This entry includes 10 subentries:
Decorative Arts
Glass
Interior Decoration
Interior Design
Painting
Photography
Pottery and Ceramics
Sculpture
Self-Taught Artists
Stained Glass Windows
Decorative Arts
The distinction between the fine arts and the "decorative" is mostly arbitrary. It was not made until eighteenth-century Europeans decided to do so, allowing fine art to gain an aura of associated mystique. Today the distinction is a familiar one, if not a clear one. The decorative arts are viewed as more craft based, serving or alluding to a function. While the categories of decorative arts are vast, fine craftsmanship seems to be the single unifier. Craftsmanship is more than technical virtuosity. It demands a profound understanding of materials and of the tools with which those materials are fashioned.
Probably the single most important factor in the creation of the decorative arts is the maker's genuine pride in the process of production, the need to make things as well as they can be made. At a purely utilitarian level, this drive to achieve perfection might seem excessive, but it is very human. However, it may well disappear in the face of consumer demand. Often, consumer goods are not made as well as they could be, nor do they last as long as they could be made to last, but these are careful adaptations to the economics of the market. Few if any machine-made products are designed to last forever, allowing for new and improved products to be designed and built with the same purpose but a different look.
Early Colonial Style
During the early colonial period, America imported its consumer products and craftsmen from Europe, resulting in the same pieces on both sides of the Atlantic. Any products made in the colonies had very similar designs to those found in the maker's originating culture. As local manufacturers became more prominent, slight modifications on the original designs began to appear. As the wealth of the colonies increased, initially in the South, so did the demand for quality furniture. A variety of indigenous soft and hardwoods, such as pine, birch, maple, oak, hickory, and later walnut, were readily available to colonial furniture craftsmen. With each ship new furniture forms arrived, including cane-back, slat-back, and leather-back chairs, as well as the upholstered chairs better known as easy chairs. Three styles came from England: William and Mary (c. 1700–1725) is an adaptation of the Baroque; Queen Anne (c. 1725–1760) is a refined Baroque with a greater awareness of technique; and Chippendale (c. 1760–1790) is a high English variant of French Rococo.
Pottery
With the arrival of the Europeans came the potter's wheel and many types of ceramic vessels. By 1635, Philip Drinker, an English potter, had started working in Charlestown, Massachusetts, and before 1655, Dirck Claesen, a Dutch "pottmaker," was working in Manhattan. By the very nature of local needs, most British colonial pottery production was utilitarian ware called redware, modeled on English and German storage jars, jugs, bowls, and plates. It was needed and produced in quantity, formed of the same red clay from which bricks were made. When fired, the clay remained porous. The glazing and ornamentation were basic. Redware (fired at 900© C–1040© C) was usually given a clear lead glaze (using a highly toxic sulfide or oxide of lead), that emphasized the clay's red tones. Adding metal oxides such as copper, iron, or manganese produced various bright colors that enhanced the surface of redware.
Most potters were either immigrants or only a generation or two removed from European or English craftsman traditions. As the immigrants began to see themselves as Americans and heirs to a continent, they sought more intellectual diversity and distance from contemporary European sources, while continuing to buy European products. By 1800, the Adamesque Neo-Classicism of Britain had pervaded domestic manufacturing design, and those ancient Greek and Roman shapes took root to varying degrees in different art forms and regions of America. Across the newly expanding country the Federal Style (c. 1785–1815) was followed by the Empire Style (c. 1815–1830). Both styles were versions of the Robert Adam–inspired Classical Revival in England and the variant Biedermeier style in Austria and Germany.
Chairs, Ceramics, and Silver
While the Shakers, a branch of the English Quakers, were rejecting the world about them, they made ladder-back chairs and sat as other Americans sat. While rockers were not a Shaker invention—the earliest-known citation is from 1741–1742 by Solomon Fussell, a Philadelphia furniture maker—their popularity may owe much to the inventiveness of the Shaker chair makers and to their readiness to accommodate to new styles.
In ceramics, the venerable English firm of Josiah Wedgwood was the leader in pottery. Wedgwood's invention of basalt ware in 1768, followed within a decade by his exquisitely modeled jasper ware, inspired ceramists everywhere. In the early nineteenth century the Wedgwood potteries did not produce porcelain, but the Worcester, Derby, and Coalport factories did, and those who sought fashionable dishes either got them from those factories or, starting about 1825, found suitable reproductions made by some twenty skilled craftsmen from England and France employed to make porcelain for the Jersey Porcelain and Earthenware Company in Jersey City, New Jersey. Other ventures followed in Philadelphia.
At the same time, and serving many of the same customers, silversmiths were both manufacturers and retailers, their shops often doubling as a workroom and a showroom. This practice continued until about 1840, when the discovery of the technique of electroplating led to the rise of large companies that produced and sold silver plate in stores. While not eliminating individual silversmiths, it did reduce their importance. Ultimately large corporations such as the Gorham Manufacturing Company and International Silver Company largely depersonalized the industry. Those individual shops that survived specialized more in repair, chasing, and engraving than in creating products.
Industrialization and Decorative Style
The American ambivalence about industrialization helps explain the inherent ideological contradictions in the decorative arts between 1850 and 1900. Laminating rose-wood, for example, required a large number of technologically sophisticated pieces of shop equipment, and it is ironic that such technical and mechanized operations produced forms that were emotional cues to the antithesis of mechanization. Besides the various European-derived revival styles, the Rococo Revival became an important stylistic force among wealthy Americans by 1850. The most influential sources for designers were the natural world, the past, and the exotic. Immensely popular in America were china patterns produced in England such as the transfer image "Ontario Lake Scenery." Mass-produced of cheap materials, the scene shows a castle, Niagara Falls, and tepees against a mountainous background. The newly powerful merchants, industrialists, and their managers bought this ware and anything else they saw at a reasonable price. The mass market was born, as was the separation of design from material reality in popular decorative arts.
Oriental Style
While China and Japan had been very important design sources for the decorative arts of elite culture before 1800, the American middle class discovered the Orient at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition. Everyday objects such as the inro, netsuke, and fans became decorative materials for homes or prized collections. "Oriental" was also a decorating, ceramics, and furniture style; at its extreme, oriental pieces were cast or carved to resemble bamboo, ebonized, or lacquered; paper parasols were popular, as were paper lanterns, fans, and kimonos. By the end of the century, artisans were manufacturing large numbers of items in the Oriental style expressly for use in America. By 1900 most "Made in Japan" furniture resembled forms from China. Design had succumbed to the marketplace.
