden,
Washington, D.C. When the
Great Depression worsened, president
Roosevelt's New Deal created several public arts programs. The purpose of the programs was to give work to artists and decorate public buildings, usually with a national theme. The first of these projects, the
Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), was created after successful lobbying by the unemployed artists of the
Artists Union. The PWAP lasted less than one year, and produced nearly 15,000 works of art. It was followed by the
Federal Art Project of the
Works Progress Administration (FAP/WPA) in 1935, which funded some of the most well-known
American artists. The style of much of the public art commissioned by the WPA was influenced by the work of
Diego Rivera and other artists of the contemporary
Mexican muralism movement. Several separate and related movements began and developed during the
Great Depression including
American scene painting,
Regionalism, and
Social Realism.
Thomas Hart Benton,
John Steuart Curry,
Grant Wood,
Maxine Albro,
Ben Shahn,
Joseph Stella,
Reginald Marsh,
Isaac Soyer,
Raphael Soyer,
Spencer Baird Nichols and
Jack Levine were some of the best-known artists. Not all of the artists who emerged in the years between the wars were Regionalists or Social Realists;
Milton Avery's paintings, often nearly abstract, had a significant influence on several of the younger artists who would soon become known as Abstract Expressionists.
Joseph Cornell, inspired by
Surrealism, created boxed assemblages incorporating found objects and
collage.
Abstract expressionism , ''
The Liver is the Cock's Comb'' (1944), oil on canvas, ,
Albright–Knox Art Gallery,
Buffalo, New York. The painting represents the peak of Gorky's achievement and his individual style, after he had emerged from the influence of Cézanne and Picasso. In the years after World War II, a group of New York artists formed the first American movement to exert major influence internationally:
abstract expressionism. This term, which had first been used in 1919 in Berlin, was used again in 1946 by
Robert Coates in
The New York Times, and was taken up by the two major art critics of that time,
Harold Rosenberg and
Clement Greenberg. It has always been criticized as too large and paradoxical, yet the common definition implies the use of
abstract art to express feelings, emotions, what is within the artist, and not what stands without. The first generation of abstract expressionists included
Jackson Pollock,
Willem de Kooning,
Mark Rothko,
Franz Kline,
Arshile Gorky,
Robert Motherwell,
Clyfford Still,
Barnett Newman,
Adolph Gottlieb,
Phillip Guston,
Ad Reinhardt,
James Brooks,
Richard Pousette-Dart,
William Baziotes,
Mark Tobey,
Bradley Walker Tomlin,
Theodoros Stamos,
Jack Tworkov,
Wilhelmina Weber Furlong,
David Smith, and
Hans Hofmann, among others.
Milton Avery,
Lee Krasner,
Louise Bourgeois,
Alexander Calder,
Tony Smith,
Morris Graves and others were also related, important and influential artists during that period. Though the numerous artists encompassed by this label had widely different styles, contemporary critics found several common points between them. Gorky, Pollock, de Kooning, Kline, Hofmann, Motherwell, Gottlieb, Rothko, Still, Guston, and others were an American painters associated with the
abstract expressionist movement and in most cases
Action painting (as seen in Kline's
Painting Number 2, 1954); as part of the
New York School in the 1940s and 1950s. Many first generation abstract expressionists were influenced both by the
Cubists' works (which they knew from photographs in art reviews and by seeing the works at the 291 Gallery or the Armory Show), by the European
Surrealists, and by
Pablo Picasso,
Joan Miró and
Henri Matisse as well as the Americans
Milton Avery,
John D. Graham, and
Hans Hofmann. Most of them abandoned formal composition and representation of real objects. Often the abstract expressionists decided to try instinctual, intuitive, spontaneous arrangements of space, line, shape and color. Abstract Expressionism can be characterized by two major elements: the large size of the canvases used (partially inspired by Mexican frescoes and the works they made for the
WPA in the 1930s), and the strong and unusual use of brushstrokes and experimental paint application with a new understanding of process.
Color Field painting The emphasis and intensification of color and large open expanses of surface were two of the principles applied to the movement called
Color Field painting. Ad Reinhardt, Adolph Gottlieb, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still and Barnett Newman were categorized as such. Another movement was called
Action Painting, characterized by spontaneous reaction, powerful brushstrokes, dripped and splashed paint and the strong physical movements used in the production of a painting. Jackson Pollock is an example of an Action Painter: his
creative process, incorporating thrown and dripped paint from a stick or poured directly from the can, revolutionized painting methods.
Willem de Kooning famously said about Pollock "he broke the ice for the rest of us." Ironically Pollock's large repetitious expanses of linear fields are characteristic of Color Field painting as well, as
art critic Michael Fried wrote in his essay for the catalog of
Three American painters: Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Frank Stella at the
Fogg Art Museum in 1965. Despite the disagreements between art critics, Abstract Expressionism marks a turning-point in the history of American art: the 1940s and 1950s saw international attention shift from European (Parisian) art, to American (New York) art. Color field painting continued as a movement in the 1960s, as Morris Louis,
Jules Olitski,
Kenneth Noland,
Gene Davis,
Helen Frankenthaler, and others sought to make paintings which would eliminate superfluous rhetoric with repetition, stripes and large, flat areas of color.
