Painting

Painting To 1945Since 1945
To 1945 The Protestant cultural heritage of Anglo settlers in the eastern colonies brought with it a long‐lived suspicion of visual experience. Dissenting Protestants associated visual display with Roman Catholicism and with absolutist forms of government. From its origins in the 1660s, therefore, visual expression in the English colonies was expected to serve moral and spiritual lessons. In contrast to the iconophobic Anglo cultures of the east were the devotional images of saints (retablos) produced by the Spanish Catholic colonies of the Southwest, annexed to the United States following the Mexican War.

Colonial and Antebellum Eras.

Seventeenth‐century Anglo‐American painting, indebted to Elizabethan courtly styles as adapted by provincial English “limners” and devoted to portraits of prosperous mercantile families such as the Freakes, focused on the external attributes of godliness in the forms of material prosperity. A nonillusionistic emphasis on pattern over volume or depth governed visual representation until the early eighteenth century, when a growing market in mezzotints after baroque masters introduced Renaissance principles of perspective and chiaroscuro. Along with the increasingly worldly New England mercantile elite, the land‐based colonial aristocracy of the New York Dutch patroons and the tidewater plantations produced a form of colonial baroque and later rococo portraiture relying on English print sources. With the Boston‐born John Singleton Copley, colonial elites found a self‐trained artist fully able to realize their self‐projections as independent artisans (Paul Revere, 1768–1770) or fashionable men of wealth (Nicholas Boylston, 1767). In the absence of inherited titles, portraiture emphasized self‐fashioning through clothing and consumer goods.

Frustrated by limited cultural opportunities, promising colonials like Copley and Benjamin West (1738–1820) pursued careers in England. Following his appointment as painter to King George III, West in Death of General Wolfe (1771) redefined British history painting with figures dressed in contemporary clothing and a Christ‐like martyred hero. The Revolutionary War furthered heroic modern history painting, as in a series of battle scenes by John Trumbull (1786–1832) that anticipated his large‐scale works in the U.S. Capitol rotunda.

London remained the artistic metropolis for Americans in the early nineteenth century; history painters such as Washington Allston (1779–1843) and Samuel F.B. Morse occupied an international arena. When Morse returned to the fledgling republic, however, his career floundered as interest in history painting waned. Allston, however, sustained by Boston's affluent Unitarians, forged a richly associative art combining figures and landscapes and shaped by European romanticism, Venetian colorism, and “Grand Manner” history painting. Celebrated during his lifetime, Allston created in America the cultural type of the artist‐visionary at odds with the materialism of society.

After the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, New York City emerged as the center of cultural production. The 1826 establishment of the artist‐run National Academy of Design (NAD) in New York gave institutional focus to the growing nationalism of American art production. Thomas Cole, an English émigré, established a youthful reputation for native and Biblical landscapes by the late 1820s; his subsequent work, notably the cautionary allegory The Course of Empire (1833–1836), offered lessons in the prophetic and instructive content of landscape art. Cole's conservative message and his distrust of national hubris went largely ignored by the landscape painters of the midcentury. His pupil Frederick Church (1826–1900), along with Asher B. Durand (1796–1886), later president of the NAD, celebrated America's cultural mission with images of a providentially blessed nature even as the eastern wilderness succumbed to industrialization. John James Audubon's monumental project The Birds of America included his meticulous, vivid painting of some five hundred different species.

Concurrently, genre painting—scenes of everyday life such as W.S. Mount's The Painter's Triumph (1836)—took its cue from theater and popular culture in revealing subtle social distinctions while also expressing a truculent sense of national pride. The Düsseldorf Academy in Germany, with its emphasis on theatrical narrative and staged effects, replaced London as the preferred destination for antebellum American artists seeking European training.

1865 to 1920.

After the Civil War, the growing cosmopolitanism of American culture was furthered by the availability of transcontinental rail travel, the increasing presence of European dealers in New York City, the emergence of a capitalist elite dedicated to acquiring European art, and the opening of major art museums in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, and elsewhere. While landscape and genre painting remained dominant into the late nineteenth century, American art gradually assumed a more retrospective and academic character. The Colonial Revival introduced antiquarian themes, along with a preference for muted interiors and preurban folkways. Landscape artists preferred intimist views of rural eastern scenery painted at dawn and twilight or through a softening atmospheric veil. Tonalist artists, following the lead of the American expatriate James McNeill Whistler, preferred subtle modulations of color within a limited chromatic range.

