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 Spirit of Research and Significant Form Conspicuous among the younger modernists were the experimenters with symbol images for the American machine-age architectural and industrial constructions which contributed an outstanding aspect to contemporary life. Stefan Hirsch and Niles Spencer, among them, based their painting upon an elementary Cubism, which like Picasso Houses in Horta and Factories in Horta, reduces the scene to its simplest terms as a pattern of three-dimensional plane relationships. Of his paintings of this order, which extended over a considerable period, Stefan Hirsch Lower Manhattan, dating from 1921, is the most notable. This is a complex design of cubed forms from which all particularization of surface, texture, and shapes has been drastically eliminated, and in which a totality of effect has been achieved that presents to the perception an idea of the massed power of metropolitan constructional complexes. The less familiar New England Town, owned by the Worcester Art Museum, shows a more conventional scene reduced to the terms of abstract design. House and pool, plant forms, and the small constructions and equipment are reduced to an elemental unity. Much of the interest derives from the suggestion of machined shapes added to by the reflection of the smooth surfaces in metal-hard water. Stefan Hirsch was born in Germany in 1899, but he has spent most of his life in this country and received here his education, which has been to a large extent self-education. "I was much affected at the time of my earliest work by my New York and New England environment," he says, "and was completely committed to strong, formal, and coloristic structure. My plastic equipment in the long run, however, proved to be limited, and I strove for years to improve it. Alongside this ran a recognition of the increasing complexities of life, and it took me longer than I expected to establish a working method which allowed me to incorporate in the painting complex meaning and simple structure." While Hirsch was tending farther towards the socially conscious painting that was to bring his art back to renewed prominence under another classification in the thirties, Niles Spencer (born 1893) continued in the original abstract direction, employing industrial center buildings and groups, and striving toward simpler and more vital relationships. "I endeavor through study of natural objects to create a formal plan and design in which the various elements are considered entirely in their relative importance to the picture as a whole," he says. Peter Blume (born 1906), using the same architectural and engineering motives from our industrial or marine centers, produced in the earliest and most original phases, a bright, Vermeer-precise kind of painting in which the forms are nonnaturalistic, flat-pattern design with suggestions of space. There are also suggestions in such well-known canvases as Parade and South of Scranton of certain Surrealist work, of some of Dali's, for instance, though the trancelike quality associated with the Freudian expression is lacking, and the symbolic element appears rather as the product of subtle, intellectual observation. Roy Hilton (born 1891) brought an abstract but less formal and static approach to his paintings of the industrial landscapes in the Pittsburgh region. His present painting, in which he delineates nature in broad and simple contours, ranks high in contemporary work because of its clarity of statement and its sensitiveness. Morris Kantor (born 1896), who is Russian born and mainly self-educated, brought a Seurat-like clarity to the organization of his stark-form landscapes at one time. If the forms of these landscapes seem to have petrified sometimes on their way from the brush to the canvas, there is a suggestion that the artist was experiencing a moment of imaginative self-expression such as Kuniyoshi's when painting the triangular cows which represent one phase of his Cubist period of experiment or Arthur Dove's when painting his upstate New York hounds. Morris Kantor, like these two, has a keen instinct for plastic form, and he has painted organic and vital canvases in a variety of styles without having yet finally arrived at a mature and personal medium of expression. Karl Knaths has followed, with almost unparalleled devotion, his own independent path as a modernist, working in comparative isolation on Cape Cod, with a willed avoidance of exposure to the ebb and flow of art's fashions and a willed concentration upon the contemporary problem of expressing life--American life--through "the plastic transformation." He has a Marin-like sensitiveness as a watercolorist, and he also uses oils with meticulous regard for the plastic "weights" of the colors and with a distinctly individual color "style." His Cock and Glove, of 1927, represents one phase in his growth. Duncan Phillips, its owner (Phillips Memorial Gallery collection), has called this a study in the elimination of nonessentials, and has seen in it an example of a kind of art which had its beginnings in cave days and which is best seen in ancient paintings of animals and birds. Knaths' Still