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Table of contents
Introduction……………………………………………………………………….2
1. History of Painting……………………………………………………………...3
2. Important American Painters……………...…………………………………4
2.1 George Bellows……………………...……………………………….….4
2.2 George Inness……………………………………………………………7
3. The Art of Painting…………………………………………………………....11
3.1 The American Southwest………………………………………..……..11
3.2 New Deal Art…………………………………………………………..13
3.3 Abstract Expressionism………………………………………………...14
3.4 Modernism ………………………………………………...…………..17
Conclusion……………………………………………….………………...……..19
Bibliography…………………………………………………………………….20
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Introduction
U.S. entry into World War I in 1917, promising a stimulating fascination that was America
to European art. But there was an isolation of art from the 1920s until 1941. In this case, it was
noted the tendency of many American artists to represent the reality of cities, continuously
growing. This method of representation was adopted by regionalists, trying a representation of
small towns, provincial, and events with which they are faced in their paintings, restoring some
literary movements such as Modernism, Expressionism, Southwest and Deal Art. In the paper
that follows I will present some 19th and 20th century American painters who made a contribution
to the history of painting.
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1. History of Painting
The history of painting reaches back in time to artifacts from pre-historic humans, and
spans all cultures. It represents a continuous, though periodically disrupted tradition from
Antiquity. Across cultures, and spanning continents and millennia, the history of painting is an
ongoing river of creativity, that continues into the 21st century. Until the early 20th century it
relied primarily on represenational, religious and classical, motifs, after which time more purely
abstract and conceptional approaches gained favor.
Developments in Eastern painting historically parallel those inWestern Painting, in
general, a few centuries earlier. African Arts, American Art each had significant influence on
Western art, and, eventually, vice-versa.
Initially serving utilitarian purpose, followed by imperial, private, civic, and religious
patronage, Eastern and Western painting later found audiences in the aristocracy and the middle
class. From the Modern era, the Middle Ages through the Renaissance painters worked for the
church and a wealthy aristocracy. Beginning with the Baroque era artists received private
commissions from a more educated and prosperous middle class. Finally in the west the idea of
"art for arts’s sake” began to find expression in the work of the Romantic painters like Francisco
Goya, and J.M.W. Turner. During the 19th century the rise of the commercial art gallery
provided patronage in the 20th century.
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2. Important American Painters
2.1 George Bellows
George Bellows was born and raised in Columbus, Ohio He was an only child, born four
years after his parents married, at the ages of fifty and forty respectively. His mother, Anna
Wilhelmina Smith, was the daughter of a whaling captain.
Bellows attended The Ohio State University from 1901 until 1904. There he played for
the basketball teams, and provided illustrations for the Makio, the school's student yearbook. He
was encouraged to become a professional baseball player, and he worked as a commercial
illustrator while a student and continued to accept magazine assignments throughout his life.
Despite these opportunities in athletics and commercial art, Bellows desired success as a painter.
He left Ohio State in 1904 just before he was to graduate and moved to New York City to study
art.
Bellows was soon a student of Robert Henri at the New York School of Arts, and became
associated with the Ashcan School, a group of artists who advocated painting contemporary
American society in all its forms. By 1906, Bellows was renting his own studio, on Brodeway.
Bellows first achieved notice in 1908, when he and other pupils of Henri organized an exhibition
of mostly urban studies. While many critics considered these to be crudely painted, others found
them welcomely audacious and a step beyond the work of his teacher. Bellows taught at the Art
Students League of New York in 1909, although he was more interested in pursuing a career as a
painter. His fame grew as he contributed to other nationally recognized juried shows.
Bellows' urban New York scenes depicted the crudity and chaos of working-class people
and neighborhoods, and also satirized the upper classes. From 1907 through 1915, he executed a
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series of paintings depicting New York City under snowfall. These paintings were the main
testing ground in which Bellows developed his strong sense of light and visual texture. These
exhibited a stark contrast between the blue and white expanses of snow and the rough and grimy
surfaces of city structures, and created an aesthetically ironic image of the equally rough and
grimy men struggling to clear away the nuisance of the pure snow. However, Bellows' series of
paintings portraying amateur boxing matches were arguably his signature contribution to art
history. These paintings are characterized by dark atmospheres, through which the bright,
roughly lain brushstrokes of the human figures vividly strike with a strong sense of motion and
direction.
