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	Modern American Art: Arthur Dove, Charles Sheeler, Charles Demuth Arthur Dove (born 1880) had already taken his master's degree at Comell University and had worked as a commercial illustrator before 1908. Henri Matisse was chiefly instrumental in changing his direction, a change which he has described as "from form to plane to first flash"--"to music for the eye." He was an experimenter in the visual expressiveness of materials, adventuring with the Cubists in efforts to break the old overfamiliar molds used by illustrational artists and provide new ones to replace them. At one time he made amazing combinations, including buttons and pieces of clothing in designs which emerged with an unquestionable aesthetic expressiveness, as did the Cubist papiers collés or the rubbish constructions made by Kurt Schwitters at a later time. Picasso delighted in this sort of thing, and once arranged on a restaurant tablecloth "a few cigar bands, a cherry stone or two, scraps of crust and cigarette ends" and made of them "an unmistakable--Picasso," to quote Clive Bell. "I should like to enjoy life by choosing all of its highest instances, to give back in my means of expression; to give in form and color the reaction that plastic objects and sensations of light from within and without, have reflected from my inner consciousness . . . to work unassailably, to enjoy life out loud." Thus Arthur Dove wrote at the beginning of his career; and thus he appears to have done, living in Europe for short intervals, living on a houseboat off metropolitan New York for years together, and in recent years, living and working in his native section of upstate New York. He was a poet of nature's mood, creating in bursts of lyric and ecstatic vision, strong, powerful, or exquisite interpretations in which natural appearances are all but lost. His Golden Storm and Silver Storm, his Wind, Waves, and Clouds and the Sea Thunder are reminiscent of chords of inspired music. Only now, more than a quarter of a century after his beginnings as an American modernist, has this naturally retiring artist begun to be appreciated by more than a few discriminating critics and connoisseurs, and even yet his work is little represented in museum collections of American modern painting. Charles Sheeler (born 1883) and Charles Demuth (born 1883) were native Pennsylvanians, each responsible for an individual painting expression developed against a background of American culture and post-Impressionist painting practice gained in France early in the century. Sheeler excels in the ability to capitalize the expressive values inherent in objects, and particularly in architectural constructions. He is generally credited with having been the first to grasp the aesthetic possibilities of American skyscraper architecture for painters. From preoccupation with problems of abstract form in the generic sense, he turned gradually to problems of expressive form. He knows how to take a Pennsylvania German stone barn or farmhouse, a simple Moravian exterior or a Shaker interior, as the subject for a painting that is wholly and unmistakably American in character. The planes of a simple early doorway or a steep angular stairway are often sufficient design elements for a Sheeler painting, which will emerge as a triumph of simplification. He uses a sensitive rhythmic line and, in the paintings where a feeling for architectural character gives the dominant design motif, makes dramatic use of strong direct light and sharp, dark shadows. Charles Sheeler's work in recent years on the one hand continues to derive a rich color and texture interest through his introduction into paintings of primitive rag-rug weavings and other colorful Americana, and on the other shows a revived interest in characteristic industrial-age engineering and architectural forms as bases for painting designs. Sheeler has been a genuine contributor to a modern American art of photography. In this field, as in painting, his emphasis is always placed upon the simplicity, strength, and clarity of the picture. That this artist's finest paintings are often classified as products of a hard, photographic realism is only an evidence of the confusions about art which abound at a time of transition. Both Sheeler's painting and his photography give us highly selective representations of objects or scenes in sharp focus; and the paintings often have that precision and that power gained by understatement which bring to mind the term "classical." Charles Demuth's still-life paintings, his studies of fruits, flowers, and sometimes vegetables, reached a new high level for American art of that genre, in the opinion of many critics who point to the precision and the luminous clarity of his color. The eggplants, the squashes or tomatoes, the poppies or chrysanthemums or grapes of his slight but exquisite masterpieces often achieve a semblance of sensuous, threedimensional life because Demuth has employed a Cézannist secret of building his forms with gradations of color, realizing, as Cézanne said, that the greatest plenitude of form is achieved where the greatest intensity of color is used. Demuth added to the individual character of his work by centering his firmly designed still-life subject on an untouched white paper background. Some of the most successful of his still-life studies afford a new conception of the beauty of free space as a plastic element; but in others, and notably in some of his abstract architectural studies, the effect achieved is of an uncompleted design. "Charles never made a bad picture," Marsden Hartley wrote of this gentle and unself-assertive artist after his death (in The New Caravan, 1936 issue), "and he made a lot of good ones, and if many of his pictures are frail in substance, they are true in import. . . . He knew the laws of picture making, and that is something that not all painters know. He was no cheap arriviste, he was no intense eclectic, so there is no strain in his product. . . . Charles traversed the all in all thin area of esthetic experience with a firm step, and he left footprints here and there which have long since been measured and found the proper size." Charles Demuth as a color precisionist of delicate but always masculine sensibility produced work which hangs eloquently beside the paintings of Georgia O'Keeffe, which exhibit a wholly feminine perception of aesthetic form. Georgia O'Keeffe was born in Wisconsin of Irish and Hungarian parentage. She studied in art schools of New York and Chicago and taught in the Southwest for a number of years before she was discovered and brought to the attention of the public, in 1916, by Alfred Stieglitz. She was married to Alfred Stieglitz in 1924, and has lived in New York City and in the Lake George region since that time, with periods of work in the Southwest. The subtle convolutions at the heart of a flower, the anatomy of a leaf or a plant, greatly magnified and represented as a color synthesis, provide the material for some of her best-known and most decorative abstractions. In some phases, her paintings have been nonrepresentational, and have been patterns of delicate, almost evanescent planes of thin, luminous color. The Black, White, and Lavender in the Stieglitz collection is an example of this order. The O'Keeffe color, which has often borne the whole compositional burden of her creations, has gradually been giving place to a more somber palette, and in recent years she has produced paintings which depend only incidentally upon color for their austere beauty--Canadian mountains and barns at Lake George, and notably, a series of interpretations of New Mexican life.