United States painting
The painting of the United States has a history of two centuries, from the independence of the country. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, artists painted mostly landscapes and portraits in a realistic style. Trends in modern art in Europe reached the United States through exhibitions in New York such as the 1913 Armory Show. Previously, American artists had based most of their work on Western painting and European arts. After World War II, New York replaced Paris as the center of the art world. Since then, many American movements have marked modern and postmodern art.
17th and 18th centuries
During the colonial era and the first decades of the new nation, the only art that was considered admissible, in a puritanical and laborious environment, were portraits. Most of the artists of the time were self-taught. Today, the hundreds of ancient portraits that still exist, made from the late 17th century, are highly valued by collectors. Among the outstanding painters of the time, it is worth mentioning the New Yorker Robert Feke or the Scotsman John Smybert. Smybert studied with Sir James Thornhill, and in 1728 he accompanied Bishop Berkeley to America, intending to become professor of fine arts at the university Berkeley intended to found in Bermuda, which never happened. In 1731 he painted Dean George Berkeley and his family , also titled The Bermuda Group (Yales University Art Gallery); from this famous nucleus of the colonies what was intended was to incorporate the young American art into the broader scope of British art of the time. For this reason, in the years preceding the American War of Independence, prominent artists traveled to Europe and some of them stayed there. John Singleton Copley is considered the painter with whom the American school of painting began. He made emblematic portraits of the increasingly prosperous commercial class, but he left for England in 1774 and there his work seemed to lose steam.
In London already lived, since 1763, Benjamin West, who became court painter to King George III of England and served as president of the Royal Academy for 28 years. Throughout fifty years, American painters who sought to train in Europe passed through his workshop, so through these students, his style influenced the painting of the new nation. He is considered the first painter to be inspired by the conquest of the New World, his work Penn's Treaty with the Indians being cited as a painting that exerted great influence on later American history painting.
Among the artists who visited West's London studio were Gilbert Stuart and John Trumbull, who developed their careers after the Declaration of Independence in 1776. The new nation needed a story, and part of that story would be expressed visually, both through portraits and history painting. Stuart painted the new government officials, being famous for the numerous portraits he made of George Washington, to which Charles Willson Peale also dedicated himself. For his part, Trumbull represented large battle scenes from the War of Independence, renewing the genre of patriotic-themed neoclassical compositions.
19th century
The first art institutions begin to emerge: the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts was founded in 1805 in Philadelphia, while the National Academy was founded in 1825 in New York. Despite this, artists continued to go to Europe to train, to places like London, Paris or Düsseldorf.
The American romantic painting that followed European academicism, like the mythological painting of Washington Allston or John Vanderlyn, was not very successful, the latter causing a scandal for the nude of Ariadne in Naxos (1815). More acceptance had the representation of the landscape, in all its forms, such as the panoramas of Robert Fulton or the cosmoramas. "Withdrawal before nature" has been cited as one of the traits of American culture, as found in Emerson, Thoreau, or Walt Whitman. It is therefore not surprising that the first originally American school of painting focused precisely on, In the landscape. This is the Hudson River School, which appeared in 1820. The artists perceived that the New World offered its own unique themes. In this case, the westward expansion of the settlements drew the painters' attention to the transcendent beauty of the frontier landscapes. Led by Thomas Cole, the Hudson River painters combined their great technical prowess with the romantic landscape. His paintings were visual explorations of light and the wonders of nature. In the second half of the century there was a veritable explosion of paintings representing the national landscape on huge canvases with a spectacular character. John Frederick Kensett, Frederic Edwin Church and Albert Bierstadt also belonged to this school.
Pictures of the Great West began to emerge as well, conveying in particular the sheer size of the land and the cultures of the native peoples who lived on it. Artists like George Caleb Bingham, who reflected the Midwest, or George Catlin, a specialist in portraying the Indians, departed from the traditional way of presenting the land, which until then was intended to show how much the subject owned; they preferred to show the West and its people, including the Indians and their folklore, in the most faithful way possible.
The success of the genre scene from 1830 must be highlighted, motivated above all by the growing illustration, newspapers and magazines, which accustomed the public to scenes of daily life. In this line, William Sidney Mount stood out.
