I. Beginnings to 1913
During much of the two and a half centuries in which the visual arts in America developed from a primitive to a sophisticated state, there hung over artists a sense of debilitating provincialism. The arts, they believed, were European, and it was European mannerisms that set the standards of artistic etiquette. From the seventeenth century, when now unidentified limners were painting tavern signs and overmantels and portraits at a few shillings a head, to the end of the nineteenth century, when French impressionists and German and Dutch realists were the mentors of young American artists, American art almost never ran free of European harnesses.
What is remarkable is that during these centuries there emerged so many independent creative talents who produced a native art that, though influenced by Europe, was distinctly and inescapably American. Painting and sculpture reflected fashions in Europe, usually somewhat late. But there were times when American artists took off on their own, as did the landscapists of the Hudson River school, some of the genre painters, and a few explorers of fauna like the great painter of birds and small beasts John James Audubon (1785-1851). The sources of their subjects and their delight in them were the land, the creatures, and the people they knew, not European models.
The colonial New England limners took their styles, much simplified, from Elizabethan artists: linear and two-dimensional with special care paid to textiles. Clothes were a measure of social position; faces were less important. Mothers and children appear in these pictures as dressed-up dolls and the men as wooden-featured, static lay figures. They were not, to be sure, without considerable charm and stern probity.
Early in the eighteenth century a few professionally trained painters arrived from Europe to set up their easels wherever they might find customers--in Charleston, Annapolis, Philadelphia, Boston, and other cities whose prosperity depended on the commerce of the sea. Among them were Gustavus Hessalius (1682-1755), a portraitist who tried his hand at mythological scenes, and John Smibert (1688-1751), a pupil of the distinguished English portraitist Sir Geoffrey Kneller. Smibert painted and sold imported engravings, the only access in America other than inept copies to the masterpieces of Europe. Furthermore he trained a more gifted artist than himself, Robert Feke (c. 1705-c. 1750), who outdid him in elegance and the mastery of portraying character.
After the middle of the century it became the ambition of most young American painters to go to Europe to feast on the arts of the past and refine their skills. America's two most eminent artists were among them, Benjamin West (1738-1820) and John Singleton Copley (1738-1815). Copley's reputation as an artist of the first rank has outlasted West's, though West's fame in his lifetime exceeded Copley's. West's promise as a boy prompted a group of Philadelphia merchants to pay his way to Europe to study, possibly the earliest example of what we now call "business sponsorship of the arts." West prospered in London, becoming history painter to George III and president of the Royal Academy. His studio became a mecca for young American painters. Copley prospered in Boston where his most distinguished portraits were painted, far superior to any made before in America. But he longed for greener pastures and took off for London in 1774, where he eventually succumbed to the seduction of fashion and the quality of his work declined. He too took to history painting, scenes of battles and other events in a baroque manner that were momentarily popular successes.
Portraits were the artists' mainstay until photography stole a large part of their livelihood in the mid-nineteenth century. The reputations of Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827) of Philadelphia, Gilbert Stuart (1755-1828) who arrived in Boston from London in 1793, Ralph Earl (1751-1802) of Connecticut, and Samuel F. B. Morse (1791-1872), best known as an inventor of the telegraph, are fixed primarily by portraits they painted--Peale and Stuart of George Washington, for example, and Morse of Marquis de Lafayette. Peale at heart was as much a scientist as Morse was. He founded America's first museum of art and natural history in Philadelphia. Col. John Trumbull (1756-1843), one of the young Americans who haunted West's London studio, devoted himself almost entirely to history painting, the most famous of which was his depiction of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, reproduced by the millions on postage stamps. Trumbull founded the American Academy of Fine Arts in New York in 1802.
Two quite different painters, John Vanderlyn (1775-1852) and Washington Allston (1779-1843), took off for Europe in the early nineteenth century. What they brought back was unlike anything that had been seen before in America. Vanderlyn shocked the public with a voluptuous nude, Ariadne Asleep on the Island of Naxos, which was denounced as an example of French depravity. Allston, an intellectual romantic and dedicated aesthete, brought back cool Italian landscapes peopled with small mythological and biblical figures.
