Home Go West, Young Art, Go West American Painting 1865-1934 American Painters - The Older Generation The Meaning of Modernism Isms and Wasms American Art in 1900 American Modernism The Whitney Museum of American Art Modern Art's First Museum The twentieth-century principle of form in art The Beginning of American Modernism American Modern Movements Cubism in England and America Activity in Art with American Subjects Backgrounds in European Art The importance of Gauguin and Van Gogh The importance of Picasso and Braque Munch, The Bridge, Kandinsky, Moreau American Backgrounds The establishment of a professional art Contemporary appreciation tends Early Twentieth Century New Directions since 1913 Max Weber, Maurice Sterne, Abraham Walkowitz, Ben Benn Arthur Dove, Charles Sheeler, Charles Demuth Dada and Despair Early 1900s American Artists The Spirit of Research and Significant Form Joseph De Martini, Louis Schanker, De Hirsh Margules Pinoeers of Abstract Art American Abstract Pinoeers American Abstract Artists Art in a Skyscraper Significant Vision The term "significant vision" The Influence of the Oriental Scroll Painters Traditionalists and Modernists American Modern Art - Fantasy American Artists More Artists The Painters Discover America The Painters of America American Modern Artists Regionalism in a Broadening View Regional American Artists Pop Art - Modern American Art Stage Design Sculpture Sculptors More Sculptors Definitions Art and Beauty Modern Painting History of Art   Abstract Art Architecture History Painting Process Picasso	American Abstract Art Pinoeers The first American abstract movement had lasted only about a decade. From about 1920 until the early 1930's, little abstract art was produced in the United States. The dominant schools--regionalism, the American scene, the social painters--were not only representational but concerned almost entirely with native subject matter. But abstract art, like music, is an international language, without references to specific content or place. The cultural nationalism of the 1920's was hostile to it, as was the insistence on social content. Its few adherents were like members of an underground movement. Of its pioneers, only Dove in this country and Bruce in France remained faithful. But a few of their fellow modernists turned toward abstraction about 1930. Alfred Maurer in his last few years experimented with geometric patterns. Another early fauve, Arthur B. Carles, who had evolved a decorative art of still life and flowers, transformed the same motifs into luxuriant fauvist abstractions. Carles loved full-blooded color and the sensuous pleasure of handling paint, and his exuberant chromatic compositions were rich in pigment and spontaneous brushwork. Of a younger generation, Stuart Davis developed his strong individual art without early foreign experience. As a student of Henri he had seen the Armory Show--"the greatest single influence I have experienced in my work." After a post-impressionistic phase, he began in the 1920's to geometrize objects into massive forms suggesting Picasso and Léger. But Davis was always his own man--vital, positive, humorous, with a grasp of the tangible realities of the contemporary United States. His innate plastic sense matured by independent thinking and experiment. He has recorded that in 1927 "I nailed an electric fan, a rubber glove and in eggbeater to a table and used them as my exclusive subject matter for a year." The result was his "eggbeater series" of nonrepresentational geometric paintings. The actual objects were a starting point for a year's concentration on forms and colors, their design, and their relation to the flat plane of the canvas. What was remarkable was the sureness and completeness of the compositions. The series foretold his future direction--design founded on actualities. "Everything I have done since has been based on that eggbeater idea," he has said. When lie went to Paris the next year lie turned again to representation, as in Place Pasdeloup, but with a new sense of the unity of platics, colors, and calligraphy. There were few other exponents of abstract art until the early 1930's. But then the tide began to turn. Nationalism was broadening into internationalism. In Europe, abstraction had never gone into eclipse. More than a generation had passed since it began, and it was now far more widely practiced and diversified, with its creeds more fully formulated. Its historical inevitability as an original expression of the twentieth century had been accepted. And it was now reaching the United States in ever-increasing volume, by way of exhibitions and publications. A younger generation was now ready for it. All this was reinforced by the arrival of several prominent Europeans, mostly from Germany, where the Nazis were suppressing all modern art. Even before that, in 1931, Hans Hofmann, who for years had conducted a school in Munich, settled here and soon had new schools in New York and Provincetown, becoming one of the country's most influential teachers. The Bauhaus at Dessau had been the greatest European center for the teaching of advanced art and design. Its principles were rational and functional, encouraging clarity and precision, and the geometric style. After it was closed by the Nazis in 1933 many of its leading figures found their way to America. Josef Albers came that year, to teach, and to continue his nonobjective painting. Feininger returned in 1937. Lászó Moholy-Nagy had been a moving spirit of the Bauhaus --painter, constructivist, designer, theorist, and originator of radical new teaching methods. Arriving here in 1937, he established a transatlantic successor to the Bauhaus in Chicago; and in his own work created some of his most completely realized paintings and constructions, demonstrating his lucid concepts of design and his imaginative use of materials, old and new. Fritz Glarner, not of the Bauhaus but of the related tradition of De Stijl, came in 1936. By early 1935 the resurgence of abstraction was apparent enough to lead the Whitney Museum to stage an exhibition of "Abstract Painting in America"--a term rather liberally interpreted to include the semi-abstract. Next year came the founding of the American Abstract Artists, with forty members. Almost all were pure abstractionists, rejecting representation and imagery, aiming at art which should exist in purely plastic terms--by the physical materials of which it was composed, their properties of shape, color, and texture, and the designs created out of these elements. These artists' belief in the creed of abstraction had an almost religious fervor --and their corresponding scorn of representational art. In opposition to the social