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These changes were more revolutionary than any in the preceding two and a half centuries of art in America. Let us consider the state of American painting and sculpture in 1900. The nineteenth century had seen a great growth in creativity, sophistication, and relations with the art of other countries. From the comparative provincialism of the Hudson River school and the old genre and portrait schools, American art had grown toward maturity in the hands of the post-Civil War generation. Inness had founded a landscape tradition at once native and related to the Barbizon school; Homer and Eakins had given a new strength and depth to the picturing of the American scene; Ryder had transformed the old literal romanticism into an imaginative expression prophetic of much in modern art; La Farge had contributed, a riper knowledge of the great art of the past; the expatriates Whistler, Cassatt, and Sargent had made substantial contributions to the international art world; Saint-Gaudens had achieved the fullest embodiment of traditional ideals; the pioneer impressionists Robinson, Weir, Twachtman, and Hassam had brought from France the first vital movement since that of the Barbizon school. In this evolution, two main forces had been at work: native creativity, sometimes limited and provincial, but making its fundamental contribution; and international influences, which had furnished the necessary leaven of knowledge and new ideas. In the impact of the second force, there had been a time lag of a generation before European movements reached these shores; even impressionism had come to us fifteen years or so after its birth abroad. With all the growth that had taken place in the last third of the nineteenth century, the art of the United States was still a side current in the main stream of world art. At the turn of the century had come a pause in the development of American art. Its older leaders were either no longer living or well on in years. The art world was in the hands of a younger generation, most of whom had studied in the academic schools abroad, particularly the Ecole des BeauxArts. Compared to their predecessors, they were less adventurous and more inclined to accept tradition, more cosmopolitan and less interested in the American scene. After Paris or Rome or Munich, the United States in its everyday aspects must have seemed raw and ugly, difficult to assimilate into art. Few of them had Homer's or Eakins' robust ability to extract artistic content out of the crude ore of American life. Avoiding the common actualities, they devoted themselves to the ideals and environment of the upper and middle classes. Their art centered around family and home, pleasant occupations and recreations, the idyllic in nature. Women played a leading role in it. Seldom had American artists concentrated so much on the feminine. With the idealism which was so deeply ingrained in the nineteenth-century American mind, they pictured woman as a creature finer and purer than the male, not only more beautiful physically but embodying man's ideals of spiritual beauty. She appeared in many guises: Thayer's grave maidens, Brush's Madonna-like mothers, Tarbell's housewives, Dewing's decorative ethereal beings, and the symbolical figures of Cox, Blashfield, and French. Yet with all its preoccupation with the feminine, a characteristic of this art was its comparative sexlessness--its emphasis on refinement and virginal qualities, its puritanical avoidance of sensuality. The flesh-and-blood realism of Eakins was still outside the pale. The interest in the American scene which had inspired earlier nineteenth-century genre painting had disappeared. The common life of the United States and its people--the life of farm, factory, and office; the teeming cities; the work and play of the larger population--found little expression. There was no hint of social conflicts or problems, no satire, indeed, little humor of any kind. The city was seldom pictured, and then only its politer aspects-Fifth Avenue, nor Fourteenth Street. The new world of the machine age, of skyscrapers and factories and great bridges, had few admirers among established artists. To judge by their work, the Industrial Revolution had never occurred. A similar idealism governed landscape painting. Earlier landscapists such as Cole, Inness, Heade, and Homer had seen nature as a drama of contending forces, as a being whose moods ranged from the somber to the idyllic. The American pioneers of impressionism had replaced this older romantic poetry with a gentler lyricism. They had concentrated on visual effects of light and atmosphere, and on a higher, purer palette. Opening up a new world of luminosity and color, impressionism had coincided with American society's increasing physical freedom and love of outdoor sports and recreations. Within a few years the new viewpoint had attained the widest acceptance of any movement from abroad. But inevitably it had become academic. Like the figure painters, the landscapists limited their range. Where the Hudson River school and its successors, with all their provincialism, had explored the continent and celebrated its wild picturesqueness, the landscapists of the 1890's and 1900's confined themselves to the more settled East, ignoring the United States beyond the Alleghenies. The man-made features of the country found little place in their work. New England's trim white villages were permissible, but not the raw Midwest towns. The evidences of industrialism and urbanization that were changing the face of America--railroads, factories, auto highways--were shunned. It was an idyllic art, focusing