How Did American Art of the Early Nineteenth Century Reflect American Values of the Period

"...the well-nigh distinctive, and maybe the most impressive, characteristic of American scenery is its wilderness."

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Thomas Cole Signature

"The painter of American scenery has, indeed, privileges superior to any other. All nature here is new to art."

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Thomas Cole Signature

"Of course, it is well to go away and run across the works of the old masters, but Americans... must strike out for themselves, and only past doing this will nosotros create a great and distinctly American art."

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Thomas Eakins Signature

"Peradventure...humanity to you has been reduced to the sterility of the line, the cube, the circle, and the square; devoid of all feeling, cold and highly esoteric. If this is then, I can well understand why you cannot portray the true America. It is because you have lost all feeling for man."

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Jacob Lawrence Signature

"I feel sometimes an American artist must feel, similar a baseball player or something - a member of a team writing American history."

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Willem de Kooning Signature

"One tin not be an American past going about saying that one is an American. It is necessary to feel America, similar America, beloved America and so work."

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Georgia O'Keeffe Signature

"I had to become to France to appreciate Iowa."

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Grant Wood Signature

"I take a definite feeling for the West, the vast horizontality of the land, for instance...I take e'er been very impressed with the plastic qualities of American Indian art. The Indians take the truthful painter'south approach in their capacity to get hold of appropriate images, and in their understanding of what constitutes painterly subject-matter. Their color is essentially Western, their vision has the basic universality of all existent art."

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Jackson Pollock Signature

"The thought of an isolated American painting, so popular in this country during the thirties, seems absurd to me, but as the idea of a purely American mathematics or physics would seem cool... An American is an American and his painting would naturally be qualified by the fact, whether he wills or non. Only the bones problems of contemporary painting are independent of any one country."

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Jackson Pollock Signature

Summary of American Art

The Us' rich artistic history stretches from the earliest indigenous cultures to the more contempo globalization of contemporary fine art. Centuries earlier the start European colonizers, Native American peoples had crafted ritual and utilitarian objects that reflected the natural environment and their beliefs. Later on the arrival of Europeans, artists looked to European tendencies in portraiture and landscape painting to craft representations of the new land, merely it was not until the centre of the 19thursday century with the Hudson River School that American artists were considered to have launched a cohesive movement. Through the early 20th century, artists withal took cues from European avant-garde groups but increasingly focused on the denizens of American urban centers and the more rural Midwest. After World War II, the artists that comprised the Abstract Expressionist movement establish international fame and notoriety, and for the offset time, American artistic influence moved abroad, and later Minimalism and Pop Art profoundly impacted the art world. Subsequently, with various global fine art centers and international connections, it is now more hard to point to a specific American art trend, although ane can still chart the influence of American artists in the global fine art sphere.

Key Ideas & Accomplishments

  • While non originally recognized by the European colonizers, the artistic creations of the ethnic Native American tribes were varied and long held. Abounding in various media and styles, Native American fine art encompassed the decorative, utilitarian, and ritualistic. Incorporating European styles and materials in the 19thursday century, Native American artists transformed traditional subjects and processes to tell their stories and continue to do and then today.
  • As the United States' territory grew through the 19thursday century due to the annexation of land, both painting and photography propelled manifest destiny'due south ideas of American exceptionalism and romantic notions of national identity. Large landscape paintings depicting the American Due west captured the sublimity of the natural mural, and photography in particular was instrumental in some cases in the creation of National Parks.
  • For many art historians, the designation "American Art" ordinarily ended at Earth State of war II. After the international recognition of Abstract Expressionism, the art world became increasingly globalized and diffuse, with styles and trends practiced in all corners of the world, but recent scholarship has focused on the transnational dialogues that are occurring now and tracing those back to create a richer understanding of the art of the United States.

Overview of American Art

American Art Image

"What constitutes American painting?... things may be in America, but it's what is in the artist that counts. What do nosotros call 'American' outside of painting? Inventiveness, restlessness, speed, alter.." said the innovative Arthur Dove. Hither is your guide to the innovations in the arts fabricated by Americans over the concluding 400 years.

Do Non Miss

  • Abstract Expressionism Biography, Art & Analysis

    A trend among New York painters of the belatedly 1940s and '50s, all of whom were committed to an expressive fine art of profound emotion and universal themes. The movement embraced the gestural brainchild of Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, and the color field painting of Mark Rothko and others. It blended elements of Surrealism and abstract fine art in an effort to create a new style fitted to the postwar mood of feet and trauma.

  • Pop Art Biography, Art & Analysis

    British artists of the 1950s were the get-go to make pop culture the dominant subject of their fine art, and this thought became an international phenomenon in the 1960s. But the Pop art movement is most associated with New York, and artists such every bit Andy Warhol, who broke with the private concerns of the Abstruse Expressionists, and turned to themes which touched on public life and mass society.

  • Modern Photography Biography, Art & Analysis

    Modernistic photography refers to a range of approaches from Straight Photography, New Vision photography, Dada and Surrealist photography, and later abstract tendencies.