But the Oriental influence also took another direction in the ceramic glazes and shapes developed by such potters as William Henry Grueby, who set up the Grueby Faience Company of Boston in 1894. Working with George Prentiss Kendrick, an established designer in brass and silverware, the shop created outstanding European-Japanese–inspired shapes and a range of delicious semi-matt glazes: blues, yellows, browns, grays, and an ivory-white crackle. His most sought-after and imitated glaze was a semi-matt green. Grueby green became an industry standard.
Grueby was an instant success at the Society of Arts & Crafts Exhibit in Boston in 1897. While already represented by Siegfried Bing (1838–1905), founder of the Gallery of Art Nouveau and Tiffany's European outlet, in 1900, Grueby was awarded one silver and two gold medals in Paris. In 1900 the pottery won a gold medal at St. Petersburg and in 1901 the Highest Award at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, at which Grueby contributed to rooms designed by Gustav Stickley, a pioneer of Arts & Crafts–style furniture in America. The Highest Award followed in Turin in 1902 and the Grand Prize in St. Louis in 1904.
Art Deco Style
While the Art Deco style actually budded between 1908 and 1912, it did not bloom until after World War I. The style draws on a host of diverse and often conflicting influences—Cubism, Russian Constructivism, Italian Futurism, abstraction, distortion, and simplification. Art Deco's tenet that form must follow function remained unchallenged by all succeeding schools of design. However, its accompanying dictum that the piece should also be unique or, at most, a limited edition proved elitist in an age ruled by Modernism. The Modernists argued that the new age demanded excellent design for everyone and that quality and mass production were not mutually exclusive. The future of the decorative arts did not rest with the rich; rather, an object's greatest beauty lay in its perfect adaptation to its usage. For the first time, the straight line became a source of beauty. In the late 1920s a moderated Modernism was all the fashion.
French Art Deco styling produced by Steuben (1903–) and Libbey Glass Compay (1892–) revived the American glass industry somewhat; it had suffered a decline after Art Nouveau flourished under Louis Comfort Tiffany. Steuben produced expensive, limited editions of art glass designed by its founder, the Englishman Frederick Carder (1863–1963). The Libbey Glass Company was in the vanguard of 1930s American commercial glass design. The tradition-bound American home of the 1930s was jolted by the Consolidated Lamp and Glass Company of Coraopolis, Pennsylvania, when it designed a Cubist line of glassware called Ruba Rombic, which was offered in pale hues such as gray, topaz, and amber.
The Great Depression struck a fatal blow to luxury items, and in America the Art Deco style was only reluctantly adapted to jewelry design. To accommodate the trend, Tiffany of New York created traditional objects in the new style, but without the crisp angularity found in Paris. C. D. Peacock and Spaulding-Gorham Inc. in Chicago produced jewelry in the new idiom, but again without the panache of their French counterparts. One genuinely new form appeared in American jewelry at the time: the stepped outline, which coincided with the emergence of the stepback skyscraper, the most beautiful examples of which are the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building in New York City.
Modernism
When the American skyscraper boom of the mid-1920s started, America did not have its own Modernist style. The country was still decorating tall buildings in a Gothic style derived from the pens of Cass Gilbert or Hood and Howells' Chicago Tribune Tower. As in traditional buildings, Modernist decoration served as a transitional device to alert the viewer to a change in contour. It was often not designed by the architect but purchased directly from companies such as Northwestern Terra Cotta in Chicago. A sumptuous combination of stone, brick, terracotta, and metal often transformed an otherwise bland structure into a source of great civic pride.
Since 1945 the decorative arts in America have served as a template for the culture of consumerism, with its attendant design functions. By the 1960s commercial television, various other advertising media, consumer magazines, and city sign systems both commercial and practical emerged as challenging and exciting new disciplines and venues in the ongoing interface between consumer and product: promising, seducing, fueling, and directing. The cultural role of the decorative arts and design was extended well beyond the need for harmony between form and function. The artisan and designer became a communicator, giving form to products not in the abstract but within a culture and for a marketplace. Never before had there been such an intensive dialogue between the "fine" and the "decorative" arts. By the 1970s Pop artists were devising their own set of rules, an antithesis to Modernism ideology yet not antagonistic. Pop was about being Modern in a different though not exclusive sense. It was the Modern of fashionable, high-impact design; a never-mind-about-tomorrow, brash, superficial Modern. All the while, decorative arts changed rapidly, embracing both functional and fully nonfunctional, both the beautiful and the ugly, limited only by the inventiveness of the craftsperson.
Bibliography
Adams, Henry. Viktor Schreckengost and Twentieth-Century Design. Cleveland, Ohio: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2000.
Clark, Garth, and Margie Hughto. A Century of Ceramics in the United States, 1878–1978: A Study of Its Development. New York: Dutton, Everson Museum of Art, 1979.
Dietz, Ulysses Grant, et al., ed. The Glitter and the Gold: Fashioning America's Jewelry. Newark, N.J.: Newark Museum, 1997.
Kardon, Jane, ed. Craft in the Machine Age, 1920–1945. New York: American Craft Museum, 1995.
Glass
Glass is created by fusing silica (sand, quartz, or flints) with alkaline fluxes (soda ash or potash) in a crucible, a fireclay pot, within a furnace. Fuel for heating is usually based on local availability. Two basic techniques dominate glassmaking: molding and blowing. All glass must also be annealed, slowly cooled to become less brittle.
Color has been an important component of the appeal of glass since the beginnings of glassmaking. Color demands a sophisticated and specialized knowledge. Some of the most popular oxide additives to molten glass are cobalt, which produces a wide range of blues; gold, the most romanticized of the additives, which produces a range of reds; antimony, which produces an opaque yellow; iron, which produces a range of colors from yellow to green to blue; copper, which produces a wide range of blues, greens, and reds, and even a glittering metal in suspension; and manganese, which can produce an amethyst color. Surface color can be quickly achieved by exposing the glass to various chemicals or gasses, thus causing iridescence similar to that found in long-buried Roman glass. Louis Comfort Tiffany became the acknowledged master of manufactured iridescence.