on the smiling aspects of nature. The dominant idealism of American art reflected the viewpoint of established culture. It was the expression of a society that was prosperous, peaceful, and seemingly secure--that had not yet seen the face of modern war, the great Depression of the 1930's, the tremendous political, social, and psychological upheavals of the twentieth century. In these years before the first World War, all seemed for the best in this best of worlds. To this society, the world of today would have seemed an incredible nightmare. The United States of our parents and grandparents was in many ways a fortunate society, and the art which mirrored it still has a nostalgic charm. The traditionalist artists of this generation are now completely out of fashion. But among them were a number who deserve a better fate. Chase's fresh eye and skilled hand and his happy combination of keen observation and zest for life; Weir's subtle, intimate poetry and muted, silvery harmonies; Hassam's sunlit lyrics of seashore and summer resort; Tarbell's and Benson's pleasant scenes of sheltered domesticity; Thayer's grave young goddesses with their air of serene strength and nobility; Dewing's fragile women in their remote, hushed, surrealist world; Saint-Gaudens' vigorous monumentality, combining idealism with solid, characterful naturalism; Vedders' fusion of romantic imagination and classic stylization--the work of all these men had positive virtues, not only as expressions of the prevailing culture, but in more purely, artistic terms. Freshness of vision, skill of hand, sound draftsmanship, refinement of color and tonal values, and sensuous pleasure in handling pigment --such qualities have perennial value, regardless of changes in taste. Now that we are far enough removed from this generation to see it in perspective, we are beginning to reappraise it. In artistic terms, the chief limitation of this period was in its basic artistic philosophy, which was naturalism: Painting and sculpture were primarily the representation of visual reality. Differences between schools were largely between modes of representation--the impressionists with their concentration on outdoor light and atmosphere, the Sargent school with its emphasis on photographic verisimilitude and brilliant brushwork, and the decorative aestheticism of Whistler and his followers. The main concern of all these schools was with light and appearances, technical skill, and taste. Of the deeper elements of form and design they seemed unaware, even in the old masters whom they admired. They showed no realization that art could be more than skillful or tasteful representation, that the great art of all periods and countries, beneath its representational aspects, had been creation in form, color, and design--a visual language as pure as that of sound in music. In Europe, innovation had not stopped with impressionism. Cézanne, rejecting impressionism's preoccupation with visual appearances, had concentrated on sculptural form and the role of color in building it; Seurat had transformed contemporary actualities into classic monumental design; Gauguin had rediscovered the purity of the primitive vision; Van Gogh had expressed intense personal emotion in the most direct physical terms; Bonnard had translated nature into subtle arabesques of color and tone; and Matisse was already discarding the naturalistic image in favor of pure design. These successive innovations had formed a step-by-step evolution toward an art which would be completely independent of naturalistic representation. The European stage was set for movements which within a decade were to revolutionize the art of our century. But of all these stirring developments, established American art remained oblivious. The last movement of which it was aware was impressionism. The United States art world of 1900 was completely under academic control. Today, when artists have so many opportunities to exhibit, it is hard to realize the state of things then. Only a few dealers handled American art, and fewer still would take a chance on an unknown. Almost the only way to get one's work before the public was in the regular exhibitions of museums or artists' societies, dominated by conservative juries who excluded anything unorthodox, and awarded to their own kind the prizes so dear to the academic mind. Getting into one of these big shows was a major event in a young man's career; it meant the difference between artistic survival or failure. Museums were still concerned chiefly with the art of the past; their scant recognition of contemporary creation was limited to the safely conservative. There was no museum devoted entirely or even largely to American art. Collectors, with a few honorable exceptions, were interested only in the old masters. Under these conditions, it was practically impossible for a nonacademic artist to exhibit or sell his work. But this academic domain was about to be invaded by two revolutionary forces. The first was the movement headed by the group called "the Eight" --the realists Robert Henri, George Luks, William J. Glackens, John Sloan, and Everett Shinn, and their allies Arthur B. Davies, Maurice Prendergast, and Ernest Lawson. The Eight and other realists who joined them were to break the spell of academic idealism and bring a franker, more robust attitude toward contemporary life, and they were to challenge the academic control of the art world. The second force, the modern movement from Europe, was to effect a revolution in the basic concepts of the nature of art. Together they were to transform American art in every respect--subject matter, viewpoint, style, artistic language.