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1. Visual arts of the USA: Painting
2. The history of sculpture in the USA
3. Museums and art collections in the USA
4. American architectural styles.
1 a) Artistic creativity in the colonial period. Leading American
painters of the period. Portrait-painting: Copley, Stuart. History
painting: Trumball, West.
In general, the term "American Colonial art" describes the art and
architecture of 17th and 18th century settlers who arrived in America from
Europe. Early American colonial artists were self-taught sign painters. The
better painters went on to paint portraits of rich landowners, officers in the
military, and merchants. These artists were called “limners”. Sometimes
a limner painter would paint a picture of a person and a background
without the face. The face would be added when someone wanted to buy
the painting.
John Singleton Copley (1738[1] – 1815) was an American-born painter,
active in both colonial America and England. He was probably born
in Boston, Massachusetts, to Richard and Mary Singleton Copley, both
Irish. He is famous for his portrait paintings of important figures in
colonial New England, depicting in particular middle-class subjects. His
paintings were innovative in their tendency to depict artifacts relating to
these individuals' lives.
Copley’s stepfather, Peter Pelham, played an enormous part in the future
artist’s education. First of all, general education – reading, writing and
math – were available right at home in Pelham’s school. Most importantly,
however, Copley had the opportunity to work in his stepfather's shop,
where he was taught the art of engraving, as well as forming friendly
contacts with several Boston-based painters, whose studios Copley could
visit. Unfortunately, this situation did not last long – Peter Pelham died in
1751 when Copley was only 13.
The boy pursued the artistic trade. All alone, he learnt from engravings of
artwork from Europe, imitating them and borrowing different elements to
create his own works, from dress to landscapes in the background. At the
age of 15 Copley started his career as a portraitist. His earliest works, such
as a portrait of his stepfather Peter Pelham (1753), or the portrait of his
stepbrother Charles Pelham and the portrait of Mrs. Joseph Mann (1753)
are still immature and stiff, and depended on liberal borrowing from other
artists' work, but nevertheless are impressive if we take into consideration
the young painter's age and training.
By 1758, Copley had produced about 40 portraits, which record his rapid
progress in mastering the craft. During these years he came to the attention
of high Boston society. One of the best works of the first five years of his
career is the double portrait of two sisters, Mary MacIntosh Royall and
Elizabeth Royall, daughters of one of the wealthiest New England citizens,
Isaac Royall. With his depictions of beautiful girls, fine lace, the folds of
silk dresses and background draperies, the 20-year-old painter was
showing off, eager to demonstrate his skills at rendering texture.
Although Copley had gained a great deal of success in Boston for his
exquisite portraits, he set his sights on expanding his name. In 1766, he
sent his painting "Boy with a Squirrel" to the Society of Artists in London.
It received great praise from fellow American artist Benjamin West, who
would eventually encourage Copley to move to London. Copley eventually
did move, and it was there that his style changed dramatically.
Once in London, Copley began to paint less portraiture and more historical
scenes.
In 1788, he painted another of his famous paintings, "Watson and the
Shark." It was this painting that began Copley's theme of man vs. nature.
Several young painters grew up in pre-Revolutionary America and went
abroad before or during the war. Among them was Benjamin West, the
son of an innkeeper in Pennsylvania. As a youth, West painted several
portraits and landscapes, one of the first in American art. At the age of
twenty, he set off for Italy to study the old masters. West never returned to
America, for when he arrived in Europe he found the art world there too
promising to abandon. However, West had an important influence on
American art, for he established a studio in London where he taught many
young American painters.
Another young painter who will be important in the post-Revolutionary
period is Charles Willson Peale. He went abroad to study with West in
England but returned in time to lead troops in several battles of the
Revolutionary War. Peale painted a delightful family portrait in 1773.
Charles was the founder of a dynasty of painters, which would carry on the
Peale painting tradition for another one hundred years.
Let us look briefly at the few examples of paintings other than portraits
from the colonial period: a strange landscape by West, painted about 1750.
Colonial landscapes were rare but sometimes they could be found as
decorations painted on the walls of the dining room or over the mantel of
an elegant home;
a painting of the Hudson Valley farm of Marten van Bergen. Some
American painters attempted religious subjects, the pictures were not well
received, however, for the austere Protestant churches in the colonies along
the eastern seaboard disapproved of the painting of religious subjects.
The colonial period in American painting ends in 1774, with the departure
of Copley for England. Immediately after that time, the colonists were
embroiled in the issues of politics and war, and patronage of the arts
declined drastically. Also, from that time on, most ambitious American
artists would travel abroad for their training. With their European
education, these painters would bring many new ideas to American art in
the post-Revolutionary period.
John Trumbull (1756-1843) was the first of the American artists to return
home to the young republic after а course of studies under Benjamin West
in London. Trumbull is known primarily as the painter of the Revolution.
While studying under West in London, Trumbull framed а vast project - to
depict а series of scenes from American history.
Working in London, Paris and the United States, he produced twelve small
dramatic compositions as studies for projected murals. In these canvases
the artist recreated the high moments of the Revolution together with
portraits of its great leaders. Eight of them are his most impressive works.
It is due to these paintings that the artist’s fame has survived for over 150
years. They may have their defects but even now they recall the
Revolution’s vigour and romance. In such powerful works as the Battle of
Banker’s Hill, The Capture of the Hessians at Trenton, and The
Declaration of Independence Trumbull has drawn the spectator to the spot
at decisive moments and has shown what the architects of American
independence looked like.
Trumbull’s battle sketches are carefully thought through; coherently
composed; full of movement, dramatic action, and emotion expressed in
fluid, rhythmic paint passages of luminous, although restricted, colour.
Gilbert Stuart (1755-1828) was the most prominent artist of the early
Republic. In his works the national American portrait school of the time
reached one of its zenith. Quite unlike Copley, who fled from Revolution
to England, Stuart, on completing his studies in England, was eager to
return to America and participate in the cultural progress of the young
Republic. From England he brought technical skill, and a consummate
artistry, which had a far-reaching effect. Stuart successfully transferred to
American soil some of the important artistic traditions and findings of
European art. Stuart created a splendid gallery of likenesses, which
truthfully embody the tumultuous bur firmly purposeful spirit of his time.
In these portraits the whole of the former British colonies can be seen,
united in its national consolidation. He painted portraits of most of the
leading personalities of the early Republic.
In spite of his sophistication and brilliant technique, Stuart retained his
native American realism, which breaks through the conventional
framework of the eighteenth-century style of portraiture. Such simple,
artless, and reticent portraits as Mrs. Richard Yates are free of rhethorics
and effects, which mar some of his official portraits. Often his works are
imbued with poetic feeling and intellectual subtlety. Stuart's candid realism
is particularly evident in the early portrait of George Washington of 1795
(the so-called Vaughan Portrait), one of the three original sketches from
life, which were later copied an innumerable number of times.
This period also saw the gradual rise of a number of excellent genre
painters-Henry Inman, William Sidney Mount, Richard C. Woodville,
David G. Blythe, Eastman Johnson, and George Caleb Bingham. These
were the earliest painters of the American scene. In addition, J. J. Audubon
created an extraordinary, detailed series of paintings of American birds. It
is significant that he had to go to England for recognition and publication
of his work. John Quidor painted scenes and legendary figures from the
works of James Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving.
b) The Hudson River school of landscape painting: Cole, Allston,
Durand
The Hudson River School was a mid-19th century American art
movement embodied by a group of landscape painters whose aesthetic
vision was influenced by romanticism. The paintings for which the
movement is named depict the Hudson River Valley and the surrounding
area, including the Catskill, Adirondack, and the White Mountains;
eventually works by the second generation of artists associated with the
school expanded to include other locales. Hudson River School paintings
reflect three themes of America in the 19th century: discovery, exploration,
and settlement. The paintings also depict the American landscape as a
pastoral setting, where human beings and nature coexist peacefully.
Hudson River School landscapes are characterized by their realistic,
detailed, and sometimes idealized portrayal of nature, often juxtaposing
peaceful agriculture and the remaining wilderness, fast disappearing from
the Hudson Valley just as it was coming to be appreciated for its qualities
of ruggedness and sublimity. In general, Hudson River School artists
believed that nature in the form of the American landscape was an
ineffable manifestation of God, though the artists varied in the depth of
their religious conviction. They took as their inspiration such European
masters as Claude Lorrain, John Constable and J. M. W. Turner, and
shared a reverence for America's natural beauty with contemporary
American writers such as Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo
Emerson. Several protagonists were members of the Düsseldorf school of
painting. The second generation of Hudson River school artists emerged to
prominence after Cole's premature death in 1848; its members included
Cole's prize pupil Frederic Edwin Church, John Frederick Kensett, and
Sanford Robinson Gifford. Works by artists of this second generation are
often described as examples of Luminism. In addition to pursuing their art,
many of the artists, including Kensett, Gifford and Church, were among
the founders of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Most
of the finest works of the Hudson River school were painted between 1855
and 1875. During that time, artists like Frederic Edwin Church and Albert
Bierstadt were celebrities, influenced by the Düsseldorf school of painting.
The epic size of the landscapes in these paintings, unexampled in earlier
American painting, reminded Americans of the vast, untamed, but
magnificent wilderness areas in their country, and their works helped build
upon movements to settle the American West, preserve national parks, and
create city parks.