After the 1870s, Paris and Munich emerged as major destinations for younger American artists who, repudiating the meticulous and nonpainterly realism of the so‐called Hudson River school, favored a self‐conscious artistry cultivated as a unique form of expertise. No longer serving nationalist cultural ideals, they joined a cosmopolitan and often expatriate international brotherhood “in pursuit of beauty,” beholden only to aesthetic principles of art for art's sake. Stylistically, much American painting in these decades was indistinguishable from that of Europe, as American artists reaped awards at the Parisian Académie des Beaux‐Arts and vied with French artists for the patronage of wealthy American collectors. Mary Cassatt of Pennsylvania lived after 1874 in Paris, where her luminous paintings of domestic and maternal scenes showed the influence of Edgar Degas and the impressionists.

Around 1900, critical attention swung toward the so‐called native realists. Thomas Eakins, although trained in Paris, focused his analytic gaze on his native Philadelphia in ambitious portraits of professional men such as his 1875 Clinic of Doctor Samuel Gross; psychologically probing portraits of women; and outdoor genre scenes combining a scientific interest in motion and light refraction with a commitment to modern life and an escape from Victorian euphemism, called for by his friend Walt Whitman. Though national fame awaited a New York retrospective following his death, Eakins furnished inspiration for the “ashcan” artists around Robert Henri (1865–1929), who rejected the “genteel” overrefinement of American painting at the end of the century.

Winslow Homer, largely self‐taught, enjoyed a growing national reputation in the late nineteenth century as a “purely American” painter. Despite his denial of external influences, his painting, with its elegant formal reductions and attention to surface forms, reveals a debt to Japanese art (Japonisme) as well as French plein‐aire and English and French academic art. Homer's late seascapes of the 1890s and early 1900s, however, gave substance to the critical repudiation of cosmopolitan art and a resurgent nationalism.

The year 1908 marked the waning institutional grip of the National Academy in the independent exhibition of the “Eight,” bringing together social realists around Henri with the postimpressionist Charles Prendergast and others. Concurrently, Alfred Stieglitz, a photographer dedicated to establishing his medium as a fine art, introduced New Yorkers to European postimpressionism, cubism, and African art at his Fifth Avenue gallery “291” (1905–1917). Viewing modern art as an agent of cultural change, Stieglitz promoted such early American modernists as Georgia O'Keeffe, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, and Arthur Dove (1880–1946). Dove's early abstractions (ca. 1910) were exactly contemporaneous with those of the first “pure” European abstractionist, Wassily Kandinsky. The 1913 Armory Show in New York City, offering audiences their first major exposure to European modernism, polarized the American art world into traditionalist academic and progressive camps. Among the latter were Stuart Davis (1893–1964), whose youthful work registered a dramatic shift in style after 1913. Other Americans like Max Weber and Dove had already gained exposure to European modernism in Paris. The migration of French artists to New York during World War I, notably Marcel Duchamp, engendered native awareness of the ironic artistic possibilities of technology and urban mass culture, producing a brief New York “proto‐Dada” movement that left its mark on American art long after its immediate influence.

1920 to 1945.

After a decade of apprenticeship to European modernism and the wartime disruption of New York cultural life, American artists in the 1920s turned to the cultural landscapes of the regions. While artists such as Stuart Davis continued to exploit advertising and urban culture, creatively interpreting the syncopated rhythms of jazz, others, from Charles Demuth to O'Keeffe, used modernist lessons of irony, geometric abstraction, scale distortion, and decontextualization to engage regional subjects from rural Pennsylvania to Hispanic New Mexico. By the 1930s, this “rediscovery of America” had broadened into “American Scene” painting, ranging from the rural, small town, and urban images of Edward Hopper (1882–1967) and Charles Burchfield to the embrace of metropolitan culture in the work of Reginald Marsh and others of New York's “Fourteenth Street School.” Leading the “regionalists” (so dubbed by Time magazine in a 1934 cover story) were Grant Wood, John Steuart Curry, and Thomas Hart Benton (1889–1975), whose repudiation of his modernist roots and virulent isolationism point to a resurgent populism. The social hardship of the 1930s Depression produced a growing affiliation of artists with workers; themes of labor, urban unemployment, and working‐class martyrdom abound in the social realism of Philip Evergood, the Soyer brothers, Ben Shahn (1898–1969), and others. New Deal Era work relief programs for artists produced many public murals—influenced by the presence in the United States of the Mexican muralists Diego Rivera, Clemente Orozco, and David Siqueiros from the late 1920s into the early 1930s—as well as easel paintings.