Growing prestige as a painter brought changes in his life and work. Though he continued
his earlier themes, Bellows also began to receive portrait commissions, as well as social
invitations, from New York's wealthy elite. Additionally, he followed Henri's lead and began to
summer in Maine, painting seascapes on Monhegen and Matinicius Islands.
At the same time, the always socially conscious Bellows also associated with a group of
radical artists and activists called "The Lirical Left” who tended towards anarchism in their
extreme advocacy of individual rights. He taught at the first Modern School in New York City
(as did his mentor, Henri), and served on the editorial board of the socialist journal, The Masses,
to which he contributed many drawings and prints beginning in 1911. However, he was often at
odds with the other contributors because of his belief that artistic freedom should trump any
ideological editorial policy. Bellows also notably dissented from this circle in his very public
support of U.S. intervention in World War I. In 1918, he created a series of lithographs and
paintings that graphically depicted the atrocities committed by Germany during its invasion of
Belgium. Notable among these was The Germans Arrive, which was based on an actual account
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and gruesomely illustrated a German soldier restraining a Belgian teen whose hands had just
been severed. However, his work was also highly critical of the domestic censorship and
persecution of anti-war dissenters conducted by the U.S. government under the Espionage Art.
He was also criticized for some of the liberties he took in capturing scenes of war. The artist
Joseph Pennell argued that because Bellows had not witnessed the events he painted firsthand, he
had no right to paint them. Bellows responded that he had not been aware that Leonardo da Vinci
"had a ticket to paint the Last Super”
As Bellows' later oils focused more on domestic life, with his wife and daughters as
beloved subjects, the paintings also displayed an increasingly programmatic and theoretical
approach to color and design, a marked departure from the fluid muscularity of the early work.
In addition to painting, Bellows made significant contributions to lithography, helping to expand
the use of the medium as a fine art in the U.S. He installed a lithography press in his studio in
1916, and between 1921 and 1924 he collaborated with master printer Bolton Brown on more
than a hundred images. Bellows also illustrated numerous books in his later career, including
several by H. G. Wells.
Bellows taught at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1919. In 1920, he began to spend nearly
half of each year in Woodstock, New York, where he built a home for his family. He died on
January 8, 1925 in New York City, of peritonitis, after failing to tend to a ruptured appendix He
was survived by his wife, Emma, and two daughters, Anne and Jean. Bellows is buried at GreenWood Cemetery in Brooklyn.
Paintings and prints by George Bellows are in the collections of many major American
art museums, including the National gallery of Art in Washington DC, the Memorial Art Gallery
of the University of Rochester, Rochester, New York, and the Whitney and the Museum of
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Modern Arts in New York, and The Hyde Collection, in Glens Falls, New York. The Columbus
Museum of Arts in Bellows' hometown also has a sizeable collection of both his portraits and
New York street scenes. The White House acquired his 1919 painting “Three Children” in 2007,
and it is now displayed in the Green Room. The Archives and Special Collections at Amherst
Collage holds his papers.
2.2 George Innes
George Inness was born in Newburgh, New York. He was the fifth of thirteen children
born to John William Inness, a farmer, and his wife, Clarissa Baldwin. His family moved to
Newwar, New Jersey, when he was about five years of age. In 1839 he studied for several
months with an itinerant painter, John Jesse Barker. In his teens, Inness worked as a map
engraver in New York City. During this time he attracted the attention of French landscape
painter Regis Francois Ginoux with whom he subsequently studied. Throughout the mid-1840s
he also attended classes at the National Academy of Design, and studied the work of Hudson
River School artists Thomas Cole and Asher Durand; "If", Inness later recalled thinking, "these
two can be combined, I will try." He debuted his work at the National Academy in 1844.
Inness opened his first studio in New York in 1848. In 1849, he married Delia Miller,
who died a few months later. The next year he married Elizabeth Abigail Hart, with whom he
would have six children.
In 1851 a patron named Ogden Haggerty sponsored Inness' first trip to Europe to paint
and study. Inness spent fifteen months in Rome, where he studied landscapes by Claude Lorrain
and Nicolas Paussin. He also rented a studio there above that of painter William Page, who likely
introduced the artist to Swedenbourgianism.
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During trips to Paris in the early 1850s, Inness came under the influence of artists
working in the Barbizan School of France. Barbizan landscapes were noted for their looser
brushwork, darker palette, and emphasis on mood. Inness quickly became the leading American
exponent of Barbizon-style painting, which he developed into a highly personal style. In 1854 his
son of George Inness jr., who also became a landscape painter of note, was born in Paris.