Thomas Cole (1801 –1848) was the principal member of the Hudson
River School of American landscape painters. He was born in England and
worked as an engraver before emigrating to the US in 1818. In 1819 he
went to the West Indies and was deeply impressed by the beauty of the
scenery. His efforts as a landscape painter met with little success until he
settled in New York in 1825, when he began to be recognized.
The sheer immensity of the American wilderness gives many of his works,
especially the series The Voyage of Life- a visionary quality.
Washington Allston (1779-1843) was the first important American
landscape painter. He was trained in London under B. West. His early
works were Italianate landscapes in the Claude manner.
Asher B. Durand in 1830 he projected a serial publication of engraving
devoted to the American landscape. Then he became one of the leading
painters in Hudson River School.
c) Impressionist painters of the late 19 century (Homer, Eakins, Cassat,
Whistler, Sargent) One of the famous art movements is Impressionism. It
started from a group of independently exhibiting artists in Paris. This
particular art movement is characterized by comparably thin and small but
visible brush strokes, accurate depiction of light and its altering qualities,
open composition, unusual visual angles, common subject matter, and
inclusion of movement as an integral element.
Winslow Homer was an American landscape painter and printmaker, best
known for his marine subjects. He is considered one of the foremost
painters in 19th century America and a preeminent figure in American art.
Largely self-taught, Homer began his career working as a commercial
illustrator. He subsequently took up oil painting and produced major studio
works characterized by the weight and density he exploited from the
medium. He also worked extensively in watercolor, creating a fluid and
prolific oeuvre, primarily chronicling his working vacations.
Some major artists create popular stereotypes that last for decades; others
never reach into popular culture at all. Winslow Homer was a painter of the
first kind. One detects the vestiges of Homer's watercolors in every
outdoor-magazine cover that has a dead whitetail draped over a log or a
largemouth bass, like an enraged Edward G. Robinson with fins, jumping
from dark swamp water. Homer was not, of course, the first "sporting
artist" in America, but he was the undisputed master of the genre, and he
brought to it both intense observation and a sense of identification with the
landscape-just at the cultural moment when the religious Wilderness of the
nineteenth century, the church of nature, was shifting into the secular
Outdoors, the theater of manly enjoyment.
"You will see, in the future I will live by my watercolors," Homer once
remarked, and he was almost right. He came to the medium late: he was
thirty-seven and a mature artist. A distinct air of the Salon, of the desire for
a "major" utterance that leads to an overworked surface, clings to some of
the early watercolors-in particular, the oil paintings of fisher folk he did
during a twenty-month stay in the northern English coastal village of
Cullercoats in 1881-82. Those robust girls, simple, natural, windbeaten and
enduring, planted in big boots with arms akimbo against the planes of sea,
rock and sky, are also images of a kind of moralizing earnestness that was
common in French Salon art a century ago. Idealizations of the peasant,
reflecting an anxiety that folk culture was being annihilated by the
gravitational field of the city, were the stock of dozens of painters like
Jules Breton, Jules Bastien-Lepage and jean-Fran?ois Millet. Homer's own
America had its anxieties too-immense ones. Nothing in its cultural history
is more striking than the virtual absence of any mention of the central
American trauma of the nineteenth century, the Civil War, from painting.
Its fratricidal miseries were left to writers (Walt Whitman, Stephen Crane)
to explore, and to photographers. But painting served as a way of oblivionof reconstructing an idealized innocence. Thus, as Cooper points out,
Homer's 1870s watercolors of farm children and bucolic courtships try to
memorialize the halcyon days of the 185os; the children gazing raptly at
the blue horizon in Three Boys on the Shore, their backs forming a shallow
arch, are in a sense this lost America. None of this prevented Homer's
contemporaries from seeing such works as unvarnished and in some ways
disagreeable truth. "Barbarously simple," thought Henry James. "He has
chosen the least pictorial features of the least pictorial range of scenery and
civilization as if they were every inch as good as Capri or Tangier; and, to
reward his audacity, he has incontcstably succeeded."
In the 1880's he moved to Prout's Neck, Maine and began painting scenes
of the sea and coast. It is interesting to note the contrast in the subject
matter of his work. His early work captured the horror of the Civil War,
and towards the end of his life, his work captured the peace and serenity of
the Maine Coast. Winslow Homer died on September 29, 1910.
An uncompromising realist whose works and teachings inspired
generations of artists, Thomas Eakins was born July 25, 1844, in
Philadelphia. Eakins attended Central High School, which was known for
its academic emphasis on science, and from 1862 to 1865 studied at the
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, also attending courses on anatomy at
the Jefferson Medical College, for which he created one of his most
celebrated works, The Gross Clinic (1875). In 1866, he enrolled at the
Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He traveled to Italy, Germany, Belgium,
Switzerland, and Spain before returning to Philadelphia in 1870,
establishing a studio at his family home.
In 1876, Eakins began to teach at the School of the Pennsylvania Academy
of the Fine Arts. He was appointed professor of drawing and painting in
1879 and became director in 1882. Two years later he married one of his
students, Susan Hannah MacDowell. Despite growing opposition to his
methods, which included the use of nude models in his classes, Eakins
continued to teach. After he was forced to resign in 1886, his student
supporters retaliated by forming the Art Students League of Philadelphia
(1886-93) with Eakins as their instructor. After this event, he concentrated
on portraiture. His subjects were portrayed with the same unyielding
attention to the fact of appearance and psychological presence that Eakins
had demonstrated in his earlier scenes of athletes and figural compositions.
Eakins continued to paint regularly until his health began to fail in 1911.
He died June 25, 1916.
Mary Stevenson Cassatt was a painter who, though really from America,
spent a good deal of her adulthood in France, where she exhibited her art.
Her works were usually depictions of lives of women, both private and
social, most giving weight to the connection of mothers and their children.
Mary Cassatt was born on May 22, 1844 in Allegheny, Pennsylvania,
which is now a part of Pittsburgh. Her family was favorable. Her father, by
the name of Robert Simpson Cassatt, was a successful land speculator and
stockbroker. Katherine Kelso Johnston, her mother, was from a banking
family. She had six siblings, although two died when they were infants.
Later on, they moved to the east, eventually to Philadelphia area but to
Lancaster before that. She started school when she was six.
In the milieu where she grew up, travel was believed to be a critical part of
education. With that, she went to Europe and spent five years there visiting capitals which included London, Berlin and Paris. In her travels,
she learned French and German and she also had her initial trainings in
drawing and music. She probably encountered French artists such as Corot,
Delacroix, Ingres and Courbet at the Paris World's Fair of 1855. Degas and
Pissarro were also in that exhibition. Both of them would later become her
mentors and colleagues.
Despite her family's objection to her taking the path of a professional artist,
Cassatt entered the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts at the age of 15.
Her parents were concerned likely because of her exposure to feminism
and the bohemian attitude of some male students. Most of the female
students viewed art as a socially crucial skill, although they only comprised
20 percent of the students. However, only few of them were as determined
as Cassatt to turn art into a career. Through the duration of the American
Civil War, she continued her studies. Thomas Eakins, who later became
the Academy's controversial director, was one of her fellow students back
then.
Cassatt later on grew impatient with how slow the instruction was going,
along with the demeaning attitude of teachers and male students. With this,
she decided to learn the old masters by herself. Also, she commented that
teaching was absent from the Academy. Female students were not allowed
to use live models until later and most of the training was done by drawing
from casts.
Cassatt decided to stop her studies - no degree was given. Then, she left for
Paris in 1866, after winning over her father's objections. Her mother and
family friends went with her as chaperones. At that time, women were not
yet allowed to attend Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Instead, she opted to study in
private with school masters. She was accepted to train with Jean-Leon
Gerome, who was renowned for his works on exotic matters and
techniques on hyper-realism. To supplement her lessons, she became a
copyist at the Louvre - she worked as one of the usually low-paid women
who frequented museums to paint copies.
At the end of 1866, she enlisted in a painting class with Charles Chaplin, a
remarkable genre artist, as its teacher. In 1868, Cassatt also trained with an
artist working on romantic and urban subject matter by the name of
Thomas Couture. Students went on countryside trips where they drew from
life, mostly peasants working. Cassatt's painting was accepted for the first
time for the Paris Salon. The painting was entitled A Mandolin Player
which is Romantic in style. This is one of the only two works from the first
decade of her career that was documented.
Mary Cassatt returned to the United States when the Franco-Prussian War
was just beginning in 1870. She lived with her family in Altoona. Her
father was still against her chosen career. He provided her basic needs but
didn't pay for her art supplies. She submitted two of her paintings which
were placed at the New York Gallery. This gave her lots of admirers but no
buyers. In addition to her disappointment, she couldn't find paintings to
study at home. There came a point when she thought about giving up art
and finding employment. She traveled to Chicago to try her luck. Then, she
was commissioned by the Archbishop of Pittsburgh to paint copies of a
painting by Correggio. She earned enough money to go back to Europe.
Her art career slowly built up from then. She gained good reputation and
her paintings were being purchased. One of her works is The Child's Bath.
The painting shows a mother giving a bath to her child. Its subject and
perspective was intuitive of Japanese woodblocks. The painting is now in
the Art Institute of Chicago and one of the most popular in the said
museum.
The influence of Mary Cassatt in the world of art and beyond extends to a
notable reach. A ship for the World War II was named after her. One of her
works, titled The Boating Party, was printed on a US postage stamp in
1966. Her paintings have been sold for as high as $2.9 million.
The American painter, etcher, and lithographer James Abbott McNeil
Whistler created a new set of principles for the fine arts, championed art
for art's sake, and introduced a subtle style of painting in which atmosphere
and mood were the main focus.