Early Glassmaking and Industrialization
When Jamestown Virginia was founded in 1607, glass-blowers were among the settlers. Like the colony, their glassmaking venture, America's first industry, failed. Other glassmakers followed in New Amsterdam (later New York), Salem, Boston, and Philadelphia. All were short-lived ventures. But demand for glass was great in colonial America. In 1739, in the face of a British ban on manufacturing glass, a German glassmaker, Caspar Wistar, established a factory in southern New Jersey that successfully produced window glass, bottles, and tableware. Free-blown glass was also popular. Many glassmakers, mostly German, followed Wistar's example, but despite abundant fuel and sand, most failed. But failure did not deter the industry, and every decade of the eighteenth century saw production increase as the demand grew for bottles, windows, and free-blown vessels. While blowing glass into a mold was efficient, the development of mechanical glass-pressing machines in the 1820s actually industrialized the industry. American glass of seemingly ever-new colors could now be pressed into a myriad of shapes. This sudden speedup in production, the first in almost 2,000 years, was America's first great contribution to the glass industry.
For the first time identical pairs or interchangeable sets were possible. Home decorating changed forever. The New England Glass Company in East Cambridge, Massachusetts (1818–1888), became one of the glassmaking giants of the century and produced an enormous variety of wares of international importance. The Boston and Sandwich Glass Company, in Sandwich, Massachusetts (1825–1889), was a significant competitor. Others followed.
After about 1845, Bohemian-style glass, blown, cut, wheel-engraved, or machine-pressed, became the rage. Soon fine line cutting and panel cuts, deep reds and blues, marble or agate glass, and cased, flashed, and stained ware were common sights in better American homes. In 1864, William Leighton of Hobbs, Brockunier, and Company in Wheeling, West Virginia, developed a soda lime glass that looked like expensive lead glass but was much cheaper to produce. It changed the industry, especially that of luxury glass. The Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition of 1876 led the campaign for glass that was deeply cut, more elaborate, and handmade. Instantly popular, it is now referred to as "brilliant," or Victorian, glass, and its production continued until about 1915. Libbey Glass Company in Toledo, Ohio, became a leader in this type of American glass.
Art Glass and Modern Styles
Paralleling brilliant glass was the very popular new taste for art glass, another continuation of Americans' desire for excess that spawned novel glass colors, finishes, and shapes, mostly for the production of decorative objects. Louis Comfort Tiffany was the uncontested master. His development of Favril glass in the late 1870s, based on existing German technologies and ideas developed by John La Farge, ushered in a new style of glass, which in 1895 was called "art nouveau." Exhibited at the 1893 Chicago World's Columbian Exhibition, Tiffany glass was immediately purchased by several European museums, internationally acclaimed, and copied. Endlessly adapting Roman, medieval, and Muslim shapes and surfaces, Tiffany's genius sprang forth in colors, patterns, and marketing. Along with "brilliant" cut glass, Tiffany glass dominated until about 1915. Brilliant cut slipped into stuffy obscurity, and Tiffany's glass was maligned, neglected, and forgotten until the early 1970s, but since then Tiffany glass has become once again the most sought-after of all glass.
The 1920s ushered in severe changes in style. Out went ornamental, in came functional. This change proved difficult for the glass industry and its designers. The great designer Frederick Carder employed elegantly simplified forms that helped make the work of Steuben Glass Works in Corning, New York, broadly popular. In 1939–1940 Libbey Glass Company turned new streamlined designs by Edwin W. Fuerst into a line called "Modern American." American glass of the 1950s, made by such firms as Blenko Glass Company in West Virginia, was broadly popular, and by the early 1990s American glass of the 1950s had become much sought-after by collectors. Art galleries specializing in modern and 1950s glass sprang up to meet the demand.
Studio Glass
Arguably the most influential change in modern glass-making occurred in 1962, when the Toledo Museum of Art organized a hands-on glass working seminar. Led by the glass technician Dominick Labino and the ceramist and glass designer Harvey K. Littleton, both of the University of Wisconsin, the seminar's emphasis on uniting the traditional functions of craftsman and designer (separated since the early eighteenth century) led directly to a renaissance in contemporary hand-worked glass seen as a sculptural medium.
The studio-glass phenomenon attracted new glass artists who migrated from other materials and who used not only traditional hot glass methods such as blowing and casting but also warm techniques such as fusing, slumping, and enameling, as well as cold techniques such as cutting, polishing, etching, sandblasting, painting, and joining with new acrylic adhesives to achieve their designs. Glass, like other materials, became the embodiment of an "artistic gesture."
Starting in the late 1960s, Dale Chihuly, Richard Marquis, James Carpenter, Michael Nourot, William Prindle, and others (Robert Willson had been there first, in 1958) had all spent time in Murano, Italy, studying ancient glassblowing traditions with master craftsmen. In 1971, Chihuly founded Pilchuck Glass Center outside Seattle, Washington, and began to work in his signature technique based on centuries-old Venetian glass traditions, without the constraint of fifteenth-and sixteenth-century technology. The same decade saw the founding of the Penland School in North Carolina and the Haystack Mountain School in Maine. Publications such as Craft Horizons and New Glass Review, and regular exhibitions, became significant supports. The American Crafts Council has had its own museum in New York since 1987, the same year the Corning Museum in upstate New York placed part of its modern glass collection on permanent display. Since these ambitious moves, the creativity and diversity of glass artists has found appeal among countless collectors, making glass the most collected of all contemporary art media.
Bibliography
Contemporary American and European Glass from the Saxe Collection. Oakland, Calif.: Oakland Museum, 1986.
Koch, Robert. Louis Comfort Tiffany, Rebel in Glass. New York: Crown, 1982.
McKearin, George S., and Helen McKearin. American Glass. 1948. Reprint, New York: Bonanza, 1989.
Memories of Murano: American Glass Artists in Venice. New York: American Craft Museum, 2000.
Warmus, William. "Steuben Forever." Urban Glass Art Quarterly 81 (winter 2000): 36–41.
Interior Decoration
Interior decoration is a profession that deals with the placement of furniture, with color, textiles, window treatments, lighting, finishes, and materials, and with the selection and display of collected objects. It mainly concentrates on the domestic interior and emphasizes the ornamental, applied, and decorative arts in creating ephemeral ambience utilizing the more easily transformed aspects of a room. Decorators tend to work either in private practice, store-home consulting, or furniture and material showrooms. Educational programs can be found in schools of architecture, art and design, human ecology, or human economics.
