American Art

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Urban Scene Painters

The revelation of urban loneliness was the special province of Edward Hopper. A gruff, taciturn man, he studied under Robert Henri and Kenneth Hayes Miller from 1900 to 1906, spent the years from 1906 to 1910 in Europe, and exhibited in the Armory Show. His etching East Side Interior (1922, Museum of Modern Art, New York) shows a woman seated at her sewing machine next to a window in a crowded interior. The artist has placed a chair and other objects in the room so that they hem the woman in as she looks dreamily out of the window, hoping (we are led to assume) to escape her unhappy existence. This is not the active, self-sufficient woman in Sloan's Turning Out the Lights. Motion pictures attracted Hopper as a subject—not as spectacle so much as a darkened place of escape from the boredom and harsh realities of life. In his New York Movie (1939, Museum of Modern Art), the audience sits in a darkened, extravagantly decorated interior, while in the hall outside the auditorium a young, harshly lit usherette, her head bowed, laments her state. The loneliness of city life is also evident in Hopper’s From Williamsburg Bridge (1928, Metropolitan Museum of Art). In this painting nothing is alive, and the bridge railing in the foreground blocks our view of the street and the lower stories of the buildings beyond, leaving a view of vacant upper-story windows.

If Hopper's figures are passive, those in the works of Reginald Marsh are boisterous, overwhelmed by the crowds of which they are a part. In many cases these crowds lie on Coney Island's beaches or promenade about its amusement parks, stopping to look at freak shows and other displays. Marsh also depicted the urban poor during the Great Depression. His etching Tenth Avenue at 27th Street (1931) shows unemployed men loitering about New York's streets with nowhere to go. Two artists who created less obviously dramatic urban scenes are Isabel Bishop, who came from Cincinnati, Ohio, to New York City to study under Marsh and Miller, and Raphael Soyer, who came to the United States from Russia at age 12. Bishop and Soyer showed the quiet day-to-day struggles of ordinary people, often women, trying to get along in the city. In Bishop's Waiting (1938, Newark Museum), a haggard woman, her packages beside her and her child asleep on her lap, waits in a station for a train or a bus. In Soyer's Office Girls (1936, Whitney Museum of American Art), young working women pass alertly though tensely along a crowded street.

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Modernism

During the period between the two world wars, modernism burst upon the American scene. Painters discarded realism, choosing instead to break up forms or overlay transparent planes in the manner of European cubism, to distort objects in the manner of European expressionism, and even to paint canvases in which nothing was recognizable. The latter choice was in keeping with the work of Europe's early nonobjective (completely abstract or non-representational) artists, such as Piet Mondrian from The Netherlands or the Russians Kasimir Malevich and Wassily Kandinsky.

Arthur Garfield Dove, who came from upstate New York near Rochester, was one of America’s first nonobjective painters. He embarked upon nonobjectivity in 1910, independently of Kandinsky who made the leap to abstraction in Europe that same year. While Kandinsky kept to this course, Dove moved back and forth between realism and abstraction. Some of Dove’s nonobjective paintings suggest—without actually picturing—landscapes with moons or suns. In the late work Sun (1943, Smithsonian American Art Museum), he comes closest to representing a recognizable solar disk.

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Skyscrapers quickly became symbols of modernism in America. Philadelphia's City Hall was the country’s tallest building until the second decade of the 20th century, when the Woolworth Building and other tall buildings were built in New York City. America's early modernist artists tilted and merged these tall buildings in their work to suggest urban dynamism and convey something of the dizzying sensation pedestrians experience while walking by a skyscraper. Max Weber used this device in Rush Hour, New York (1915, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), and John Marin incorporated it in Lower Manhattan (Composing Derived from Top of Woolworth) (1922, Museum of Modern Art).

Dove, Marin, Weber, and another American artist, Marsden Hartley, received emotional and, at times, financial support from the photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who also exhibited their work in his gallery. He called his influential New York gallery at 293 Fifth Avenue 291 after its former address down the hall. Hartley’s work featured objects that were flattened in the manner of cubism. Stuart Davis was another American modernist who, under the influence of cubism, flattened objects, rearranged their parts, and changed their relative sizes. By the time Davis painted Abstraction (1937, Smithsonian American Art Museum), the objects in his paintings had become quite unidentifiable, although in this work a ladder-back chair, lettering, and a few other objects can be deciphered.

Another modernist group in New York city found its chief mentors in French artists Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia, both of whom challenged traditional notions of what constituted art. Duchamp claimed to be “interested in ideas—not merely visual products.” One of his most shocking artistic actions was to exhibit objects that he acquired rather than made himself. These objects, which he called readymades, included a snow shovel, a hat rack, and even a urinal. In the United States, Philadelphian Emmanuel Radenski, who took the name Man Ray, assimilated Duchamp's ideas, as demonstrated in Object to be Destroyed (1923). This work by Ray consisted of a metronome with a paper image of an eye attached to the pendulum, which, when swinging, was meant to have a hypnotic effect on the spectator. Today it exists only in a 1964 replica entitled Indestructible Object in the Museum of Modern Art. The original was destroyed in 1957.

