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 Beginnings of American Modernism Contemporary art in America is represented by a body of painting and sculpture greater than that of any other country in the world; it shows evidences of sound craftsmanship; and, more significantly, it is alive and creative. If the statement sounds controversial and exaggerated, it is because of the revolutionary state of all creative effort and the current confusions about what is art; and because of the confusions and revolutions in every aspect of the national and international life from which art draws its substance and its character. Until the end of the nineteenth century, no claim was made for an independent American art; that is, for an art that expressed the spirit of New World life and at the same time satisfied the prevailing technical requirements of international critics. Our artists were European educated, and our Academy drew its authority unquestioningly from European officialdom, at a time when all official art in Europe was in a state of unprecedented anemia. We have only to look at today's situation in perspective against the stagnant backwashes of late nineteenth-century American eclecticism to appreciate the contrast. Today's artist is independent. He may get his education exclusively in America. He is free to make a profession of painting or sculpture, and to express himself with all the originality and force he possesses in either field. Even more than the poet, the playwright, the novelist, he makes himself sensitive to the changing spirit of his age. We may have no genius of the first rank in world art. We have no "school" of the kind that men from Charles Willson Peale to Arthur B. Davies foresaw. We have not even the beginnings of a new American tradition. But we have sensitive and mature painters, and a few sculptors. We have generations of young men who are filled with selffaith, and faith in America's cultural destiny--however variously they may visualize that destiny in the terms of their own temperament, artistic inheritance, or racial background. Our art is still formative. It is, however, no longer concentrated in one small area in the North Atlantic states, but has representation in every geographical area of the country, as recent surveys and "samplings" have shown. It is no longer exclusive in practice; the art of the "forgotten man" and of the untaught having its place wherever widely representative showings are held. It is not by this permeative activity that we recognize it as American, however, any more than we accept it as modern because of the chaos and the anarchy that are still observable in it after over a quarter of a century. The conventional technical practices of nineteenth-century studios are in process of final rejection--the end products of the exhausted Renaissance period. Imitation and the reproduction of the surface semblances of things have reached their final perfection (and their final futility); and a more direct re-presentation of things themselves is sought. The artist, imaginatively moved by experiences that are new to his time and his place, again becomes the interpreter of the age. Young men, as we near the nineteen forties, turn again in large numbers to abstract art, to pick up clues from Cézanne or the early and most creative Cubists, convinced that all art must return to its sources and must painstakingly evolve a new plastic language for experiences that cannot be conveyed by the technical means evolved in Florentine and Venetian studios of the quattrocento for kingly pageants and for the heavenly hierarchies of angels and cherubim, and God Himself enthroned. At the other extreme from the abstractionists, there are artists who feel the necessity of showing the psychological conflicts, not of the masses, but of man, with the instrument of a new order in his hands. There are no hard and fast groups nor clean-cut divisions in the varieties of effort that are observable everywhere. Men of opposing principles often exhibit together, and in most of the important annual exhibitions on a national scale, representation is cross-sectional. This means that the exceptional artist or art student is still largely left to arrive at his own definitions and make his alliances independently, and that therefore his achievement is the more notable when he arrives at recognition. The extent to which our critical values remain unclarified--and the extent therefore of the individual artist's necessity for making his own way--is seen in the acquisition policies of the museums. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, for instance, the leading institution of its kind in America and one of the foremost of the world, within a short period acquired Watteau's Le Mezzetin (at a reported cost of $250,000) and one of the Walt Disney paintings on celluloid from the motion-picture sequence for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Of the creator of Mickey Mouse, the Three Little Pigs, and Donald Duck, Harry B. Wehle, curator of painting of this institution, said: "I think he is a great historical figure in the development of American art." The spirit of rebellion that was beginning to appear in American art at the opening of the century assumed the scope of a revolution on the occasion of that now historic event, the Armory Show (officially the International Exposition of Modern Art). The pine tree of the American Revolution, adopted as the Show's emblem, became, even beyond the expectation of the sponsors, a badge of independence from the authority of outmoded academic practices and restrictions. The Armory Show was sponsored by the American Painters and Sculptors Association, an insurgent group of twenty-five artists who had banded together at a time when French post-Impressionism was exciting Europe and when the new work was beginning to be seen here. The original intention of the sponsors was simply to exhibit some of the work of independent young Americans over the heads of the Academy (a gesture more daring a quarter of a century ago than young men of