The flight of painters to Europe was followed in the 1830s by a flock of stonecutters bent on becoming sculptors. In colonial days the only sculpture galleries were the cemeteries where tombstones were often ornamented with distorted skeletons and winged death's heads. Craftsmen produced elegant weathervanes and wood-carvers decorated chests and turned out splendid, brightly polychromed figureheads for merchant ships and frigates. Although they were admired in ports around the world, their creators were considered mere wood-carvers. Nevertheless, one of the so-called fathers of American sculpture was William Rush (1756-1833), a Philadelphia wood-carver who was in every aesthetic sense a sculptor, producing figureheads and nymphs and occasional portrait figures (one a life-size Washington).
What Henry James called "the White Marmorean Flock" streamed to Italy in the 1820s and 1830s, determined to bring the noble art of sculpture back to America in a sophisticated (which meant neoclassical) manner. The most eminent of these, the Bostonian Horatio Greenough (1805-1852), was commissioned by Congress to create a heroic sculpture of George Washington. The statue, half-clad in marble draperies, was greeted with ridicule when it was installed in the rotunda of the Capitol. "Will it not be worth thirty thousand dollars," Greenough argued, "to be able to point to the figure and say, 'there was the first struggle of our infant art.'" Thomas Crawford (1813?-1857), whose Armed Victory is the spike on the dome of the Capitol, followed Greenough to Rome, as did William Wetmore Story (1819-1895) of Boston, as much a poet as a sculptor and short of genius at either. Story was, however, the urbane pivot around whom American artists in Rome revolved. Among them were a number of women sculptors, most notably Harriet Hosmer (1830-1908) of Boston and Edmonia Lewis (1845-?), daughter of an African-American father and a Chippewa Indian mother.
It was a time when fashion impelled sculptors to depict American politicians as Roman senators. None was more expert at this than Hiram Powers (1805-1873), America's most famous stonecutter at midcentury. His fame, however, derived primarily from his Greek Slave, a daring nude female, her hands fastened with a chain that somehow made her nakedness respectable. Powers settled in Florence and operated a sort of sculpture factory there, turning out reproductions of the maiden and portraits for a thousand dollars a head. But compared with two sculptors who stayed at home, Erastus Dow Palmer (1817-1904) of Albany and the anatomist Dr. William Rimmer (1816-1879), he was a mere statue maker. Powers worked from the outside in; Palmer and Rimmer from the inside out.
While sculptors flirted with neoclassicism, a group of painters, inspired by Thomas Cole (1801-1848), was capturing on canvas the romantic American landscape. They were the painters of the Hudson River school, the first indigenous school of American painting. They thrived from the 1830s until late in the century, when they were supplanted by the impressionists. Among them were Asher B. Durand (1796-1886), Frederick Church (1826-1900), Worthington Whittredge (1820-1910), Sanford R. Gifford (1824-1860), Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902), and John Frederick Kensett (1818-1872). They have also been called luminists because of their effective rendering of atmospheric subtleties and brilliance. Their landscapes were by no means limited to the Hudson valley; they painted the Rockies, the Andes, the western plains, the Berkshires, and the White Mountains.
It was not until the 1830s and 1840s that a new breed of artists painted people in places doing things people do. There appeared in those years a number of genre painters. William Sidney Mount (1807-1868) portrayed his farmer neighbors on Long Island, and George Caleb Bingham (1811-1879) in Kentucky and Missouri painted small-town and river scenes. They were considered unartistic by contemporary sophisticates but were popular with "the people." Bingham, forgotten for fifty years, was recognized as an American master only in the twentieth century.