school, they saw no necessity for social content, or indeed for any relation to society as a whole. Their attitude can be seen as also a reaction from the disturbed state of the world--but in tile opposite direction. In pure plastic creation they were building an aesthetic order independent of outer chaos--one of the artist's immemorial functions. Curiously enough in view of later developments, many of them (perhaps the majority) were working in geometric styles, consciously planned, precise, sharp edged, severely rectilinear or with geometric curves. The painters concentrated on the flat surface of the picture, avoiding attempts to create sensations of deep space or of form in the round. Their nearest approach to the third dimension was design in superimposed flat planes. A number were constructivists, using actual three-dimensional materials. This prevalence of geometric style in the 1930's can be ascribed to several factors. The style was logical, clear, direct. Its purity was unquestionable; any more three-dimensional quality, or more complex, irregular forms, would have brought suggestions of imagery. And the style was related to the modern world, and specifically to the machine age. The dominant nationalist and social schools had not been concerned with the aesthetics of the machine, as were the precisionists, the constructivists, and the Bauhaus. Geometric abstraction, though not using mechanical motifs, was in harmony with the functionalism, precision, and impersonality of the machine. In this it resembled the severity of functional architecture. Except for its abstract language, it bore much the same relation to the modern United States that precisionism had. The style cannot be attributed to any particular influence. There were the Bauhaus artists, and Hans Hofmann, whose expressionism had a geometric foundation; and there were general international influences, of which the strongest were cubism, constructivism, and De Stijl. But none of these entirely accounts for the prevalence and the characteristics of American geometric abstraction at this time. It was evidently the expression of one aspect of the American mind, as precisionism had been. In these years it seemed that a characteristically American variation of formal abstraction was in the making. A leader of the tendency, and its chief spokesman, was George L.K. Morris, who had studied with Léger in 1930, and had evolved a strong, clear-cut style with more three-dimensional quality than most, thoughtful in design and solid in substance. Other early members of the school who have since remained consistent were Burgoyne Diller, Carl Holty, and Ilya Bolotowsky. I. Rice Pereira in 1937 began her rectangular compositions with their fine feeling for spatial relations. A number of others who have since gone on to other modes were then working geometrically: Balcomb Greene, John Ferren, Byron Browne, and Ad Reinhardt, whose inventive forms were more complex than his present austere style. Simultaneously, an opposite abstract tendency was making its appearance--free-form abstraction. Its origins could be traced back to early Kandinsky and the Blaue Reiter group, with their expression of subjective emotion, emphasis on color, and freedom and variety of forms. Another source was the protean genius of Picasso, with his synthesis of imagery and abstract language. Surrealism also was making its contribution. An element of fantastic imagery, often transformed beyond recognition, was being assimilated into abstraction, freeing it from sterile purism, diversifying and enriching it, not only in associative values but on the level of pure form. The American pioneer of this tendency was Arshile Gorky. An ardent student of the masters, past and present, he went through successive modern influences, from Cézanne to Miro, but he was no mere imitator; his nature was instinctive and sensual, with a passion for colors and forms. His retrospective portrait of himself and his mother, based on childhood memories, was still representational, but with an undertone of fantasy in its trancelike mood Its monumentality shows his admiration for Ingres and the neoclassic phases of Picasso, but the character of the forms--flowing, sinuous, yet sure and powerful--is essentially the same as in his abstract work of twenty years later. In the late 1920's he embarked on abstractions, at first cubistic, then increasingly free in form and rich in symbolism. In Painting the influence of Picasso's recent work was obvious, but as always with Gorky, external influences were transformed into plastic creation. Thenceforth his individuality was to reveal itself progressively, in sumptuous color, strong linear design, and prodigal inventiveness of form. Gorky's fusion of surrealist imagery and highly developed abstract design was prophetic of the advanced tendencies of the 1940's. A few others were combining surrealism and abstraction--such as Gorky's friend Willem de Kooning, who was varying his figurative work by occasional abstractions. Abroad, Charles Howard, associated with the British surrealists, was creating precise abstract compositions strangely suggestive of organic life. Bradley Walker Tomlin about 1939 turned from decorative still life to cubistic patterns with illusive images superimposed, pervaded by a melancholy poetry, and painted with sensitive, fastidious artistry. This phase, lasting about five years, was to be succeeded by the bold pure abstract style which made Tomlin one of the chief figures of abstract expressionism in the 1940's. As the 1930's ended, a few other future leaders of abstract expressionism were painting abstractly: Clyfford Still, extreme individualist, who had done so for some years; and Jackson Pollock and William Baziotes, still tentatively. But most of the others were working in styles more or less representational, and were not to develop their fully abstract language until the middle 1940's. Thus the 1930's had opened up two main paths for abstract art: formal and free form. At the close of the decade, the future direction was not yet plain. The first path was being followed by many artists, with impressive results. Today it still includes many distinguished figures, and there are signs that it may assume a greater importance in the future. But the second path is the one that has been taken by a large majority of the avant-garde since 1940. Just as representational expressionism had been the main road for the first generation of modernists, abstract expressionism was to be for the generation of advanced artists who came to maturity in the 1940's. Like the older trend, its emotional expressiveness and freedom of form have responded to fundamental qualities in the American spirit.