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 Influence of the Oriental Scroll Painters The influence of the Oriental scroll painters is felt in the black, gray, and white painting of Zoar Valley ( Great Lakes Exposition, 1939) and also in the character of the design; and in Marsh, the disciplined calligraphic statement, added to these other characteristics, results in a painting that suggests the interior quality, the philosophical content, of the Sung landscapes. Skaters (a recent work) in the subtlety of its subdued tones suggests a Chinese album picture, to which a fresh dramatic note is contributed by the spotlighted area where the figures move in delicate linear vitality. An El Greco-like upsweep of light-drenched forms is seen in a canvas called Migrations that is also El Greco-like in color. Kenneth Callahan, curator of painting in the Seattle Art Museum and a member of the Seattle group, The Twelve, paints landscapes of a Ryder-like subjectivity. His conception of realism, and the philosophical conviction underlying his art, he has expressed in these words: "I do not believe that the importance of painting is in aesthetics, nor that it is for decorative purposes. I do believe in painting as a language in its own right, bound by certain rules, through which an individual can express his consciousness of life in its broadest sense." He emphasizes his regard for modernist procedures and uses them in finely conceived murals and easel paintings, but he regards these procedures merely as a means of giving concreteness to the essence of experience, to "that eternal truthfulness and permanence that lies below the surfaces and the scenes." Something of the same evidence of the "architectonic transformation " of the material taken from nature into a creation with independent reality for the observer is to be seen in the painting of many young Americans just emerging from their student days. Young men seem to have turned back in numbers to seek the creative art that is not mere craftsmanship or mere politics and that, though unanalyzable in its essential spirit, has been a reality for thousands of years. John Gemand of Washington offers a convenient type figure for this particular group, most of the members of which work in independence, here and there over the country. They add, as do the creative, experimenting abstractionists, to the atmosphere of change and excitement that surrounds all contemporary creative art under the permeative influence of modernism. Reappraisal of our modern art in the light of the spirit of independence gives new significance to the work of certain older men--of Arnold Friedman, for instance (born 1879), who studied with Henri, but who turned his back upon his public and painted in isolation for years when the work of the French moderns suggested to him a new world of expression. He is a sincere and sensitive artist who relies upon paint plasticity and an almost classic purity of line. His color is cool, delicate, and imaginative, and is used in precisely defined areas (as in numerous portrait studies) to produce painting that is both subtle and solid. There is a power of sensuous evocation in certain of his outdoor scenes; the market display of a New York East Side street, for example, gives an intimate tactile experience of the early-spring freshness and beauty of fruits and vegetables. This artist, who bears a striking personal resemblance to Abraham Lincoln, finds in art a passionate ritual significance. The quality in his very able painting which has been called "innocent" arises through some necessity he feels to work alone through what is to him art's "period of purification." "If we are ever to have such a thing as a proletarian art," he says, "it will come from the palette and not from the platform. Paint thinking is a mental process in no way related to or associated with word thinking." Benjamin Kopman (born 1887) suggests the one-time Verist, George Grosz, in various ways. There are scope and brilliance in his always well-realized undertakings. His imaginative figure studies include two self-portraits, one the stalwart young man he now is and the other an old man. In the range of his figures, he variously symbolizes sections of our contemporary society. But while skirting the fields of social satire, he seldom actively cultivates them. The Clergyman and The General are typical figures that suggest the earlier Grosz, or the German Max Beckmann, though inspired by a less fervent zeal for reform; and on the whole, stylistically and in mood, he appears nearer the French artist Rouault. His colorful fantasies have been done for the delight of fantasy. "It is the artist's place," says Kopman, "to imbue matter with the glory of life." Carl Nelson was born in Sweden in 1898. Since emerging a few years ago from the influences of conventional art training, he has shown the influence of various styles, but his experiments have been marked with fertility and genuine creativeness, and he gives promise of exceptional power when he arrives at an integrated individual expression. His Looking Forward shows a rather Surrealistic conception of a negro musician's gaudy and childlike dream. The picture reproduced, Musicians, is typical of much of Nelson's recent work. "With our present knowledge of psychology," he says, "abstract