After the Civil War, there was a fork in the paths of American painting. On the one hand, there were the "Americanist" artists, who promoted a purely American vision, taking an interest in real-life problems and placing great value on the human being. They cultivate a realistic painting, influenced by the direct approach and the simple vision of the Hudson River school. Winslow Homer represented the American rural world: the sea, the mountains and the people who lived near them. Middle-class urban life found its painter in Thomas Eakins, an uncompromising realist whose bleak, unartificial portraits departed from the romantic sentimentality that the "educated" people of his day had favored. He studied with him Henry Ossawa Tanner, one of the first important African-American painters. George Inness, who was called the "American Corot", and the more subjective Albert Pinkham Ryder also worked along these lines. This theme of scenes from daily life, as happened before with that of the American landscape, originates from the same American concern to make art something not exclusive to an elite, but rather something that must be understood by all and in this sense it is an art. democratic; but it must also extol the peculiarities of a nation, and for this reason it is a nationalist art.
Different is the second path, the one followed by American painters who followed European academic styles. To this trend belongs William Merritt Chase. Some are considered American, but they spent much of their career in Europe, meeting other European artists in Paris and London, such as the impressionist Mary Cassatt or Whistler. John Singer Sargent ends up being considered an American only because of his nationality, having been born in Florence (Italy) to American parents; A famous portrait painter, who also painted landscapes, he was an expatriate who spent much of his life in Europe.
20th century
Controversy soon became a way of life for American artists. Indeed, much like Europe after the Italian Futurists, much of American sculpture and painting since 1900 has been a series of rebellions against tradition. "To hell with artistic values," proclaimed Robert Henri (1865-1929). Henri led the group of Eight, which critics dubbed the "garbage can" school (Ashcan school) or even the "revolutionary black gang" because the group's realistic portrayals they showed the poorer aspects of life in the city. They chose an academic realism depicting American rural and urban scenes, so their novelty lies more in the themes than in the technique. They developed in their works an iconography of social conscience. Of the group of Eight George W. Bellows was famous for his boxing songs.
Just a few years later, the "trashcan" artists were displaced by the arrival from Europe of avant-garde movements such as cubism and abstraction, championed by photographer Alfred Stieglitz from 291 Fifth Avenue in New York, authentic bastion of the pictorial avant-garde. After World War I, many American artists developed modern trends emanating from the Armory Show, or "Arsenal Exposition," which in 1913 brought avant-garde European works to the American public alongside indigenous social realist works. American artists became closely related to the new European artists. Thus, Max Weber was related to Matisse and Picasso, being the first American cubist, while Lyonel Feininger joined the Blaue Reiter. They include John Marin, Arthur Dove, Arthur Bowen Davies and Georgia O'Keeffe.
In this period between the wars, American painting was marked above all by cubism, often understood as mere geometrization. Within Orphism it is worth mentioning Patrick Henry Bruce, Morgan Russell and Stanton Macdonald-Wright; These last two also conceived synchronism in Paris, with the study of the relationship between color, light and music. Joseph Stella preferred futurist cubism, joining with Charles Demuth and Charles Sheeler what was called the "precisionist" group, or the "immaculates", who used cubism to portray the industrial landscape, developing between 1915 and the 1930s. In this line, Edward Hopper stood out, who reflected with original realism the American cities and towns. Dadaism had as reference Marcel Duchamp, of French nationality, but nationalized American in the fifties and who influenced both Paris and New York, and the painter and photographer Man Ray, who already in New York in 1915 can be considered forerunner of dada
The American Southwest
After World War I, the completion of the Santa Fe Railroad allowed American settlers to travel west as far as the California coast. New artist colonies began to grow around Santa Fe and Taos. The artists' main subject matter was the towns and landscapes of the Southwest, the images of which became popular in advertising, with the Santa Fe Railroad being used significantly to encourage settlers to go West and enjoy the "unsoiled landscapes." ». Among the Southwest's most prolific artists were William Henry Jackson and Georgia O'Keeffe.
Harlem Renaissance
The Harlem Renaissance was another significant development in American art. In the 1920s and 1930s, a new generation of African Americans supported literary societies and art shows to combat racist stereotypes. Although this movement included artists from all over the country, it was centered in Harlem, where they worked. Graphic artist Aaron Douglas and photographer James Van Der Zee became emblematic of the movement. Among others, Romare Bearden and Charles Alston were in this movement.