James Abbott McNeill Whistler was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, on
July 10, 1834, the son of Major George Whistler, a railroad engineer, and
Anna McNeill. In 1842 Czar Nicholas I (1796-1855) of Russia invited
Major Whistler to build a railroad from St. Petersburg to Moscow and
offered the princely salary of twelve thousand dollars a year. In St.
Petersburg the family lived luxuriously, with several servants, and James
and his brother had a governess and a Swedish tutor. Because French was
the court language, the boys soon became fluent in it. On one occasion the
Whistlers took a trip fifteen miles out of St. Petersburg to Tsarkoe Selo.
Here, in the palace built by Catherine the Great (1729-1896), there was a
suite of apartments in the Chinese style containing many fine examples of
Oriental porcelain. James was fascinated by this collection and later
became a collector of blue-and-white porcelain.
Whistler's interest in drawing, which had begun when he was four, greatly
increased during the years in Russia, and in 1845 he was enrolled in a
drawing course at the Academy of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg. In 1849
Major Whistler died, and Mrs. Whistler returned to the United States with
her sons, settling in Pomfret, Connecticut. James decided he wanted to go
to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, which his father had attended,
and obtained an appointment in 1851. At West Point he stood first in the
drawing course but did poorly in chemistry. Because he constantly broke
the rules, he racked up two hundred eighteen demerits (marks for bad
conduct) and as a result was dismissed in 1854.
After an unsuccessful apprenticeship (a job acquired to learn a trade) with
the Winaas Locomotive Works in Baltimore, Maryland, Whistler obtained
a job in Washington, D.C., with the Coast and Geodetic Survey. He was
always late, often absent, and was the despair of his employer. However,
he had the finest training in etching (the process of producing a design or a
picture off a hard surface with the use of chemicals) and learned the basic
principles of printmaking.
With a three hundred fifty dollar-a-year inheritance from his father,
Whistler went abroad to study art. He arrived in Paris, France, in 1855 and
at once threw himself into the artistic life of the French students. While
copying in the Parisian art museum the Louvre in 1858, Whistler met
Henri Fantin-Latour (1836-1904), who in turn introduced him to Alphonse
Legros (1837-1911) and other artists, including the great realist painter
Gustave Courbet (1819-1877). In 1858 Whistler brought out Twelve
Etchings from Nature, known as the French Set. The next year his first
important painting, At the Piano, influenced by Fantin-Latour and Dutch
seventeenth-century interiors, was rejected by the Paris Salon (an art
gallery), although it was accepted by the Royal Academy in London,
England, in 1860.
Whistler's painting Wapping (1861) shows the influence of Courbet's
realism, an art style that seeks to capture reality. One of the figures in the
foreground is the redheaded Irish beauty Joanna Hiffernan, known as Jo,
who became both Whistler's model and mistress. He painted her as The
White Girl (1862), standing in a white dress, against a white background,
with her red hair over her shoulder. The figure is medieval (having to do
with the Middle Ages) in feeling with a remoteness and deep-thinking gaze
that place it close to the Pre-Raphaelite painters, a band of painters that
reacted against the unimaginative and traditional historical paintings of
their time. Whistler knew their work; he had met Dante Gabriel Rossetti
(1828-1882) in 1862 and was decidedly influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites
at this time. Although The White Girl was rejected by the Royal Academy
in 1862 and the Paris Salon of 1863, it was a sensation at the Salon des
Refus?s, admired by artists though laughed at by the public.
In 1863 Whistler leased a house in the Chelsea section of London, where
he set up housekeeping with Jo. His mother arrived late that year and spent
the rest of her life in England. Whistler became a collector of blue-andwhite porcelain as well as Oriental costumes, in which he posed his models
for such pictures as La Princess du pays de la porcelaine (1864).
In 1871 Whistler published the sixteen etchings, Views of the Thames,
known as the Thames Set. He also did a series of atmospheric paintings
which he called nocturnes. He liked to go out on the river at twilight and
was fascinated by the foggy or misty effects in the fading light. In putting
these impressions on canvas from memory, he made use of the Japanese
concept of space as a well-balanced design in which perspective plays no
part. In the famous Arrangement in Grey and Black, the Artist's Mother
(1872) he composed the picture with disarming simplicity, keeping the
Japanese concept of space in mind.
During 1877 Whistler exhibited several paintings, including Falling
Rocket, a nocturne showing the mysterious and elusive (hard to grasp)
effects of fireworks at night at Cremorne Gardens. It outraged John Ruskin
(1819-1900), considered the country's finest judge of good taste in
England, and he wrote an insulting review of the exhibition. Whistler sued
him for libel (a written statement that hurts someone's public image) in
what was the most sensational art trial of the century and was awarded
very little money. The trial ruined Whistler financially, and he had to sell
his new house and sell off his porcelain collection.
Fortunately, the Fine Arts Society commissioned Whistler to do twelve
etchings of Venice, Italy. He spent fourteen months in Venice doing many
etchings as well as small oils, watercolors, and pastels. His etching style
was now completely changed. He treated his themes with the utmost
delicacy, using a spidery line and lively curves, and he often wiped the
plates to give tone. His Venetian work sold well and he was financially
reestablished. He took a house in London with Maud Franklin, who had
replaced Jo as model and mistress.
On the evening of January 31, 1885, Whistler delivered at Prince's Hall the
"Ten O'Clock," his famous lecture summing up his theories on the nature
of beauty in polished prose. He mentioned the poetry that evening mists
produce when "the tall chimneys become campanili and the warehouses are
palaces at night."
John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) was an American painter by birth-right.
He loved his country yet he spent most of his life in Europe. He was the
most celebrated portraitist of his time but left it at the very height of his
fame to devote full time to landscape painting, water colors and public art.
He was born in Florence, to American parents and traveled extensively
throughout Europe. His parents never settled back in America, not stepping
foot in the States himself until right before his 21st birthday to retain his
citizenship.
He was schooled as a French artist, heavily influenced by the Impressionist
movement, the Spanish Master Velazquez, the Dutch Master Frans Hals,
and his teacher Carolus-Duran . He was the darling of Paris until the
scandal of his Madame X painting at the 1884 Salon.
Discouraged at the rejection, even considered leaving art at the age of 28,
he left Paris and settled (if that word could ever be used for him) in
England where he reached the height of his fame. To be painted by Sargent
was to be painted by the best.
Although England would be his home, he never stopped traveling and he
never stopped painting. To describe Sargent is to say that he painted. It
was his life and yet he had a deep appreciation for music and all art forms
and went out of his way to promote other artists -- for this selflessness he
was greatly loved.
Extremely bright, extremely gifted, an intense hard worker, he was the last
great generalist. It is hard to put a label on him for he could master so
many different painting styles. He was an Impressionist, a Classical
Portraitist, a Landscape Artist, a Water Colorist, a Muralist of public art,
and even started sculpting at the last of his life. He was all of these things
and yet he was none of them in total.
He once said that the knowledge of a technique for an artist, such as
Impressionism, "does not make a man an Artist any more than the
knowledge of perspective does -- it is mearly a refining of one's means
towards representing things and one step further away from the
hieroglyph".
He is often passed by, not studied, or dismissed because he was never a
radical artist or trend-setter. He always worked within the wide, rich
textured pallet of known and established styles. Yet his brilliance was in
fusing these elements together and for this he has never fully gotten credit.
His output was prodigious. Working dawn til dusk in some cases -- even
on vacations, and sometimes seven days a week. Between 1877 (when his
work really started taking off) and 1925, he did over 900 oils and more
than 2,000 watercolors along with countless charcoal sketch-portraits and
endless pencil drawings.
He painted two United States presidents, the aristocracy of Europe, the
new and emerging tycoons and barons of business -- Rockefeller, Sears,
Vanderbilt; and he painted gypsies, tramps, and street children with the
same gusto and passion. He hiked through the Rocky Mountains with a
canvas tent under pouring rain to paint the beauty of waterfalls, and
painted near the front lines during World War I to capture the horrors of
war. He painted the back alleys of Venice, sleeping gondoliers, fishing
boats and the dusty side streets of Spain. He painted opulent interiors and
vacant Moorish Ruins. He painted the artists of his time -- performers,
poets, dancers, musicians, and writers -- Robert Louis Stevenson, and
Henry James. He painted the great generals of the Great War, and the
Bedouin nomads in their camps. He painted grand allegorical murals, and
his friends as they slept.
Where others kept journals, John Singer Sargent painted his, and his life
can easily be chronicled by these records in color and canvas. He loved
people, yet was intensely private. And he loved his family deeply and
devotedly, though he never had a family himself (was childless and never
married). He was simply, a great man and a great Artist.
d)The Ashcan School, also called the Ash Can School, was an artistic
movement in the United States during the early twentieth century that is
best known for works portraying scenes of daily life in New York, often in
the city's poorer neighborhoods.
About 1900, a group of Realist artists set themselves apart from and
challenged the American Impressionists and academics. The most
extensively trained member of this group was Robert Henri (1865-1929),
who had studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts from 1886
to 1888 under Thomas Anshutz (1851-1912). Anshutz had himself studied
at the Pennsylvania Academy from 1876 to 1882 with Thomas Eakins,
who had defied Victorian decorum in his teaching principles and in his
boldly realistic paintings. After spending the years from 1888 to 1891
working at the Academie Julian in Paris, Henri taught at the School of
Design for Women in Philadelphia and gave private art classes in and
around that city and, during return visits to France, in and around Paris.