European Influences
Any survey of the history of American interior decoration must begin by acknowledging the importance of European influence. The majority of work in the field is based on the importation and revival of European styles, although there has also been some emphasis on broader global influences and contemporary American popular culture.
American interior decoration has built a design tradition that reflects the successive waves of explorers, settlers, and immigrants who have come to the United States over hundreds of years. English citizens in search of religious freedom, Spanish missions spreading Christianity, and Dutch merchants seeking wealth in the trade market all brought elements of their decorative heritage to the new land. Each wave of immigrants strove to recreate the living spaces they had left behind.
At the same time, the American homestead reflected a constant process of shaping the past to meet the demands of the present. Initially, the fundamental necessities of life determined decorative style. In the northern colonies, space and heat were high priorities, as people would eat, sleep, prepare meals, and socialize all in one-room parlors (see, for example, the Parson Capen House, Topsfield, Massachusetts, 1683). Beds were curtained off, and rugs were thrown over crude wood floors. Regional folk-art painting was used to enliven the severe, plain forms of the exposed-wood structures (see the Fraktur Room at Winterthur House, near Wilmington, Delaware, or the Pembroke Room at Beauport [the Sleeper-McCann House], Gloucester, Massachusetts, [1907–1934]). Spanish homes, with their whitewashed walls, were equally austere, though highlights of bold color added interest. In the southern colonies, interiors were somewhat more luxurious: various surviving structures in Williamsburg, Virginia, provide a complete picture of the comfortable, paneled rooms of the 1750s.
The early simplicity of interiors shaped by the necessities of survival gave way to new luxuries as plantation owners, merchants, and prosperous traders furnished their homes with furniture and decorative objects that were locally created versions of prominent styles from Paris and London (see the Washington Library, Mount Vernon, Virginia, or Gunston Hall, Lorton, Virginia, 1755). With greater prosperity came new types of spaces for dining, entertaining, and performance, all featuring European-influenced ornamentation. After the Revolutionary War (1775–1783), the typically restrained decor of the eighteenth-century interior became more expressive. Two major new styles predominated: the graceful, neoclassical Federal style, which grew out of the work done in England by American architect Robert Adam, and the American Empire style, modeled after design trends in Napoleonic France (see the Bartow-Pell Mansion, Bronx, New York, 1842, or Samuel McIntire's Derby West House, Peabody, Massachusetts, 1801). Prominent developments in furniture design included the Sheraton style (named for English designer Thomas Sheraton), the Hepplewhite style (named after British designer and cabinetmaker George Hepplewhite), the Robert Adam style (named for the American architect mentioned above, who also designed furniture while in England), and the Duncan Phyfe Adaptation (named after an American cabinetmaker who combined Empire motifs with influences from Adam, Sheraton, and Hepplewhite). These neoclassical design trends were influenced greatly by the English Regency style. Swags, husks, flutings, festoons, and rams' heads were common motifs applied to furniture.
Prosperity Leads to Modernism
At the end of the eighteenth century, continued prosperity brought to the United States treasures garnered from the expansion of trade routes throughout Europe and the Orient. Prosperous fleet owners built and embellished coastal mansions using local craftspeople and completed them with imported goods. Grand staircases, parlors, sitting rooms, verandas, dining rooms, libraries, front offices, upstairs bedrooms, and detached servant quarters completed the array of spaces necessary for commodious living. Paneling was replaced with wainscoting, while moldings, reduced in size, began featuring reeding, channeling, and a greater variety of shapes and expressions. Plaster cornices and bas-relief work complemented an increased use of color and of patterns from every historic period.
From the post-Revolution era to the antebellum period, interiors featured very tall ceilings; walls without wainscoting were edged with massive molded baseboards. The furniture of choice was mostly of Empire design with brass mounts. Tall French mirrors over mantels and between windows expanded the space, which was hung with dark damask (see the Nathaniel Russell House, Charleston, South Carolina, 1809). The next wave in decoration came during the Victorian period and involved an array of revivals of various historical styles. Extraordinary excess was the hallmark of the period, as reflected in the elaborately carved furniture, the rich fabrics, the luxurious window treatments, and the signature gilding of objects (see the Wickham-Valentine House, Richmond, Virginia, 1812). Along with the Rococo revival, other eccentric displays of Victorian taste were the Neo-Gothic and Neo-Renaissance styles. A. J. Davis's Lyndhurst Castle (1838), in Tarrytown, New York, is a premier example of the Gothic influence, with its ribbed vaulting, arched moldings, and furniture inspired by medieval churches. The Ramsey Mansion (1872) in St. Paul, Minnesota, exhibits all the trappings of the fashion for classicism. World's Fair exhibitions showcased Victorian opulence and the increasing array of domestic products. Museums began to collect and put on permanent display furniture and period objects, and began recreating interiors.
Along with the embellishment of styles derived from Europe, nineteenth-century America also saw the development of a unique design sense derived from the beliefs and practices of the Shakers. This fundamentalist community shunned elaborate expressions of wealth and opulence, and developed a style based on essential forms and a spare purity of line, reflecting their belief that form follows function. Their minimalist approach was a key component in the mix of influences that led to twentieth-century modernism. Regional craftsmen and artisans also worked outside the heroics of revivalism and created instead simple, unadorned pieces intended not for the wealthy, but for those of average income. At the same time, the factories of the new machine age made high-quality work available to more people for less money; in contrast to handcrafted furniture, they produced painted cottage furniture or slat-back chairs.
Publications, Film, and New Technology
The pre-Modernist sensibilities of nineteenth century decoration, including the Victorian era's taste for eclecticism, survived well into the twentieth century. In 1913, for example, Elsie de Wolfe, considered the first professional decorator, wrote The House in Good Taste to promote the use of a range of historical styles. At the same time, the new age of travel, with its ocean liners and airliners, established contemporary aesthetics that favored the streamlined and the modern.
Even as much of its aesthetic orientation remained rooted in the nineteenth century, the field of interior decoration rapidly modernized and professionalized itself. In 1897, the novelist Edith Wharton collaborated with architect Ogden Codman Jr. in writing The Decoration of Houses, in which the authors define interior decoration as dealing with surface treatments and interior design as encompassing the design of interior spaces. In 1904, The Interior Decorator began publishing; one of the earliest specialist publications, it soon set standards for the profession. Nancy McClelland established the interior decoration department of New York's Wanamaker Department Store in 1913, and in 1923 Eleanor McMillen founded McMillen, Incorporated, credited with being the country's first interior-decorating firm. Beginning in the 1930s, John Fowler, Terence Harold Robsjohn-Gibbings, and Billy Baldwin all became coveted professional decorators. The American Institute of Decorators was founded in 1931.