New Deal Art
When the Great Depression hit, President Roosevelt's New Deal created several public art programs, intended to employ artists and decorate public buildings, usually with a national theme. The first of these projects, the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), was created after successful lobbying by unemployed artists from the Artists' Union. The PWAP lasted less than a year and produced almost 15,000 works of art. It was followed by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) Federal Art Project (FAP) in 1935, which provided resources to some of America's best-known artists. An art of social protest was produced, stylistically similar to that promoted by some artists in the Soviet Union and the muralists in Mexico. Everywhere, artists created extraordinary pictorial attacks on social systems in multitudes of public paintings and murals. Nowhere else have so many artists spoken out so candidly and idealistically about what was wrong with their country, often living on the government budget, as when hundreds of artists were put on the US payroll as part of the effort of the federal government for providing jobs.
Several separate and related movements begin and develop during the Great Depression, including the American genre scene, regionalism, and social realism. A renewed nationalist sentiment encouraged artists to rediscover and explore what is called "Americana" (the collection of documents and objects that chronicle the history, culture, and art of the United States). Regionalism was reminiscent of the German New Objectivity, artistically extolling the Midwest and its provincial life; the best-known painter of this trend is Grant Wood, whose 1930s American Gothic is considered an icon of 20th-century American culture.
Abstract Expressionism
In the years after World War II, a group of New York artists formed the first genuinely American abstract art movement: Abstract Expressionism. This term, which was used for the first time in 1919 in Berlin, was taken up in 1946 by Robert Coates in the New York Times, and assumed by the two leading art critics of the time, Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg. It has always been criticized as too big and paradoxical, however the common definition implies the use of abstract art to express feelings, emotions, what is inside the artist and not what is outside of him. Although the many artists covered by this appellation have widely different styles, contemporary critics found several commonalities among them. It can be characterized by two main elements: first, the large size of the canvases used, partly inspired by Mexican frescoes and the works they did for the WPA in the 1930s; secondly, the strong and unusual use of brushstrokes and application of experimental paint with a new understanding of the process. Most of the abstract expressionists abandoned formal composition and the representation of real objects. They often attempted spontaneous, intuitive, and instinctive compositions of space, line, shape, and color.
The first generation of abstract expressionists included artists such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, Arshile Gorky, Robert Motherwell, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb, Philip Guston, Ad Reinhardt, Hans Hofmann, James Brooks, William Baziotes, Mark Tobey, Bradley Walker Tomlin, Theodoros Stamos, Jack Tworkov and others. Many first-generation Abstract Expressionists were influenced both by Cubist works, which they encountered through black-and-white prints in art reviews and also directly, at Gallery 291 or the Armory Show; but also by the European surrealists, by Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse.
Two trends can be distinguished. The first was Action Painting or «action painting», practiced by Pollock, De Kooning and Kline. It is characterized by spontaneous reaction, powerful brushstrokes, (dripping) and thrown paint, and strong physical movements used in the production of a painting. Jackson Pollock is an example of an "action painter": his creative process involved throwing paint, or dripping it from a stick or pouring it directly from the can; with it he revolutionized painting methods. There is a famous saying by de Kooning regarding Pollock: "he broke the ice for the rest of us." Ironically, Pollock's large, repetitive extensions of linear fields are also characteristic of the second trend, "Color-field painting"; as noted by art critic Michael Fried in his essay for the catalog of Three American painters: Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Frank Stella at the Fogg Museum of Art in 1965. Two of the principles applied to this movement are the emphasis and intensification of color and the large surfaces. This colour-field painting was cultivated in the fifties by Newman, Rothko, Still, Reinhardt, Gottlieb and Motherwell. In the 1960s, this trend was followed by Jules Olitski, Kenneth Noland, and Helen Frankenthaler, who sought to make paintings that eliminated superfluous rhetoric with broad, flat color.
Abstract expressionism marks a turning point in the history of American painting. The abstract tradition is reborn in him from the late forties. With him the first original pictorial movement of the United States arose, at a time when the center of the international artistic world passed from Paris to New York, coinciding with the end of World War II, when the United States appeared as the hegemonic power. of the West, both economically and politically. From this moment on, many pictorial movements arose in the United States and from there they spread to Europe and the rest of the world; at the same time, other trends born abroad are followed and cultivated in the United States.
Some of these later trends derived directly from one of two kinds of Abstract Expressionism, such as hard edge painting (hard edge, cultivated by Ellsworth Kelly) or shaped canvas (canvas with a different format than the traditional one, exemplified by Frank Stella). Frankenthaler and Morris Louis continued with abstract painting even in the sixties, when pop art was triumphant, with paintings in which the use of color predominated. Within informal art, we can classify Sam Francis, the main exponent of Tachismo, and Mark Tobey, inclined more towards calligraphy with a deep philosophical and spiritual meaning typical of the Orient.