Beginning in 1892, Henri also became the mentor to four Philadelphia
illustrators-William Glackens (1870-1938), George Luks (1866-1933),
Everett Shinn (1876-1953), and John Sloan (1871-1951)-who worked
together at several local newspapers and gathered to study, share studios,
and travel. Between late 1896 and 1904, they all moved to New York,
where Henri himself settled in 1900.
Henri and his former-Philadelphia associates comprised the first generation
of what came to be known as the Ashcan School. A second generation
consisted of Henri's New York students, of whom George Bellows (18821925) was the most devoted. The term Ashcan School was suggested by a
drawing by Bellows captioned Disappointments of the Ash Can, which
appeared in the Philadelphia Record in April 1915; was invoked by
cartoonist Art Young in a disparaging critique that appeared in the New
York Sun in April 1916; and was given curatorial currency by Holger
Cahill and Alfred H. Barr Jr. in a 1934 exhibition at New York's Museum
of Modern Art. Although the Ashcan artists were not an organized
"school" and espoused somewhat varied styles and subjects, they were all
urban Realists who supported Henri's credo-"art for life's sake," rather than
"art for art's sake." They also presented their works in several important
early twentieth-century New York exhibitions, including a group show at
the National Arts Club in 1904; the landmark show of The Eight at
Macbeth Galleries in February 1908, which included the five senior
Ashcan School painters along with Ernest Lawson (1873-1939), Maurice
Prendergast (1858-1924), and Arthur B. Davies (1862-1928); the
Exhibition of Independent Artists in 1910; and the Armory Show-an
immense display dominated by modern European art-in 1913.
In their paintings as in their illustrations, etchings, and lithographs, Henri
and his fellow Ashcan artists concentrated on portraying New York's
vitality and recording its seamy side, keeping a keen eye on current events
and their era's social and political rhetoric. Stylistically, they depended
upon the dark palette and gestural brushwork of Diego Velazquez, Frans
Hals, Francisco de Goya, Honore Daumier, and recent Realists such as
Wilhelm Leibl, Edouard Manet, and Edgar Degas. They preferred broad,
calligraphic forms, which they could render "on the run" or from memory,
thereby enlisting skills that most of them had cultivated as newspaper
illustrators. Although the Ashcan artists advocated immersion in modern
actualities, they were neither social critics nor reformers and they did not
paint radical propaganda. While they identified with the vitality of the
lower classes and resolved to register the dismal aspects of urban
existence, they themselves led pleasant middle-class lives, enjoying New
York's restaurants and bars, its theater and vaudeville, and its popular
nearby resorts such as Coney Island. Because they avoided civil unease,
class tensions, and the grit of the streets, their works are never as direct or
disturbing as those of their European counterparts or of the reformist
images of American photographers such as Jacob Riis.
The Ashcan artists selectively documented an unsettling, transitional time
in American culture that was marked by confidence and doubt, excitement
and trepidation. Ignoring or registering only gently harsh new realities such
as the problems of immigration and urban poverty, they shone a positive
light on their era. Along with the American Impressionists, the Ashcan
artists defined the avant-garde in the United States until the 1913 Armory
Show introduced to the American public the works of true modernists
Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, and others. Henri and
most of his Ashcan colleagues continued to paint-even into the 1940s, in
the case of Sloan and Shinn. Although their creativity waned and their
pioneering character faded, they infused some of their late canvases with
their earlier vigor.
In 1902, Henri accepted a position at the New York School of Art
(formerly known as the Chase School of Art, after artist William Merritt
Chase). It was here that Henri would establish himself as the pre-eminent
art teacher in America at the turn of the century. In his years as an
instructor, he taught some of the greatest artists of the younger generation,
including Edward Hopper, Stuart Davis, Man Ray, Adolph Gottlieb, Glen
Coleman, Rockwell Kent and Yusuo Kuniyoshi among others. He was also
an art teacher to the poet Vachel Lindsay, actor Clifton Webb, writer Ariel
Durant and Marxist theorist Leon Trotsky. In 1909, he established his own
school of art, appropriately named the Henri School of Art.
By 1907, Henri became an Academician of the National Academy of
Design (NAD). However, Henri left the Academy in that same year
following a dispute with the selection jury of the NAD Annual Exhibition.
In protest to the jury's rejection of several artists within his circle, Henri
withdrew both of his paintings from the annual exhibition and formed an
alternative, landmark group exhibition, which was held at the Macbeth
Gallery in New York City. The group of eight artists whose works were
displayed included the Philadelphia Four and several other followers of
Henri. In 1934, the artists Robert Henri, Arthur B. Davies, Maurice
Prendergast, Ernest Lawson, William Glackens, Everett Shinn, John
French Sloan, and George Luks were labeled "The Eight" (also known as
the Ashcan School).
Determined to fulfill his vision for the American art world, Henri
organized a jury-free, prize-free exhibition in 1910, which closely
resembled the Salon des Independents of Paris. Although aging, Henri
embraced modern art of the early 20th century and took part in the
planning of the Armory Show of 1913, in which five of his paintings were
included. In the years following 1913, Henri went on to teach at the Art
Students League in New York. After a painful struggle with cancer, he
died in 1929 in New York City.
George Wesley Bellows grew up in Columbus, Ohio, the son of a devout
and solidly Republican building contractor, and a mother who hoped that
her son would become a Methodist Bishop. He always felt deeply
ambivalent about his father, noting at the time of his death that, "He was a
wonderfully fine man, yet being fifty-five when I appeared, his point of
view, his character even, belonged to so remote a past that I look upon
many of his ideas to this day with amazement and sorrow."
Teased as a sissy by his classmates, George Bellows quickly learned to
defend himself with his fists, and compensated for his gangling
awkwardness by becoming an outstanding athlete, particularly in baseball.
His love of drawing was kindled early since he was forbidden to play
outside on Sundays but allowed to draw while his mother read aloud from
the Bible.
At Ohio State University, George Bellows proved a spirited extrovert,
excelling in baseball as well as in the new sport of basketball, singing in
theatricals, and producing drawings of Gibson-like girls for the university's
magazine. Bellows's athletic prowess almost diverted him from a career in
art, but in 1904 he decided to turn down a professional baseball contact and
move to New York City to study painting.
The sprawling, teaming city of New York was a revelation to him after the
neat lawns and tidy homes of Columbus. There he quickly fell under the
spell of the charismatic teacher Robert Henri, who introduced him to
Shaw, Ibsen and socialism, and inspired him to shift from drawing Gibson
Girls to painting the life of the streets. Bellows was still a relative
newcomer to New York when Henri and his followers staged their famous
exhibition of "The Eight" at the Macbeth Gallery, and consequently he was
not included. But in spirit his work belongs with that display - perhaps
someday Henri's group will be rechristened "The Nine" to pay tribute to
the fact that George Bellows was the painter whose work best expresses
the goals of the group.
In 1906 Bellows painted his first masterpiece, "The Cross-Eyed
Boy." He followed with several other equally memorable likenesses of
street urchins, and then expanded his vision with a series of masterful
urban scenes that record such subjects as boys swimming in the East River,
bums swarming around a lone tenement, the bridge to Blackwell's island,
or the great scar created by the excavation of Pennsylvania station. A
dozen or more of these canvases rank with the best American paintings
ever made. Perhaps his masterpiece was his boxing scene, "Stag at
Sharkey's," inspired by Sharkey's saloon, just across the street from the
Lincoln Arcade where he had his studio, where amateurs pummeled each
other on "Fight Night." The painting has become an icon of American art,
perhaps the most memorable single expression of the tough, rough
excitement of the modern city. Dazzling in its execution, the brushwork
has the same athletic bravura as the scene itself, as befits a painter who was
also a star athlete.
In 1910, after a long and at times tempestuous courtship,
Bellows married a very proper American girl, Emma Story, in St. George's
Episcopal Church in the Bronx. They had two children, Anne, born in 1911
and Jean, born in 1915. After his marriage, Bellow's subject matter began
to shift. While he continued to paint urban scenes, increasingly he focused
on landscapes of Maine and Woodstock, as well as portraits. Somewhat
surprisingly, the painter of bums and boxers proved particularly adept at
sensitive portraits of women, including many masterful likenesses of his
wife and daughters. Just a year before his death he painted the most famous
of these, "Lady Jean," showing his ten-year-old daughter Jean dressed in
quaint Victorian attire. Appropriately, Jean later became an actress,
appearing on Broadway opposite such stars as Helen Hayes.
While the vigor of his work conveys an unselfconscious feeling,
George Bellows was actually a remarkably intellectual painter, who
mastered a variety of different color systems, including those of Hardesty
Maratta and Denman Ross, and also explored complex systems of design,
such as Jay Hambridge's theories of "Dynamic Symmetry."
Along with being a great painter, George Bellows was also one
of this country's greatest printmakers, who exploited the technique of
lithography to make prints that are as fresh and natural-looking as a
charcoal sketch. In executing these designs, George Bellows worked
closely with the great printer Bolton Brown, who along with George Miller
ranks as one of the two most significant American lithographers of the 20th
century. The delicacy of Brown's printing, however, was unique. While
Miller produced richly tonal effects for artists such as Thomas Hart Benton
and Grant Wood, Brown produced lithographs with a silvery delicacy that
almost perfectly matches a pencil line, and gives Bellows's prints the fresh,
silvery appearance of actual drawings.