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Precisionism

The French artist Picabia, who was fascinated by machinery, painted precise but imaginary mechanical objects. He paved the way for a more moderate approach to modernism called precisionism, which prevailed in the United States during the 1920s and 1930s. Instead of the distortions, rearrangements, and merging of forms of the previous generation of modernists, precisionism featured simplified but recognizable forms reduced to their essential geometry. Many of the subjects of precisionist art had a distinctly American character—factory buildings, Pennsylvania barns, early American churches, and other structures that were plain and sturdy. The turn to American subject matter can be attributed largely to the growing isolation of the United States after World War I, demonstrated by the end of the country’s involvement in European wars and its refusal to join the League of Nations. An additional factor was the emergence of popular homegrown heroes such as Babe Ruth, Charles Lindbergh, and Jack Dempsey.

Charles Demuth and Charles Sheeler are the best-known American precisionist painters. After All (1933, Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach), Demuth's painting of parts of factory complexes in his native Lancaster, Pennsylvania, demonstrates the simplification of forms that the precisionists favored. Demuth most likely took the title of the painting After All from a stanza in Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1855), a volume that marked the beginning of a uniquely American poetry. Sheeler lived for a while in the rolling hills of Bucks County, north of Philadelphia. In some of his paintings of the area’s barns, he set the building back in space, omitted doors and windows, and left the foreground bare, as in Bucks County Barn (1923, Whitney Museum of American Art). In a later painting showing New England barns, Connecticut Barns in Landscape (1934, Smithsonian American Art Museum), the sharply focused, hard-edged barns contrast with the soft, slightly out-of-focus landscape around them.

Stieglitz's wife Georgia O'Keeffe applied her precisionist vision to the American Southwest. She became enamored of the look and feel of the region from visits to New Mexico, where she settled permanently after Stieglitz's death in 1946. O’Keeffe painted desert stones and flowers, cows’ skulls bleached white by the sun, crosses left by Spanish Catholic missionaries in the 1600s and 1700s, and old adobe churches. An example of the latter is Ranchos Church (1930, Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas).

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Realism

Despite the arrival of modernism, realism persisted in American art in the 1920s and 1930s, chiefly in the form of regionalism and social realism. Most of the regionalists were white, American-born, of European ancestry, and antiurban in their outlook. They celebrated in their art the culture of small towns and rural life, which they regarded as authentically American. The social realists, on the other hand, consisted mostly of Jewish and black artists and were urban in their orientation. They saw the United States as a place of discrimination and injustice, of privilege vested in a wealthy upper class. Both groups sought to portray American subjects in a way that could be understood by all people, not just by an elite few.

Thomas Hart Benton, the leader of the regionalists, painted vast surveys of different industries and histories of particular regions, including those of his native Missouri. He peopled his canvases with vigorous horseshoe pitchers, country fiddlers, cowboys, star-crossed country lovers, hay mowers, and cotton pickers. For the Missouri state capitol he painted a large mural entitled A Social History of Missouri. Grant Wood from Iowa was exceptional among the regionalists in two respects. First, he drew inspiration from Flemish and German paintings of the 14th and 15th centuries, which he had seen in Europe. Like these artists, he painted some areas of his canvases meticulously in minute detail. Second, he lampooned some of the country folk he pictured, as in his American Gothic (1930, Art Institute of Chicago). The couple taken for man and wife in this painting are actually Wood’s sister and a dentist, and their clothes were purposefully acquired for the suitable 'hayseed' effect.

Ben Shahn, a Lithuanian-born Jew, was a leading social realist. When he heard of the arrest of two Italian immigrants, who were professed anarchists, for a holdup and murder in South Braintree, Massachusetts, he exclaimed, “Ever since I could remember, I wished that I'd been lucky enough to be alive at a great time—when something big was going on, like the Crucifixion. And suddenly I realized I was. Here I was living through another crucifixion.” Liberal interests maintained that the two—Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti—were innocent victims of the upper-class establishment. When Sacco and Vanzetti were finally put to death in the electric chair (seven years after the original arrest in 1920), Shahn painted The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti (1931-1932, Whitney Museum of American Art). In the painting he shows them as Christian martyrs with their final accusers standing next to their coffins like attending saints.

African American artist Jacob Lawrence was born in Atlantic City and raised in poverty in New York City’s Harlem. In his paintings he focused on the history and sufferings of his race. His painting Tombstones (1942, Whitney Museum of American Art) is marked by irony. It shows a black family living in a rickety building above a shop for tombstones. The implication is that families for whom death comes early and often find it convenient to live above such a shop. William Henry Johnson, from Florence, South Carolina, spent the years from 1926 to 1938 in Europe, moving through various styles. During the 1940s he worked with simplified shapes in a deliberately awkward manner to paint works that dealt with experiences of African Americans, such as Ferry Boat Trip (1943-1944, Smithsonian American Art Museum).

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Original Visions

Several notable American painters fit in none of the groupings mentioned so far. Charles Burchfield, who is sometimes grouped with the regionalists, may be considered part of the visionary tradition of Ryder and Blakelock. From Ashtabula, Ohio, he was sensitive to the frightening appearance and impact of old, decaying buildings in backwater towns. In his Church Bells Ringing, Rainy Winter Night (1917, Cleveland Museum of Art), he encases human faces within the facades of houses and makes the church steeple suggest the semblance of a human head. Ivan Le Lorraine Albright had served as a medical draftsman during World War I. This training informed him in painting old and decrepit people, whose wrinkles, cracked skin, blemishes, and protruding veins he recorded in great detail, as in The Farmer’s Kitchen (1933-1934, Smithsonian American Art Museum).

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