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 Artists - Regionalism In Connecticut, there is Peter Blume, who often paints for a period of years on one of his pictures. He seems to have abandoned the meticulous miniature technique and the Surrealist imagery of The Light of the World, South of Scranton, and Parade. The recent antifascist picture, The Eternal City--as fantastic in its own way as anything he has produced--reveals some of the most masterly passages of painting to be found in recent American art and imagery as provocative as that of Piero di Cosimo. It is a very disturbing picture, nevertheless, and one may prefer the lilies, also beautifully painted, from the artist's garden at Gaylordsville, to the socially conscious masterpiece, remembering Machen who somewhere said: "Art, you may feel sure, proceeds always from love and rapture, never from hatred and detestation; and satire of any kind, qua satire, is eternally doomed to that Gehenna where the pamphlet, the 'literature of the subject' and the 'lifelike' books lie all together." James Daugherty has been painting in Westport for twenty years. His work has not been more widely known because he has gone so quietly about his way. He has worked professionally as an illustrator of children's books of a high graphic standard. As a painter, he has been aware of the work of Gauguin and the Mexicans, of the Italian primitives--perhaps, in recent murals, of Thomas Benton. But the quality that gives his painting distinction arises from an individual sensitiveness to the plastic potentialities of painting materials and to subject. At times when mural painting was very little done in America and when no one had thought of "American Scene" publicity, he was painting pictures forty feet high directly on the wars of new buildings, surrounded by workmen of all sorts, with the covered wagons and the pioneers who broke the trails across the continent as central to his finely conceived designs. Sanford Low, of New Britain, is one of the newer figures who are contributing an authentic non-suburban expression in Connecticut. He gives evidence of the ability to observe and report competently factual details from the industrial centers and scenes of his familiar experience, in oil and in water color. But it is in the use of the watercolor medium for conveying the spirit of the broad landscape that he excels. His scenes are drastically simplified, developed in fluid color, often tending to pass over into a Marin-like abstraction. The artist life in Woodstock, on the other hand, reflects the movement and the change as well as the spirit of contrast of the metropolitan New York scene, with recent tendencies towards the merging of academic and independent interests. Paul Burlin, Arnold Blanch, Henry Mattson, Wendell Jones, Doris Lee, Joseph Pollet, Austin Mecklem, Emil Ganso, Eugene Speicher, Georgina Klitgaard, Harry Gottlieb, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, and Dorothy Varian are among well-known painters whose names are identified with the historic colony. A number of these are mentioned elsewhere. Arnold Blanch has produced an odd mixture of gay carnival scenes, hunger strikes, skeletons hanged in cornfields, and similarly macabre pictorial imaginings. His Portrait of a Man ( Rehn Gallery), and the more recent Man Talking, exhibited at the Artists Congress Exhibition, are, however, sound contributions to contemporary American painting, because of the largeness and simplicity of their conception, their nonnaturalistic character, and the feeling of a rapport that has existed between the painter and the painted and that is shared to a certain extent with the spectator. Francis Speight has made himself an interpreter of the coal-mine regions of Pennsylvania. His feeling for his subject is emotional and intuitive. From his childhood in a minister's home in North Carolina to maturity, he was torn between the urge to be a poet and the urge to be a painter. He might have been either; perhaps is both. There is a quality of primitive lyricism in his outdoor scenes. Speaking of his work, he says: "I like the sunshine. I like the feel of the sun shining on my face. I like the wind. I like to hear the wind blow, starting in the distance, and coming nearer, and passing, and then another breeze approaching. I like to paint the sun and the wind, and the things I feel." With this attitude of abandon, he overcomes technical difficulties of magnitude and brings a complex array of subject material into an orderly, coherent design. Many of his pictures are now in museum collections. One of the best known is Boxholder No. 27, which was the winner of a Carnegie International award in 1937 and is now owned by the Philadelphia Museum of Art. "I liked that place," he says. "I think I managed to get into the painting something of the way I felt about the place. I strive for freedom in my work, and I think that it is as free as anything I have painted." This is an interesting statement in contrast with that of another Pennsylvanian, Roy Hilton, already mentioned, who has similarly concentrated his attention upon industrial Pennsylvania. "When I first started painting," he says, "my attitude toward nature was mainly that of an impressionist. I was interested in color, regardless of form. As time went on I found that that method did not fully express the reaction which I received from the subject. Then for a time I experimented with reducing all complexities of nature to their simplest geometric equivalents. Now, I try to combine the two, but I still find that the formal qualities interest me most and the color is secondary. However, I have no intention of stopping here with my experiments both in methods and medium, as I am finding that the use of tempera and glazes adds greatly to the variety of color and textures. "I believe that one of the most difficult things for any artist is to recognize the quality of the subject which has made him want to paint it and to stick to his objective regardless of many other interesting phases that may intrude themselves as the work progresses." Pennsylvania, and particularly the Philadelphia area, which historically was the "Athens of America," has other artists who work in equal freedom for the independent expression of experience and who are among the contributors to our formative Americanism in painting. In New Jersey, for