Sadly, George Bellows died of appendicitis, at the height of his fame and
artistic prowess, at the early age of forty-three. Later that year a great
memorial exhibition of his work was held at the Metropolitan Museum of
Art in New York. At the opening, Bellows' teacher, Robert Henri squired
his widow, Emma, through the opening, and when it was over he turned to
her in tears. "I always gave him my most severe criticism," he commented,
"because I thought he was my best pupil. Now I am sure of it."
Bellows's fame came early and has proved long lasting. At the
age of twenty-three, he attained membership in the National Academy of
Design, and at the age of thirty-one became a full academician, the
youngest painter ever elected to that body. By the age of thirty his work
hung in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as much an honor as it would be
today. Today he is still ranked as one of the giants of American art - a
figure whose tough-minded realism rivals that of Eakins, whose technical
virtuosity rivals that of Sargent.
A leader of The Eight, John Sloan was born in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania.
Sloan grew up in Philadelphia, where he studied briefly at the
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and in 1892 joined the art staff of
the PhiladelphiaInquirer. That year he met Robert Henri, who would
become his life-long friend and inspire him to become a painter. Among
his fellow newspaper artists in Philadelphia were William Glackens,
George Luks, and Everett Shinn. In 1904 Sloan and Dolly, his wife of three
years, moved to New York, where he continued to work as an illustrator
and became increasingly interested in depicting city life and city scenes.
He participated in many major exhibitions such as "The Eight" in 1908, the
Exhibition of Independent Artists in 1910, the 1913 Armory Show, and the
first show of the Society of Independent Artists in 1917.
In 1910 Sloan joined the Socialist Party and contributed illustrations to its
publications, notably the magazine The Masses. With the advent of World
War I he resigned from the party. About the same time he began spending
summers away from the city, first at Gloucester, Massachusetts (19141919), and then in Santa Fe (from 1919). In 1916 he had his first oneperson exhibition (at the Whitney Studio), began his association with
Kraushaar Galleries, and started teaching at the Art Students League. He
became president of the Society of Independent Artists in 1918, a post he
held until 1944.
It was probably due to Sloan's paintings, which favored a dark palette and
scenes of the gritty side of urban life in turn-of-the-century New York
City, that the Eight was later dubbed the "Ashcan School." Sloan's subjects
are voyeuristic, a spectator of the human dramas he glimpsed in the streets
and tenements of New York. Duncan Phillips further noted in A Collection
in the Making, that Sloan was a "…sympathetic and understanding
observer of class consciousness, crowd psychology and the bitter ironies of
life." One of America's most revered artists in his later years, Sloan
continued to paint, etch, and experiment with new printing techniques,
until his death in 1951.
e) Pop Art was the art of popular culture. It was the visual art movement
that characterised a sense of optimism during the post war consumer boom
of the 1950's and 1960's. It coincided with the globalization of pop music
and youth culture, personified by Elvis and the Beatles. Pop Art was brash,
young and fun and hostile to the artistic establishment. It included different
styles of painting and sculpture from various countries, but what they all
had in common was an interest in mass-media, mass-production and massculture.
The word 'POP' was first coined in 1954, by the British art critic Lawrence
Alloway, to describe a new type of art that was inspired by the imagery of
popular culture. Alloway, alongside the artists Richard Hamilton and
Eduardo Paolozzi, was among the founding members of the Independent
Group, a collective of artists, architects, and writers who explored radical
approaches to contemporary visual culture during their meetings at ICA in
London between 1952 and 1955. They became the forerunners to British
Pop art. At their first meeting Paolozzi gave a visual lecture entitled 'Bunk'
(short for 'bunkum' meaning nonsense) which took an ironic look at the allAmerican lifestyle. This was illustrated by a series collages created from
American magazines that he received from GI's still resident in Paris in the
late 1940s. 'I was a Rich Man's Plaything', one of the 'Bunk' series, was the
first visual artwork to include the word 'POP'.
Pop art in America evolved in a slightly differently way to its British
counterpart. American Pop Art was both a development of and a reaction
against Abstract Expressionist painting. Abstract Expressionism was the
first American art movement to achieve global acclaim but, by the mid1950's, many felt it had become too introspective and elitist. American Pop
Art evolved as an attempt to reverse this trend by reintroducing the image
as a structural device in painting, to pull art back from the obscurity of
abstraction into the real world again. This was a model that had been tried
and tested before. Picasso had done something similar forty years
previously when he collaged 'real world' printed images onto his still lifes,
as he feared that his painting was becoming too abstract. Around 1955, two
remarkable artists emerged who would lay the foundations of a bridge
between Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. They were Jasper Johns and
Robert Rauschenberg, the forerunners of American Pop Art.
Jasper Johns' early artworks question how we look at, perceive and make
art. He does not distinguish between subject and object in his work, or art
and life for that matter. In his eyes they are both the same thing. Johns
believes that we should not look upon a painting as a representation or
illusion but as an object with its own reality.
Like the forerunners of British Pop Art, Johns was influenced by Dada
ideas, in particular the 'readymades' (found objects) of Marcel Duchamp,
whose bottle racks and bicycle wheels challenged the definition of the art
object.
However, it was not 'found objects' that Johns introduced as a subject for
his paintings, but 'found images' - flags, targets, letters and numbers - and
it was this iconography of familiar signs that appealed to Pop. He saw them
as "pre-formed, conventional, depersonalised, factual, exterior elements."
Johns' depersonalized images provided an antidote to the obscure personal
abstraction of late Abstract Expressionism. His use of such neutral icons
offered him a subject that was immediately recognisable but so ordinary
that it left him free to work on other levels. His subjects provided him with
a structure upon which he could explore the visual and physical qualities of
his medium. The results were a careful balance between representation and
abstraction.
Johns painted in encaustic, an archaic medium that dates from the first
century which fuses pigment in hot wax. He combined encaustic with
newspaper collage to create a seductive expanse of paint where his
sensitive mark-making articulates the surface of the work. His fascination
with the overall unity of the surface plane in a picture places him in a
tradition that stretches back through Cubism and Cezanne to Chardin.
Johns' art plays with visual ideas that have layers of meaning and
communicate on various levels. It is both sensual and cerebral - an art
about art and the way we relate to it.
Andy Warhol (August 6, 1928 - February 22, 1987) was an American
artist who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop
art. His works explore the relationship between artistic expression,
celebrity culture and advertisement that flourished by the 1960s. After a
successful career as a commercial illustrator, Warhol became a renowned
and sometimes controversial artist. The Andy Warhol Museum in his
native city, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, holds an extensive permanent
collection of art and archives. It is the largest museum in the United States
dedicated to a single artist.
Warhol's art encompassed many forms of media, including hand drawing,
painting, printmaking, photography, silk screening, sculpture, film, and
music. He was also a pioneer in computer-generated art using Amiga
computers that were introduced in 1984, two years before his death. He
founded Interview Magazine and was the author of numerous books,
including The Philosophy of Andy Warhol andPopism: The Warhol
Sixties. He is also notable as a gay man who lived openly as such before
the gay liberation movement. His studio, The Factory, was a famous
gathering place that brought together distinguished intellectuals, drag
queens, playwrights, Bohemian street people, Hollywood celebrities, and
wealthy patrons.
Warhol has been the subject of numerous retrospective exhibitions, books,
and feature and documentary films. He coined the widely used expression
"15 minutes of fame". Many of his creations are very collectible and highly
valuable. The highest price ever paid for a Warhol painting is US$100
million for a 1963 canvas titled Eight Elvises. The private transaction was
reported in a 2009 article in The Economist, which described Warhol as
the "bellwether of the art market".Warhol's works include some of the most
expensive paintings ever sold.
Roy Lichtenstein (October 27, 1923 - September 29, 1997) was an
American pop artist. During the 1960s, his paintings were exhibited at the
Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City and, along with Andy Warhol,
Jasper Johns, James Rosenquist, and others. He became a leading figure in
the new art movement. His work defined the basic premise of pop art better
than any other through parody.Favoring the old-fashioned comic strip as
subject matter, Lichtenstein produced hard-edged, precise compositions
that documented while it parodied often in a tongue-in-cheekhumorous
manner. His work was heavily influenced by both popular advertising and
the comic book style. He described pop art as, "not 'American' painting but
actually industrial painting"
It was at this time, that Lichtenstein began to find fame not just in America
but worldwide. He moved back to New York to be at the center of the art
scene and resigned from Rutgers University in 1964 to concentrate on his
painting. Lichtenstein used oil and Magna paint in his best known works,
such as Drowning Girl (1963), which was appropriated from the lead story
in DC Comics' Secret Hearts #83. (Drowning Girl now hangs in the
Museum of Modern Art, New York.) Drowning Girl also features thick
outlines, bold colors and Ben-Day dots, as if created by photographic
reproduction. Of his own work Lichtenstein would say that Abstract
Expressionists "put things down on the canvas and responded to what they
had done, to the color positions and sizes. My style looks completely
different, but the nature of putting down lines pretty much is the same;
mine just don't come out looking calligraphic, like Pollock's or Kline's."
