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	Significant Vision Large groups of contemporary artists work more visibly in the "middle kingdom," as Ernest H. Short (in The Painter in History) has called the region where the artist may impose on matter what form he will and may invent activities that give a complete ideal satisfaction to the contending faculties of sense and spirit. The plastic structure which gives the paintings of these artists their claim to a place in modern art though substantially apparent is not that of the conspicuous post-Cubists and seekers for significant form. The visual content, drawn as it is from the familiar world, is careless of actual appearances, but glows with the unique coloring of the artist's personality as seen in the shapes of his dream. The paintings are spontaneous creations, in which form is fused with vision into unities which often have great distinction and beauty. Outstanding independents, with a discriminating knowledge of painting "style" in its essence, an understanding of tradition in its continuity, and historical sense, work in this way. Intuitives, aware of a subconscious life underlying the surface semblance of nature, also work this way. John Carroll and Yasuo Kuniyoshi are familiarly classed as independents. Henry Mattson is an intuitive, whose paintings have an affinity with work by Ryder and are understandable in the light of Chinese canons of painting of the fifth century, just as the contemporary painting of George Grosz (now an American citizen) is related, by the intensity of its subjective mood, to Van Gogh's work. Louis Eilshemius, in the phases in which he has often been called a "primitive," or Lauren Ford, when her theme is inspired by an innate reverence, shows the observer glimpses of a private world of vision which is felt to be his, or her, real world. "My aesthetic credo," says John Carroll, "is to produce pictures which move the observer to experience an emotional reaction that contributes to his delight in living, or carries him beyond the dull, commonplace, or ordinary." "I use the above three adjectives in place of the so-called reality,'" he says, "as reality to me is something akin to nature. The true reality is in the mind. It is the expression of our aspirations and not of the circumstances of living." The simplicity of some of the Carroll paintings, the more mature ones, has misled a part of the public and caused them to be classed as American realism. The fragile, dreamy figures, wrapped in a luminous unreality, are among the results of a process of self-education that has extended over a long period and has included painting in varied phases of European modernism. There is a fine sensitiveness in the Carroll landscapes of the twenties. Like the Mother and Children, the Three People, and other figure groups of the early period, they are essays in modernist procedures embarked upon with fresh, imaginative enthusiasm and carried through to aesthetic realization. In Lydia, Agatha, Georgia with Flowers, the ambiguous and provocative Diana, and the memorable Anita, John Carroll was arriving at the flexibility of craftsmanship through which he is able to evoke deep subtleties of feminine character. The studies of young negroes and the portrait studies, notably those of Henry Mattson and of Dr. Valentiner, are vividly realized with a minimum reliance upon observed detail. Nothing is added to the design, all is integral to it. Arrangement is a still-life study where planes of light separate and emphasize such ordinary properties as a reproduction of the Virgin and Child and a vase on a table so as to relate them in an extraordinary design and give them extraordinary significance. In Stiff Shirt, Henry McBride, critic of the New York San, sees "unique greatness. Each brushstroke seems to pile subtlety upon subtlety without loss of strength till we positively see--instead of just fresh clothes spread upon a chair--a luminous adumbration of the complex romantic night ahead. The accomplishment," he says, "betokens imagination of a high order." The typical Carroll is gray, somber, or, more often, delicate to the point of suggesting a luminous immateriality, but his colors are on occasion clear and bright. His line is fluid and sensitive, and his craftsmanship is superb. All that he does bears the stamp of direct, intellectual honesty. This artist was born in Kansas City in 1892, and studied with Frank Duveneck, from whom he can be seen to have derived his regard for the classical painting tradition. Yasuo Kuniyoshi is a native of Japan (born 1893) who came to America in 1906. His work resembles that of John Carroll, not only in its independence of conventional style limitations, but also in its subtlety and its essentially imaginative inspiration. There is the familiar Kuniyoshi brown, as distinctive a note of this artist's products as is the Carroll gray. Kuniyoshi has brought a lively creative spirit to his experiments in many phases of modernist painting, and when he says that he is a realist, it is apparent that he, also, conceives of the meaning of the word as other than visual verisimilitude. The droll three-cornered cows produced as a series to demonstrate one phase of Cubism have already been mentioned as an example of his gift for fantasy. His Boy Stealing Fruit is like an accentuated copy of American provincial painting (at its hard, bright, objective best), with a stressing of the aesthetic significance. It is, at the same time, (and the fact is typical of many Kuniyoshi still-life arrangements) given a psychological meaning. It is a sly piece of portraiture, incidentally, with observations upon the morallessness of greedy infancy. Pascin has frequently been noted as an influence observable in many Kuniyoshi women. But his gains from that and other European artists, at certain stages, can be seen to have been made through a fresh approach each time to the aesthetic problem, and his resultant painting has usually revealed an original talent of an exceptionally sensitive kind. The Twentieth Century Index of American Artists said, in giving this artist's biographical record, that he was the only Japanese in America who showed influences of neither