Every aspect of the visual arts occupied American artists during the second half of the nineteenth century--sculpture, both monumental and sentimental (sometimes both at once), still life, illustration, reportage, portraits, fantasy, landscape, genre, social commentary, mural decoration. After the Civil War sculpture "escaped" from Rome and took to celebrating politicians, preachers, generals, admirals, pioneer women, and other favorites in bronze. War memorials appeared on village greens and in city parks, and small anecdotal sculptures, like the justifiably popular groups by John Rogers (1829-1904), appeared on parlor tables everywhere. Of these sculptors three stand out: John Q. A. Ward (1830-1910), Daniel Chester French (1850-1931), and foremost, Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848-1907). All were portrait sculptors who worked on both small and monumental scales. Ward is probably best known for his Henry Ward Beecher in Brooklyn, French for his seated Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, and Saint-Gaudens for his General Sherman in New York and the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial in Boston.
Most painters of any prominence still studied in Europe. One of those who went briefly but thought better of it was Winslow Homer (1836-1910) of Boston. During the Civil War he had been an artist-reporter for Harper's Weekly, but he gave up illustration to devote himself primarily to the out-of-doors and above all to the sea. He was arguably America's finest seascapist and watercolorist and most subtle genre painter, a master of light, a truth-teller free of sentimentality. His friend Eastman Johnson (1824-1906) went to Düsseldorf, Germany, to study, as did many young American artists then, and worked in Emanuel Leutze's studio on that painter's Washington Crossing the Delaware, a critically derided national icon. Johnson had a very successful career as a portrait and genre painter.
Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) of Philadelphia, like Homer, found little to his taste or temperament in Paris. He pursued a quiet, financially unsuccessful career as a portraitist of scrupulous veracity, a painter of poetic, albeit matter-of-fact, genre; he left a body of work that is one of the miracles of American painting. His portraits are as different in spirit and manner from those of his contemporary John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) or of William Merritt Chase (1849-1916) as probity is from panache. Few painters have enjoyed the popularity and acclaim in their day as Sargent and Chase did, and few deserved it more. Sargent was a muralist and portraitist as was John La Farge (1835-1910). James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) was only marginally American. Like Benjamin West a century before, he made his reputation in Europe and saw no reason to return to the States. He deserves better than to be known as Whistler's Mother's son. (His portrait of his mother is the only American painting in the Louvre.)
Two more modest talents of this period were William Harnett (1848-1892) and John F. Peto (1854-1907), who painted eye-foolers (trompe l'oeil) and made magic out of commonplace objects. Both were working in a long tradition of delightful foolery dating back to Raphaelle Peale (1774-1825), one of Charles Willson Peale's many painting progeny.
Toward the end of the century impressionism, born in France, permeated much of American painting. Mary Cassatt (1844-1926), a Philadelphian, went to Paris as a young woman and fell in with Edgar Degas and his circle and became one of them artistically. The many young artists flocking to Paris now were transformed by the visions of Monet and Renoir and Pissarro, and they saw the landscape in colors that the Hudson River school painters never glimpsed. Childe Hassam (1859-1935) was one of these, the best known of them today, but no painter of landscapes in America since has been untouched by the impressionists' discoveries. One, Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847-1917), stands darkly apart, however. He was in his time an abstract expressionist, but he threw his soul rather than his paint at his canvases full force and defiantly. A nineteenth-century spirit, Ryder was a twentieth-century discovery.
In the last years of the century, led by a painter who called himself Robert Henri (1865-1929), though his name was Cozad, there evolved a school of social realists with an aesthetic but not a political ax to grind. They believed in "the importance of life as the primary motive of art" and threw aside the polite preoccupations of what has been called the genteel tradition of Sargent, Chase, and others. They would "tell it as it is." These artists--William Glackens (1870-1938), George Luks (1867-1933), Everett Shinn (1876-1953), John Sloan (1871-1951), principally--became known as the Ashcan school: they painted urban life with its underwear showing on laundry lines and its snowy streets blackened with soot. The time had come, they believed, to paint America not as a land of milk and honey but as a place where people live with all their faults and frustrations and escape hatches, their crowded streets and thronged beaches and honky-tonk.