In the 1930s, the fantastic world of film first became the prominent influence on American interior decoration it would continue to be throughout the twentieth century. The decorative styles of the English country house, the Californian Spanish house, and the Art Deco interiors of the Jazz era were all disseminated through Hollywood set design. The stylized "Modern" look of the 1930s owed much to futuristic epics like Metropolis (1927), while the nostalgia for the Civil War period inspired by Gone with the Wind (1939) also greatly influenced decoration. Later in the century, the sensational Cleopatra (1963) created a resurgence in Egyptian motifs, while the futuristic sets of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) helped inspire the distinctive minimalist environments of the late 1960s and 1970s. Mail-order catalogs and women's magazines, while not as glamorous as Hollywood, also exerted a strong influence on interior decoration. They featured an expanding diversity of goods and began portraying fashionable interiors.
In the second half of the century, the dominant architectural philosophy sought a reduction in ornamentation, and objects both small and large were increasingly made of synthetic materials. Technological innovations transformed interior spaces as the television and hi-fi made their way into everyone's living room during the 1950s and 1960s. During the 1990s, the widespread usage of the Internet made information readily accessible, transforming the profession of interior decoration itself. Access to any image, the availability of increasingly varied products and furniture types, and an ever-expanding and increasingly sophisticated lighting industry all expanded the decorator's palette.
Initially a luxury for society's affluent, the interior decorator at the start of the twenty-first century is a consultant to businesses and middle-class homeowners alike, helping them shape living and work environments through the use of an ever-expanding range of possibilities.
Bibliography
Aguilar, Kathleen, and Michael Anderson. Miniature Rooms: The Thorne Rooms at the Art Institute of Chicago. New York: Abbeville, 1984.
Ball, Victoria Kloss. Architecture and Interior Design: Europe and America from the Colonial Era to Today. New York: John Wiley, 1980.
Friedman, Arnold, J. Pile, and F. Wilson. Interior Design: An Introduction to Architectural Interiors. New York: American Elsevier, 1970.
Geck, Francis J. Interior Design and Decoration. Dubuque, Iowa: Brown, 1971.
Pile, John F. History of Interior Design. London: Laurence King, 2000.
Rogers, Meyric R. American Interior Design: The Traditions and Development of Domestic Design from Colonial Times to the Present. New York: Norton, 1947.
Wharton, Edith, and Ogden Codman Jr. The Decoration of Houses. New York: Norton, 1997. Reprint of the original 1897 edition.
Whiton, Augustus Sherrill. Interior Design and Decoration. 4th ed. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1974.
Interior Design
American interior design has its roots in the traditions of interior decoration that developed in the United States during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Interior decoration was primarily concerned with the surface decoration of the home, its furnishings and room arrangement. Interior design came to be conceived, following the publication in 1897 of The Decoration of Houses, by Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman Jr., as encompassing the design of interior spaces. Both disciplines involve the planning and organization of space, lighting, and color; surface treatments of walls, windows, floors, and ceilings; furniture selection and arrangement; and the choosing of accessories. But in the twentieth century, the growth of corporate office-space planning needs, the infusion of European design influences, the historic preservation movement, and the formation of national governing agencies for the profession altered the traditional parameters of interior design.
The history of American interior design parallels that of American interior decoration. Colonial styles took their inspiration primarily from the former European homes of Dutch, French, Spanish, and English settlers. Wealthy eighteenth-century Americans developed tastes influenced by the Georgian style popular in England (see, for example, the Governor's Palace, Williamsburg, Virginia, 1722). The third President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, championed Palladian ideals at Monticello (1784–1809), as did Benjamin Latrobe, long considered the nation's first architect. The furniture and interior design of the Federal Style of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was a reflection of contemporary interest in the Greek world, an interest undergirded by a paralleling of the young America with the first pure democracy of Periclean Athens.
The Gothic Revival of the early nineteenth century paralleled contemporaneous English and German tastes. This reflection upon the Middle Ages led to a style known as Carpenter Gothic, which featured simple rural construction, and to more mainstream revivalisms across the expanding country. The Victorian Age that followed offered an eclectic mix of styles borrowed from any and all periods of design history, with a vital infusion supplied by the mechanized processes of the new Industrial Age. This period in history witnessed the first widespread introduction of factory-made products. The Arts and Crafts movement objected to the machine's impact on design and to the elimination of the craftsman. Out of this movement came the first generation of design that departed from European traditions and was truly American. Gustav Stickley and others were leaders in developing the Craftsman style, a proportioned plane and linear language that was expressed in architecture, furniture, and interiors. Also emerging from the latter half of the nineteenth century were the minimal and restrained design forms of the Shaker religious community. Shaker simplicity, so divergent from the elaborate ornamentation popular in the Gilded Age, helped point the way toward twentieth-century Modernism.
Louis Sullivan (Chicago Auditorium, 1889) and Frank Lloyd Wright (Robie House, Chicago, 1909) offered an American response to the international Art Nouveau movement with their nonhistorical, nature-based decorative vocabulary. Their late-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century masterpieces were direct descendants of the Modern movement. Complementing their work in the Midwest were the California designers Greene and Greene (Gamble House, Pasadena, California, 1909) and Bernard Maybeck.
The Modern movement was built on the principles of the antihistorical Dutch group De Stijl and on the teachings of the Bauhaus—a German school of design—and can also be seen as a reaction to World War I (1914–1918). Modernism ran counter to the popular Art Deco style favored by the era's dominant academic institution, the École des Beaux Arts in Paris, at which many American architects and designers were trained. Its key proponents, the Germans Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and the Finn Eliel Saarinen, all emigrated to the United States and landed at premier design institutions: the Harvard School of Design, the Illinois Institute of Technology, and Cranbrook Academy, respectively. Mechanization, reconceptualization of interior space, and the suspension of the barrier between interior and exterior space were key principles in this functionalist approach. Convenience and economy became paramount, and were supported by the development of electric power, temperature control, and lighting and ventilating innovations.
