Painting

PAINTING

Schools

"Ashcan," "Precisionist," "Regionalist"—several schools of American art flourished in the 1920s, as well as important painters unallied with any school.

"Ashcan."

The "Ashcan School," developed from Impressionism, was realistic painting of informal subject and style. John Sloan (1871-1951) and George Bellows (1882-1925) were still producing important work in the 1920s (Sixth Avenue Elevated at Third Street by Sloan in 1928; Lady Jean by Bellows in 1924), though they are identified especially with the preceding decade.

Stieglitz Group

After the 1913 New York Armory Show launched modern art in America, the two principal clusters of American avant-garde artists were the Stieglitz Group and the Precisionists. All of these painters were born in the 1870s and 1880s, and they overlapped. The Stieglitz circle were painters who had been exhibited by photographer Alfred Stieglitz at his 291 Fifth Avenue gallery. Mostly European-trained and influenced by Cubism, they included Max Weber (1881—1961) and Arthur Dove (1880-1946), who had been in Henry Matisse's painting class in Paris in 1908; John Marin (1870-1953) and Marsden Hartley (1877-1943) had also studied in Europe. Weber, the first to develop a mature style, was a Cubist painter and sculptor. His Tranquility (1928) is a formal composition of three primitively massive female nudes in repose. Arthur Dove was an early innovator in nonobjective painting; his Fog Horns (1929) is a visual representation of three ominous, fog-muffled blasts of sound. Hartley (1877-1943) was influenced by German Expressionism; in the 1920s he worked in New Mexico, painting bold, abstract landscapes. Marin was a master of watercolor whose Cubist-influenced seascapes and cityscapes are full of movement; his Sunset was painted in 1922. Joseph Stella, an adjunct member of the Stieglitz group, was influenced by Italian Futurism with its geometric patterns and changing angles of vision. A repeated subject for Stella was the Brooklyn Bridge, as in one of his five panels collectively titled New York Interpreted (1922).

Precisionism

Precisionism (also known as Cubist-Realism or Cubo-Realism) presented an accurate realism with Cubist simplicity that achieved an abstract effect. Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986) was connected with the Stieglitz group (she and Stieglitz were married) and with the Precisionists for her closeups of flowers and plants, Black Iris being an example from 1926. Other principal Precisionists were Charles Sheeler (1883-1965) and Charles Demuth (1883-1935). Sheeler's austere, photo-realistic personal style is exemplified in Upper Deck (1929). Demuth's complexity and variety defy the narrowness of category, but in the 1920s he was a Precisionist painter, sometimes choosing industrial subjects (Industry, 1924?, and "My Egypt," 1927). His best-known work, / Saw the Figure 5 In Gold (1928), is an abstract representation of a clanging fire engine that was painted to illustrate a poem by William Carlos Williams.

Davis

The two-dimensional still lifes (notably Lucky Strike, 1921, and the Egg Beater series of 1927-1928) of Stuart Davis (1893-1967) prefigured the abstract art of post-World War II and provide a link between trompel'oeil (fool-the-eye) and pop art. Davis worked through and transcended almost every style and movement, and he is often identified as the most important American painter to emerge in the 1920s.

Motley

Archibald Motley Jr. (1891-1981), New Orleans born, Chicago educated, and influenced toward the abstract by a period of study in Paris, became in 1928 the first African American painter to have a solo exhibition in a commercial gallery.

Regionalism

Regionalism—a reaction against abstraction and formalism—is a movement in American painting associated with the 1930s. However, two of its important artists, Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975) and John Steuart Curry (1897-1946), produced characteristic works—realistic in style (though Benton's use of distortion and unnatural color suggests a debt to Expressionism) and nonurban American in subject—in the 1920s. Benton's Boom Town (1928) is appropriately full of movement, an incident-filled painting unified by dynamic composition. Curry's Tornado Over Kansas (1929) is a survival drama of the pioneer-spirited western family.

Hopper and Burchfield

Edward Hopper (1882—1967) and Charles Burchfield (1893-1967) were essentially realistic painters who developed independently of art movements. Hopper's formal, spare compositions of urban or rural scenes are melancholy with the loneliness of motionless isolation. (House by the Railroad was painted in 1921.) Burchfield painted a natural world filled with hostile forces. His 1920s paintings of small-town malignancy (House of Mystery, 1924) were partly inspired by Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio.

Sources:

John I. H. Baur, ed., New Art in America: Fifty Painters of the 20th Century (Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1957);

Milton W. Brown, American Painting from the Armory Show to the Depression (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955).