a number of years, James Chapin concentrated upon portrait studies of native American residents painted with a homely, forthright naturalism in marked contrast with his previous period of French-influenced work. His portraits of various members of the Marvin family have been widely exhibited. More recently, he has been concentrating upon studies of well-known persons. He looks enthusiastically to the American environment as the source for a future art that will be made rich by the contribution of many peoples of all races. His present intention is "to organize and express through form and color the aesthetic values inherent in nature, and in so doing to enhance as poignantly as possible their essential characteristics." The spirit of the deep South is given modernist expression in work shown by A New Southern Group in New Orleans. Charter members of this organization include John McCrady and Conrad Albrizio; also Xavier Gonzalez, Will Stevens, and the sculptor, Enrique Alferez, among others. John McCrady belongs to Mississippi, as Joe Jones belongs to Missouri. Like Jones, he is largely self-taught. The story is that he was raised on a plantation and never saw a work of art until he was nearly grown, and that homesickness for the familiar places of the deep South gave him, at a much later time, the ability to reproduce them with so much vividness. He has observed with great intelligence; and has absorbed the significance of modern pictorial organization, as may be seen in his House on the Hill, which has been exhibited in several cities. Benjamin Shute conveys the spirit of the Georgia red-clay country. Lamar Dodd, at the University of Georgia, and Conrad Albrizio, at the University of Louisiana, are both mature artists of modern, cosmopolitan training and outlook, and they are both producing painting of merit. Albert Bloch, director of painting at the University of Kansas, was one of the Blaue Reiter group in Germany, with Kandinsky, Klee, and Franz Marc. His present painting is personal and subjective. Clarence H. Carter, who studied with Henry G. Keller and with Hans Hoffman, is a painter of solid merit and considerable distinction. He lives and works in Cleveland. John Carroll has been mentioned as an influence upon the younger men of the Detroit region. Zoltan Sepeshy of the Cranbrook School in that region is a painter who is a master of his medium. Jean Paul Slusser is another. Edgar Lewis Yeager and Jay Boorsma are promising younger figures. Cameron Booth is in Minneapolis, where he is painting the results of his familiar observations and influencing younger generations of artists through his teaching at the Institute of Arts. This artist was born in Pennsylvania in 1892. He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and in Paris, where for a time he felt the influence of the Cubists. The ordering of the plastic elements is of primary importance in his work. He simplifies, distorts his forms, uses color as a structural element, and in all his most recent work realizes a synthesis which satisfies the requirements of substantial structure and of pictorial interest and warmth and creates the impression of unity and completeness. His Early Mass ( 1923), in the collection of the Newark Museum, was painted on a Minnesota Indian reservation. Indians are shown going to church, with their patterned blankets against plain snow and an even gray light. It is representative of his early work, as is Clam Bay Farm (artist's collection) of a somewhat later period. This picture is a profound psychological generalization. It expresses, in somber colors and in ungainly, nonnaturalistic forms, the drama of people on close terms with poverty and the soil in a particular region; and illustrates a statement of his own that "the Ancients, Byzantines, Primitives, are more vital to us than the Little Dutch Masters of the French Academies." His Street in Stillwater, a gouache in the Phillips Memorial Gallery, was selected by the Museum of Modern Art for inclusion in the 1938 exhibition of American work in Paris. It is a clear, emotionally realized record of a familiar scene and is also an interesting example of design. Dewey Albinson and Stanford Fenelle, of Minnesota, are among modernists of exceptional ability; and the work of Edmund Lewandowski of this region is promising, Among painters in the national capital who are producing strong simplified expressions of the life about them, without academic or literary accent, are Robert F. Gates and Olin Dows. The cosmopolitanism of Chicago is akin to that of New York. The Art Institute, the official exhibition center for the region, is, of course, a historic institution. The No-Jury Society, in its opposition to officialdom, has had the support and collaboration of artists of divergent talent, Rudolph Weisenborn, Gustaf Dalstrom, Frances Foy, Ramon Shiva, Francis Strain, Macena Barton, and Julia Thecla among them. Aaron Bohrod is a young Chicagoan who came to national prominence through the Art Institute award given him for his painting of a Wyoming scene. Ivan Le Lorraine Albright produces well-contrived pictures, the interest of which is often diverted to his ponderous literary titles: Into the World There Came a Soul Called Ida; There Were No Flowers Tonight; and so forth. William S. Schwartz is very well known for his semi-abstract paintings that are not unlike the work of the Frenchman Delaunay. Many kinds of communities throughout the country are now seeing some of the unique character and essence of their familiar scenes represented in paintings. In their total effect, these paintings give promise of a notable national expression. A widespread effort can be felt on the part of the artists to show aspects of life that have more than provincial and picturesque appeal, and often they interpret, with psychological insight, changing institutions and traditions that although local in character represent movements of national import. Or sometimes these artists function most completely when merely sharing the sense of satisfied beauty or delight that they feel in the familiar scenes of their daily life. Two kinds of expression fuse in all of the most notable instances of this regional painting to give them their essential character: that which catches the spirit of the subject and that which plays its part towards an American version of twentiethcentury modern art.