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	Max Weber, Maurice Sterne, Abraham Walkowitz, Ben Benn Max Weber (born 1881), with Marsden Hartley, Abraham Walkowitz, and a few others, first exhibited post-Impressionist work in New York in the basement of a picture-frame store about the time Alfred Stieglitz was beginning to bring over the work of new Frenchmen to show at "291." Early Webers, productions in oil, water color, black and white, and gouaches, show massed and interblent figures emerging, as if reluctantly, from backgrounds which hold them, in geometric designs or in the indistinctly defined shapes of amorphous earth masses. With the true post-Impressionist's insatiable interest in art's remoter and more obscure pasts wherever they promised something new, Weber became a student of Persian and Chinese art, as well as of the Spanish and the Italian primitive styles. One of the early periods of his own development of a style produced a pure linear abstraction. His White Horse, of 1910, in gouache, has a distinct kind of beauty like a later Lurçat. His still lifes represent a notable series in the Cézannist tradition, with The Celadon Vase, now in the Metropolitan Museum, representing a high point in achievement. Meanwhile, before 1920, the Weber symbolic figure groups began to appear, suggesting somber Old Testament characters or the personifications of anciently meaningful, almost forgotten proverbs. The Musicians, of 1918, is one. The Women, painted a little later, is another. With the series of rabbis and Talmudists, these comprise some of the finest painting done by any American of the twentieth century. The Weber style has unmistakable idioms observable chiefly in his very personal palette and his method of distorting forms. His paintings have been exhibited in London, Paris, Moscow, and the cities of Germany, and are perhaps more widely known than those of any other American. Maurice Sterne (born 1877) was not strikingly American or outstandingly "modern" in the ordinary sense. Though his work is a distinct expression of the post-Cézannist period, there is about it a quality of archaism, almost of timelessness. Sterne began working as an engraver's apprentice in New York as a boy of twelve, and may have been helped to his precision of style by that early training in skilled craftsmanship. He has lived, studied, and worked in a Greek monastery, in the South Sea Islands, and in Mexico, and altogether has spent much of his life outside the reach of traditional influences. What he has done in all the phases of a versatile painting career, however, has quietly taken its place in American modern art. He has painted Balinese girls and festivals and ceremonies, Mexican field workers, and, most notably, many women and girls who are very much alive in their substantial simplicity and very close to nature, but of no specific period or place. Some of his black-and-white work achieves a decorative richness which recalls that of Gauguin, and like Gauguin, Sterne has also produced a small but by no means insignificant body of sculpture. His murals recently executed for the United States Treasury Department on commission add to the scope of his already extensive expression. Abraham Walkowitz (born 1880) has worked prolifically and disinterestedly for thirty years to further what he has seen as the finest expression of modern art. He was one of the early post-Impressionists who has experimented in many directions, and has been a quiet influence on younger men. Phases of his own work have shown a sensitive recognition of the stylistic distinctions of other men, of Gauguin, Matisse, Picasso, and others, and a capacity for borrowing them to his own ends. "I must seek to attune my art to what I feel to be the keynote of my experience," he wrote in a lengthy statement in 1913, which still appears to express his artistic philosophy. The test to which he put his work, he added, was the power of the painted "equivalent" to recreate for him the inner emotional stir which he had first felt when the subject chose him. He has returned again and again to friezelike paintings where human figures in idyllic nature settings form arabesque-like designs of great beauty. His flower paintings demonstrate a fine feeling for pure color harmonies, and the series of Orientalized heads of women reach another kind of color richness, where he builds with dense, luminous polychrome paint on paper. Some of his work has continued linear and abstract, recalling figures by Picasso and patterns of skyscrapers by Marin, and much of it shows an affinity with the paintings of certain German forerunners of the Expressionists. Ben Benn (born 1884) was a less sensitive but a more vigorous and emphatic painter, who early learned the meaning of naturalism from Manet and the other Impressionists and the secret of what he calls "harmonic form" from Cézanne and Matisse. The Mother and Child in the Whitney Museum has an austere Byzantine suggestion and is representative of the period in which Benn placed primary reliance on color organization. The Shipwreck, first shown in the mid-thirties, achieves its powerful plastic expressiveness through the manipulation of simple forms in water and spray-filled air. Cubism and the succeeding movements, each with its manifesto, were still news in Paris, when two young Americans there, S. MacDonald Wright and Morgan Russell, exhibited their new art of pure color under the name of Synchromy, which merely means "with color," with the aid of Willard Huntington Wright, who was already established as a writer and critic. They concluded that "painting is finished." That, historically, painting had always been a development of colored drawings; that after Rubens it had been nothing but technical experiment; and that that experiment since Cézanne and the innovators of his era had been towards a new compositional use of color. They presented Synchromy as the first development, against that background, of an art for the twentieth century. MacDonald Wright spent years in devising a system of the inherent and absolute movement of colors toward and away from the spectator, and an explanation of the use of this system for arriving at three-dimensional rhythmic organizations in paint that were entirely abstract. "They wished to express by means of color, forms which would be as complete and as simple as a Michelangelo drawing," the author wrote in a discussion of the two artists' work, "and which would give subjectively the same emotion of form that Renaissance art gives objectively. They wished to create images of such logical structure that the imagination would experience their recognizable reality in the same way that the eye experiences the recognizable realities of everyday life. They strove to bring about a new and hitherto unperceived reality which would be as definite and moving as the commonplace realities of every day, in short, to find an abstract statement for life itself by the use of forms which had no definable aspect." A small public with appetite whetted for novelties exclaimed with delight over the sheer and almost bewildering beauty of the creations, first in Paris and later in New York. But Synchromy as a named movement shared the dilemma of all early abstract art. It proved comprehensible chiefly to its makers, and remained so because they withdrew quietly from the field about 1916 and went about other affairs. Meantime mobile color theory, a subject of exhaustive scientific research, is familiarly employed in modern picture building in the Cézanne-Matisse-Picasso tradition, and even in modern professional design. Red and yellow, for instance, are among the warm colors that advance towards the spectator; blue and violet correspondingly recede; and the infinite play of internal dynamic movement that may thus be set up within the bounds of a painting and correlated with the dynamic interplay of forms accounts for the exciting beauty of some modern painting. The conclusion about abstract painting, as represented in Synchromy, seems to be that, like all art, it is the outward form of a personal idea or perception and must be understandable to a public, however small. It must make use of some understandable language of form. But if the Synchromists' pictures remained mere decorative abstractions to others, the Synchromists themselves still appear prophetic of a nonsubject art in America of which indications became visible from many sides in the mid-thirties, amidst a general vogue for realism in painting and a clamorously popular wave of colored illustrations. "While there will always be illustrative pictures, it cannot be denied that this century may see the flowering of a new art of forms and colors," said Morgan Russell in the early days, voicing perfectly the sentiments of the Concretists, the Syncretists, the Constructivists, and other of our strictly contemporary nonfigurative painters. In the intervening period no group has evolved a credo or issued a manifesto showing more maturity and breadth of background and outlook.