In the middle of the twentieth century, a shift took place in the practice of interior design. In 1958, the National Society of Interior Designers was established to complement the American Institute of Decorators. The profession of interior decoration as developed by the early pioneers in the field, Elsie de Wolfe, Nancy McClelland, and Ruby Ross Wood, expanded its scope to encompass new design programs. Commercial interior design became a new business venture. Key individuals like Florence Knoll championed the modern movement and its response to post–World War II (1939–1945) corporate America. In 1965, Art Gensler opened a firm that focused on corporate office design. Traditional architecture firms like Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill began to add services that specialized in office interiors. Office planning, facilities management, movements supporting historic preservation and adaptive reuse, and the expanding scope of the built environment all offered new horizons for the field and led to a new definition of interior design as a separate discipline. Differentiated from interior decoration and architecture, interior design attempted to claim the territory of the public interior. Beyond arrangement and selection of furnishings and finishes, interior designers concentrated on the human experience of the design environment. With this focus, interior design became a science as well as an art.
Interior design expanded to encompass telecommunications, mechanical and electrical systems, ergonomics, food and beverage service, kitchens and commercial laundries, and the educational, institutional, medical, and hospitality fields. Social science research began to be developed to identify and meet user needs. Color theory, acoustics, lighting, human behavioral studies, anthropology, and sociology began to inform the design process.
Large furniture manufacturers like Knoll, Steelcase, and Herman Miller responded to the corporate world's needs. Design and continued modification of the "workstation" transformed rooms of closed offices into open-plan multiuse corporations. Herman Miller's "Action Office," a system of freestanding panels and reconfigurable countertops and storage elements, was one of the responses to the demand for a transformed office. In the late 1940s and 1950s, Ray and Charles Eames created office interiors specifically for the people who worked in them, using only the furniture and objects necessary to work effectively and efficiently. The Eameses stressed appropriate, socially conscious, egalitarian, and ethical designs.
From producing a limited set of choices, the furniture industry expanded into use-specific and ergonomically designed offerings that have multiplied the possibilities. The science of lighting design expanded from general lighting to include task, accent, and ever-changing mood lighting. The specifications for materials superseded mere questions of color and texture, and added durability, toxicity, flammability, and impact on the environment as new variables. The development of design knowledge in academia, practice, and allied industry began to change interior design from an aesthetic process into an analytical, research-oriented endeavor that advocated change in the environment.
The field of interior design continues to develop and expand its arena of expertise. It overlaps with construction, architecture, art, design technologies, mechanical systems, lighting, and product and environmental design. In 1950, there were seventy programs focusing on interiors at various U.S. schools of design, architecture, and home economics. In 1971, the Foundation for Interior Design Education and Research (FIDER) was formed by the Interior Design Education Committee to govern the growth and direction of the emerging profession. The National Council for Interior Design Qualifications was created in 1974 by the American Society of Interior Designers to ensure professional competence. By 2000, FIDER listed 130 accredited interior design programs.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the interior design professional functions in three types of work environments: architectural firms that have both design and technical teams who work collaboratively on larger projects; firms in which architects oversee project management while interior designers contribute color, materials, and treatments; and the interior design firm that features the designer as "decorator."
Interior design was unregulated, but this had changed by the end of the twentieth century. New regulation requires familiarity with energy-conscious products and safety issues. Health and safety issues have led to licensing in some states, and there is a gradual trend toward licensing nationwide. Licensing examinations reflect the growing nature of the field, as applicants must now show proficiency in programming and planning, theory, contract documents, building construction, materials, professional practice, history, and design.
Bibliography
Ching, Francis D. K. Interior Design Illustrated. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1987.
Keane, Linda, and Mark Keane. "Interior Design Education." In Handbook on Interior Design. Edited by Cindy Coleman. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2001.
Knackstedt, Mary, with Laura J. Haney. Interior Design and Beyond: Art, Science, Industry. New York: John Wiley, 1995.
Nielsen, Karla, and David Taylor. Interiors: An Introduction. 3d ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002.
Pegler, Martin M. The Dictionary of Interior Design. New York: Fairchild, 1983.
Russell, Beverly. Women of Design: Contemporary American Interiors. New York: Rizzoli, 1992.
Painting
The Colonial Era: Rising from the Formulaic
The first paintings executed in the American colonies were portraits of early settlers, mostly in Boston or New Amsterdam (later New York City), painted by artists trained in England or the Netherlands. These portraits from the second half of the seventeenth century are rudimentary in execution. There is little attempt to create convincingly modeled forms, and facial features are only broadly described. The sitters are for the most part well-to-do merchants and landowners who have about them a sense of sobriety and determination. These early artists are sometimes known as limners and they also worked as sign painters or even house painters. The names of only a few of these early artisans are known, the earliest being Henri Couturier, who in 1663 executed a portrait of Governor Peter Stuyvesant in New Amsterdam. Also active in that area at this time were Evert Duyckinck and his son Gerrit, while in Boston native-born John Foster painted portraits while also teaching school, and made the first woodcut known to be executed in the colonies.
Farther south, in Charleston, Mrs. Henrietta Johnston is the first recorded woman painter, while in Maryland, Justus Engelhardt Kühn made several crudely executed portraits of early settlers. By the mid-eighteenth century, Gustavus Hesselius had painted some portraits that have a sense of the personality of the sitter. Hesselius also worked in the more ambitious categories of religious and mythological painting, although the practical demands of establishing a new nation offered little scope for ambitious multifigure canvases. Eighteenth-century colonists preferred portraits or views of early colonial towns.
The first native-born artist of note was Robert Feke, active in the Boston area, as well as in Newport and Philadelphia. His handling of the medium of paint and his use of rich colors marks an advance over most colonial portraiture, which presents the sitter in a formulaic pose painted with a restricted, drab palette. Gustavus Hesselius's son John painted portraits of settlers along the eastern seaboard from Philadelphia to Virginia. His most striking image is Charles Calvert and Slave (1761), which shows one of Maryland's wealthiest landowners and one of his African chattel.
The high point of American colonial painting is attained in the work of John Singleton Copley, a native of Boston. A self-taught artist, Copley's ambitions went beyond portraiture. As a student he copied prints after the work of earlier European masters as a way of teaching himself anatomy. Copley's portraits of New England's social and political figures are notable for the acuteness with which he suggested the personality of his sitters. Copley's portraits owe their success in large part to his skill in representing the accessories of people's lives, the rich fabrics of their clothes or the gleaming surfaces of their household furnishings. Frequently, the artist used unconventional poses for his sitters, which enhanced the sense of their individuality. His double portrait, Mr. and Mrs. Isaac Winslow (1774), is a characteristic, masterful image of colonial painting just prior to the American Revolution. In 1774 Copley left to study in England and on the Continent; the next year he settled in London, where in addition to portraits he painted historical themes such as Watson and the Shark (1778). Copley was driven abroad by the absence in the colonies of any training for artists and of any public collections of art.