The cultural impact of World War II, along with a second wave of European artistic migration to New York, brought a turn from social themes and politically engaged art toward new techniques of automatism that drew on the uncensored energies of the unconscious. Blending surrealist influences, an interest in cross‐cultural myth, and the art of tribal cultures, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko (1903–1970), and other figurative artists of the 1930s turned during World War II to subject‐based abstraction dedicated to universal themes that explored the tragic dimensions of human experience. Such developments prepared the way for the innovations of abstract expressionism that combined the muralism of the 1930s with a commitment to the role of American art in articulating mythic truths.
See also Architecture; Folk Art and Crafts; Modernist Culture; Romantic Movement.

Bibliography

Milton Brown , American Painting, from the Armory Show to the Depression, 1955.
Neil Harris , The Artist in American Society: The Formative Years, 1790–1860, 1966.
Joshua C. Taylor , America as Art, 1979.
H. Wayne Morgan , New Muses: Art in American Culture, 1865–1920, 1978.
Theodore E. Stebbins et al. , A New World: Masterpieces of American Painting, 1760–1910 (exhibit catalog, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), 1983.
Wayne Craven , Colonial American Portraiture, 1986.
Elizabeth Johns , American Genre Painting: The Politics of Everyday Life, 1991.
Michael Leja , Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s, 1993.
Terry Smith , Making the Modern: Industry, Art, and Design in America, 1993.
Sarah Burns , Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in the Gilded Age America, 1996.

Angela Miller

Since 1945 Eclecticism ruled nineteenth‐century American painting as artists looked to Europe for traditional styles and subject matter. By World War I, the Picasso‐led revolution of cubism and its offshoots had licensed independent self‐assertion. Thus, the earliest American abstractionists, including John Marin and Stuart Davis, created a wide range of individualistic expression with significant content as well as modernist form. Following World War II, as New York City replaced Paris as the capital of art in the West, American painters declared their ultimate independence from European influences. The shift was signaled by Peggy Guggenheim in her gallery, Art of This Century. After showing works by leading exiled Europeans in 1942, including Max Ernst (1903–1970), Guggenheim held one‐artist exhibitions of recent works by Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Robert Motherwell, and William Baziotes. Each revealed the influence of surrealist psychic automatism, which in its purest doodle‐like process resulted in biomorphic imagery, a highly ambiguous metamorphosis of plant and animal appearances. Representing the avant‐garde of modernism, the Americans had moved beyond the social realism, regionalism, and stylized cubism of the 1930s.

By 1950, Pollock, Rothko, and Willem de Kooning, varying greatly in style and subject matter, led the movement hailed as “abstract expression” by the formalist critic Clement Greenberg or “action art” by the content‐oriented critic Harold Rosenberg. Both labels suggested disturbance, whether from painterly turmoil or a sociopsychological origin. Though Pollock did not necessarily invent his signature technique of dripping, splattering, and pouring compositions of enamel over large areas of unprimed canvas, he vastly extended its scale and free associations of meaning. Jungian analysis underlay his free‐flowing compositions and stream‐of‐consciousness imagery as he struggled to harmonize the conflicting forces of his psyche. Rothko's paintings, comprised of luminous layers of what appear to be chromatic vapor, invite meditation, especially when presented in a chapel‐like setting. Sadly, the shades of his consistently formatted canvases gradually descended into melancholy, depression, and suicide, ending whatever relationship their early, heightened color schemes may have had to an American tradition of decorative optimism. De Kooning, more outwardly expressive than either Pollock or Rothko, culminated a series of single female figures with the provocative Woman I in 1952. Its painterly configuration of seemingly spontaneous gestures of primary hues, scumbled whites, and black contours distorts the body into a large‐breasted, primeval goddess image and the face into a rodent‐toothed, bug‐eyed mask. De Kooning alluded to both an Oedipus complex and the ubiquitous commercialized glamour‐girl as motivating factors in his best‐known work. He followed it up with a Marilyn Monroe painting and a progression of large, nonfigurative, urbanscapes. Moving to the end of Long Island, he luxuriated in thickly painted pink, white, and yellow sun‐bathed nudes through the 1960s. For twenty more years, beautifully painted abstractions grew increasingly linear in their decorative patterning by the time of his death in 1997.

