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	Early Twentieth Century When the nineteenth century ended, the country was apparently farther from the power to make an art of its own than it had been in the days of Earl and Copley. Having first gone down to the bare and stripped fundamentals of human association, it had, in the words of H. G. Wells, been building up a new sort of society and a new sort of state upon those fundamentals, and had thus marked a definite stage in the release of man from precedent and usage and a definite step forward toward the conscious and deliberate reconstruction of his circumstances to suit his needs and aims. The United States had been formed, and had been made a demonstration center of largescale industrial revolution and mass production. But that innate creativeness that had expressed itself in the homely arts and crafts of the pioneering phases had been poured at later times into the science and the engineering that were the foundations of our material civilization. These great movements and issues did not immediately or sufficiently stir the imaginations of artists or potential artists to bring out a corresponding Americanness in art, which it may be must await longer processes of time and growth. Meantime, official art went on expiring of exclusiveness and respectability, popular art of the pleasant if trite nineteenth-century American genre had deteriorated into a crude chromo-lithography, and Italianate sculpture had run out into mass-produced parlor ornaments of which the Rogers groups are the most conspicuous examples. Every middle-class bride's parlor was furnished with one, and the medical journals carried advertisements of the family doctor series which was the center of interest in the physician's outer office. The new insurgency with which the century came in found its first conspicuous embodiment in the now celebrated exhibition group, The Eight. Robert Henri and a small company of his fellow illustrators in Philadelphia formed the nucleus of The Eight, which exhibited in New York in 1908. The men, besides Henri, were George Luks, John Sloan, and William Glackens; Ernest Lawson, Maurice Prendergast, Arthur B. Davies, and Everett Shinn. The status of art is indicated by the fact that a company of this membership could so shock and scandalize the populace as to win for themselves the epithets the "Ash Can School" and the "Revolutionary Black Gang." The naturalism of Manet, the scientific objectivity of Eakins, and the severely honest craftsmanship of Homer were among the ideals of Robert Henri and his followers. The illustrators, who had made a profession of their power to capture life in its most vivid aspects, working against the pressure of deadlines on the daily papers, improvised their techniques to suit their occasions; and when they turned to the more exacting practices of painting, they took what they could use from the Old Masters, especially those who had left vivid records of their own environments: Hals, Velasquez, Goya, and even the earthy Courbet. Hals' half-emptied wineglasses, the lute and the rose, the bar wench and the fishwife in rumpled attire; Velasquez's Christ with bread in his wounded hands; Goya's malicious portrait of a homely queen, Maria Luisa; the fleshy amplitude with which Courbet invested female nudes: these were studied by men who pioneered in an American realism that sought to capture in its moving poignancy, color, and variety the life on Washington Square and Union Square, in the tenderloin section, in the parks and slums and on the waterfronts of New York. George Luks had been an illustrator for the New York World and had been condemned to death in Cuba as a spy before the SpanishAmerican war. He brought to his painting a sardonic humor, a fugitive tenderness, and a lusty impatience with parlor politeness. John Sloan interpreted scenes of a city's life that were more inspiring incentives to reform than were paid propaganda efforts at a time when social action was directed towards public playgrounds, parks, and slumclearance schemes as national issues. William Glackens made some of the first real-life studies of New York streets, parks, and intimate interiors and gave them the status of "academic" art. Everett Shinn became peculiarly the painter of the theater. Lawson, Davies, and Prendergast were of other schools. Ernest Lawson was a follower of Twachtman and, like Twachtman, developed a lyric and personal expression from Impressionism. Arthur B. Davies dwelt in a world as remote from the "raw realism" with which the group was identified as did his elderly friend Ryder. He dwelt in a realm of romance that bordered on classic and legendary places. Maurice Prendergast had come home from the Paris of the neo-Impressionists a modern and an independent, though his work was to have only limited attention for nearly two decades and was to be little understood until the end of his lifetime. The Eight and the younger men who joined their ranks as exhibitors in succeeding seasons were held together principally by their need for opportunities to exhibit and by their common will to break through to professional independence. But Robert Henri continued to exert a dominant influence on his associates and students, and that influence is observable throughout the ranks of today's maturer painters, as a reverence for the traditions of the painter's art, a respect for familiar everyday life as a permanent source of subject matter, and in other ways. Walter Pach, Glenn Coleman, Walt Kuhn, Guy Pène DuBois, Edward Hopper, Arnold Friedman, George Bellows, and William Gropper were among the Henri associates or students. Helen Appleton Read, the American art critic, was a Henri student. She writes, in the catalogue of an exhibition of the work of the early realists at the Whitney Museum of American Art: "When we packed our paint boxes and journeyed north from the then conservative classes of the Art Students' League to the new Henri school in the Lincoln Arcade, it was the equivalent of throwing our gauntlets in the face of an old order. And the ingenuous belief did exist among the students that we were mildly socialistic because of our efforts to paint reality." She adds: "We also learned that art was only another medium for interpreting life, and we were taught that all the arts were kindred and relevant to painting. Isadora Duncan, Wagner, Dostoievski, Whitman and Emerson were discussed with Manet, Daumier, Eakins and Courbet. Henri was the first teacher to mention Eakins' rugged individualism and Ryder's romanticism as being distinctly American." There was a new spirit abroad that belonged to the age, rather than to any one country, and that was making itself felt in all fields of creative effort. There was not merely a French madness that was presently to "give Americans the signal to turn the art world upside down"; nor merely" an outbreaking of exotic cults that attempted to undermine our dignified cultural institutions," as ultraconservatives supposed, but a revolutionary beginning. The appearance of The Eight in New York in 1908, without benefit of jury and under its own auspices, was an unprecedented act of effrontery to established American art. It was simultaneous, as it turned out, with the first appearance of the much more revolutionary works of Braque and Picasso, which were to give the Western world the basis for a new aesthetic theory--Cubism. During that year, Americans began coming back from the French studios, bringing their strange-looking new paintings, which they exhibited to a few people in obscure rented spaces. In the more than thirty years since that time, Western art has gradually returned to its sources to seek among them materials for a new structure that shall be capable of containing the record of our twentieth-century human experience, not in imitation but in essence. In America, it has turned to distinctly national sources, not to borrow their picturesque aspects--the flat factualism of the "ancestors" or the fancifulness of folk art, or the painstaking illustrations of everyday scenes (as in the late-nineteenth-century genre art)--but to study the secret of their fresh aesthetic appeal.