Charles Willson Peale moved from Maryland to Philadelphia, where he painted portraits of the city's aristocracy. His commission from the Cadwalader family in 1772 for five large portraits was unique. Peale used the conventions of fashionable contemporary British art as the basis of his work, which reflects the wealth and sophistication possible at the apex of colonial life. Peale trained his sons Raphaelle, Rubens, and Rembrandt to become painters; they not only did portraits, but Raphaelle executed meticulously observed and rendered still lifes of familiar objects such as arrangements of books or flowers and fruit.
The Early Republic: Beyond Portraiture
In 1795 Charles organized the Columbianum, a short-lived artists' association modeled on Britain's Royal Academy in London. Within the first decade of the nineteenth century, art academies were established in New York City (American Academy of Fine Arts, 1802, and National Academy of Design, 1826) and Philadelphia (Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, 1805), evidence that the new republic was assured enough to recognize the fine arts as a basic part of civilized education.
In the early republic, portraiture continued to be a major area of endeavor for American painters, who looked to England for inspiration. Gilbert Stuart studied in Britain before returning to the United States in 1792, where he produced his celebrated portrait of George Washington, which exists in numerous replicas. Thomas Sully studied in London, where he was greatly impressed by the portrait style of Sir Thomas Lawrence, whose gracefully posed sitters are rendered by an easy, assured handling of paint. Sully adopted Lawrence's manner to represent the comfortable lifestyle of his patrons, whether wealthy or middle class.
As the nation grew more prosperous, some artists attempted to create large-scale paintings of historical or mythological subjects, which in European art academies were considered the most worthwhile, and most difficult, subject matter for a painter to master. John Trumbull and John Vanderlyn each studied in Europe before returning home to paint canvases in the grand manner of epochal themes. Trumbull's paintings of subjects from America's Revolutionary War were installed in the Capitol, although to severe criticism, and Vanderlyn's mythological figures such as Ariadne fared no better with the public at the time, which is generally known as the age of Romanticism. Washington Allston was the most complex individual in American art in this epoch. Educated at Harvard University, he then left to study painting in London and on the Continent. His writings on art dismissed the notion of painting as imitation of appearances and placed emphasis on the imagination and intuition. Allston's huge Belshazzar's Feast (begun 1817) remained unfinished and is one of America's great Romantic images.
Alongside these painters, who were laboring to create in America an art of grand achievements in European terms, existed a number of largely self-taught artists, usually active outside of America's big cities. The best known is the Quaker missionary and preacher Edward Hicks. His paintings are executed with an emphasis on outline to define objects and the simplicity of his compositions recalls the bold immediacy of sign paintings. In sympathy with his pacifist religious convictions, Hicks's work centers on the biblical theme of the Peaceable Kingdom, as with Noah's Ark (1846).
As the United States developed, people were curious to see the largely unexplored western territories. Landscape painting, often executed in a very idealized manner, was a response to this demand for information. North of New York City the Hudson River School comprised professional artists such as Thomas Cole, who specialized in landscapes, and as national boundaries spread beyond the Mississippi River, artists traveled westward to paint the countryside and its inhabitants. George Catlin is the best-known artist to paint the American Indians, their customs, and the rugged terrain in which they lived and hunted as he explored the Missouri River in 1832. An exhibition of these works surprised audiences in New York City, London, and Paris. The life and customs of Native Americans were also the subject of Karl Bodmer's work, while somewhat later Alfred J. Miller made more picturesque images of the people and landscape of the West. The grandeur of the western terrain, with its stretches of towering snow-capped mountains, inspired painters such as Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Moran, and Frederick E. Church to create vast panoramic canvases of views at Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon that were purchased by private collectors for huge prices.
The everyday activities of life were represented in the popular category of genre painting, while ordinary objects were represented in still-life paintings executed with crystalline realism. These paintings, known as trompe l'oeil (fool the eye) compositions, take commonplace objects and arrange them in imaginary compositions executed in an astonishingly realistic manner. William M. Harnett's Old Cupboard Door (1889) and John F. Peto's Still Life with Lard-Oil Lamp (c. 1900) are characteristic trompe l'oeil works, with things arranged in curious, unexplained juxtapositions that may imply a moral or humorous anecdote.
The Mid-and Late Nineteenth Century: Europeanists and Individualists
By mid-century many American artists still felt the need to study abroad; art academies in London, Paris, or Munich were favored by painters in search of contact with more sophisticated training than they could find at home. John La Farge studied in Paris, where he came to know the work of old masters, contemporary artists such as Eugène Delacroix, and Oriental art, the stylized decorative qualities of which so attracted him that eventually he traveled to Japan and the South Pacific. Paris and the work of the French Impressionists attracted Mary Cassatt to the city, and eventually she settled in France, where she lived for the rest of her life. James A. McNeill Whistler first studied in Paris, and then went on to spend his mature years in London. His views of London and the river Thames at dusk or in fog, painted in a narrow, delicately modulated range of colors that he called nocturnes, became popular with American collectors; his art was well-known in the United States during his lifetime.
Another mid-century artist, William M. Chase, studied at Munich; his most attractive canvases are his landscapes painted out-of-doors with a free touch and in bright, clear colors. John Singer Sargent studied in Paris and then moved across the English Channel to London, where he became one of the most acclaimed portraitists of his time. He had an international clientele of wealthy, powerful sitters and his portraits create a record of an epoch. Later, Sargent went to Boston, where he executed important murals (begun in 1890) commissioned by the Boston Public Library and, later, by the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, on which he worked from 1916 until his death in 1925. In Paris, Theodore Robinson discovered the paintings of the Impressionists, and in the 1880s he was so taken with Monet's colorful, vividly executed landscapes that the American settled in Giverny, where the French painter had a studio. Childe Hassam adopted the Impressionists' painting technique to create views of the New England countryside—coastal scenes or villages with neat houses and churches.
