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: Early 1900s American Artists Maurice Prendergast ( 1861-1924), who had returned to his native Boston at the outset of the century, the only man in America at that time to have grasped something of the significance of Cézanne, carved picture frames with his brother Charles and painted in his spare time until 1914. After that, he worked and exhibited in New York and found recognition with younger Americans who were then working under the influence of the Cubists. He developed a highly individual style, making extensive use of the Pointillist, or neo-Impressionist, expedient of divided tones as part of the means of imparting a bright, twinkling, often jewellike color to his canvases, which are decorative in a new and distinguished sense among American paintings. His usually crowded figures of promenading crowds or playing children are subordinated to the intentions of space filling within the design; that is why some of his canvases bring to mind Byzantine mosaics and others suggest tapestries. Maurice Prendergast became one of The Eight in order to exhibit his work and to play his part in the American artist's struggle for the right to professional independence, much more than because he possessed a crusading spirit. With his brother Charles, who now paints in New York and Connecticut, he staked his professional career on the faith that art is for the joy of the creator and the observer, and he worked in an immovable independence which in the last decade of his life carried him into the conspicuous forefront of American modernism. Walt Kuhn has continued for thirty years or more an unclassifiable independent. Robert Henri and the French moderns successively aided him in arriving at a painting style that is distinctly American in its maturest expression. Picasso as well as Cézanne has been a formative influence, though the long range of his painting has qualities more comparable with those of certain of the Fauves, Vlaminck and Rouault, and with the German Expressionists. He was born in New York in 1880, of German parents, and became a selftaught illustrator, working for newspapers in New York and San Francisco, before joining, in 1910, the exhibition group that had grown from The Eight of two years before. His career in purely creative art was thereafter interrupted from time to time by seasons of making stage sets for vaudeville, designing costumes for theater and circus productions, creating publicity material for political organizations, and, among other breadwinning occupations, designing a modern bar and grill for one of the new streamlined trains. Kuhn paints landscape, still life, and figures. His work, particularly the figure painting, is often mistaken for a gross naturalism. In reality it represents accumulations of slow, painstaking sensory impressions brought into a unity that is usually a strong and simple generalization about some aspect of the artist's familiar environment. He uses bright, often crude colors with full knowledge of their mobile and dynamic interrelationships and their contribution to the total expression he is in process of making. Sometimes his flowers have the hard bright showiness of mechanical products, and his women of the stage and the circus are notable for their atmosphere of theatrical tawdriness. In these and other ways he seeks to make a plastic record of an era in which he feels a prevailing artificiality, with gaudiness, limelight, and high-pitched and strident noises among the elements. His simple figure studies from the early White Clown series to the most recent, of which The Juggler is an example, are masterly technical accomplishments. They show an aliveness to the intrinsic qualities of good painting in the great nonnaturalistic tradition, as in Cézanine, but also in Tintoretto and the painters of the Chinese "ancestors": to the arbitrary placing of the figure in space, the elimination of all but the most revealing essentials of feature and posture, and to simple, distinguished color designs. Such studies often go beyond the bounds of individual characterization and appear as symbolic representations of the "show business" in one or another of its aspects. By 1925, gains made by the American artists mentioned, and others, under the influences of French modernism, could be recapitulated. Max Weber, for instance, one of the most sensitive and consistent followers of Cubism through its complex course, had embarked upon the painting of somber and static figure groups, which are profoundly psychological in atmosphere. Charles Sheeler had pursued his sensitive researches in the expressive properties of form from which the static, early American architectural motives were derived, and from which the contemporary syntheses, as represented by the dynamic Church Street L, were shaping. William Zorach had gone from Cubist painting to direct-cut sculpture that was unexcelled in America for a decade except by Gaston Lachaise, and that was to prove one of the strongest influences on younger Americans working in this medium at home. Arthur Carles, of Philadelphia, Agnes Pelton, working in California, Abraham Walkowitz, Stuart Davis, and Oscar Bluemner in New York, were among those who felt the continuing influences of abstract and geometrical art to which they had responded even before 1913. Alfred Maurer and Preston Dickinson were among the most promising Americans influenced by Cubism. Both were to die a little later when their work had begun to reach maturity and distinction, as was Oscar Bluemner. Samuel Halpert, more comparable with Bernard Karfiol, A. S. Baylinson, and Bertram Hartman as the carrier of a modernist feeling for order back to figure and landscape painting, also died in 1930, when, at forty-five, he was combining certain principles of simplification of the Cézannists with a sensitive traditional "style" of painting. Modern art in the American market place--and in the exhibitions and schools--had meantime tended to greater sterility. Exercises in geometrical design, preoccupation with the externals of plastic construction, and fantastic amorphous creations in vivid paint were prevalent. Imitative Cubism had also pervaded the architectural and "decoration" fields, where the modernistic vogue for distortions and for oblique angles was appearing. These circumstances could only hasten the reaction that was already felt in the direction of realism, naturalism, propaganda, fantasy, and other varieties of subject painting which the American public was to see exploited during the following decade. Some of the most brilliant critics of modern art in America in that period were individual artists. They recognized the failure of Americans to make a coherent or widely convincing use of the principles of Cézanne and the Cubists, and concluded that this must be because America had not so far felt a fundamental aesthetic driving force or found an aesthetic direction. It was also pointed out, notably by Andrew Dasburg, an interpretive critic of the new movements, that American individualism and intolerance of experimental group activities was a barrier to progress. In the generation whose student days came a little late for the full drama of the American art revolution, there were experimenters to continue the pioneering of the generation of Marin and Hartley and Kuhn--Hirsch, Spencer, Hilton, Blume, Kantor, Jonson, Knaths, Charlot, Mangravite among them. Also Ault, Wiltz, Elsie Driggs, and others whose direction equally opposed that of the makers of realistic and popular art. With the American pioneers of modernism, they carried on through a period of transition and into strictly contemporary phases.