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: Traditionalists and Modernists Kenneth Hayes Miller (born 1876) paints with the authority of the Venetians of the High Renaissance and also possibly under influences from Rubens and Renoir. In the portrait of Albert Ryder, who was his friend, the dignity and simple majesty of character suggest Tintoretto's late self-portrait. Like Henri and Sloan, this artist has exerted an influence on younger generations through his teaching. Molly Luce, H. E. Schnakenberg, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, and Alexander Brook are only a few of his students who are making prominent contributions to today's painting. Charles S. Hopkinson (born 1869) belongs to the small rank of portraitists in America who work in the spirit of the John Copley of Boston days. He might be called the Copley of contemporary life by reason of the large gallery of highly cultured Americans, men and women, whom he has painted. Many of the museums and institutions of higher education of the country own his paintings, which are also to be seen in the White House. Before this New Englander studied at the Julian Academy in Paris, he was a student of John Twachtman. This is a fact recalled with interest before one of the landscapes that Charles Hopkinson"paints for recreation" when vacationing from portraiture. These small pictures are semi-abstract, they have a Japanesque delicacy, and there is about them the almost mystic attitude toward nature that is felt in the Twachtman pictures.   "Art is the skillful expression of the aesthetic emotions or reactions of the artist which derive from the impact upon him of life or nature (in its largest sense)," he believes. "A growing tendency in the painting and sculpture of the past quarter century towards the use of artist imagination and the realization that a work of art exists by itself (in a world apart, so to speak) and not as a mirrored image of the world," seems to him conspicuous. "The progress of art, however, is retarded by artists who use their work for propaganda outside of the world of art. I do not think that the pictures and sculptures made in the Gothic and Renaissance periods which make use of Christian symbols fall into the category of propaganda, where it is evident that the artist was religiously moved," he adds. "There is all the difference in the world between Tintoretto's great Crucifixion in the Scuola di St. Rocco, in Venice and the propagandist pictures filled with the spirit of hate, by Rivera." George Biddle, Bernard Karfiol, Rockwell Kent, Varnum Poor, H. E. Schnakenberg, Alexander Brook, and Peppino Mangravite are other well-known painters, produced by the same influences under which these men developed, that is, they have had American art school training, usually with periods of residence, study, and work abroad, but they have developed a different expression, and are modern without being distinctly post-Impressionist. George Biddle (born 1885) is one of the most interesting among mature contemporaries. He has a fertile creative imagination in unusual combination with keen powers of intellectual analysis, and he unites a thorough education in historical art criticism with an enthusiasm for contemporary experiment. He is a member of a prominent Philadelphia family and studied at Groton and Harvard, graduating cum laude from the Harvard Law School in 1908, after periods of ill-health which interrupted his study and started his world travels. He studied art at the Pennsylvania Academy and in Paris and Munich and, after various periods of European painting, has settled down to live and work at Croton-on-Hudson, New York. His painting is always well designed and well realized, always cerebral in inspiration. Early interest in Velasquez and other Renaissance masters may have aided in forming his style. At one period his Hudson River landscapes became only backgrounds for innumerable, charmingly wrought nudes that were suggestive of the "classical" painting tradition. His more recent portraits, including his self-portrait with skis, and the portrait study of his sculptor wife, Hélène Sardeau, are notable in character reading and in the directness of their rendering. He is one of the artists who have been drawn gradually to socially conscious subjects, and from the presentation of his fellow-beings with a satirical touch to a tone of greater depth and seriousness; meantime, he has been achieving a clear and forceful plastic organization, as may be observed in mural projects which he has designed for various purposes. "I believe that, following an insistence on the reportorial in art lasting generally from 1925 to 1937, American artists have turned to social themes and that one of the effects of the depression may be a socially conscious art that transcends the literal and accidental," he says. "I think there is evidence of more creative direction today in America than in Europe. The outcome of such creative intent is uncertain (as it depends upon too many imponderables) but if one could say, in 1925, that the United States was ten years behind Paris, today one might say with equal truth that much European art is two years behind America." Bernard Karfiol (born 1886) and Rockwell Kent (born 1882) are products of a period of changing aesthetic conviction. Karfiol, born in Hungary of American Jewish parentage, is essentially a figure painter. About his figures, which are usually nudes, there clings what Jean Paul Slusser has termed "a mellow paganism" and "a happy heritage from our mixed racial and cultural tradition." Boys