In the mid-1850s, Inness was commissioned by the Delwara, Lackwanna and Western Railroad
to create paintings which documented the progress of DLWRR's growth in early Industrial
America. The Lackawanna Valley, painted ca. 1855, represents the railroad's first roundhouse at
Scranton, Pensylvania and integrates technology and wilderness within an observed landscape; in
time, not only would Inness shun the industrial presence in favor of bucolic or agrarian subjects,
but he would produce much of his mature work in the studio, drawing on his visual memory to
produce scenes that were often inspired by specific places, yet increasingly concerned with
formal considerations.
Inness moved from New York City to Medfild in 1860. In 1862-63, Boston, he was an art
teacher to Charles Dormon Robinson. He then to New Jearsy in 1864. He returned to Europe in
the spring of 1870, living in Rome and touring Tivoli, Albano , and Venice. In 1878, he returned
to New York, taking a studio in the New York University Building. The same year, he also
participated in the Universal Exposition in Paris, and published art criticism in the New York
Evening Post and Harper’s New Monthly Magazine.
His work of the 1860s and 1870s often tended toward the panoramic and picturesque,
topped by cloud-laden and threatening skies, and included views of his native country (Autumn
Oaks, 1878,Metropolitan Museum of Arts ; Catskill Mountains, 1870,Art Institute of Chicago),
as well as scenes inspired by numerous travels overseas, especially to Italy and France (The
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Monk, 1873,Additon Gallery of American Art ; Etretat, 1875). In terms of composition,
precision of drawing, and the emotive use of color, these paintings placed Inness among the best
and most successful landscape painters in America.
Eventually Inness' art evidenced the influence of the theology of Emanuel Swedenborg.
Of particular interest to Inness was the notion that everything in nature had a correspondential
relationship with something spiritual and so received an "influx" from God in order to
continually exist. Another influence upon Inness' thinking was William James, also an adherent
to Swedenborgianism. In particular, Inness was inspired by James' idea of consciousness as a
"stream of thought", as well as his ideas concerning how mystical experience shapes one's
perspective toward nature.
Inness was the subject of a major retrospective in 1884, organized by the American Art
Association, which brought him acclaim in the United States. He earned international fame when
fame when he received a gold medal at the 1889 Paris Exposition.
After Inness settled in New Jersey in 1885 and particularly in the last decade of his life,
this mystical component manifested in his art through a more abstracted handling of shapes,
softened edges, and saturated color, a profound and dramatic juxtaposition of sky and earth
(Early Autumn, Montclair, 1888,Montclair Art Museum), an emphasis on the intimate landscape
view (Sunset in the Woods, 1891,Corrcoran Gallery of Art), and an increasingly personal,
spontaneous, and often violent handling of paint. It is this last quality in particular which
distinguishes Inness from those painters of like sympathies who are characterized as Luminists.
In a published interview, Inness maintained that "The true use of art is, first, to cultivate
the artist's own spiritual nature." His abiding interest in spiritual and emotional considerations
did not preclude Inness from undertaking a scientific study of color, nor a mathematical,
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structural approach to composition: "The poetic quality is not obtained by eschewing any truths
of fact or of Nature...Poetry is the vision of reality."
Inness died in 1894 at Bridge Allan in Scotland. According to his son, he was viewing
the sunset, when he threw up his hands into the air and exclaimed, "My God! oh, how
beautiful!", fell to the ground, and died minutes later. A public funeral for Inness was held at the
National Academy of Design, and a memorial exhibition was conducted at the Fine Arts
Building in New York City.
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3. The Art of Painting
3.1 The American Southwest
20th-century Western painting begins with the heritage of painters like Vincent van
Gogh, Paul Cazanne, Paul Cauzzin, Georges Seurat and Henry de Toules all of whom were
essential for the development of modern art. At the beginning of the 20th century Henri Matisse
and several other young artists including the pre-cubist George Braque Andre Derain, Raouls
Duffy and Maurice de Vallwik revolutionized the Paris art world with "wild", multi-colored,
expressive, landscapes and figure paintings that the critics called Fauvism. Henry Matisse's
second version of The Dance signified a key point in his career and in the development of
modern painting. It reflected Matisse's incipient fascination with primitive Art : the intense warm
color of the figures against the cool blue-green background and the rhythmical succession of the
dancing nudes convey the feelings of emotional liberation and hedonism.
