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 Painting 1865-1934 The period between 1865 and 1934 is one year short of the biblical threescore and ten. This period, which saw the rise and development of several generations of important American painters, the emergence of American art from a provincial to a national and cosmopolitan phase, the successive waves of European influence from the romanticism of the 1830's to the equally romantic super-realism and expressionism of today, may be spanned by the life of one man. At the beginning of the period American art was provincial. It is true, of course, that American art had always been provincial, that is, it was a local dialect of the great language of European art. But with the end of the old portrait school, which had been the glory of the Colonial and early Republican eras, American art, in the decades before the Civil War, sank into an even deeper provincialism. The social classes which had supported the early portrait school had been swamped by the tidal wave of industrialism which carried to power classes with no tradition of art patronage. And to complete the ruin of the portrait school, photography, which had its beginning earlier in the century, had by the 1860's been developed to such a point that it took the place of the painted portrait not only in the affection of the public, but also in the estimation of many painters who did their best to imitate the effects of the camera. American art was seeking its bearings in an age of profound economic and social change. After the Civil War the momentum of social change was accelerated. The decades immediately following the war have about them the bustling disorder of a vast construction camp. The landed gentry of the East had fallen into decay, or they had joined forces with the leaders of business enterprise. In the South they had been destroyed. The old maritime aristocracy of the Atlantic seaboard had passed. With the decay of these classes went the genteel tradition with its rather mild good taste in the arts. In place of the more cultured older aristocracy, which had never been very large nor very sure of its taste, came the beneficiaries of the booming industrial order-individualists scrambling for wealth and power, the barons of factory towns, raining towns, coal towns, steel towns, oil towns, the builders of railroads, land grabbers, speculators, carpet-baggers, prospectors, boomers. A whole nation was "on the make," restless, uprooted, eagerly developing, wasting and destroying the resources of a continent. It was an age of technical achievements, rapid material advances. Inventions multiplied daily. New industries were born almost over night. And from these flowed immense streams of wealth to people who had never had wealth before. It was a time when great fortune attended the ruthless and the pushing -- when the rawness of the frontier was matched by the crudeness of the new industrial plutocracy, who cared as little for the more dignified esthetic ideals of the older America as they cared for its more democratic social theory. When they turned to art patronage they showed little discrimination. As Isham says: "They gratified themselves with fast trotters, diamonds and champagne; they built themselves big and amazingly ugly houses and filled them with furniture whose only excuse was its cost. And with other things they bought pictures. . . ." They bought the largest and the emptiest of the Salon prize-winners, the grandiose landscapes of Bierstadt and Church, the dull portraits of Healy and Huntington, and "monstrous plaster figurines daubed with crazy paint . . . shoddy portrait statues and inane ideal ones . . . ornaments, pictures and sculptures made to gull and to sell." American art in the decades after the Civil War shares in the qualities which made that extraordinary period of American life, with its crude power, its chaos and its emergent order. At the feet of the great slag mountains of the Gilded Age there were many small plots of green where a rich intellectual and spiritual life was germinating. There were living at the time men and women of extraordinary personal quality. In painting there were Whistler, Homer, Inness, Hunt, La Farge, Eakins, Ryder, Mary Cassatt, Wyant and Homer Martin. And there were others, educators and practical men who were busy extending public education, building museums and art schools, and introducing the study of art into the public schools. There were rich men who gave their art collections to the public. These were genuine contributions and America today is richer for them. Tuckerman, writing in 1867, could say that Chicago, Albany, Buffalo, Philadelphia, Boston and New York had "native ateliers, schools and collections" whose fame "has raised our national character and enhanced our intellectual resources as a people." In spite of the museums, the art schools and the collectors it was a difficult time for the artists. A sympathetic and discriminating public is a necessary element in the development of a national art. It alone can create an environment in which the artist can function freely and fully. In the decades after the Civil War there was no such public. What public there was found interest only in the kind of art which flattered the pretensions of a careless individualism restlessly engaged with material expansion and the ideal of constantly mounting profits. In such an environment the original artist had little place. He was driven into isolation, forced into the accentuation of personal peculiarities, into bohemianism and defiance. It is true that for the original artist there have been no golden ages, but the era following the Civil War was an age of sounding brass that made bitter harmony for Whistler, Homer, Inness, Hunt, Eakins and Ryder. It was an age of expatriates and solitaries. The question of Henry James, "Is one's only safety, then, in flight?" was answered by many artists in the affirmative. Others remained to accept and to master. The vulgarities of the period and the crude common humanity rising to power were rejected by the sensitive and fastidious Whistler, but they found epic affirmation in the work of Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins, and an extraordinary sublimation in Albert Pinkham Ryder, though Eakins suffered isolation and neglect, Homer in the end withdrew from humanity to his shack by the sea, and the life of the more sensitive Ryder centered about the one room in which Lao Tze says a man may see the whole universe. Whistler, the expatriate, and Homer, the stay-at-home, bring into sharp focus the divergent tendencies of their period. Both were born in Massachusetts in the middle 1830's, when the smoke of factory chimneys was beginning to dim the light of New England transcendentalism and to darken the ideal of a Greek democracy which was the dream of the agrarian South. Whistler was allied by birth to the older American aristocracy. His father and his grandfather had been army men. He himself was destined for a military career, which was cut short by the dislike for hard study which was characteristic of him as a painter. He got some instruction in art from Robert W. Weir at West Point, and studied for two years with Gleyre in Paris. This constituted all his school training. What he learned in Europe he got not so much from his training under Gleyre as from his contact with French painters, Courbet, Manet, Degas, Fantin-Latour, with the English Pre-Raphaelites, and from his studies of Velasquez, the Spanish master, and of Japanese prints. At the beginning of his career Whistler showed a tendency to follow the French realists in such pictures as The Thames in Ice ( 1859), Wapping Docks, and The White Girl, ( 1862) which was shown at the Salon des Refusés in Paris in 1863. By the middle 1860's, under the combined influences of the English Pre-Raphaelites, Velasquez and the Japanese, he had turned from realism to the problems of tone and arrangement. The change is hinted in The White Girl, it is stronger in The Little White Girl, painted in 1864, and complete in the series of nocturnes, begun in 1865. By this time Whistler's study of Japanese prints had convinced him that the illusion of the third dimension was a vulgar mistake of Western painting, and linear perspective a cheap accomplishment. He had turned from the realistic to the decorative. From this time on we are conscious of an increasing eclecticism in Whistler's work. Up to the period of the Civil War European critics had considered American art no more than a tasteful résumé of certain European tendencies. Whistler may be considered the heir of this side of the American tradition. The most truly cosmopolitan of American painters, he extends his tasteful résumé of art beyond the boundaries of Europe to the Far East. No painter of the nineteenth century is more cosmopolitan than Whistler. None is more intensely personal. Whistler's cosmopolitanism makes his connection with American art seem rather tenuous, but he does not fit in the French tradition as Mary Cassatt does, and he is far less English than Copley. Whistler's very cosmopolitanism is American. He is the true child of his uprooted time. Like the other expatriates of the nineteenth century, he searched the world for something he did not find in his own country, for the look of the past, for the elusive romantic beauty which is always to be found somewhere else, in another country, in another age. It is the romantic quest, old as the human heart, new as the "lost generation" of the post-war period.