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	American Modern Movements Robert Henri and Alfred Stieglitz were the conspicuous leaders and influences in the movements that were to give our art its character after 1913. American painting was never called anemic after Henri. He was the first American teacher to arouse in his students a spirit of militancy and an idealism for their cause that made them go out and blacken the eyes and bloody the noses of students of the older established school, in fights that might begin over baseball but ended over art. He was probably the first group leader whose followers flaunted the names insultingly given them by conservative critics and the public of the time. Henri stood for thorough and sincere workmanship and for the integrity of personal vision, and his influence in these directions is still strong, though upon younger generations who have come to distinguish between plastic values and literary values in art more clearly than was possible in Henri's time. Alfred Stieglitz has displayed a prophetic judgment in discovering and fostering talent among unrecognized artists and bringing their work to the attention of a small public, to whom he also showed the first work of Cézanne, Matisse, Rousseau, Picasso, and other European moderns to be seen in this country. He was the first also to demonstrate here that photography might have its own aesthetic standards, and the first to demonstrate anywhere that children's art had its place and might be appreciated along with abstract art. Stieglitz values above everything the individual sensibility, and the contribution of original, creative painters and sculptors to a new cultural expression. Weber and Marin, Prendergast, Walkowitz, Hartley, Karfiol, Hartman, Sheeler, Demuth were among Americans who had been students of French post-Impressionism before 1913, as were the Zorachs, Dasburg, and McFee. Some of them had held small and bewildering exhibitions in New York in the earliest days of Cubist influence. In 1916, the Forum Exhibition established a landmark. A jury including Alfred Stieglitz, Robert Henri, Christian Brinton, W. H. Wright, and W. H. De B. Nelson, selected "the best work of the best modern artists," including paintings by Ben Benn, Oscar Bluemner, Andrew Dasburg, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Alfred Maurer, Henry Lee McFee, Morgan Russell, Charles Sheeler, Abraham Walkowitz, and Marguerite and William Zorach. The event not only was the first thoughtful presentation of American post-Impressionist accomplishments, but it was accompanied by a symposium written by the artists for the catalogue and giving a thoughtfully worded account of what they sought to do. The Society of Independent Artists, which was largely an outgrowth of Robert Henri's influence in behalf of freedom for the individual artist to work and exhibit without official interference, held its first annual, free-for-all exhibition early in the following year, 1917, when the confusion and excitement occasioned by America's entrance into the World War were at their height. This event was in sharp contrast with the small, highly selective Forum Exhibition, and represented "a composite of the soul of America, with all its boundless riches and its amazing poverty." The quotation is from the statement of John Sloan, the first president, and the Society's leader through most of the intervening period. This large-scale opportunity for showing painting and sculpture without jury and without "creating distinctions among exhibitors by awarding prizes," called forth, and has continued to call forth, original and creative work that had lacked channels of expression. It includes, side by side with painting and sculpture by notables in the art world, work that is crude and melodramatic, that is raucous and self-assertive and incompetent, and some work that would ordinarily be barred from public exhibition by rules of ethics and good taste. The Chicago No-Jury Society, following the precedent of the Independents, was organized in 1921, and provided through difficult years, as it still provides, opportunity for all artists of the Great Lakes region, and others, to exhibit outside the restrictions set by the region's established center, the Art Institute of Chicago. In war and postwar years, experimental art, with literature, poetry, criticism, the theater, architecture, the dance, was vibrant with a new quality of life, that had here and there the aspects of a minor Renaissance. An inconsequential phase of Paris life came to Greenwich Village with its postures and its parasites, and that historic section of New York City became the center from which a kind of Bohemian life spread over the country. D. H. Lawrence, Marcel Proust, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein; the Russian Ballet, the Provincetown Players; the Liberator and the Masses, were of the times. Forty thousand people attended the large-scale exhibition of French post-Impressionist masterpieces at the Metropolitan Museum in New York in 1921, the largest and most important exhibition of its kind in America to that time, showing that public resistance to what is strange and new was in this case wearing down. An anonymous group protest followed, ostensibly made by the museum's important supporters. It denounced the exhibition as a vicious influence and referred to certain artists as "degenerates." But it was proof of the changing times that nothing came of it. Technical facility and knowledge of the backgrounds of art increased prodigiously all over the country. Men of talent gained recognition as post-Impressionists, while a few individuals of exceptional sensibility developed their own independent modern art style. Before the mid-twenties, and partly at least in response to the fashions in art that demanded the new interest, there were signs of a general turning from problems of form to problems of subject; and in the decade from 1925 to 1935, painters and sculptors in numbers became again American realists. Charles Burchfield was a young painter, for instance, working with an intense consciousness of the changes that advancing industrial life were making in his native Ohio. Being a romantic realist he undertook to do in painting what Sherwood Anderson had done in prose in Winesburg, Ohio and other stories, and to add his own testimony to that of Masters, Dreiser, Willa Cather, and the others, as to the impact of industry upon the lingering pioneer life. He is said to have been the first "American Scene" artist. "American Scene" art, the essential significance of which was obscured for a time by the almost spectacular publicity with which it was attended, was part of a new impulse to paint American, to capture the spirit of our changing, dynamic life. It appeared simultaneously with the wave of neoRomanticism that marked the reaction of French painting against abstract art (and also with Surrealism). The art of class-conscious American workers and their struggle for power came to prominence about the same time, inheriting high standards of graphic design from the revolutionary periodicals of our own country and certain modern painting practices from the Mexicans. The disillusionment and cynicism of the postwar Germans, the Verists, were echoed in their early work. Rivera, Siqueiros, and Orozco, revolutionary Mexico's official muralists, were largely responsible for a new phase of interest in fresco in this country and for opportunities which began to open to American artists in this direction.