Meanwhile, modern American painting evolved from early reactions in the 1950s against painterly expressionism; through the movements of pop art, geometric minimalism, and photo realism in the 1960s; to a revival of expressionist painting in the 1970s that ended in a near chaos of postmodernist diversity as the century ended. Barnett Newman and Ellsworth Kelly introduced a minimalist subversion of abstract expressionism as Pollock came into public view. Beginning in 1948 with Onement, a humorous “zip” of heavy orange pigment bisecting a modulated brown “field,” Newman expanded his color‐fields onto enormous, vertically divided canvases. His compositions were strictly intuitive, he maintained, defying the search for momentary self‐identity of existentialist action art. Kelly, returning to America in 1954 from a six‐year stay in Paris, offered geometric abstraction comprised of gestureless, solid‐color shapes that he said “shifted the visual reality of painting to include the space around it.” He thereby, to a greater extent than Newman, liberated the medium from both the picture frame and the picture plane. As instructed by ArtForum critics influenced by Greenberg, minimalist painters of the 1960s were well aware of the precedents set by the Dutch modernist Piet Mondrian and the Russian revolutionary artist Kasimir Malevich, both highly reductive in designing geometric paintings. Kenneth Noland, Gene Davis, Robert Mangold, and Brice Marden maintained their predecessors' level of precisely ruled abstraction. Though this was not particularly true of Frank Stella (1936– ), his work was often categorized as “hard‐edge” minimalism in spite of his penchant for decorative designs.

Cool detachment in American painting emerged by the mid‐1950s when Jasper Johns (1930– ) exhibited his flag and target paintings, and his loft‐mate, Robert Rauschenberg (1925– ), introduced his “combine” paintings, including Bed. From that point forward, through many varieties of object matter and media, including encaustic on newsprint and silkscreen collages of magazine clippings, they insisted that their purpose was simply a chance, inconsequential display of random actuality. Free from subjective attachment, their increasingly complicated compositions were supposed to be viewed “the same way you look at a radiator,” according to Johns. In Rauschenberg's case, his visual noise, from black‐and‐white to color, might well correspond to the information explosion of television, especially experienced with a quick‐action remote control. This detachment persisted as the central concept of 1960s painting, no matter how hot the decade became politically and culturally.

Drawing upon mass‐media imagery and a booming consumer culture, pop art stole the show by the early 1960s. The British artists Eduardo Paolozzi and Richard Hamilton anticipated the process in the 1950s, but the most authentic instigator was Andy Warhol, a New York advertising artist who aspired to fame as a fine artist. In 1960, Warhol produced a casein‐and‐crayon head of the comic‐strip character Dick Tracy on canvas and a synthetic polymer painting of an ad for a storm door. In 1961 he began his series of repetitive silkscreen paintings, including Campbell's soup cans, Coca‐Cola bottles, and promotional shots of Marilyn Monroe. Promoted through Leo Castelli Gallery, Warhol was joined in the burgeoning pop art market by Roy Lichtenstein with his oil‐on‐canvas blowups of comic‐strip frames. The former billboard painter James Rosenquist outdid Rauschenberg by painting enormous montages of consumer goods intermingled with glamorous female faces and other human‐figure fragments. This mixture climaxed in his F‐111 (1965), an eighty‐six‐foot, fifty‐one‐panel mural featuring the new U.S. fighter‐bomber identified with the Vietnam War. Social commentary not to be denied, Romare Bearden (1911–1988) during the peak of the civil rights movement, applied a similar cut‐and‐paste composition of masklike faces to rhythmic depictions of black ghetto life.