Rather than attempt to reproduce his subjects, his work tackled the way
mass media portrays them. Lichtenstein would never take himself too
seriously however: "I think my work is different from comic strips- but I
wouldn't call it transformation; I don't think that whatever is meant by it is
important to art". When his work was first released, many art critics of the
time challenged its originality. His work was harshly criticized as vulgar
and empty. The title of a Life magazine article in 1964 asked, "Is He the
Worst Artist in the U.S.?" Lichtenstein responded to such claims by
offering responses such as the following: "The closer my work is to the
original, the more threatening and critical the content. However, my work
is entirely transformed in that my purpose and perception are entirely
different. I think my paintings are critically transformed, but it would be
difficult to prove it by any rational line of argument". He discussed
experiencing this heavy criticism in interview with April Bernard and
Mimi Thompson in 1986. Suggesting that it was at times difficult to be
criticized, Lichtenstein said, "I don't doubt when I'm actually painting, it's
the criticism that makes you wonder, it does."
His most famous image is arguably Whaam! (1963, Tate Modern,
London), one of the earliest known examples of pop art, adapted a comicbookpanel from a 1962 issue of DC Comics' All-American Men of War.
The painting depicts a fighter aircraft firing a rocket into an enemy plane,
with a red-and-yellow explosion. The cartoon style is heightened by the
use of the onomatopoeic lettering "Whaam!" and the boxed caption "I
pressed the fire control... and ahead of me rockets blazed through the
sky..." This diptych is large in scale, measuring 1.7 x 4.0 m (5 ft 7 in x 13
ft 4 in). Whaam is widely regarded as one of his finest and most notable
works. It follows the comic strip-based themes of some of his previous
paintings and is part of a body of war-themed work created between 1962
and 1964. It is one of his two notable large war-themed paintings. It was
purchased by the Tate Modern in 1966, after being exhibited at the Leo
Castelli Gallery in 1963, and has remained in their collection since.
Lichtenstein began experimenting with sculpture around 1964,
demonstrating a knack for the form that was at odds with the insistent
flatness of his paintings. For Head of Girl (1964), and Head with Red
Shadow (1965), he collaborated with a ceramicist who sculpted the form of
the head out of clay. Lichtenstein then applied a glaze to create the same
sort of graphic motifs that he used in his paintings; the application of black
lines and Ben-day dots to three-dimensional objects resulted in a flattening
of the form
Most of his best-known artworks are relatively close, but not exact, copies
of comic book panels, a subject he largely abandoned in 1965. (He would
occasionally incorporate comics into his work in different ways in later
decades.) These panels were originally drawn by such comics artists as
Jack Kirby and DC Comics artists Russ Heath, Tony Abruzzo, Irv Novick,
and Jerry Grandenetti, who rarely received any credit. Jack Cowart,
executive director of the Lichtenstein Foundation, contests the notion that
Lichtenstein was a copyist, saying: "Roy's work was a wonderment of the
graphic formulae and the codification of sentiment that had been worked
out by others. The panels were changed in scale, color, treatment, and in
their implications. There is no exact copy." However, some have been
critical of Lichtenstein's use of comic-book imagery and art pieces,
especially insofar as that use has been seen as endorsement of a patronizing
view of comics by the art mainstream;[ noted comics author Art
Spiegelman commented that "Lichtenstein did no more or less for comics
than Andy Warhol did for soup."
In 1966, Lichtenstein moved on from his much-celebrated imagery of the
early 1960s, and began his Modern Paintings series, including over 60
paintings and accompanying drawings. Using his characteristic Ben Day
dots and geometric shapes and lines, he rendered incongruous, challenging
images out of familiar architectural structures, patterns borrowed from Art
D?co and other subtly evocative, often sequential, motifs. The Modern
Sculpture series of 1967-8 made reference to motifs from Art D?co
architecture
Larry Rivers (August 17, 1923 - August 14, 2002) was an American
artist, musician, filmmaker and occasional actor. Rivers resided and
maintained studios in New York City, Southampton, New York (onLong
Island) and Zihuatanejo, Mexico. Larry Rivers was born in the Bronx, as
YitzhokLoizaGrossberg to Russian Jewish parents. He changed his name
to Larry Rivers in 1940, after being introduced as "Larry Rivers and the
Mudcats" at a local New York City pub. From 1940-45 he worked as a jazz
saxophonist in New York City, and he studied at the Juilliard School of
Music in 1945-46, along with Miles Davis, with whom he remained friends
until Davis's death in 1991.
Rivers is considered by many scholars to be the "Godfather" and
"Grandfather" of Pop art, because he was one of the first artists to really
merge non-objective, non-narrative art with narrative and objective
abstraction.
Rivers took up painting in 1945 and studied at the Hans Hofmann School
from 1947-48, and then at New York University. He was a pop artist of the
New York School, reproducing everyday objects of American popular
culture as art. He was one of eleven New York artists featured in the
opening exhibition at the Terrain Gallery in 1955.
During the early 1960s Rivers lived in the Hotel Chelsea, notable for its
artistic residents such as Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen, Arthur
C. Clarke, Dylan Thomas, Sid Vicious and multiple people associated with
Andy Warhol's Factory. In 1965 Rivers had his first comprehensive
retrospective in five important American museums. His final work for the
exhibition was The History of the Russian Revolution, which was later on
extended permanent display at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture
Garden in Washington, DC. During 1967 he was in London collaborating
with the American painterHowardKanovitz.
In 1968, Rivers travelled to Africa for a second time with Pierre
Dominique Gaisseau to finish their documentary Africa and I, which was a
part of the groundbreaking NBC series "Experiments in Television".
During this trip they narrowly escaped execution as suspected mercenaries.
During the 1970s Rivers worked closely with Diana Molinari and Michel
Auder on many video tape projects, including the infamous Tits, and also
worked in neon.
Established as one of America's most important postwar artists, Rivers
continued, until his death on August 14, 2002, to exhibit regularly both in
the United States and abroad and to create work that combined realistically
rendered images within a loosely brushed, quasi-abstract background.His
primary gallery being the Marlborough Gallery in New York City. In 2002
a major retrospective of Rivers' work was held at the Corcoran Gallery of
Art in Washington, D.C.
Op art, also known as optical art, is a style of visual art that makes use of
optical illusions.
"Optical art is a method of painting concerning the interaction between
illusion and picture plane, between understanding and seeing." Op art
works are abstract, with many of the better known pieces made in black
and white. When the viewer looks at them, the impression is given of
movement, hidden images, flashing and vibration, patterns, or
alternatively, of swelling or warping.
Op art is derived from the constructivist practices of the Bauhaus. This
German school, founded by Walter Gropius, stressed the relationship of
form and function within a framework of analysis and rationality. Students
were taught to focus on the overall design, or entire composition, in order
to present unified works. When the Bauhaus was forced to close in 1933,
many of its instructors fled to the United States where the movement took
root in Chicago and eventually at the Black Mountain College in Asheville,
North Carolina, where Anni and Josef Albers would come to
teach.[citation needed]
The term first appeared in print in Time magazine in October 1964 in
response to Julian Stanczak's show Optical Paintings at the Martha Jackson
gallery, though works which might now be described as "op art" had been
produced for several years previously. For instance, Victor Vasarely's
painting, Zebras (1938), is made up entirely of curvilinear black and white
stripes that are not contained by contour lines. Consequently, the stripes
appear to both meld into and burst forth from the surrounding background
of the composition. Also the early black and white Dazzle panels of John
McHale installed at the This Is Tomorrow exhibit in 1956 and his Pandora
series at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1962 demonstrate proto-op
tendencies.
In the 1960s Arnold Schmidt (Arnold Alfred Schmidt) had several solo
exhibitions of his large, black and white shaped optical paintings exhibited
at the Terrain Gallery in New York. Some members of the group Nouvelle
Tendence (1961-1965) in Europe also were engaged in Op art as
AlmirMavignier and Gerhard von Graevenitz, mainly with their
serigraphics. They studied optical illusions. The term "Op" irritated many
of the artists labeled under it, specifically including Albers and Stanczak.
They had discussed upon the birth of the term a better label, namely
perceptual art
2) The history of sculpture in the USA
The history of sculpture in the United States begins in the 1600s "with the
modest efforts of craftsmen who adorned gravestones, Bible boxes, and
various utilitarian objects with simple low-relief decorationsAmerican
sculpture in its many forms, genres and guises has continuously
contributed to the cultural landscape of world art into the 21st century.
Folk art
There is frequently art in well-made tombstones, iron products, furniture,
toys, and tools-perhaps better reflecting the character of a people than
sculptures made in classical styles for social elites. One of these specific
applications, the carving of wooden figureheads for ships, started in the
Americas as early as 1750and a century later helped launch the careers of
Samuel McIntyre and the country's first famous sculptor, William
Rush(1756-1833) of Philadelphia,.[3] The tradition begun then continues
today in the folk sculpture style known as Chainsaw carving.
In the 1830s, the first generation of notable American sculptors studied and
lived in Italy, particularly in Florence and Rome, creating in the Neoclassic
style. At that time, Italy "provided the proper atmosphere, brought the
sculptor close to the great monuments of antiquity, and provided museum
collections that were available to study." They also gave the artists access
to the carvers of Italy who translated their clay works into marble. During
this period the themes from which the subjects of sculptural works were
chosen tended to be drawn from antiquity, the exceptions being portraits
(whose subjects were frequently shown wearing Roman or Greek garb) or
works that included Native Americans. These artists included Horatio
Greenough (1805-1852), Hiram Powers(1805-1873), Thomas Crawford
(1814-1857), Thomas Ball (1819-1911) and his son-in-law William
Couper (1853-1942), Harriet Hosmer (1830-1908), Chauncey Ives (18101894), Randolph Rogers (1825-1892) and (somewhat later) William Henry
Rinehart (1825-1874).