  • Modernism and Modern Art Biography, Art & Analysis

    Modernistic Art is a catamenia of fine art making that promoted the new and industrial world, free from derivation and historical references. And for the new to be possible, erstwhile ideas well-nigh fine art were oftentimes altogether abased, or deconstructed.


The Important Artists and Works of American Art

Thomas Cole: A Wild Scene (1831-32)

A Wild Scene (1831-32)

This dramatic landscape exemplifies the piece of work of the Hudson River School. A stunning vista of rocky outcrops and precipitous mountains opens upon a waterfall, in the heart correct, breaking into a luminous pool that flows into the bounding main on the left. A craggy ancient tree frames the right border, its twisted limbs curving vertically toward the darkly portentous sky. Native American figures, dressed in animal hides and armed with bows, occupy the lower third of the sail, 1 outlined against the pink and blue patch of sky on the left, the others located beneath the two prominent trees. As art historians Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser and Tim Baring wrote, the piece of work is "a fine essay in the sublime: the crude, uncultivated landscape and nighttime, rolling clouds...convincingly represents an untamed wilderness." Precise detail reflects the influence of Naturalism, while what the artist described equally its "flashing chiaroscuro and a spirit of motion pervading the scene, as though nature was just waking from chaos," reflects a Romanticist inspiration.

Art historian Carl Pfluger wrote that Cole "virtually invented a new fashion of landscape, specializing in views of the wilderness." The artist described the painting as "a vision of the earliest form of guild, the 'perfect state' of nature, with advisable savage figures." The portrayal of Native Americans and the description of them equally "cruel" played into the growing mythology of uncultured peoples who on 1 hand added something like authenticity to the landscape but on the other were not "civilized" plenty and had to be removed every bit settlers moved West during the era of Manifest Destiny. Cole and the Hudson River School significantly influenced American environmental movements, as well as new art directions, including American Regionalism and Group f/64. Contemporary artists Charles LeDray, Stephen Hannock, and Angie Keifer have repurposed Cole's works, every bit seen in LeDray's Empire (2015).

George Bellows: Cliff Dwellers (1913)

Cliff Dwellers (1913)

Artist: George Bellows

Bellows' Cliff Dwellers, with its depiction of the gritty vitality of slum life, exemplifies the Ashcan Schoolhouse. In a neighborhood of tenement buildings, its citizenry crowd into the streets, engaged in a variety of activities; some women and children sit down on the steps, a mother admonishes her child at middle, while working men and a street vendor throng in the background. Only a touch of horizon and sky remains between the vertical rows of apartments and the network of clotheslines that diagonally cross the street from building to building. Equally the people gather outside to avert the heat in the stifling apartments, the brushwork, vibrant and vigorous, creates a sense of physicality. Apartment dwellers can exist glimpsed in the upper levels of the buildings, as they seem to be caught upwardly in private conversations or lean out of their apartment windows. The work reflects the impact of clearing in the era, equally contempo arrivals were densely crowded into slum neighborhoods. Withal as art critic Michael Kimmelman writes, "the joylessness of the bailiwick is undercut by the soft light that streams into the scene and past the characters on the stoops and in the streets whom Bellows endows with more than charm than misery."

Office of the second generation of the Ashcan School, Bellows used the group's and so favored strategies in this work, employing a geometric compositional scheme as well equally the "chords," or triads of complementary colors expounded by Hardesty M. Maratta'south colour theory. Nevertheless, his fluid brushwork and vibrant colour made his work distinctive, equally he conveyed the robust swagger and energy of working class life.

Alfred Stieglitz: The Steerage (1907)

The Steerage (1907)

Artist: Alfred Stieglitz

This photograph has get famous both as a cultural document of clearing to America and as a pioneering piece of work of American modernism and Straight Photography. The epitome is cropped to emphasize the diagonals of the gangplank horizontally crossing the frame while intersecting the massive cavalcade on the left, echoed past the stairway on the correct intersecting the horizontal planes of the upper deck. The upper level, reserved for the well-to-practice, seems peopled primarily by men, the shape of their hats catching the calorie-free every bit they await down into the steerage, where women and children, along with article of clothing hanging upwards at the left, create a sense of a lived-in infinite similar a crowded tenement. Though the piece of work highlights class and gender divisions, Stieglitz was primarily interested in its formal qualities, every bit its precipitous focus converged on intersecting planes, shapes, and angles.

Around 1900 Stieglitz began using large format cameras and considered this his first truly "modernist" film, every bit he said, "Intensely direct. Not a trace of hand piece of work on either negative or prints. No diffused focus. Just the directly goods." He published the photo in Camera Work in 1911 forth with several of his other photographs.

Useful Resource on American Fine art

Content compiled and written by Rebecca Seiferle

Edited and revised, with Summary and Accomplishments added by Valerie Hellstein

"American Art Definition Overview and Assay". [Net]. . TheArtStory.org
Content compiled and written by Rebecca Seiferle
Edited and revised, with Summary and Accomplishments added by Valerie Hellstein
Available from:
Starting time published on 13 Feb 2019. Updated and modified regularly
[Accessed ]

underwoodstrowd.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.theartstory.org/definition/american-art/

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