art takes on new meaning. Art to me is personal and universal, and I have little interest in trends toward the regional and the national in art." Constantine Pougialis (born 1894) likewise has wished "to absorb the traditions and the philosophies of art, and through them to find freedom for expressing ideas, when and in what manner I choose." He learned the craftsmanship of paint by working with his father in the restoration of Byzantine churches and monasteries, and he studied with Bellows; he now paints in Chicago. His formalistic structure is organic and sensitive and he works to make it increasingly responsive to the demands of his subject. James Sterling (born 1907) can also be seen to work for a unity which is at once that of structure and of mood. Louis Eilshemius is a "natural." He is a genius also, if his own definition of the word be taken. "A genius means a man who creates subjects grand and new," he says. After painting for forty years, more or less in obscurity, this artist was "discovered" by Marcel Duchamp (of Nude Descending a Staircase fame) when in 1917 he entered a painting, Supplication, in the first Independent Artists exhibition. He is now a member of the National Academy. His work is in many museums, including the Metropolitan, which bought his Delaware Water Gap Village in 1932. And when, at seventy-five, he is confined to a wheel chair and can no longer paint, he is by way of becoming a part of America's legendry of success. It was a fresh quality of simplicity and naïveté that Duchamp saw in the Eilshemius painting, the same quality that the postImpressionists recognized in Henri Rousseau, the Frenchman, and that Andrew Dasburg, as a member of a Carnegie International jury, was to discover in the pictures of John Kane. Louis Eilshemius, however, is not a "primitive," as the wider range of his work shows. (How wide this range is, is perhaps not accurately known. In 1922, he had produced over five thousand pictures, many of which give a vivid, sensitively conceived life to some bit of American landscape.) His water colors, painted about the time Twachtman was producing the woodland scenes, have their own lyric beauty and are finely conceived harmonies of color and design. Since about 1916, he has shown a capacity of the first order for expressing personal pictorial conceptions that are willful legends out of a strange, archaic fancy and things of beauty. "Color is feeling," he says, with his still quick Gallic tongue (he was born in New Jersey of French ancestry) and his gift of epigrammatic clarity. "You go to nature to learn it. But it must be mixed with science. You must use it according to the Old Masters. I always used my colors according to the Old Masters. But I get my material from nature. I paint to make things gay. The world is not gay enough! I spent five years learning to paint those nice little girls that romp through my pictures!" Louis Eilshemius is supremely himself. Lauren Ford, living on a farm called "Sheepfold" in Bethlehem, Connecticut, is also supremely herself. Her painting is naïve, because it is the product of an authentically simple nature. It shows a reverence for the common experiences of life, and sometimes expresses a religious emotion of appealing sincerity. Shiny-faced children in a country parlor, rural affairs set out on view with a breadth recalling canvases of Breughel the Elder, and bright, animated scenes ( Street in Assisi, Metropolitan Museum) are among her subjects. There is in her representative work a structural integrity that appears to have been inherent in the conception of the picture. "My painting takes place as simply as washing floors or mending stockings," she says, "all being part of the daily life," and all performed "to the glory of God." She looks forward to the time when fresco techniques will be more clearly understood, and when all artists will learn their craft in all its branches as in the old workshops of Florence and Venice, believing that apprenticeship systems would prevent the bad art that results so widely from freedom of selfexpression on the part of the immature. The Blessed Innocents, by Lauren Ford, is a lucid record of a personal religious faith. There is an aesthetic significance of the same kind in The Crucifixion and certain other paintings by Lawrence Lebduska, the American of Bohemian ancestry and Bohemian training in the Old World craftwork of stained glass and fresco. This artist has a lively and original color sense and an extraordinary ability to create rich designs based on free linear rhythms. He is frequently called a "primitive" because he works with the same carelessness of conventional means as may be observed in the work of John Kane, the Pittsburgh steel-mill worker, Vincent Canadé, the New York immigrant plasterer, and Thorvald A. Hoyer, the Chicagoan whose profession has been that of "understander" in an acrobatic team. In The Crucifixion, particularly, Lebduska's intention of painting to escape from the difficulties and disappointments of daily life is expressed. "Like the early man who fled from external nature and sought refuge within himself, the modern primitive adopts flight from the 'civilization' that would devour his soul," Hermann Bahr wrote. That is, in effect, what all of the independents among today's painters are doing.