American sculpture of the mid- to late 19th century was often classical and
often romantic, but it showed a special bent for a dramatic, narrative,
almost journalistic realism (especially appropriate for nationalistic themes)
as witnessed by the frontier life depicted by Frederic Remington. This was
the beginning of the style of "Western Art" that continued with Alexander
Phimister Proctor and others through the 20th into the 21st century.
The years following the American Civil War saw a huge increase in the
number of public monuments erected in the United States. "By far the
most prevalent monument features a fully equipped Confederate soldier
(the same prototype held true for Union monuments) in a realistic pose."
This style of monument was popularized by sculptor Martin Milmore who
created one of the first ones in 1868. Milmore's own monument, authored
by Daniel Chester French, Death and the Sculptor remains one of
America's "noble tributes."
As the century closed, the pace of monument-building quickened in the
great cities of the East, especially those erected to memorialize the Civil
War. Several outstanding sculptors emerged, most of them trained in the
beaux-arts academies of Paris. Daniel Chester French stands out, as do
Frederick William Macmonnies, Hans Schuler, and Lorado Taft. This
tradition continued to the 1940s with Charles Keck, Alexander Stirling
Calder and others and the use of figurative sculpture in monuments persists
into the 21st Century. After the middle of the 20th Century sculpture used
in public monuments was increasingly abstract.
There are at least three major mountain sculptures in the United States.
These are Mount Rushmore, Stone Mountain, and Crazy Horse Memorial.
Gutzon Borglum, an accomplished sculptor with such pieces as Seated
Lincoln and a variety of other public monuments, oversaw the sculpture of
Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills in South Dakota. The monument was
finished after his death by his son Lincoln Borglum.
Gutzon Borglum also was responsible for starting the Stone Mountain
project in Georgia but had a falling-out with its overseers. The monument
was then taken up by Augustus Lukeman, who died during its carving in
1935. The memorial was finished by Walker Hancock and was considered
complete in 1972.
The Crazy Horse Memorial in the Black Hills of South Dakota depicts the
Oglala Lakota warrior Crazy Horse riding a horse and pointing into the
distance. It was begun in 1948 by sculptorKorczak Ziolkowski and
continued after his death by his wife, Ruth, and several of their children.
The face was dedicated in 1998.
Several notable American sculptors joined in the revitalization of the
classical tradition at this time, most notably Paul Manship, who
"discovered" archaic Greek sculpture while studying on a scholarship in
Rome. C. Paul Jennewein and Edward McCartan were also leaders in this
direction who fit easily with the art-deco tastes of the 1920s. In the 1930s
and 1940s, the ideologies that rent European politics were reflected in
associations of American sculptors. On the right was the group, mostly
native-born, mostly old-school classical, mostly modelers of clay, who
founded theNational Sculpture Society.
Some Americans, such as Isamu Noguchi, had already moved from
figurative to nonfigurative design, but after 1950, the entire American art
world took a dramatic turn away from the former tradition, and America
led the rest of the world into a more iconoclastic and theoretical approach
to modernism.
Within the next ten years, traditional sculpture education would almost
completely be replaced by a Bauhaus-influenced concern for abstract
design. To accompany the triumph of abstract expressionist painting,
heroes of abstract sculpture such as David Smith emerged, and many new
materials were explored for sculptural expression. Louise Nevelson
pioneered the emerging genre of environmental sculpture.
However, during this period a group of American sculptors persisted in
creating works in their pre-war, modern/classical-style. These include
Milton Horn, Donal Hord, Charles Umlauf, Joseph Erhardy, and John
Henry Waddell.
3)Museums and art collections in the USA
The National Gallery of Art and its Sculpture Garden are a national art
museum in Washington, D.C., located on the National Mall, between 3rd
and 9th Streets, at Constitution Avenue NW. Open to the public and free of
charge, the museum was privately established in 1937 for the people of the
United States of America by a joint resolution of the United States
Congress. Andrew W. Mellon donated a substantial art collection and
funds for construction. The core collection also includes major works of art
donated by Paul Mellon, Ailsa Mellon Bruce, Lessing J. Rosenwald,
Samuel Henry Kress, Rush Harrison Kress, Peter Arrell Brown Widener,
Joseph E. Widener, and Chester Dale. The Gallery's collection of paintings,
drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, medals, and decorative arts traces
the development of Western Art from the Middle Ages to the present,
including the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas and the
largest mobile ever created by Alexander Calder. The Gallery's campus
includes the original neoclassical West Building designed by John Russell
Pope, which is linked underground to the modern East Building, designed
by I. M. Pei, and the 6.1-acre (25,000 m2) Sculpture Garden. The Gallery
often presents temporary special exhibitions spanning the world and the
history of art.
The National Gallery of Art has one of the finest art collections in the
world. It was created for the people of the United States of America by a
joint resolution of Congress accepting the gift of financier, public servant,
and art collector Andrew W. Mellon in 1937. European and American
paintings, sculpture, works on paper, photographs, and decorative arts are
displayed in the collection galleries and Sculpture Garden. The permanent
collection of paintings spans from the Middle Ages to the present day. The
strongest collection is the Italian Renaissance collection, which includes
two panels from Duccio's Maesta, the great tondo of the Adoration of the
Magi by Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi, a Botticelli on the same subject,
Giorgione's Allendale Nativity, Giovanni Bellini's The Feast of the Gods,
the only Leonardo da Vinci painting in the Americas, Ginevra de' Benci;
and significant groups of works by Titian and Raphael. However, the other
European collections include examples of the work of many of the great
masters of western painting, including an important version of Saint Martin
and the Beggar, by El Greco, and works by Matthias Grünewald, Cranach
the Elder, Rogier Van der Weyden, Albrecht Dürer, Frans Hals,
Rembrandt, Johannes Vermeer, Francisco Goya, Jean Auguste Dominique
Ingres, and Eugène Delacroix, among others. The collection of sculpture
and decorative arts is admittedly not quite as rich as this, but includes such
works as the Chalice of Abbot Suger of St-Denis and a superb collection of
work by Auguste Rodin and Edgar Degas. Other highlights of the
permanent collection include the second of the two original sets of Thomas
Cole's famous series of paintings titled The Voyage of Life, (the first set is
at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, New York) and the
original version of Watson and the Shark by John Singleton Copley (two
other versions are in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Detroit
Institute of Arts).
The National Gallery of Art is supported through a private-public
partnership. The United States federal government provides funds, through
annual appropriations, to support the museum's operations and
maintenance. All artwork, as well as special programs, are provided
through private donations and funds.
The Getty Center, in Brentwood, Los Angeles, California, is a campus for
the J. Paul Getty Trust founded by oilman J. Paul Getty. The $1.3 billion
center, which opened on December 16, 1997, is also well known for its
architecture, gardens, and views overlooking Los Angeles. The center sits
atop a hill connected to a visitors' parking garage at the bottom of the hill
by a three-car, cable-pulled tram. The center draws 1.3 million visitors
annually.
It is one of two locations of the J. Paul Getty Museum. This branch of the
museum specializes in "pre-20th-century European paintings, drawings,
illuminated manuscripts, sculpture, and decorative arts; and 19th- and
20th-century American and European photographs". Among the works on
display is the painting Irises by Vincent van Gogh. Besides the museum,
the center's buildings house the Getty Research Institute (GRI), the Getty
Conservation Institute, the Getty Foundation, and the administrative offices
of the J. Paul Getty Trust, which owns and operates the center. The center
also has outdoor sculptures displayed on terraces and in gardens. Designed
by architect Richard Meier, the campus includes a central garden designed
by artist Robert Irwin. GRI's separate building contains a research library
with over 900,000 volumes and two million photographs of art and
architecture. The center's design included special provisions to address
concerns regarding earthquakes and fires.
The Getty Research Institute (GRI) is "dedicated to furthering knowledge
and advancing understanding of the visual arts." Among other holdings,
GRI's research library contains over 900,000 volumes of books,
periodicals, and auction catalogs; special collections; and two million
photographs of art and architecture. GRI's other activities include
exhibitions, publications, and a residential scholars program. At the Getty
Center, GRI is located to the west of the museum. The round building
encircles a landscaped garden and is located to the west of the central
garden. The main entrance of GRI is connected by a terrace to the main
arrival court of the museum, with outdoor sculptures placed along the
route. GRI has one art gallery on its entrance level that is open to the
public.
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (often referred to as "The
Guggenheim") is a well-known art museum located on the Upper East Side
of Manhattan in New York City. It is the permanent home of a renowned
and continuously expanding collection of Impressionist, PostImpressionist, early Modern and contemporary art and also features special
exhibitions throughout the year. The museum was established by the
Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in 1939 as the Museum of NonObjective Painting, under the guidance of its first director, the artist Hilla
von Rebay. It adopted its current name after the death of its founder,
Solomon R. Guggenheim, in 1952. Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, the
cylindrical museum building, wider at the top than the bottom, was
conceived as a "temple of the spirit" and is one of the 20th century's most
important architectural landmarks. The building opened on October 21,
1959, replacing rented spaces used by the museum since its founding. Its
unique ramp gallery extends from just under the skylight in the ceiling in a
long, continuous spiral along the outer edges of the building until it reaches
the ground level. The building underwent extensive expansion and
renovations from 1992 to 1993 (when an adjoining tower was built) and
from 2005 to 2008. The museum's collection has grown organically, over
eight decades, and is founded upon several important private collections,
beginning with Solomon R. Guggenheim's original collection. The
collection is shared with the museum's sister museums in Bilbao, Spain,
and elsewhere.