Occidental nor Oriental tradition. Kuniyoshi's maturest painting appears in canvases of which Café ( 1937) is an example. Technically, this is modernist work of a distinguished order, where the unity of the plastic construction seems to have been assimilated unobtrusively into the unity of psychological atmosphere, and "the girl is seen to live in her own right," as one newspaper critic said. As in the Carroll portrait studies and figures, all is integral to the design. The few strong, simple volumes are held in a free, centrifugal rhythm and made to communicate a unity of vision by means that could belong to no other painting conception than that of the twentieth century. Franklin Watkins of Philadelphia who has something in common with these men, has made his reputation as a painter upon the rather remarkable gift of precipitating the observer into moments of suspense as if they were pauses preceding the climax of a tense drama. The significance is aesthetic and not literary because the subjects live in the moment alone. In the case of Man Laughing at Woman (from the Courtauld collection, London University) the observer does not care why, or what the woman will say. Rather, he has a moment of fascinated participation, from an angle of vision that is very oblique indeed, in one of the ancient inequalities of creation. In Gabriel, the spirit of young self-expression flares high as the cornettist toots his horn, with a skull among the properties on the table beside him; and in Soliloquy, the same young man in a moment of profound introversion surrenders his fancy to what may be the raptures of first love. In all these paintings, in Paper Bouquet, Suicide in Costume, and other typical Watkins pictures (which show a regard for the conventions of fine painting), almost extravagant use is made of the modernist device of distorting for emphasis. In the least effective works, plastic organization is sacrificed to visual suggestiveness, but oftenest there is a firm structure; and there is a quality here which belongs to the age that has produced the angle shots of the candid camera, and the behavior psychologist's "looking at" human nature. Franklin Watkins is a sensitive artist who takes the stuff of a highly individual subjective experience and gives it a plastic embodiment, painting (as does John Carroll) to add to the pleasure and amusement of the observer. Henry E. Mattson, of Woodstock, is the outstanding American contemporary who has placed primary reliance, as a painter, upon aspects of the familiar world and the landscape in larger view, as felt and remembered. Like Ryder's, his painting reveals a deep mysticism towards nature. Like Ryder, he is largely self-taught. Mattson was born in Sweden in 1887. After coming to America, he worked as a mechanic. The story is now familiar of a Saturday night in Worcester, Massachusetts, when he saw a display of paint and other artist materials in a shop window as he was going home with his pay in his pocket. His Woodstock neighbor, Ernest Brace, gave an authentic firsthand version of it in the, then, American Magazine of Art, about the time Mattson's work came to the attention of a general public. He bought the paint, and set to work to become an artist. Most of his painting has been done in the art colony at Woodstock where the uncertainties of artist life at first brought hardships to his family. The extraordinary quality of his work was recognized from the start by other artists and a small number of people, however, and when general recognition came to him, it came swiftly. His neighbors like to recall how, in the depth of a depression winter, he was cutting wood under a sky and a spiritual atmosphere too dark even for his darkest palette, when the postman came. Unexpectedly, in the same mail he received three honors which, altogether, changed his status to that of a recognized artist. One was a commission for a painting for the Federal Government, awarded on the basis of WPA work done; one was the notice that he had been awarded a fellowship for work and study; and the third was the news that a museum had bought one of his pictures! It is the landscapes and seascapes which seem particularly to reveal the unique gift of this artist. The earlier ones were painted in somber, involved masses, and often recalled certain Ryders, not so much through resemblance as in the similarity of conception and the frequency of moonlight effects and weirdly suggestive lighting. The later works are generally larger, lighter, and more luminous, and though Mattson seldom paints from a bright palette, they are more positively colorful as well as more boldly simple in construction. The Waterfall (seen in various exhibitions), placed beside the Wings of the Morning, of the Metropolitan Museum collection, makes clear this contrast and illustrates the direction of the artist's progress. In the Wings of the Morning, as in Deep Waters and comparable works of the same period (the mid-thirties), there is an atmosphere of splendor, a quality that has resulted from the mood of exultation in which the artist experienced the vastness of the mid-ocean's dynamic pulsations. No one has ever painted blue dawn across the sea and sky in just the same way. It suggests the way of the Chinese that was embodied in the canons of painting of Hsieh-Ho some thirteen hundred years ago, and that sought to show, through the nature subjects, the artist's recognition of the inner life of nature, its unity and its wholeness; the way of the Chinese landscapes that reached their climax in the great Sung period. But it is Mattson's own. All work of this order is concerned with the reality of a fresh experience that is spiritual in the oldest sense of the word and is most flawless when most spontaneously communicated and when shown with fewest contrived features. The "landscapes of the mind" that George Grosz has been painting at his home on Long Island are dipped deep in the swift, dark symbolism of a Van Gogh; they appear as the records of a struggle for individual reorientation, sometimes through flashes of blinding emotional vision, sometimes with satirical overtones that recall briefly the earlier periods of this artist's work in Germany.