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 twentieth-century principle of form in art The process through which new world types take shape and assert themselves as major points of eminence in art's long development is more easily observed in events of the past than of the present. In the rich, technically progressive, and commercial republic of Florence, during the last three quarters of the fifteenth century and the early part of the next century, conditions were widely favorable to creative artists and to creative experiments in art based upon new scientific knowledge. The result was the formation of a tradition that developed with special regard for the science of visual laws, or what the eye sees--a tradition that remained largely beyond question until the time of Cézanne. Artists at that time devised systems of lines to enclose objects and give them the appearance of three dimensions; they simulated action, thought, feeling, emotions of all sorts, and represented panoramic views of whole sections of society, with group relationships carefully worked out; they painted church walls with pictorial parables of moving reality; and, with the refinement of the knowledge of perspective, they finally knew how to give the illusion of companies of angels moving through space overhead, in semblance of reality. The twentieth-century principle of form in art is a basic principle of abstract construction; and has its analogy with the constructional principles of music and architecture. Many of the illustrations reproduced here show how artists are using this principle as the basis of works expressing qualities of personality and conveying typically American aspects of nature and humanity, or intensities of emotional experience, through its use; while, at the same time, others are using it for creations that are drastically nonrepresentative and are in the realm called "art without object." The influence of French modern art on American modern art is extremely limited at present. At the same time, the importance to American art of Cézanne and the French abstractionists must be insisted upon. Cézanne's statement that he wished to restore a stable structure to the decadent, exhausted, nonplastic painting of his time and to make it again suitable for the museum appears now, in relation to our work, to have a symbolic significance. Abstracting from some selected scene in nature its indispensable elements of line, color, plane, and volume, Cézanne forced these elements to give some adumbration of a structural order that underlies characteristic natural forms, in the interest of which he could discard the semblance of reality upon which all art had insisted for nearly five centuries. All that identifies the art of the twentieth century as other than a working up of new effects from old ones is contained in the experiment and the research upon this one point of abstract structural order. The experiments have been, and still are, concerned with finding relationships between organic forms and geometrical forms; between the principles of construction in nature and the formal order in geometry, architecture, painting, and sculpture. Our painting of spring showers on the Kansas prairies, sand storms in Texas, winter in the logging regions of the Northwest, subways and circuses and strip-tease shows, skyscraper construction and street brawls in cities, starvation and strikes, and all that gives the spectator an awareness of the swift-moving drama of common life: our present art, in all of its phases, owes its inner and plastic significance to this rich background of aesthetic exploration and discovery. Modern art insists that new types of art are not invented; they are evolved; and they appear when the enlarged knowledge of a new age reveals, first to the intuition of small numbers of creative workers, relationships that are constant among the forms. It is not a narrow Americanism or national pride that, for two decades, has pointed to signs that the central activity of a new major art type is destined to take place in America, within this century. These expectations, voiced chiefly by eminent European historians and critics, are based upon the nature of the changing American scene, in its economic, racial, technological, and scientific aspects, and upon the vast scope of the changes.