The two greatest personalities in American art in the late nineteenth century were Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins, neither of whom owed much to European influences. Homer was largely self-taught and his early training prepared him to work as a magazine illustrator. His interest in the American scene was a constant in his art, whether he recorded events from the Civil War or later, often working in isolation in Maine, painted the outdoors life of hunters and fishermen. Homer's preference for stretches of New England wilderness, as in Breezing Up (1876), stands in contrast to the growing industrialization of America's cities. Thomas Eakins studied at the Paris École des Beaux Arts but returned to Philadelphia in 1870. There he taught painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he insisted that students work after nude models. That resulted in his dismissal in 1886 and afterward he turned increasingly to portraiture as a means of continuing his career. Eakins's celebrated The Concert Singer (1890–1892) is characteristic of the introspective, sometimes plaintive character of his portrayals.
Academic Artists and Modernists
The art of these individualists stands apart from the academic work that was popular at the turn of the twentieth century. High-minded civic virtues were expressed in solidly grounded technique by painters such as Thomas W. Dewing, Edmund Charles Tarbell, and William Morris Hunt, whose scenes of polite society or allegories of political or social idealism avoided the ugly realities of urban, industrial life.
The social problems that came with the rapid growth of America's big cities became the subject matter for a group of artists who rejected academic art. These realist artists originated in Philadelphia and comprised Robert Henri, George Luks, William Glackens, John Sloan, and Everett Shinn. Later they moved to New York City, where their subject matter was the metropolis, including its tenement life, the isolation possible in its crowded environment, and the diversions of the city. These five painters were joined by Arthur B. Davies, Maurice Prendergast, and Ernest Lawson to form a group that was known as The Eight or the Ashcan School in recognition of the commonplace themes of their art. These progressives were interested in current European modernism, and Henri, Sloan, and Luks were instrumental in organizing the controversial 1913 Armory Show, the first large-scale presentation in America of such controversial art as French cubism and the work of Henri Matisse, Maurice de Vlaminck, and Georges Rouault, which was seen alongside avant-garde American works by John Marin, Marsden Hartley, Joseph Stella, and Charles Sheeler, among others.
Prior to the Armory Show it was almost impossible to see progressive European work in the United States, with the rare exception of the photographer Alfred Stieglitz's Photo-Secession Gallery in New York City, which exhibited work by Paul Cézanne, Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and Constantin Brancusi as well as American art and children's drawings. Both Marin and Stella celebrated America's engineering marvels—its skyscrapers and bridges—in paintings that use both cubist and Italian futurist devices to express the magnitude of America's urban buildings and the fast-paced life of its cities. Examples are New York Interpreted (1920–1922) and The Bridge (1922), by Stella, and Marin's The Woolworth Building (1912). Not all American modernists followed the lead of European painters. A case in point is Arthur Dove, whose abstract canvases often use biomorphic shapes to suggest fantasy landscapes, sometimes recalling the work of the Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky, as in Dove's A Walk, Poplars (1920). Another modernist who defies categorization is Marsden Hartley, sponsored by Alfred Stieglitz and sent by him to Europe in 1912, where Hartley not only came to know the work of French modernists but those of the Russian Kandinsky and the German Expressionists. Hartley's works, including Painting No. 4 (also called A Black Horse, 1915), are concerned with representing spiritual values through symbolism and are deliberately ambiguous.
Several artists continued to explore city life as the subject of their work, and in this sense they perpetuated the Ashcan School's concern with urban realities. George Bellows combined a relish for all aspects of urban existence with superb, academically oriented draftsmanship. His figure style is most evident in his prizefight subjects, as in Stag at Sharkey's (1907). Bellows's relish for city life was shared by other realist painters such as Jerome Meyers and Leon Kroll.
While European cubism of the 1920s had little effect on American painting, the Cubists' clarity of organization is evident in the early work of Stuart Davis, whose Super Table (1925) is clearly in their debt. Davis's later, large abstract compositions were influenced by American billboard paintings, with their strident colors and bold shapes. The work of the American Precisionist Movement reflects a knowledge of cubism's rigorous organization, but also of photography's clarity of representation. Charles Sheeler was both a photographer and a painter. His photographs undoubtedly nurtured his preference for clarity and sharp focus observation. Their subjects are taken from the immediate world of his rural Pennsylvania background, the factories of industrial America, or—as in Rolling Power (1939)—the skyscraper architecture of cities. Edward Hopper recorded with clarity and unmatched poignancy the isolation of urban life. His Nighthawks (1942) is a precise evocation of nighttime, when people's energies are at low ebb. Hopper's views of Victorian houses and his seacoast paintings of crashing waves and boats at sea present a more optimistic view of American life as it exists in small towns freed of urban complexities.
Georgia O'Keefe's startling close-up views of organic forms make no reference to cubism but instead concentrate on details of plants or the skulls and bones of the New Mexico desert, where she lived during the later part of her career. Vast stretches of sky suggest the isolation in which she pursued her art, as in From the Plains (1952–1954).
Regionalism
A reaction against European modernism developed partly in response to America's economic and political isolation after World War I. Regionalism is particularly identified with artists working in the Midwest and the Great Plains. The low horizons and towering skies of the regionalists' landscapes make a backdrop for the farmers' and ranchers' life of isolation and hard work. Thomas Hart Benton's gaunt figures sometimes approach caricature and his themes are anecdotal as well as political, as in Cotton Pickers (1928–1929). Other Regionalists include Grant Wood, whose American Gothic (1930) is an iconic image of a farming couple standing in front of their wood Gothic-looking house. John Stewart Curry also portrayed the rural Midwest with humor.
This Regionalist aspect of American art received support during the depression years of the 1930s from the federal government, whose Federal Art Project, which ran from 1935 to 1943, was administered under the Works Progress Administration. The program supported both easel painting, the graphic arts, and murals for public buildings. Regional committees administered the project's awards on a competitive basis. A bias existed in favor of representational styles and American subject matter. No outstanding artist came to prominence as a result of this support, but the program enabled many painters to continue to work who would otherwise have been forced to put aside their art and seek other employment.
Avant-Garde Art
European avant-garde art came to the United States at the outset of World War II with the arrival of a new wave of artists (including Yves Tanguy, Piet Mondrian, Max Beckmann), many of whom settled in New York City. The German painter Hans Hofmann became an important teacher and an example for the development of abstract expressionism. The German Expressionist Max Beckmann also taught, and the presence of his art in the United States made the country more aware of
