American Art

V

The 20th Century: Disturbing the Status Quo

The history of 20th-century American art consists of an accelerating series of revolutions against the status quo. Movement followed movement at an ever-faster pace and with growing profusion, until at the century’s end it had become impossible to identify a dominant trend in American art.

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Before World War I: 1900-1914

The first artistic rebellion of the 20th century saw the emergence of The Eight, a group of eight artists who showed their work together in 1908 in New York City’s Macbeth Gallery. The Eight were linked by their rebellion against the subjects considered proper for painting at the time, but their approach to style remained basically impressionist. Later rebellions were aided and abetted by a major exhibition of modern painting, the Armory Show of 1913.

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The Eight

Five members of The Eight were later dubbed the Ashcan school, a reference to their brand of realism drawn from the city streets. They were Robert Henri, William Glackens, George Luks, Everett Shinn, and John Sloan. Painters Edward Lawson, Arthur B. Davies, and Maurice Prendergast also belonged to the Eight. Other names for The Eight were Apostles of Ugliness and the Revolutionary Gang.

The Eight featured as their subject matter the life of the people of New York’s Lower East Side, which by the first decade of the 20th century was teeming with immigrants from Italy, eastern Europe, and elsewhere. These artists viewed the paintings of Whistler as elitist (appealing only to a select few), the paintings of the visionaries as too private in meaning, the subjects of the impressionists as irrelevant to modern city life, and the late seascapes of Homer as escapist. The Eight’s spokesman, Henri, contended that the working classes were the most suitable subjects for art and that the artist was a social force whose “work creates a stir in the world.” And The Eight did indeed capture the grittiness of New York life.

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The best-known members of The Eight are Luks, Sloan, Glackens, and Prendergast. The first three had worked as illustrators or journalists at urban newspapers, where they encountered the rougher aspects of city life. Luks, who came from a Pennsylvania mining district though from a home of more-than-average culture, passed himself off as a working-class tough. For a while he took up a career as a boxer, a pastime that must have influenced the choice of subject—physically active, straining figures—in paintings such as The Wrestlers (1905, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston). Luks worked with dark tones and expressed disdain for all artists of the past except for the 17th-century Dutch artist Frans Hals, who also depicted the low-life types of his time. Sloan was adept at showing the seamy side of city life—in the streets, inside tenements, and even on rooftops. His etching Turning Out the Lights (1905), which gives the viewer a glimpse of a drab, dimly lit interior, is part of a series titled New York Life.

Glackens, who used bright colors closer to those of the French impressionists, preferred scenes of crowds in parks, in theaters, or at beaches, as in Beach Umbrellas at Blue Point (1915, Smithsonian American Art Museum). Prendergast grew up in Boston and lacked the newspaper background of the others. The large spots of vivid color in his beach, park, and city scenes gave an abstract tapestry-like effect to his paintings, such as Summer, New England (1912, Smithsonian American Art Museum). For Glackens and Prendergast, the city was a place of camaraderie and fulfillment, regardless of the economic situation of its inhabitants.

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The Armory Show

Many historians regard the so-called Armory Show as the most important art exhibition in the United States in the 20th century, and credit it with having helped to bring the modern movement in art to the United States. The exhibition was held from February 17 to March 15, 1913, at the 69th Infantry Regiment Armory in New York City. It featured some 1,300 European and American works of art, beginning in time with a miniature from 1799 by Spanish master Francisco de Goya and continuing to 1913. Modern European artists in the show included Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Wassily Kandinsky, and Marcel Duchamp. The American artists represented included Hassam, Twachtman, Ryder, Luks, Sloan, Glackens, and Prendergast. Record-keeping was not exact, but more than 250,000 people saw the Armory Show in New York City, Chicago, and Boston, and they thereby became acquainted with the latest tendencies in art. Moreover, some American painters, notably Stuart Davis, converted to modernism as a result of seeing the exhibition. Purchases made from the show became the starting point for important collections of modern art by museums in Baltimore, Chicago, and Philadelphia.

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Between the Wars: 1918-1939

In the decades following the Armory Show the views of the city put forth by The Eight would appear rosy, and the ability of artists to find beauty in crowded city life disappeared for the most part. Differences between rich and poor became noticed and resented. World War I (1914-1918) proved the terrible destructiveness of modern weapons. The stock market crash of 1929 marked the beginning of a terrible economic crisis: the Great Depression. By the end of 1931 almost 10 million wage-earners were out of work, and the next year from 4 million to 5 million more were added to their number. In addition to addressing economic hardships, artists observed that loneliness existed in crowded cities and that psychological barriers arose between people in close physical proximity. Enormous government spending during World War II (1939-1945) finally brought an end to the Great Depression.