When they closed the book on the nineteenth century, the first chapter of the volume they opened was called the Armory Show.
Wayne Craven, Sculpture in America (1968); E. P. Richardson, A Short History of Painting in America: The Story of 450 Years (1963).
Russell Lynes
See also Ashcan School; Audubon, John James; Cassatt, Mary; Copley, John Singleton; Eakins, Thomas; Folk Art; Homer, Winslow; Hudson River School; Morse, Samuel F. B.; Sargent, John Singer; Whistler, James McNeill.
II. Since the Armory Show
The 1913 Armory Show, which gave American artists and the public their first comprehensive look at the art produced by the modernist movement in Europe, had a profound effect on the way painting and sculpture in the United States were subsequently created. It also changed the way art was thought about. The American art world promptly divided into modernists and traditionalists, and their conflict often took the form of a fierce rivalry between an artistic minority that embraced the ideas of the European avant-garde and the majority who remained loyal to more familiar conservative styles. Although at first outnumbered, the minority that found in modernism its principal source of inspiration set the pace in artistic achievement for the remainder of the century.
The history of American painting and sculpture since 1913 is therefore, in large part, the history of American modernism and of the varying responses it met with in the course of the century. This history divides itself into two distinct periods. During the first, which began in 1913-1914 and ended in the early 1940s, the modernists worked under severe handicaps. With few exceptions, the public tended to be either hostile or indifferent to their work. Patronage was scarce and public ridicule common. Museums, the galleries, the collectors, the critics, and the academy generally regarded modernist art as aesthetic heresy, a betrayal of established standards if not indeed a threat to public morality. As a result, modernist artists were condemned to live and work in bohemian coteries and isolated enclaves outside the mainstream of American cultural life.
During the second period, which commenced with World War II and continues to the present day, the modernists acquired an ever-increasing measure of public recognition and artistic influence. By the end of the 1950s, their work had achieved a position of dominance in American cultural life. It now enjoyed widespread support from the institutions that had formerly spurned it, and these institutions were now more numerous and more powerful than before. For the first time, moreover, American modernist art occupied a prominent place in world esteem. Several modernists of the post-World War II period--Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning--became international celebrities.
This change paralleled a larger change in the relation between Europe and America. Until the beginning of World War II, Paris remained the unrivaled artistic capital of the Western world, the place where seminal art movements, from impressionism and postimpressionism in the nineteenth century to fauvism, cubism, and surrealism in the twentieth, were born and developed. It was thus to Paris that the first generation of American modernists looked for artistic leadership. It was to Paris that a significant number of the outstanding talents of that generation--Marsden Hartley, Max Weber, Man Ray, Morgan Russell, Patrick Henry Bruce, John Marin, and Alfred Maurer, among others--traveled in order to establish contact with the art and the artists who were definitively altering the way painting and sculpture would henceforth be thought about. To meet the challenge of the new pictorial ideas to be found in the work of Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and others now became the irresistible imperative for this first generation of American modernists. Although their art remained in many ways American in fundamental outlook and character, Paris was nonetheless indispensable to their aesthetic orientation and to the standards by which this generation judged its achievements.
In the early 1940s, however, New York emerged for the first time as the artistic capital of the West. The Nazi occupation of Paris in 1940 marked the end of the reign that French art had enjoyed on the world scene for well over a century. In Nazi-occupied Europe, modernism--now stigmatized by Adolf Hitler as "degenerate"--was officially banned, and the United States became a refuge for many of the Europeans who had devoted their lives to it. It was to New York, in particular, that important representatives of the European avant-garde--not only artists but art dealers, art historians, museum curators, collectors, and writers on art--now expatriated themselves.
Their presence in New York during the war years had a powerful catalytic effect on American art and the whole cultural scene. European modernism still exerted an immense influence on the thinking of this emerging American vanguard, but with Europe itself in a state of political chaos and the future of its civilization in doubt, it seemed possible for American modernists to seize the artistic initiative, and they did. The result was the abstract expressionist movement--later dubbed the New York school--that catapulted American painting into a position of international dominance in the postwar era.
