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 Painters - The Older Generation Early in 1908 New York was scandalized by the exhibition of a group of painters called "The Eight." "Beauty" in the eyes of academic artists and their polite admirers had been betrayed by a "revolutionary black gang" who painted shabby street scenes, saloons, the interiors of cheap rooming houses, and rooftops cluttered with laundry. Not only their art but also, as so often happens to original artists, their morals and their politics were held suspect by those who preferred the nicely brushed still lifes, the snow scenes (with daring blue shadows!), fashionable portraits and genteel nudes which annually won prizes at the National Academy. Of this "ashcan school" John Sloan was perhaps the most typical as well as the most belligerent. His best paintings and numerous etchings recall his early days as a newspaper illustrator. George Bellows was too young to belong to The Eight, but carried on in his best works the sliceof-life tradition of Sloan and Luks. Once, briefly, a professional baseball player, Bellows drew with an athlete's muscular vigor and sense of timing. One of the most dramatic moments in American ring history is recorded in his lithograph of Firpo knocking Dempsey through the ropes. Bellows died young and very famous in 1925. That was also the year Edward Hopper painted The House by the Railroad. He had been Bellows' fellow student, was even born the same year, but Hopper was still almost unknown. Even today he is as stubbornly unfashionable as he is greatly esteemed. "My aim in painting," Hopper says, "has always been the most exact transcription possible of my most intimate impressions of nature." 27 When The House by the Railroad was first shown it was generally interpreted as satirical; more recently, nostalgic and romantic overtones have been discerned. Hopper denies both implications, reasserting his objectivity. Yet the quiet, haunting intensity of his best paintings induces feelings far deeper than the "facts" alone would warrant. Max Weber had studied with Matisse, known the Steins, Picasso, Delaunay, Apollinaire and Henri Rousseau, the last intimately. He returned to New York at the end of 1908, the year of the attacks on the "apostles of ugliness" such as John Sloan. In 1911, the year he painted The Geranium, Weber's own works shown at Stieglitz' gallery were denounced as "travesties," "emanations" from a "lunatic asylum," "atrocities." As Holger Cahill remarked in 1930, "Max Weber has lived the history of modern art in America. Its search and tribulation, its rebellion against decadence, the natreds which it aroused, and its ultimate triumph are chapters in his life story." Like Whistler, Feininger made his great reputation in Europe as an expatriate generally ignored by his fellow Americans. In 1937 he returned to the United States. Just fifty years earlier, as a youth, he had sailed from New York to Hamburg in a small square-rigged steam brig such as he was often to paint later in a mood of nostalgia. The steamer Odin is a more modern craft, but she, too, and the sea and Baltic shore and those who watch have gone through what Feininger calls "the process of transformation and crystallization." "I see great forces at work," Marin wrote Stieglitz, "the large buildings and the small buildings; the warring of the great and the small . . . each subject in some degree to the other's power. I can hear the sound of their strife and there is great music being played." Lower Manhattan looks like an explosion -- ominous simile -- but the radiant nucleus (paper cut out and sewn on) was inspired by the gold leaf on the dome of the old World Building seen looking down from the top of the Woolworth Tower. From this dizzy height the eye plunges into the zigzag perspectives of buildings and car-dotted streets, grinding out to sea like a dynamited ice flow. Georgia O'Keeffe has produced few abstract paintings but they are among the most memorable in American art. Even in her paintings of objects -- barns, mountains, trees, lakes, enormous flowers, clam shells, or white desert bones that fill the whole blue sky -- she has the gift of isolating and intensifying the thing seen, or destroying its scale, until it loses its identity in an ambiguous but always precise beauty.   "In many of Demuth's figure pieces there is an emphasis on intricacy of balance, on those daring relationships of stance and muscular action which so delighted him in performances by acrobats and dancers. At times his art seems altogether Mannerist in its tensions and exaggerations of contour, and he was particularly fond of the 'C' curve formed by the figure of one acrobat arched outward from another, the whole framed by complementary arcs of color.   "In the Acrobats. . . watercolor is applied film over film, with wonderful control of shading and transparency and a perfect mastery of the tonal resonance of black. The freer wash handling of the stage and backdrop provides a radiant foil to the figures . . ." -- James Thrall Soby "Charles Sheeler gives us . . . a world of elements we can believe in, things for our associations long familiar or which we have always thought familiar . . . "To discover and separate these things from the amorphous, the conglomerate normality with which they are surrounded and of which before the act of 'creation' each is a part, calls for an eye to draw out that detail which is in itself the thing, to clinch our insight, that is, our understanding, of it. "It is this eye for the thing that most distinguishes Charles Sheeler." -- William Carlos Williams Japan and the West combine successfully on a decorative level in the art of Tiffany, Bonnard and Guimard, page 215; in the early work of Yasuo Kuniyoshi they meet on the plane of humor, visual humor as sharp and precise and original as its most famous motif, the triangular cow. Later, Kuniyoshi was more completely absorbed in the general stream of American art in which he participated not only as a distinguished painter and craftsman but as a much loved and greatly honored leader. "I very often use words in my pictures," Davis states, "because they are a part of urban subject matter." In Visa the word CHAMPION, "clearly the subject matter of the painting," was derived from a matchbook cover. The word else answered the artist's need for a short word without associations. The phrase, The amazing continuity, besides "animating the area at the extreme right," refers to the experience of finding in paintings of very different subject matter and style the mysterious common factor, the "amazing continuity," which unites them as works of art. "The content of this phrase is real," Davis concludes, "as real as any shape of a face or a tree . . ." "The term Realist, as it is applied to contemporary painting, has acquired a number of contradictory associations. These should be made clear if the aims of many present-day artists are to be understood. "There is realism in the work of abstract artists. Picasso, for example, is always concerned with some basic reality . . . The deeper meanings of nature can only be captured in painting through disciplined form and design. The visual recognizability is actually irrelevant. It may be there or not." -- Niles Spencer, 1941 The year Marsden Hartley painted Boots he wrote: "What do pictures mean anyhow -I have been trying to find out for at least half a lifetime . . . I have no interest in the subject matter of a picture, not the slightest. A picture has but one meaning -- is it well done, or isn't it -- and if it is, it is sure to be a good picture whether the spectator likes it or not . . . And I remember the old gag that we have heard so often, and is perhaps still being used: 'I don't know anything about art, I only know what I like,' and the only answer to that is -- do you?"