The cosmopolitan, formal trends in 20th-century painting

THE YEAR 1920 may be taken as a turning point in American art. Many of the social realists, who had pioneered in the discovery of the city, turned at about this time to other interests, particularly to esthetic problems which had little to do with the spontaneous genre painting of their youth. Glackens fell in love with Renoir and became an impressionist. Bellows was absorbed by Jay Hambidge's theory of Dynamic Symmetry. Even Sloan, who remained most faithful to the group's original aims, began to paint more landscapes and nudes and to experiment with glazing and cross hatching. Some of the old enthusiasm and excitement had gone.

At exactly the same time, most of our early modernists turned back in a more conservative direction. Macdonald-Wright gave up Synchromism. Weber and Hartley abandoned abstraction for their individual forms of expressionism. The work of both Dove and Feininger became more naturalistic. It was far from a total retreat, but it was a marked adjustment between their youthful rebellion and the main current of American art. Such a reaction might well have taken place even without the hostile attitude of our critics and public, for no artist can escape entirely from the cultural climate in which he has been raised. Virtually all of the American modernists seem to have felt a compulsion to relate their early experiments to native tradition. If this was a compromise, it was generally a productive one, and produced some notable work. Even when it did not immediately do so, as with Marsden Hartley, it was apparently a necessary preparation for a final flowering that came later.

The most important single development in American art during the 1920's was the birth of the precisionist or Immaculate movement, and this, too, was the fruit of just such a compromise. One of the principles of modern art which appealed particularly to Americans was that the design of a picture must function with the absolute precision of a machine. Since the machine was already accepted as a peculiarly American symbol, it is not strange that a number of our artists--led by Demuth, Sheeler and Niles Spencer--were drawn to paint it in a precise, sharp-edged, hard-surfaced style that was itself machine-like in character. Using extreme simplifications, learned from cubism and futurism, these artists, and the many younger ones who soon joined them, brought their semi-abstract designs into an appropriate and easily understood relation to their subjects. The latter included factories, bridges, ships, grain elevators, Shaker architecture and, in general, those forms that combined functional simplicity with a distinctively native character. Immaculate art was a little chilly--despite the fact that Georgia O'Keeffe turned it into a more personal vehicle of expression--and it did not, as a movement, survive much beyond the 1920's. But it was the first widespread, truly popular compromise between American realism and international abstraction, and its influence is still felt in our art today. Its decline in the early 1930's was due less, one suspects, to any lack of vitality in the style itself than it was to the economic depression which shadowed those years and made us not quite so complacent with our machine-made, industrial civilization.

The depression had a more profound, or at least a more demonstrable, effect on American art than any other external event of the decade. In a country which had always considered art a luxury, the painter was one of the first to suffer. He was also one of the first to question the justice of a social order that seemed to have dealt the worst hardship to those who were least responsible for the situation. The result was the rapid growth of a school of "social protest," or "socially conscious," painting which attacked wealth and privilege and allied itself with the worker, the jobless, the racial minorities. Members of this group were more closely knit than those in most American art movements. Their bond was a passionate conviction that art must justify itself by its service to humanity, that the artist must become a responsible member of society, indeed that he had a special obligation to be society's conscience. Abstract art, in their view, was a retreat from reality, an experiment in an ivory tower. Yet the social protest painters were more advanced stylistically than many of their contemporaries. All of them made free use of expressionist distortion, often pushed to violent extremes. This was not quite the same as being orthodox expressionists, for the latter used distortion, regardless of subject, to express a constantly romantic attitude towards life. In the hands of the social protest painters, distortion served a more restricted purpose; it was a weapon of attack, a tool to dramatize a specific situation. At times social protest art was rather declamatory, but in the work of its best men, such as Ben Shahn, Philip Evergood and Jack Levine, it reached a moving sincerity and a perfect adjustment of means to end.

In one sense the socially conscious painters were the artistic descendants of Sloan, Bellows and the other pioneers in urban genre. At least they concerned themselves with events in the lives of real people, caught in familiar settings and circumstances. On a wider scale, and without the ingredient of angry protest, this revival of interest in contemporary life became a dominant trend in our art from late in the 1920s to at least 1940. It has often been suggested that the popularity of American Scene painting was closely related to a wave of nationalism (and in some quarters isolationism) which swept the country after the first World War. But nationalism is a broad word. So far as the arts are concerned, it generally means regionalism, since every man's concept of his native land is based on his limited experience of certain parts and certain people. It is not surprising, then, that many different groups sprang up and that they explored different aspects of America with quite different attitudes. The most militant regionalism was that of a middle-western group led by Thomas Benton, Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry--the famous "Triumvirate" of the 1930's. Espousing realism in various forms, they produced some still memorable pictures of rural and small-town America, but they also expended a good deal of energy attacking "decadent" European art and even the "effete" creations of the eastern seaboard. In the long run their program, always a rather self-conscious one, became a straight-jacket for their painting. The best of the regionalists, indeed, were men like Edward Hopper and Charles Burchfield who never thought of themselves in that term and beLonged to no group but who were drawn by deep compassion to record the kind of American life they knew.

Regionalism is generally associated with the widespread return to realism that occurred in these years. The two did indeed go hand in hand, but they were not synonymous. Among the expressionists, Marin's scenes of the Maine coast and of lower New York were plainly inspired by his profound attachment to those places. Even some abstract work, especially that of Dove and Stuart Davis, was based on a response to distinctively American subjects and bore the stamp of specific time and place.

In spite of the general reaction against modernism during this period, a number of painters, in addition to those mentioned above, continued to work in an abstract or expressionist vein. On the whole their art was more international than regional in character and incorporated a variety of influences from abroad. George Grosz brought a strain of German mysticism with him when he settled in America in 1932. Yasuo Kuniyoshi and Mark Tobey were both deeply affected by oriental art, Arshile Gorky by his recollections of the Sumerian culture of Armenia, where he was born. Many, like Maurer, had lived and studied for years in Paris. These men, with others, swam counter to the American Scene current and kept alive a concern with the cosmopolitan, formal trends in 20th-century painting.

A quite different modern movement, surrealism, also reached America in the early 1930's and soon affected a number of our painters. Founded in France in 1924, surrealism claimed the subconscious as its province; its subjects were dreams, hallucinations and those hidden impulses which lie deep in the atavistic layers of the mind. The strict surrealist did not believe in consciously designing a picture, but rather in letting the mind's image grow unprompted on the canvas. It followed that surrealism was even more opposed to cubist and expressionist art (since these were strongly designed) than it was to conservative, academic realism--which indeed it often resembled in technique. Surrealism eventually developed its own kind of abstraction, but in the 1930's its meticulously realistic branch was the one which had the greatest influence here. Even so, relatively few Americans embraced it wholeheartedly. Man Ray, living in Paris, was perhaps closest to the French group. More typical was the varying reaction of men like Ivan Albright, Peter Blume, Edwin Dickinson and Alton Pickens. These painters emulated surrealism's immensely skillful technique and they followed its path into a realm of fantasy, but they did not give up all concern with design and their fantasy tended to be either more poetic or more closely linked to common experience than that of the wilder dreamers abroad.

As the decade of the 1930's ended in the second World War, American art came to another major turning point. The next few years saw a dramatic revival of abstract art and, with it, a strong reaction against our regional painting of the 1920's and '30's. To many critics and artists, that regionalism began to seem chauvinistic in subject and creatively bankrupt in its various forms of naturalism. A fairer estimate would acknowledge that these were its common pitfalls, which it did not always escape, but that regionalism at its best, and in its largest sense, produced a moving art rooted in a deep emotional response to America.

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