today can readily realize). But the plans grew even bolder as they went forward. Arthur B. Davies, acting as president of the Association, and Walt Kuhn, its secretary, went to Europe, and, first and last, borrowed from all the outstanding centers of European modern art works of painters and sculptors that were to confuse and divide the American art public thereafter for a full quarter of a century, and until today. In Paris, Munich, Cologne, Berlin, Brussels, the Hague, London, they engaged Cézannes , Picassos, Matisses, Lehmbrucks, Munchs, Gauguins, Van Goghs, and an array of experimental art of many new named varieties. Kuhn, who went alone at first, on borrowed money, personally underwrote the expenses of a roomful of Redons. Arthur B. Davies, who was a connoisseur and a scholar as well as a painter, painstakingly made a chart to show how the new influences had come in along currents from Ingres, Delacroix, Daumier, Corot, Manet, Cézanne, Renoir, and so on, to the twentieth-century Frenchmen and the young Americans. In a catalogue foreword, he explained the intention of the event, which was, he said, to show the American public what contemporary art was, and to permit it to arrive at its own independent judgment about that art. The history of American academism to that time had been made under the influence of indirect invasion and slow reform. But the International Exposition of Modern Art, opening at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York, in February, 1913, was seen as open anarchy. Not even the Salon des Refusés of 1863, in Paris, aroused a more resounding commotion or established a more hostile atmosphere towards all unconventional creative effort in official circles. Academists and traditionalists, conservative critics and public personages of distinction came to the Show; social leaders, reformers, sensation seekers, and finally grade-school classes en masse. A large part of the public came, and was perplexed--and even angered--over what it could not understand in Cézanne, Van Gogh, Matisse, the Cubists. The atmosphere of mystification was increased by the scope of the work, which included, without distinction, the masters of the post-Impressionist revolution and their predecessors, and fantastic experimenters in minor movements. This accounts for the undue prominence given to Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, a gay and lighthearted venture, by a versatile innovator, in crossing various currents of modern influence, Cubism and Dadaism included. This experimental painting, even more than the pine tree on the thousands of celluloid buttons that were passed out to be worn by visitors, became fixed in the conventional mind of the larger public as the symbol and sign that art had gone mad. The confusion was increased, at the time, by the fact that American artists in many parts of the country had received the news of the exhibition tardily and that their canvases came pouring in even after the opening. The judges were obliged to abandon the cataloguing finally, and squads of hastily trained young women were stationed in the section to identify the works as best they could, from memory. Kenyon Cox, Edwin Blashfield, and Royal Cortissoz were the most prominent figures of the art world in denouncing the effort. Theodore Roosevelt, recently out of the White House, wrote a pungent and personal opinion for a leading journal. Every periodical of consequence in the country carried at least one critical article in the ensuing months. Duret's book on the French Impressionists had been circulated for a number of years, reviewing Cézanne's struggles against accepted opinion and voicing the conviction that never again--as a result of his experience--would artists have to fight so great a fight before justifying themselves in the face of conventional prejudice. Nevertheless, Cézanne was seen as "an offshoot of the Impressionist school," an artist who could not learn his trade and who painted nonsense. Van Gogh was seen as an incompetent egoist and "obviously insane." Matisse and Picasso were showmen, giving the cue to America to turn the art world upside down. Sargent, in London, opposed modern art, and his name was invoked by conservative American critics. Christian Brinton was among the sympathetic and informed critics. He wrote clearly and challengingly to the young men of the century, urging on them the necessity of making a new art in the terms of their own sensibilities and their own age. It is the business of the young artist of this century, as of all centuries, he said, to keep alive that primal wonder and curiosity concerning the universe, visible and invisible, that has been the informing spirit of creative art since the days of the cave men. The Armory Show was dismantled after it had gone to Chicago and to Boston. But the revolutionary spirit spread, the modern influence made its way. The Metropolitan Museum bought a Cézanne, the first to be acquired by a public institution in this country. Galleries were opened for showing French art. Special exhibitions were offered. Artists and art students felt the challenge to investigate. The growth of American modernism during the intervening quarter of a century has been marked by a decade or so of obvious technical experiment influenced by French post-Impressionism and by abstract art, followed by a decade of obvious concentration upon subject. At the time of the Armory Show there were young realists who were taking their characters and their scenes from the city streets, the milling life of the slums, the parks, and the intimate byways. They sought to make these subjects vivid and irresistible by their fidelity to simple, everyday fact. There were also theorists, home from twentieth-century Paris with their new conceptions of significant form and their talk of abstraction and the expressiveness of materials and of the sensuous and plastic elements of a work of art as its determinants. Henri, Luks, Lawson, Glackens, Shinn, Sloan; Marin, Hartley, Maurer, Weber, Sheeler, Demuth, were representative figures of opposing groups.