This development would have seemed unimaginable even a few years earlier. Between the two world wars, modernist art in America was very much on the defensive. New and important modernists came to prominence; Stuart Davis and Milton Avery were the most accomplished among the painters, and Gaston Lachaise, Elie Nadelman, and Alexander Calder, among the sculptors. Yet in the 1920s, the older generation of modernists had to some extent retreated from its avant-garde ambitions, seeking to entrench its art in a more recognizably American subject matter.
In the depression era of the thirties this nativist impulse acquired added political momentum with the emergence of two popular movements adamantly opposed to modernism and to the cosmopolitan culture it encompassed. One of these movements was called the American scene, which had its headquarters in the Midwest and specialized in idealized depictions of American rural, frontier, and small-town life. Its leading representatives were Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood, and John Steuart Curry, and its driving spirit was populist, isolationist, and xenophobic. Its regionalist outlook proscribed modernism and the metropolitan centers that fostered it as alien intrusions into the purity of American life.
The other antimodernist movement was the school of social realism that was tethered to the cultural and political program of the Communist party and its Popular Front. Social realists championed social consciousness in art under the banner of an antifascist crusade. The leading representatives of this school were Ben Shahn, Jack Levine, Jacob Lawrence, and William Gropper, and its principal focus was on class conflict, the plight of the poor and the dispossessed, and idealized depictions of the working class and rural poverty.
With the American economy in collapse in the thirties, both of these movements--the one essentially nativist, the other leftist--exerted a tremendous influence; the modernists were shunted off to the margins of American cultural life. Even the institution that was founded in 1929 to champion the cause of modernism--the Museum of Modern Art in New York--offered little support to the struggling American representatives of vanguard painting and sculpture. Although the museum was making its successful pioneering effort to introduce the American public to the classics of European modernism--Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso--its first acquisition for its permanent collection was a railway landscape by the American realist Edward Hopper. It wasn't until the 1940s that the museum took up the cause of American modernism with real conviction.
A major element in the rise of the abstract expressionist movement in the early forties was its rejection of the social art of the thirties. Both the American scene painters and the school of social realism were shunned as too folksy, superficial, and propagandistic. There was a general turn toward a more inward, subjective, and psychological view of art. Psychoanalysis supplanted socialism and populism as a source ofinspiration. In the early phase, abstract ex pressionism emphasized symbolism and myth; psychological archetypes replaced history and politics as appropriate subject matter for art.
This turn toward a more subjective and psychological art was greatly abetted by the influence of the French surrealists, who formed a significant part of the exiled European artists' community in New York during the war. It was one of the central beliefs of the surrealists that art should attempt to draw upon the unconscious depths of the psyche for its subjects, and toward this end they advocated a technique known as automatism as the most effective means of gaining access to the unconscious. This involved the temporary suspension of consciously planned composition in favor of improvisation and free association.
Automatism, both as an idea and as a technique, was seized upon by the abstract expressionists as a means of liberating their art from the obligation to deal with social and political subjects. Where they differed from the surrealists, however, was in their tendency to carry this automatist method into the realm of pure abstraction. As abstract expressionism developed in the late forties and fifties, Pollock, Rothko, Robert Motherwell, Adolph Gottlieb, and others removed the last traces of legible symbolism from their canvases. Painting became completely abstract. It was as a movement in large-scale abstract painting--and as a mode of abstraction based largely on the automatist method--that the New York school made its international impact from the fifties onward.
The sculpture of the New York school did not have an impact equal to that of its painting. It was generally true of American art in the twentieth century that sculpture lagged behind painting in setting the pace of aesthetic innovation and artistic achievement. If Gaston Lachaise and Elie Nadelman, both European-born, were exceptions to the rule in the period between the wars, it was because of their special ability to revitalize the classical tradition of European figurative sculpture and give it an American accent.