Initially influenced by Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin and other late-19th-century innovators
Pablo Picasso made his first cubist paintings based on Cézanne's idea that all depiction of nature
can be reduced to three solids: cube, sphere and cone. With the painting Les Demoiselles
d’Avignon 1907, (see gallery) Picasso dramatically created a new and radical picture depicting a
raw and primitive brothel scene with five prostitutes, violently painted women, reminiscent of
African tribal mask and his own new Cubist inventions. Analitik cubism (see gallery) was jointly
developed by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, exemplified by Violin and Candlestick, Paris,
from about 1908 through 1912. Analytic cubism, the first clear manifestation of cubism, was
followed by Synthetic cubism, practised by Braque, Picasso, Juan Gris ,Albert Gleisez, and
several other artists into the 1920s. Synthetic cubism is characterized by the introduction of
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different textures, surfaces, collage elements, pappier colle and a large variety of merged subject
matter.
During the years between 1910 and the end of World War I and after the heyday of
cubism, several movements emerged in Paris. George Chirco moved to Paris in July 1911, where
he joined his brother Andrea (the poet and painter known as Alberto Savino). Through his
brother he met Pierre Laprade a member of the jury at the Salon d’Autonoim, where he exhibited
three of his dreamlike works: Enigma of the Oracle, Enigma of an Afternoon and Self-Portrait.
During 1913 he exhibited his work at the Salon des Independences and Salon d’Automne, his
work was noticed by Pablo Picasso and Gullaume Appinon and several others. His compelling
and mysterious paintings are considered instrumental to the early beginnings of Surrealism. Song
of Love 1914, is one of the most famous works by de Chirico and is an early example of the
surrealist style, though it was painted ten years before the movement was "founded" by Andre
Breto in 1924.
3.2 New Deal Art
Artists in the twentieth century chose two distinct ways to depict modernism and the
excitement of progress—realism and abstraction. Both are well represented in the collection. The
museum has the largest collection of New Deal art and murals in the country. Images of jazz and
street life, farms and factories, workers and families captured a changing America, from Thomas
Hart Benton's Midwest to Jacob Lawrence's Harlem. In Cape Cod Morning Edward Hopper
captures the post-war mood of anxiety in this stark, ambiguous painting. John Sloan and Andrew
Wyeth are among other realist painters in the collection.
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Some American modernists found new ways of depicting the spirit of their age. The dynamic
rhythms of modern life energized artists like Georgia O'Keeffe and Joseph Stella, while artists
such as Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline reveled in the freedoms and frustrations of
abstraction, and in turn inspired the next generation of painters such as Richard Diebenkorn and
Kenneth Noland. Important twentieth-century artists such as Marsden Hartley, Stuart Davis,
Wayne Thiebaud, Alfred Jensen, and Philip Guston explored questions about subject,
composition, color, and technique.
The museum has an extensive collection of large-scale paintings by Washington Color
School artists, who were conducting innovative experiments with color and form between the
mid-1950s and mid-1970s, including Leon Berkowitz, Gene Davis, Thomas Downing, Sam
Gilliam, Fel Hines, Jacob Kainen, Howard Mehring, Paul Reed, and Alma Thomas.
In recent years the museum has added to the collection works from the late twentieth
century by artists such as Jennifer Bartlett, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Eric Fischl, David
Hockney, Roy Lichtenstein, Nam June Paik, Philip Pearlstein, Renée Stout, Mark Tansey, and
William Wiley.
3.3 Abstract Expressionism
Abstract Expressionism is also referred to as Gestural Abstraction because its brush
stokes revealed the artist's process. This process is the subject of the art itself. As Harold
Rosenberg explained: the work of art becomes an "event." For this reason, he dubbed this
movement Action Painting in 1952. But today art historians feel that his emphasis on "action"
leaves out another side of Abstract Expressionism: control vs. chance. Therefore, we must
acknowledge the foundation of Abstract Expressionism comes from three major sources:
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Kandinsky's abstraction , the Dadaist's reliance on chance, and the Surrealist's endorsement of
Freudian theory that embraces the relevance of dreams, sexual drives (libido) and the
authenticity of ego (unfiltered self-centeredness, known as narcissism), which this art expresses
through "action."
