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	Joseph De Martini, Louis Schanker, De Hirsh Margules Ambrose Patterson (born 1877) had been a faculty member of the University of Washington school of art at Seattle since 1919. He gives a lucid analysis of his method of unifying plastic form and life content: "The experience which served for this painting was an everyday one, but a new and exciting one for me. Serious worshipers in the characteristic interior of an Indian Shaker Church, the rhythm of the chanting and marching, offered an attractive motif. To express this appropriately I had immediately to study the elements before me and decide upon a plan that would best symbolize what I felt. I made as many notes as I could. Returning from LaPush, I had a collection of facts and ideas, and much enthusiasm. The whole had to be coordinated with order, drama, and design. Composition sketches followed, literal at first, then less so, as I eliminated nonessentials and approached a type of freedom of a more creative character. Structure and content were now visualized, and I painted spontaneously to give those who look at the painting an instant appreciation of what I experienced. That was my aim." Herman Maril (born 1908), a Baltimore artist who has, to a large extent, followed his own course in the development of a modernist painting practice, displays a natural gift of style, a sensitive intuition of contemporary plastic values, and unfailing good taste. An interesting course can be traced through his painting from its earliest appearance in the thirties to its latest manifestations; from a precisionism of line and color, suggesting influences of Picasso and Matisse, to greatly enriched formal syntheses with more deeply felt life content. Simplification and clarity are of the essence of his maturing style; but from the French moderns he went back to the Sienese primitives to study the secret of visual and emotional communication, and to the Renaissance figure, Piero della Francesca, for aid in the geometry of form; he has gradually added colors and gradations of colors to give weight to his volumes and depth to his space. Meantime, the progress in his work-and its promise are in a direction determined by his ambition to paint American life, its meaning and its sentiment, without resort to superficial devices or naturalistic appeals. Maril's sensitiveness to form relationships and his use of color suggest phases of the work of Peppino Mangravite, the Italian-born American artist whose recent work reflects a strong influence of romantic realism and is more properly considered in another company. Frances Ferry was a young woman of Salt Lake City, whose painting, still experimental and immature, has delicacy of color and form expressiveness. This artist laid the foundations of her modernist painting style through study in the art department at the University of Washington, and studied later in Europe with Lhote and Pruna, feeling the influences of both for a time--as well as of Cézanne and other Frenchmen. Painting in America since the mid-thirties, however, she is producing spontaneous works with a nonnaturalistic life content and a sound basic construction. Frances Ferry's very individual plastic perception is evidenced particularly in water colors of almost ethereal aspect, pictures which mislead the casual observer into mistaking the delicacy of touch for a lack of structural stability--as happened in the case of Twachtman's masterly woodland scenes. Somewhere in this continuing experimental line the work of Joseph De Martini, Louis Schanker, and De Hirsh Margules, Among others, is to be accounted for. Joseph De Martini was born in Mobile, Alabama, in 1896 and worked in New York, where he was achieving portraiture that is stark and expressive in the manner of some of the African wood sculptures, but with the added suggestion of some of our precisely mechanized constructions and industrial assembly-line processes. It would not be impossible to attribute to the Self-Portrait a symbolic content; to see it a generalization upon the stage of civilization in which the human unit conforms, perforce, to the mass necessities of life. This aspect is heightened by the artist's flexible, expressive use of a color range in which gray and black prevail. All suggestion of dream behind the mask, everything but the objective and elemental aspects of an individual artist, is carefully eliminated. All emphasis is placed upon the form expressiveness, without psychological reference or emotional content. De Martini has done able portraits and also landscapes and industrial scenes, equally nonnaturalistic and formal in conception, but less stark, and equally without direct indebtedness to any modernist figure. In other moods he has painted landscapes that are somber and Ryder-like and that appear as equally the work of a young painter of exceptional endowments. Louis Schanker, also among younger artists working in New York, has experimented in various modernist directions and at times has shown conspicuous indebtedness to the French moderns, to Picasso especially. His use of color as a constructional element is individual and often striking; and in certain instances, of which the Piano Player, first exhibited in Paris, is one, there is a traditional elegance in the brushwork. Among recent experiments that he has apparently devised as a means of testing out separately the expressive components of plastic form is Handball Players, which was shown at the American Abstract Artists Exhibition in New York in 1938. Here the apparent intention is to indicate the relationships of planes, and the tensions between volumes (which are together the most important means of achieving the "life movement" or dynamic rhythm upon which modern art places emphasis) by charting the movement path of a ball speeding between players. De Hirsh Margules was born in Rumania in 1899, but was brought to America as an infant. He has received his art education largely outside conventional art schools. Some of his painting suggests influences from the Fauves, from Vlaminck, for instance, while MacDougal Alley, first exhibited at the Whitney Museum in 1938, is an evidence of the artist's analytical search for expressive form. Of his phase, he says: "I struggle to break the glassy, dead-eyed stare of static in painting. I experiment with invented rather than adapted light. I use tactile contrasts, illuminated color, planular and diagonal arrangements; I use both flat planes and planes arranged to give spatial depth; and I break prisms and disintegrate the solid spectrum." "I go directly to nature, and use pure water color," says Margules, who learned from Egyptian art to design his pictures in simple plane arrangement; who went to Chinese art--potteries and silks--for color and texture enrichment; and who follows Cézanne and Marin in complex spatial arrangements. "For fifteen years, I have been experimenting with the problem of 'movement' in art," he adds. All of these artists are form seekers in the Cubist line, with greater departure from the visual values of nature. Jean Hélion, the Parisian, wrote in 1933, "The artists do nothing but indicate the paths for the eye through the surfaces of the pictures. Whether the path follows the known line of a nose or the anonymous trajectory of a parabola, is of no importance in itself," though, he adds, "there are means that correspond better with the epoch and its ideas than other means." "Painters have grown conscious, through their sensibility or a knowledge of past cycles, that the aesthetic voice can assert itself anew at any time only after a reorientation of the structural language itself," says George L. K. Morris, who is an abstract artist and a critic in the field of contemporary abstract effort, as well as one of the sponsors of the American Abstract Artists, organized in 1936. Typical of the group, he refutes the idea that Cubism, or French modern art as a whole, has provided any tradition; or that the significant leaders --Picasso, Braque, Miró--have even maintained their own creative supremacy free of periods of sterile and repetitious exercises. "Nevertheless, the path has been cleared for later artists who are finding for themselves that they must strip their art to those very bones from which all cultures take their life. It remains for them to construct the foundations anew." "Whether the American art of the future will be representational or not, I cannot say," Morris writes, "but it will have to pass through abstract stages, as have all authentic art cycles. The bare expressiveness of shape and position of shape must be pondered anew; the weight of color, the direction of line and angle, must be restudied until the roots of primary tactile reaction can be perceived again. Occasionally in America, we have been able to project our own quality; and it is on quality that we must insist, for quality can never be counterfeited. Perhaps when we have fixed a genuine accent, the artist will again be free to raise his voice, and to leave for posterity a conception of our life and being." The necessity to vitalize art with the suggestions and the possibilities of our century's transformed experiences, is felt by all the artists who, at the end of the thirties, are turning back to renew the spirit of earlier abstract experimentation.