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	The establishment of a professional art Of the state of public taste in the late sixties, James Jackson Jarves, an American critic, more recognized in Europe than at home, wrote, in his book, Art Thoughts: "In America, the present is an epoch of monstrous plaster figures, daubed with crazy paint; of mammoth cast-iron wash-basins, called fountains; of cast-iron architecture and clumsy gateways to public parks; of shoddy portrait statues and inane ideal ones; of ornaments, pictures and sculptures made to gull and to sell." This writer, with a more truly prophetic vision than any other American of his time, formulated a definition of abstract design of the kind that the mass production centers should adopt. He argued the basic and unchanging soundness of Chinese and Egyptian art and pointed out the plastic vitality in the designs of the Melanesians and the Polynesians, the Aztecs, and other primitive and prehistoric peoples. Abstract design, he said "rejoices not in teaching or representing the natural facts, but in giving sensuous or suggestive delight, doing for the eye what music does for the ear. Its mission is to sooth or seduce the imagination and senses into dreamy enjoyment by mystical harmonies of form and color which may hint at the variety of seen and unseen nature without literally representing anything in either world." Jarves saw that public education of taste alone could convert an epoch of monstrous ornament and bring about a demand for objects designed with respect for the sound and unchanging principles of good design. James McNeil Whistler, Mary Cassatt, and John Singer Sargent were most conspicuous among the large number of Americans who became expatriates to develop their art in Europe, during the last half of the century, and who were accordingly lost to a groping spirit of Americanism at home. William Morris Hunt, in the fifties and George Inness in the sixties imported the French atmosphere of the Barbizon school that went to nature and that staked its faith on the personal vision of nature. George Inness stands out now as one of the significant men of his time, though lacking the prime creativeness of the true genius. He learned, from Corot principally, to resynthesize the elements of a scene and present them in an emotionally guided unity in which he sought more and more to suggest the inner spirit of nature. His finest landscapes, done in the eighties, have the broad simplicity which he admired in the "men of 1830," and are filled with light, air, and space; historically, they stand at the head of a new phase of American outdoor painting. As throughout his work, he sought to invest them with an atmosphere of peace and beauty and with a metaphysical significance which he derived from his Swedenborgian faith. Frank Duveneck and William Merritt Chase brought home from Munich a style based upon direct and vigorous brushwork which lingered in the work of generations of students in contradistinction to the art of salient outline of the fashionable French studios of Bonnat, Gérôme, and Carolus Duran. The American Academy of Design had been founded in 1826 under the leadership of Samuel F. B. Morse, to encourage an independent professional practice. It was not until the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876, however, that an extensive national showing of American painting and sculpture was attempted as a part of the international art exhibition. The general critical reaction was that little progress had been made toward developing broad and general procedures or toward giving an independent character to professional art practice. "The work of Harding, Neagle, Hunt and Homer were there," one critic has said, "to show the lack of coherence in our art." At the century's end, the names of Homer, Eakins, and Ryder stood forth most prominently among contributors toward an American native painting. Both Homer and Eakins were vigorously American, though neither is central among the influences felt by today's painters and students. Winslow Homer ( 1836- 1910) was essentially an illustrator. The accuracy and selectivity of observation gained from his graphic reporting of scenes from the Civil War became the strongest point of his painting, to which he devoted his exclusive attention after 1876. He was a fine water-colorist and a dramatic realist who took his subjects from the sea and the people whose destinies are shaped by the sea. In the same years that Cézanne was painting at Aix, groping after that "concentric vision" by which he sought to give an intensified version of visual truth, Homer was working with equal tirelessness on the Maine coast. If he did not achieve the "architectonic transformation" of nature, he did, however, leave evidence of a remarkable power to observe and record with more than surface verisimilitude. Thomas Eakins ( 1844- 1916) was a man of broader education, more subtle intellectual perception, and a more cosmopolitan taste. He was a student at the studios of Gérôme and Bonnat in Paris, where he also studied sculpture. He specialized in anatomy, which he made basic to his scientifically grounded teaching. His Americanism, like that of Homer, appears in his uncompromising accuracy of observation of his time and place and his ability to reveal something of the mental and spiritual atmosphere of his era in his characters and his scenes. His prize fights and boat races are as objective as Homer. Unlike Homer, he produced penetrating character studies--often to the consternation of the sitter--and other pictures which illuminate obliquely a strange transition period of nineteenth-century life. Eakins was an American in the tradition of Leonardo, and was a scholar, a scientist, and a philosopher as well as an artist. If he is without appreciable influence upon today's artists, it is because they have turned, at least for the time, from painting grounded in scientific anatomy and from Renaissance procedures. Contemporary appreciation tends meantime to endow the figure of Albert Pinkham Ryder ( 1847- 1917) with more than ordinary honor. Of some hundred and fifty artists of today asked what Americans had been most influential in the shaping of their art, more than half named this solitary or included his name with one or two others. Ryder never properly learned to paint, though he studied for a time at the National Academy; he had few friends and little recognition, and he left few pictures. He blotched and retouched and often finally spoiled pictures he had worked on for years, not so much because he had lacked patience to master the technical side of the craft as because he relied--more than anyone else of whom we have record--upon the primary power of his vision to thrust itself outward into form. The secret of his power is that he painted the realities of a spacious subjective realm into which he seemed able to escape at will from the cluttered West Side flat in New York where for years he had not even a bed to sleep on: that he was a mystic. There are two kinds of mystic art, Lewis Mumford said in writing about Ryder in The Brown Decades, "that which achieves its intensity by an abstraction akin to the methods of the Hindu mystic, and that which achieves a similar result by concretion, absorption, concentration, packing into the symbol infinitely more than is present to the eye." It is the second kind, he adds, which Ryder has achieved in his great pictures, in Jonah, The Flying Dutchman, Siegfried and the Rhine Maidens, and A Sea Tragedy. He must himself have appeared a symbolic figure at the Armory Show, where he calmly viewed his work hung on the same walls with the spectacular young makers of a new century's revolt, unaware or careless of the influences which were to turn new generations of young men to his work to try to find there the secret by which he communicated his extraordinary perceptions. John H. Twachtman ( 1853- 1902) was the first American to believe that art should be as abstract as music. The fragility and the reticence of his outdoor scenes caused critics generally to miss their underlying plastic stability, which in itself somehow suggests the unobtrusive strength of the earth beneath the snow and the foliage. His very personal style was developed under European influences, with Impressionism the last and most strongly felt, but the final, nonnaturalistic, and almost Orientally delicate phase of the Connecticut woodland scenes is the product of an artist who has gone beyond influences. Twachtman was the founder, in 1898, of Ten American Painters, a group feeling the need to exhibit outside the reach of an academic jury and reflecting the spirit of the times which were preparing the way for the professional independence of the artist.