Although at first glance it seems that your Kindergartner can do it, trust me: these artists
cultivate the interplay of skill and unplanned occurrences to determine the painting's final
outcome. So, if you feel that you are a budding Jackson Pollock, may I suggest experimenting
outside on the lawn or in your garage--far from precious possessions. Pollock used an empty
barn in East Hampton which is now the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center.
Most of the Abstract Expressionists lived in New York and met at the Cedar Tavern in
Greenwich Village. Therefore the movement is also called The New York School. A good
number of the artists met through the Depression era Works Progress, a government program
that paid artists to paint murals in government buildings. Others met through Hans Hoffman, the
master of the "push-pull" school of Cubism, who came from Germany in the early 1930s to
Berkeley and then New York to serve as the guru of abstraction. He taught at the Art Students
League and then opened his own school.
But rather than follow the tame brush applied methods from the Old World, these young
bohemians invented new ways to apply paint in a dramatic and experimental manner. Jackson
Pollock (1912-1956) became known as "Jack the Dripper" because of his drip-and-spatter
technique that fell upon a canvas laid out horizontally on the floor. Willem de Kooning (19041907) swashbuckled with loaded brushes and garish colors that seemed to collide rather than
settle down into co-existence. Mark Tobey (1890-1976) "wrote" his painted marks, as if he were
inventing an unintelligible alphabet for an exotic language that no one knew or would ever
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bother to learn. His work was based on his study of Chinese calligraphy and brush painting, as
well as Buddhism.
The key to understanding Abstract Expressionism is to understand the concept of "deep"
in 1950s slang. "Deep" meant not decorative, not facile (superficial) and not insincere. Abstract
Expressionists strove to uncover their most personal feelings directly through making art, and
thereby achieve some transformation--or, if possible, some personal redemption.
Therefore, Abstract Expressionism's physicality comes from explorations of inner turmoil
and anxiety. Some of this distress came from exposure to the disturbing reports of horrors and
pain endured during World War II. Some of the distress came from the threat of a nuclear
holocaust as the Cold War heated up. Their unbridled approach to making art mirrored James
Dean (1931-1955) in Rebel Without a Cause, contemporary jazz and the free verse of the Beat
Generation poets, such as Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) and Gary Snyder (born 1930). For these
aspiring artists, noncompliance with any art rules to date separated them from the sins of their
parents, who had unleashed untold madness into the world of their youth. It was their revenge.
Abstract Expressionism can be divided into two tendencies: Action Painting (Jackson
Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Tobey, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell and Grace Hartigan,
among many, many others) and Color Field Painting (Mark Rothko, Helen Frankenthaler, Jules
Olitski, Kenneth Noland and Adolph Gottlieb and so forth).
Abstract Expressionism evolved through the work of each individual artist. Generally
speaking, each artist arrived at this free-wheeling style by the end of the 1940s and continued in
the same manner to the end of his or her life. The style has remained alive well into the current
century through its youngest practitioners.
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3.4 Modernism
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More
specifically, the term describes the modernist movement in the arts, its set of cultural tendencies
and associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes
to Western Society in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In particular the development of
modern industrial societies and the rapid growth of cities, followed then by the horror of World
War I, were among the factors that shaped Modernism. Related terms are modern, modernist,
contemporary, and postmodern.
In art, Modernism explicitly rejects the ideology of realism and makes use of the works
of the past, through the application of reprise, incorporation, rewriting, recapitulation, revision
and parody in new forms. Modernism also rejects the lingering certainty of Enlightenment
thinking, as well as the idea of a compassionate, all-powerful Creator.
In general, the term Modernism encompasses the activities and output of those who felt
the "traditional" forms of art, architecture, literature, religious faith, social organization and daily
life were becoming outdated in the new economic, social, and political conditions of an emerging
fully industrialized world. The poet Ezra Pond's 1934 injunction to "Make it new!" was
paradigmatic of the movement's approach towards the obsolete. A salient characteristic of
Modernism is self-consciousness. This self-consciousness often led to experiments with form
and work that draws attention to the processes and materials used.
The modernist movement, at the beginning of the 20th century, marked the first time that
the term avant-garde with which the movement was labeled until the word "modernism"
prevailed, was used for the Arts.
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Conclusion
Following the above said art, realism and romanticism of the early 19th century have left
then place to impressionism and post-impressionism in the second half of the 20th century. In
America the Hudson River School was prominent with painters.
I chose this topic because I am passionate about painting and art in general.
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