Pop Art
Between 1955 and 1970, approximately, pop art (in English, Pop art, short for popular art) developed in the United States, where it took root most strongly than anywhere else, despite the reluctance of some critics such as Harold Rosenberg, given the strength that abstract expressionism had in all instances of the art industry. Neo-Dadaists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, who created art out of waste materials in the 1950s, are considered precursors of pop art. Johns used photos, newspapers and discarded objects in his compositions. His technique of painting with paddles was reminiscent of abstract expressionists such as De Kooning.
Echoing the consumer society and its stereotypes, this style is often considered the epitome of American imperialist art. Pop iconography was easily assimilated as something purely American and this was important in that continent because always, both artists as collectors, they were in a certain way in struggle or competition with the European. Confirmation of this came with the exhibition entitled "Pop Art and the American Tradition" at the Milwaukee Art Center in 1965. This nationalist aspect was the only thing that brought him closer to the generation of abstract expressionists; everything else is the opposite: pop artists ironic about the calligraphy and gesture characteristic of the expressionists (Lichtenstein's works in which he amplifies a graphically schematized brushstroke), or Rosenquist's enormous paintings in which he amplifies spaghetti as if recalling the nervations of Pollock's drippings (“drips”), and in general the interest in removing from the work any trace of the artist's manual intervention. The pop art group is made up of Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, Jim Dine, Robert Indiana, Tom Wesselmann, Ronald Kitaj and Claes Oldenburg. On the periphery of American pop are Alex Katz and Larry Rivers. Warhol, Rivers and Lichtenstein reproduced, with satirical care, everyday objects and images from American popular culture, such as Coca-Cola bottles, soup cans or comic strips. Although all these artists are pop, they differ from each other. Warhol intended to eliminate from the work of art any trace or sign of craftsmanship; many of his works are made from photographs projected onto canvas. Lichtenstein takes his motifs from comic strips and enlarges them to enormous dimensions, leaving visible the dots that result from the printing process. Dine combines real objects with painted backgrounds. Oldenburg manufactures everyday objects (hamburgers, knives, etc.) in enormous sizes that he sometimes installs in outdoor spaces. Indiana paints gigantic signs that claim the viewer's attention while admonishing him.
Other trends since 1950
During the 1950s, abstract painting in the United States evolved towards movements such as neo-dadaism, post-painterly abstraction or Op Art, although abstract expressionism continued to be cultivated. To a large extent, many of these trends were superseded from the 1960s by the appearance of minimalism, which marked a new period of interest in geometry and structure, of the object with itself. He takes from pop art the "clear definitions and devoid of ambiguity", and from abstraction the free use of colors. It is represented in the work of Frank Stella, Carl Andre and the artist famous for his fluorescent lighting installations Dan Flavin.
Alfonso A. Ossorio is the American representation within the art brut of the fifties. In this same decade, Funk art arose in San Francisco (California), and as a reaction to the lack of objectivity of abstract expressionism.
Later, other abstract movements emerged such as Fluxus and post-minimalism (a term first coined by Robert Pincus-Witten in an article published in Artforum magazine in 1969; referring to the work of the artist Eva Hesse, said it was post minimal art or "post-minimalist art"). These movements, like lyrical abstraction, sought to expand the boundaries of abstract painting and minimalism by focusing on process, new materials and new ways of expression. Lyrical abstraction shares similarities with color field painting and abstract expressionism especially in the carefree use of paint - texture and surface. The direct drawing, the calligraphic use of line, the effects of splattered, smeared, and poured paint superficially resemble the effects seen in abstract expressionism and color field painting. However the styles are markedly different. Post-minimalism often incorporated industrial materials, raw material, found objects, installations, serial repetitions, and often with references to Dada and Surrealism is best exemplified in the sculptures of Eva Hesse. This artist, along with other "post-minimalists" such as Richard Serra, are within the trend of processual art.
Realism, despite the enormous success of non-representational movements such as Abstract Expressionism, did not go unpopular, as Norman Rockwell's illustrations prove. In addition to Pop Art, there were other figurative movements that reacted to abstraction, such as the Bay Area figurative movement or, in the 1970s, neo-expressionism. In certain places abstract expressionism never caught on. An example of this is Chicago, in which the dominant artistic style was symbolic and grotesque realism, as shown by the Chicago Imagists, including Nancy Spero.