The most original sculptor in the interwar period, however, was Alexander Calder, who had been trained as an engineer and developed his artistic gifts only after he moved to Paris in the late twenties. Drawing his inspiration from Joan Miró, Piet Mondrian, and other Parisian exponents of abstract art, Calder applied his engineering skills to the creation of a new sculptural genre called the mobile. It was an audacious innovation that won the artist a good deal of popularity in America after World War II. Another important sculptor to emerge in the early thirties was Isamu Noguchi, whose highly simplified abstract stone carvings reflected both his Japanese heritage and the influence of Constantin Brancusi, the leading modernist sculptor of his generation in Paris.
The preeminent sculptor of the abstract expressionist generation was David Smith. Beginning as a painter who looked to cubism, surrealism, and abstraction for his artistic ideas, Smith seized upon the methods of cubist collage as a means of creating open-form sculptural construction. Following the example of Picasso and Julio González, he adopted welded metal as his principal material, and it was he, more than any other sculptor of his generation, who made open-form welded sculpture--sometimes called "drawing in space"--a major genre. Although at times employing symbolic images in the manner of the abstract expressionist painters, Smith's sculpture was largely abstract. His achievement was immense; his was the most important body of modernist sculpture produced by an American in this century. But recognition of that achievement came more slowly to Smith than to the painters of the New York school. To the world at large, the New York school has always been identified with painting.
The United States had never before produced an art movement that had such an impact on the international art world, and it was inevitable that so powerful a movement would meet with opposition. The first attempt to supplant the authority of the abstract expressionists--and of abstraction itself as a mode of artistic expression--came in the late fifties in the work of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, painters who reintroduced recognizable images and objects into paintings and collage-like constructions that still owed something to abstract expressionist methods. The images that were now incorporated into art--commonplace items like flags, targets, and maps in Johns's work, and junk materials like rubber tires and stuffed animals in Rauschenberg's--had a facetious quality that mocked the psychological and metaphysical gravity of abstract expressionism. This impulse toward mockery and irony proved to be the basis of one of the principal movements of the 1960s: pop art.
The pop art movement that erupted in New York in the early sixties in the work of Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, and others specialized in making the iconography of popular culture--advertising, comic strips, media images--the basis of painting and sculpture. This movement marked a decisive shift away from the inwardness and subjectivity of abstract expressionism, and it became immensely popular and influential. Yet it did not mark the end of abstraction as a dominant strain in American art, for there also emerged in the sixties two new schools of abstraction: color-field painting--notably in the work of Helen Frankenthaler--which refined and simplified the legacy of abstract expressionism in a style that focused on pure color; and minimalist painting and sculpture that favored more geometrical and impersonal forms.
As a result of these diverse and conflicting art movements of the sixties, no single style or movement any longer enjoyed a position of historically sanctioned dominance. American art was more openly eclectic than it had been at any time since the war, and no single school enjoyed the position of unrivaled leadership that had characterized the abstract expressionists in the fifties. Not only pop art and minimalism and color-field abstraction but a broad range of representational styles, including a revival of realism, now competed in an open field. New fashions in art turned up with increasing regularity--neoexpressionism, for example, was one of the sensations of the 1980s--but the American art scene was too big, too varied, too crowded with competing ideas, styles, and claims, for any single group or movement to prevail.
What had been permanently altered, too, was the notion of the modernist artist as an isolated and rejected figure in American cultural life. The visual arts had entered the cultural mainstream with an impact that gave every sign of being irreversible.
Dore Ashton, Modern American Sculpture (1968); Milton W. Brown, American Painting from the Armory Show to the Depression (1955); Irving Sandler, The Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism (1970).
Hilton Kramer
See also Abstract Expressionism; Armory Show; Calder, Alexander; de Kooning, Willem; Guggenheim, Peggy; Johns, Jasper; Lawrence, Jacob; Nevelson, Louise; Noguchi, Isamu; O'Keeffe, Georgia; Pollock, Jackson; Pop Art; Warhol, Andy.