and Ponies, in the collection of the Whitney Museum, is representative of his early postImpressionist style. At one period he produced nude young girls in landscapes where the flesh and the foliage were realized by the use of delicately fluctuating planes of color. Contemporary Karfiol work is distinguished by its skilled craftsmanship. It is free from all recognizable influences, modern and traditional in the ordinary sense; but as may be seen in the typical example, Christina, which is reproduced, it is in spirit actually both, belonging thoroughly to the twentieth century in the boldness and simplicity of its design and the stability of its plastic construction, while manifesting a feeling for human form that suggests study of classical sculptures. Rockwell Kent was born in Tarrytown, New York. He is, temperamentary, a mystic; his mysticism is toward nature. "I cannot trust myself to paint what I see," he once wrote. "I paint only what I remember." "I paint eternity I" he said at another time. There is an archaic and elemental rhythm in his paintings, which often have the snow fields and mountains of the far North for subject. He paints sunlight on ice or lonely shacks at nightfall beside black water, and his figures suggest old fables. Rockwellkertiana is an illuminating record of the life and philosophy of this strange wanderer and affords a clue to an emotionally complex character. He has had a phenomenal commercial success, due in part to the excellence of his workmanship as a print-maker and the uniquely decorative style of the prints. Like many other sensitive contemporaries, Rockwell Kent (in his attitude more than his painting) reflects the changing currents in American social life. "To me the most significant trend in American art is its return to representation, to story-telling, to the use of this new trend to serve the growing social consciousness of artists," he wrote in 1938. "I see the future of American art as more and more expressing those social ideals, which, as I have said, are coming to Americans. I see American art as serving the pending revolution and becoming a powerful art through the thought and emotion that pending social changes force the artist to." Kent was one of the winners in a competition held by the Treasury Department Section of Painting and Sculpture (now the Section of Fine Arts) to paint murals for the new Post Office Building in Washington. His subject, illustrating the far-flung mail service, showed a letter from Alaska being read by a group in Puerto Rico. After the mural had been in place for some time, the discovery was made that the text, minutely lettered in an obscure dialect, was an incitement to revolution, whereupon the federal authorities commissioned another artist to replace the wording. Alexander Brook was born in Brooklyn in 1898 and studied in this country. He began to receive recognition at an early age, and his work is now in many museums. To quote Edward Alden Jewell, "Alexander Brook is not, as we employ the terms, a realist, an abstractionist, a romanticist, an intellectualist, a purist. And yet in his work you will find realism, so far as appropriate fidelity to form is concerned, abstraction to the extent of intelligent simplification, the intellectual approach, if a habit of clear reasoning be implied, purity in the articulation of color, while everything he does is suffused with the romantic and humorous spirit of the explorer who does not pretend to omniscience regarding what lies ahead." Some of this artist's most competent work is in studies of young women and children, including those of his wife, Peggy Bacon, and his son and daughter. The comic spirit has asserted itself in his recent work, as Peggy Bacon and Metaphysics, now in the Worcester Art Museum, testifies. Peppino Mangravite (born 1896) is an Italian by birth, but he has lived in New York since 1915. He was at that time outstanding among younger men in this country for the production of sensitive, individual post-Impressionist painting. He produced in this vein for a number of years, meanwhile establishing himself as teacher and critic. Gradually, since the mid-thirties, he has responded to a more subjective, human-interest trend; and his contemporary paintings, Dancing in the Moonlight and City People in the Country among them, suggest the traditional gayety and elegance of eighteenth-century work. In clarity of design and in the skill of their painting, these are excellent. If they have gained vivacity and romantic glamour at the expense of plastic construction, they may be taken as representing a transition period in the painting style of an artist of extraordinary sincerity and sensibility. His aesthetic credo he expresses thus: "To become aware of some fundamental and significant quality or need in mankind, and to create a pictorial personal symbol for it." He feels the need "to understand, appreciate, and be consistently in love with that symbol; to modify, reshape, and reconstruct it according to one's understanding of man's moods, actions, and attitudes in contemporary society. To give aesthetic meaning to it by vital, technical performance." "The most significant trend," he says, "is a subjective direction toward painting; one which has made many important artists more conscious of humanistic aspects on one side and of a simpler and more lucid pictorial articulation on the other. Today, the American scene is the most artistically fertile in the four continents, and warrants a future of immeasurable creative activity and an art culture worthy of its growing greatness."