Stylized sexuality became the hallmark of Tom Wesselmann, who garnished his Great American Nude paintings with an assortment of supermarket items, including, of course, Coca‐Cola. The San Francisco‐born Peter Saul heated up his pop iconography with Day‐glo compositions of elastic, bubble‐gum figures reenacting the inhuman horrors of Vietnam. His idiosyncratic style influenced the figural fantasies of Chicago artists Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, and Karl Wirsum. The Chicagoan Ed Paschke's TV wrestlers, sideshow freaks, streetwalkers, and transvestites, as well as Roger Brown's cartoon fantasies of Chicago and its suburbs, with silhouetted figures at yellow‐lit windows, are inventions of their own. Because of pop art's diversity, debate continues about how coolly objective it could have been, when its characteristic “take offs” may readily be interpreted as satirical cultural commentary.

Urban appeal and abstract objectivity fused in another strain of painting by the end of the 1960s, photo realism, a manual, photocopy technique guaranteed to attract a following in a materialistic society. All kinds of consumer goods, from kosher meats to shoes and silverware, fill the colorful show‐window paintings of Richard Estes and Don Eddy. An arrangement of details and reflections, rendered with small‐scale brushes and airbrushes, extracts factual renderings from photographs. Audrey Flack accomplished the same in her autobiographic still‐life paintings, while Chuck Close tediously enlarged black‐and‐white face‐shots of himself and friends to enormous sizes and then simulated the dot‐by‐dot process of three‐color reproduction. Whatever the object matter—Robert Cottingham's neon signs, Robert Bechtle's Buicks and Chevys, Ralph Goings's Airstream trailers, or John Salt's rusted‐out junkers—the transcribed data of these paintings add up to impersonal inventories, as aesthetically significant as uniform abstractions. In this sense they, too, were a product of the “cool” 1960s, despite their reactionary distance from mainstream minimalism.

In keeping with the stylistic dialect characteristic of the history of painting since the Renaissance, a counterresponse to the “cool” reactions against abstract expressionism came in the form of a painterly synthesis that critics labeled neoexpressionism. This, in turn, spawned what was commonly termed postmodernism. In the neoexpressionist work of Philip Guston (1912–1980) in the 1970s, paintings of alternating interior and exterior spaces were occupied by Ku Klux Klan hoods, comic hands holding cigars, knobby legs bent at right angles, shoe bottoms, clocks, and backs of stretched canvases. These heavily painted oddities lack overt relevance to each other and refuse to coalesce as an overall configuration. This defiance of order, whether expressive of sociopsychological disturbance or a visual counterpart to the poststructuralism that prevailed in literary theory and criticism after 1980, invaded fashionable painting on both sides of the Atlantic. Modernist principles of harmonious balance, traceable to Cezanne and cubism, virtually vanished in the decentered, deconstructive paintings of young postmodernist celebrities. Susan Rothenberg “deenergized” crudely drawn images of horses in a surface of dense pigment, while Julian Schnabel overloaded enormous canvases with broken dinnerware and undisciplined drawing. Jean‐Michel Basquiat ceased defacing subway station walls for a seven‐year career of eye‐catching, drug‐addicted, figural scrawls accompanied by essentially undecipherable graffiti texts. Elizabeth Murray abandoned the rectangular format entirely, fragmenting such domestic objects as tables, beds, and coffee mugs into bulky pictorial pieces that project like sculpture from the wall. All in all, an engaging eccentricity, free from the dictates of institutionalized patronage or traditional stylistic prescriptions, characterized advanced American painting as the twentieth century ended. No longer restricted to a New York avant‐garde, the postmodern license of creative self‐indulgence infiltrated the entire art world as American culture spread over the globe.
See also Fifties, The; Foreign Relations: The Cultural Dimension; Literature: Since World War I; Modernist Culture; Photography; Sixties, The.

Bibliography

Irving Sandler , The Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism, 1976.
Louis K. Meisel . Photo‐Realism, 1989.
David Anfam , Abstract Expressionism, 1990.
Christin J. Mamiya , Pop Art and Consumer Culture, American Super Market, 1992.
Norma Broude and and Mary D. Gerrard , The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact, 1994.
Brandon Taylor , Avant‐Garde and After, Rethinking Art Now, 1995.
Thomas Crow , The Rise of the Sixties: American and European Art in the Era of Dissent, 1996.
Irving Sandler , Art of the Postmodern Era, from the Late 1960s to the Early 1990s, 1996.
Kenneth Baker , Minimalism: Art of Circumstance, 1998.

James M. Dennis