Other figurative movements of the second half of the century are photorealism and new realism. Hyperrealism, photorealism or superrealism makes highly detailed and cold figurative paintings; It emerged in the United States around 1965 and Richard Estes and Chuck Close stand out in this trend. The new realism (new realism) that developed between 1960 and 1970 had its highest American representatives in Alex Katz and Alice Neel. In the eighties the figurative was revitalized, although through very diverse proposals ranging from Keith Haring and his simple forms inspired by graffiti to the Bad painting of Julian Schnabel, David Salle or Jean-Michel Basquiat. Bad painting emerged in the early eighties; it is a "bad painting" reminiscent of art brut and that is part of a broader international movement (with the new German fauves or the Italian transvanguardia) in which the intellectualism of conceptual art was abandoned and the "bad taste" of outsider art was vindicated.
From the mid-1960s and throughout the 1970s, new trends appeared that expanded the limits of contemporary art. Conceptual art, which emerged in New York around 1965, considers that the priority is the concept, the idea, and not its physical realization in a determined artistic object; conceptual are, for example, Joseph Kosuth and Dennis Oppenheim. By the end of the 1970s, however, conceptual art was considered a "failure," and a new artistic discourse was attempted, the initial example of which was the exhibition Pictures, held in New York in 1977, in which artists such as Jack Goldstein, Robert Longo and Sherrie Levine exhibited. There were those who recycled previous works or logos, making a kind of copies of copies (simulationists) or magazine articles in a way that was reminiscent of pop art (appropriationists, including Jeff Koons).
The Land Art uses the land itself as the material for its work, prioritizing the testimonies that remain of the work, in photography or video, more than the artistic result; Featured land artist was Robert Smithson. Video art emerged around the year 1963, simultaneously in the United States and in Europe, and was used by other currents of the time, such as fluxus or conceptual art. Other novelties were the performances or the art of installations. Vito Acconci and Dennis Oppenheim cultivated body art or body art.
One of the currents that contributed something new was pattern painting, which emerged in California in 1975, which repetitively presents decorative motifs; Its cultivators are female artists who thus oppose the severity of minimalism, often using artisan techniques traditionally considered feminine, such as patchwork. In a certain sense, it had as a precursor the so-called feminist art, made by women and having as its theme the female condition, which emerged at the end of the sixties, in parallel with the Women's Lib. movement.
All these avant-gardes of the last third of the XX century focused on experimenting with various means that technology made available to them. Neither computers, which give rise to digital art, nor the Internet, which allows net.art. Computers allowed, from the mid-sixties, to create images artistic by digital means, that is, computer generated images. In the mid-nineties a qualitative leap was made, achieving artistic creations through the network, which challenges classic concepts of authorship or identity of the artist.
Visionary Art
Their common theme is their attempt to portray the world beyond the physical eye and overlap mystical and spiritual ideas. Visionary art aims to transcend the physical and scientific world and give the audience a virtual vision (hence the name Visionary Art) of what the world would be like if we could see spiritual and mystical things in our everyday lives. The type of mystical energies portrayed in Visionary Art varies from artist to artist, but the four elements (water, fire, earth, and wind), love, lust, sacred, secular, positive, and negative forces are reasonably common.
Amanda Sage and A. Andrew González are some of its most recognized artists.
Fonts
- Carrassat, P.F.R. and Marcadé, I., Movements of painting, Spes Editorial, S.L., 2004. ISBN 84-8332-596-9.
- Pohl, Frances K. Framing America. A Social History of American Art. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2002 (pp. 74-84, 118-122, 366-365, 385, 343-344, 350-351)
- Robbins, Daniel, and Marandel, Jean-Patrice, «United States» in Larousse Dictionary of PaintingI, p. 589-591, Editorial Planeta-De Agostini, S.A., 1987. ISBN 84-395-0649-X.
- «The Art in the United States» Great Larousse UniversalI take 13, p. 4694-4699, Editorial Plaza & Janés, 1996. ISBN 84-01-61733-2.
- "United States." Painting. Great Rialp Encyclopedia, Volume 9.
- United States Department of State
- This work contains a translation derived from Wikipedia's "Visual arts of the United States", published by its editors under the GNU Free Documentation License and the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.