After abstract expressionism ,
Untitled (Black on Grey), 1969-70,
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum,
New York City. One of Rothko's final paintings which relate closely to both
Minimal art and
Color Field painting. During the 1950s abstract painting in America evolved into movements such as
Neo-Dada,
Post painterly abstraction,
Op Art,
hard-edge painting,
Minimal art,
Shaped canvas painting,
Lyrical Abstraction, and the continuation of
Abstract expressionism. As a response to the tendency toward abstraction imagery emerged through various new movements like
Pop Art, the
Bay Area Figurative Movement and later in the 1970s
Neo-expressionism. Lyrical Abstraction along with the
Fluxus movement and
Postminimalism (a term first coined by Robert Pincus-Witten in the pages of
Artforum in 1969) sought to expand the boundaries of abstract painting and Minimalism by focusing on process, new materials and new ways of expression. Postminimalism often incorporating industrial materials, raw materials, fabrications, found objects, installation, serial repetition, and often with references to
Dada and Surrealism is best exemplified in the sculptures of
Eva Hesse. Lyrical Abstraction shares similarities with Color Field Painting and Abstract Expressionism, especially in the freewheeling usage of paint texture and surface. Direct
drawing, calligraphic use of line, the effects of brushed, splattered, stained, squeegeed, poured, and splashed paint superficially resemble the effects seen in Abstract Expressionism and Color Field Painting. However the styles are markedly different. During the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s painters as powerful and influential as
Adolph Gottlieb,
Phillip Guston,
Lee Krasner,
Cy Twombly,
Robert Rauschenberg,
Jasper Johns,
Richard Diebenkorn,
Josef Albers,
Elmer Bischoff,
Agnes Martin,
Al Held,
Sam Francis,
Barnett Newman,
Kenneth Noland,
Jules Olitski,
Ellsworth Kelly,
Morris Louis,
Gene Davis,
Frank Stella,
Joan Mitchell,
Friedel Dzubas,
Paul Jenkins,
Larry Poons and younger artists like
Brice Marden,
Robert Mangold,
Sam Gilliam,
Sean Scully,
Elizabeth Murray,
Walter Darby Bannard,
Larry Zox,
Ronnie Landfield,
Ronald Davis,
Dan Christensen,
Susan Rothenberg,
Ross Bleckner,
Richard Tuttle,
Julian Schnabel,
Peter Halley,
Jean-Michel Basquiat,
Eric Fischl and dozens of others produced vital and influential paintings.
Other modern American movements '' (1942) by
Edward Hopper is one of his best-known works,
Art Institute of Chicago. Members of the next artistic generation favored a different form of abstraction: works of mixed media. Among them were
Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) and
Jasper Johns (1930- ), who used photos, newsprint, and discarded objects in their compositions.
Pop artists, such as
Andy Warhol (1928–1987),
Larry Rivers (1923–2002), and
Roy Lichtenstein (1923–1997), reproduced, with satiric care, everyday objects and images of American popular culture—Coca-Cola bottles, soup cans, comic strips. Realism has also been continually popular in the United States, despite modernism's impact; the realist tendency is evident in the city scenes of
Edward Hopper, the rural imagery of
Andrew Wyeth, and the illustrations of
Norman Rockwell. In certain places Abstract Expressionism never caught on; for example, in Chicago, the dominant art style was grotesque, symbolic realism, as exemplified by the
Chicago Imagists Cosmo Campoli (1923–1997),
Jim Nutt (1938- ),
Ed Paschke (1939–2004), and
Nancy Spero (1926–2009).
Contemporary art into the 21st century At the beginning of the 21st century, contemporary art in the United States in general continues in several contiguous modes, characterized by the idea of
Cultural pluralism. The "crisis" in painting and current art and current
art criticism today is brought about by pluralism. There is no consensus, nor need there be, as to a representative style of the age. There is an
anything goes attitude that prevails; an "everything going on" syndrome; with no firm and clear direction and yet with every lane on the artistic superhighway filled to capacity. Consequently, magnificent and important works of art continue to be made in the United States albeit in a wide variety of styles and aesthetic temperaments, the marketplace being left to judge merit.
Hard-edge painting,
Geometric abstraction,
Appropriation,
Hyperrealism,
Photorealism,
Expressionism,
Minimalism,
Lyrical Abstraction, Pop art, Op art, Abstract Expressionism, Color Field painting,
Monochrome painting,
Neo-expressionism,
Collage,
Intermedia painting,
Assemblage painting,
Digital painting,
Postmodern painting, Neo-Dada painting,
Shaped canvas painting, environmental
mural painting,
Graffiti, traditional
figure painting,
Landscape painting,
Portrait painting, are a few continuing and current directions in painting at the beginning of the 21st century. ==Notable figures==