Life, owned by A. E. Gallatin, in the Museum of Living Art at New York University, is a study of the Cubist phase in which effort--particularly that of Braque--was concentrated upon texture contrast and the separation of planes in space. In representative contemporary landscapes, he strives for an architectonic unity, a formal order, that is established mainly by the vitality of the rhythm in which the few and simple elements are held, and that operates upon the consciousness of the observer as do certain modern musical compositions. The ideal for which Knaths is striving is suggested when he says that naturalism, however profound, is no longer an adequate theme for our generation of painters. "I have to admit that art must still be in the making," he says, "and that our best artists have much to learn before they can initiate a new culture that deserves the name. A new stage, however, is being reached, for instance in certain efforts of Picasso, in the recent Guernica, where materiality is transcended; where art is abstract but collectively valid." Knaths was born in Wisconsin in 1892, and studied at the Art Institute of Chicago. "I am an Expressionist," he says. "Expressionism in terms of the materials is my aim. Any connotative content is taken into account in my work as a modification of the form and not as distinct from it." He believes that modern art, from beginnings made by Cézanne, has recovered the key to an understanding of the earth's plastic cultures, primitive, ancient, and "traditional," and that a great, still uncrystallized process is under way, representing the assimilation of what is vital from past periods with contemporary discoveries, and that our hope of a new cultural expression of our own is to be looked for as a result. "Americana looks parochial beside such efforts," he says, "and proletarian art now attempting to find forms beyond those of journalistic use is not very successful, because, after all, the artists have not found themselves as proletarians!" Jean Charlot is an international figure; but he has painted and taught, written in the field of art criticism, and exhibited in this country, and has made his place among mature American moderns. He was born in Paris in 1898 of a mixed ancestry, partly Spanish. He developed under the influence of French modernism, and at the outset of his artistic career went to Mexico. He was selected by the Carnegie Institution in 1926 to make the official drawings of archaeological discoveries at Chitzen-Itza in Yucatan. The Mayan frescoes and basreliefs unearthed there, with the longer record of ancient cultures in Central America, have been a formative influence in his painting. He was a conspicuous pioneer in the so-called Mexican Renaissance, and painted one of the first of the frescoes in Mexico City that represent a revolutionary return of art to an age-old medium for appealing to the people. Charlot characteristically uses brilliant colors in large, relatively flat areas. He organizes these areas into simple rhythmic patterns by the smiled arrangement of repeated and opposed color planes, and thus effects the "decorative" quality usually attributed to his work. Using a different palette, however, with emphasis upon white, he often achieves a luminous quality and a spatial depth in which his figures appear symbolic in the largeness and the simplicity of their homely forms. The women and the children of Mexico are particularly his subjects, or rather the medium through which he communicates something of the quiet dignity of folkways in an ancient, homogeneous, and tropically colorful culture. Jean Charlot is a brilliant critic, and a writer on many phases of painting. Of the contemporary approach, he once wrote: "Easel pictures as well as monumental paintings must be built up as soundly as one would build a house. The architectural quality does not depend on the work's conformity to accidental optics, but on the relation of line and color, per se, of the balance of volumes and spaces. Emotion is all-important as the genesis of art, but in transcribing it into general terms, reason and knowledge are required." "Visual memory has an emotional content much richer than objective vision." Charlot has been called a religious painter, not so much because he sometimes draws his theme from the Catholic faith, as in the recently completed Stations of the Cross, as because he brings certain compositional themes to a static balance that represents the emotional quality of calm reverence surrounding the everyday life of traditionally simple Catholic folk. Nothing could be more in contrast with the emotional tone of many representative proletarian paintings projected from the subconscious background of our confused and confusing era of social transition. Shaker Service, introduced as an example of Ambrose Patterson's painting, has the same quality of expressive form and is a product of the same kind of visual evocation as the Cooking Lesson by Charlot; while Herman Maril, working with less maturity, can be seen to have the same direction: to respect the traditional and ageless order in painting and to make a transcription of experience, meantime, with an emotionally inspired life content.