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 Modern Art - Fantasy Parallel with the revolution in form effected by the modern movements occurred a revolution in imagery. Just as there was a liberation from naturalism in form and design, there was also a liberation from the naturalistic representation of actualities. The objective facts of the external world were transformed by the subjective fantasies of the inner world of the mind. We all know the inexhaustible profusion of imagery which rises to consciousness in dreams and half-waking states--a creative activity of the subconscious mind, without conscious volition. Such imagery, embodying our deepest desires and conflicts, has an affinity to art; as Nietzsche said, in his dreams every man is an artist. This hidden world, drawn on by much great art of the past, had been lost in nineteenth-century naturalism, and its rediscovery has been one of the fundamental achievements of our century. In Europe the process began almost simultaneously with modernism, and was allied with modern psychology, particularly the exploration of the subconscious through psychoanalysis. Then in 1916 came Dada, product of the disillusion and despair of war and postwar years: an iconoclastic assault on all accepted values. Though primarily destructive, its antirationalism nevertheless sowed seeds for the future. Out of it grew surrealism, a serious, systematic movement using the subconscious as the fundamental source of art. One root of Dada had originated about 1915 in New York, where Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia lived during the war, and where together with the American Man Ray they launched a protoDada movement. But Dada remained an exotic; the United States was not as shattered by the war as Europe, nor did we have the burden of a great artistic past to revolt against. Similarly, surrealism, founded in Paris in 1924, did not become acclimated here until several of its European leaders arrived in the late 1930's. But long before that, spontaneous native manifestations of the trend toward free imagery had appeared. These Americans were not connected with the highly organized movements of Dada and surrealism; they were individuals, unconnected even with one another. They had neither Dada's destructive motivations nor surrealism's link with psychoanalysis; they were responding to the general spirit of the time. There was Eilshemius, with his naïve fantasies, first idyllic, then tragic. There were Charles Burchfield's watercolors of 1916 to 1918. There was Ivan Le Lorraine Albright, who by the middle 1920's was creating his compelling images of age and dissolution, with their intense macabre realism. There was Yasuo Kuniyoshi, whose work from 1921 on revealed an instinctive fantasy, basically Oriental in its fascination with all forms of organic life, down to the most minute--human beings and cows, snakes and birds, weeds and flowers--pictured in free, dreamlike associations, and with clear sexual symbolism. Equally individualist, Edwin Dickinson presents the phenomenon of a highly skilled traditionalist whose subject matter is far removed from academic conventions: a visionary world of ambiguous figtires and objects. He avoids verbal explanations, but of The Fossil Hunters he has said that it resulted from his interest in certain fossils he had himself found. This motif seems revealed in the whole concept: figures lying on rocks in trancelike sleep, beneath folds of drapery partly pulled back to disclose them, and enshrouded in darkness pierced by dim light as in a cave. The sense of immobility and silence, of a buried world, is intensified by the deep night colors. But under the subdued light the forms are completely clear, painted with sure command, sculptural largeness, and rich substance. Building his pictures slowly, Dickinson has produced only a few on the scale of The Fossil Hunters, which took a hundred and ninety-two sessions extending over two years. In the early work of Franklin Watkins, fantasy expressed itself in wild romantic themes filled with picturesque action, or, as in Soliloquy, in moods of Byronic introspection. But fantasy was also inherent in the forms themselves, with their flamboyant movement and skillful distortions, recalling his admiration for El Greco. Later this imaginative vein was combined with characterful portraiture, among the finest of our period--searching, sympathetic, yet completely without flattery. In his evolution front early expressionism toward his present abstract style, Morris Kantor about 1930 passed through a phase of modified individual surrealism, using double images--one image superimposed over another, or rooms seen from both inside and outside. These devices were entirely personal, creating an evocative poetry, a haunting sense of mystery. Though closer to surrealism than almost any other American-trained painter, Peter Blume has never belonged to the movement; his whole approach is conscious and rational. His paintings are elaborate allegories, logically conceived, complex in imagery, and executed with the precision and detail of the fifteenth-century Italian and Flemish masters the admires. While his vision is completely realistic, his combination of elements is fantastic-a distortion not of things themselves but of their relations to one another and to their setting. Yet these apparently incongruous figures and objects are seen on closer study to have clear underlying connections. Light of the World embodies the concept of the museum as a light. the lantern at which the actors are gazing is the lens of a lighthouse--to be exact, Highland Light on Cape Cod. As the artist said to James Thrall Soby, "You got the feeling of being inside a huge glittering eye radiating all the colors of the rainbow." Most of the other elements are objects actually in the Metropolitan Museum. The lantern is a flower whose stem is an obelisk, with leaves formed by specimens of architectural cornices. On the base stands the Museum's model of the apparatus used to erect "Cleopatra's Needle" in Central Park; in the background is the Museum's model of Notre Dame. All these objects are incorporated into a pictorial structure that is unified and satisfying. Blume's paintings, conceived with infinite care, often take years to complete. But beneath their meticulousness is a vital energy that has become more pronounced with each work. He cares nothing about current fashions, and his naturalistic style and startling color make no concessions. The freeing of imagery in our century has been a basic revolution. It has restored fantasy to the role it occupied in the great art of the past; it has opened up the storehouse of myth and legend, and the collective imagination of mankind; it has replaced the worn-out symbolism of neoclassicism with living symbols, revitalized by their relation to the actuality of the human mind.