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum in Midtown
Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth
Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art,
and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the
world. The museum's collection offers an overview of modern and
contemporary art, including works of architecture and design, drawings,
painting, sculpture, photography, prints, illustrated books and artist's
books, film, and electronic media.
MoMA's library and archives hold over 300,000 books, artist books, and
periodicals, as well as individual files on more than 70,000 artists. The
archives contain primary source material related to the history of modern
and contemporary art. It also houses a restaurant, The Modern, run by
Alsace-born chef Gabriel Kreuther. It is considered one of the "big five"
modern art museums in the U.S.
4)American Architectural styles:
The character of American architecture. The amalgamation of many
disparate cultures. The conflict present in the image of a young
country with an old mentality.
Colonial mansion. Reproduction of Georgian style / architecture.
Neo-classic architecture: reproduction of the neo classically inspired
architecture of England.
The Georgian style appeared during the 18th century and Palladian
architecture took hold of colonial Williamsburg in the Colony of Virginia.
The Governor's Palace there, built in 1706-1720, has a vast gabled entrance
at the front. It respects the principle of symmetry and uses the materials
that were found in the Tidewater region of the Mid-Atlantic colonies: red
brick, white painted wood, and blue slate used for the roof with a double
slant. This style is used to build the houses for prosperous plantation
owners in the country and wealthy merchants in town.
In religious architecture, the common design features were brick, stonelike stucco, and a single spire that tops the entrance. They can be seen in
Saint Paul's Church (1761) in Mount Vernon, New York or Saint Paul's
Chapel (1766) in New York, New York. The architects of this period were
more influenced by the canons of Old World architecture. Peter Harrison
(1716–1755) used his European techniques in designing the Redwood
Library and Athenaeum (1748 and 1761), in Newport, Rhode Island and
now the oldest community library still occupying its original building in
the United States. Boston and Salem in the Massachusetts Bay Colony
were two primary cities where the Georgian style took hold, but in a
simpler style than in England, adapted to the colonial limitations.
The Georgian style predominated residential design in the British colonial
era in the thirteen Colonies. At the Mount Pleasant mansion (1761–1762)
in Philadelphia, the residence is constructed with an entrance topped by a
pediment supported by Doric columns. The roof has a balustrade and a
symmetrical arrangement, characteristic of the neoclassic style popular in
Europe then.
FEDERAL ARCHITECTURE
In 1776, the members of the Continental Congress issued the Declaration
of Independence of the Thirteen Colonies. After the long and distressing
American Revolutionary War, the 1783 Treaty of Paris recognized the
existence of the new republic, the United States of America. Even though it
was a firm break with the English politically, the Georgian influences
continued to mark the buildings constructed. Public and commercial needs
grew in parallel with the territorial extension. The buildings of these new
federal and business institutions used the classic vocabulary of columns,
domes and pediments, in some referencing to ancient Rome and Greece.
Architectural publications multiplied: in 1797, Asher Benjamin published
The Country Builder's Assistant. Americans looked to affirm their
independence in the domains of politics, economics, and culture with new
civic architecture for government, religion, and education.
In the 1780s, the Federal style began to diverge bit by bit from the
Georgian style and became a uniquely American genre. At the time of the
War of Independence, houses stretched out along a strictly rectangular
plan, adopting curved lines and favoring the decorative details such as
garlands and urns. Certain openings were ellipsoidal in form, one or
several pieces were oval or circular.
The Bostonian architect Charles Bulfinch fitted the Massachusetts State
House' in 1795-1798 with an original gilded dome. He worked on the
construction of several houses in Louisburg Square of the Beacon Hill
quarter in Boston. Samuel McIntire designed the John Gardiner-Pingree
house (1805) in Salem, Massachusetts with a gentle sloped roof and brick
balustrade. With Palladio as inspiration, he linked the buildings with a
semi-circular column supported portico.
The Federal style was popular along the Atlantic coast from 1780 to 1830.
Characteristics of the federal style include neoclassical elements, bright
interiors with large windows and white walls and ceilings, and a decorative
yet restrained appearance that emphasized rational elements. Significant
federal style architects at the time include: Asher Benjamin, Charles
Bulfinch, Samuel McIntire, Alexander Parris, and William Thornton.
Thomas Jefferson, who was the third president of the United States
between 1801 and 1809, was a scholar in many domains, including
architecture. Having journeyed several times in Europe, he hoped to apply
the formal rules of palladianism and of antiquity in public and private
architecture and master planning. He contributed to the plans for the
University of Virginia, which began construction in 1817. The project was
completed by Benjamin Latrobe applying Jefferson's architectural
concepts. The university library is situated under a The Rotunda covered
by a dome inspired by the Pantheon of Rome. The combination created a
uniformity thanks to the use of brick and wood painted white. For the new
Virginia State Capitol building (1785–1796) in Richmond, Virginia,
Jefferson was inspired by the ancient Rome Maison Carrée in Nîmes, but
chose the Ionic order for its columns. A man of the Age of Enlightenment,
Thomas Jefferson had participated in the emancipation of New World
architecture by expressing his vision of an art-form in service of
democracy. He contributed to developing the Federal style in his country
and adapting European Neoclassical architecture to American democracy.
Thomas Jefferson also designed the buildings for his plantation Monticello,
near Charlottesville, Virginia. It's an example of the Neo Palladian style,
with the Hôtel de Salm in Paris, that Jefferson saw when ambassador to
France, as a model. Work commenced in 1768 and modifications
continued until 1809. This American variation on Palladian architecture
borrowed from British and Irish models and revived the tetrastyle portico
with Doric columns. This interest in Roman elements appealed in a
political climate that looked to the ancient Roman Republic as a model
The United States Capitol in Washington, D.C. is an example of uniform
urbanism: the design of the capitol building was imagined by the French
Pierre Charles L'Enfant. This ideal of the monumental city and
neoclassicism . Several cities wanted to apply this concept, which is part
of the [, but Washington, D.C. seems the most dedicated of all of them.
The White House was constructed after the creation of Washington, D.C.
by congressional law in December 1790. After a contest, James Hoban, an
Irish American, was chosen and the construction began in October 1792.
The building that he had conceived was modeled upon the first and second
floors of the Leinster House, a ducal palace in Dublin, Ireland which is
now the seat of the Irish Parliament. But during the War of 1812, a large
part of the city was burned, and the White House was ravaged. Only the
exterior walls remained standing, but it was reconstructed. The walls were
painted white to hide the damage caused by the fire. At the beginning of
the 20th century, two new wings were added to support the development of
the government.
The United States Capitol was constructed in successive stages starting in
1792. Shortly after the completion of its construction, it was partially
burned by the British during the War of 1812. Its reconstruction began in
1815 and did not end until 1830. During the 1850s, the building was
greatly expanded by Thomas U. Walter. In 1863, the imposing Statue of
Freedom", was placed on the top of the current (new at the time) dome.
The Washington Monument is an Obelisk memorial erected in honor of
George Washington, the first American President. It was Robert Mills who
had designed it originally in 1838. There is a perceivable color difference
towards the bottom of the monument, which is because its construction
was put on hiatus for lack of money. At 555.5 feet (169.3 m) high, it was
completed in 1884 and opened to the public in 1888.
Greek Revival
Greek revival style attracted American architects working in the first half
of the 19th century. The young nation, free from Britannic protection, was
persuaded to be the new Athens, that is to say, a foyer for democracy.
Benjamin Latrobe (1764–1820) and his students William Strickland
(1788–1854) and Robert Mills (1781–1855) obtained commissions to build
some banks and churches in the big cities (Philadelphia, Baltimore and
Washington, DC).
Some state capitol buildings adopted the Greek Revival style such as in
North Carolina (Capitol building in Raleigh, rebuilt in 1833-1840 after a
fire) or in Indiana (Capitol building in Indianapolis). One later example of
these is the Ohio State Capitol in Columbus, designed by Henry Walters
and completed in 1861. The simple façade, continuous cornice and the
absence of a dome give the impression of the austerity and greatness of the
building. It has a very symmetrical design and houses the Supreme Court
and a library.
Gothic Revival
From the 1840s on, the Gothic Revival style became popular in the United
States, under the influence of Andrew Jackson Downing (1815–1852). He
defined himself in a reactionary context to classicism and development of
romanticism. His work is characterized by a return to Medieval decor:
chimneys, gables, embrasure towers, warhead windows, gargoyles, stained
glass and severely sloped roofs. The buildings adopted a complex design
that drew inspiration from symmetry and neoclassicism.
The great families of the east coast had immense estates and villas
constructed in the style, with antipodes of Neoclassicism. Some took
Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill House as a model. Alexander Jackson
Davis (1803–1892) worked on villa projects in the Hudson River Valley
and used details from the Gothic to Baroque repertoire. For the Jay Gould
estate country house "Lyndhurst" in Tarrytown, New York, Alexander
Jackson Davis designed a building with a complex asymmetrical outline,
and opened the double-height art gallery with stained glass windows.
New York City is home to James Renwick Jr's Saint Patrick Cathedral, an
elegant synthesis of the Notre Dame Cathedral in Reims and the Cologne
Cathedral. The project was entrusted to him in 1858 but completed by the
erection of two spires on the facade in 1888. The use of materials lighter
than stone allowed to pass from flying buttresses to exterior buttresses.
Renwick also showed his talent in Washington, D.C. with the construction
of the Smithsonian Institution. But his critics reproached him for having
broken the architectural harmony of the capital by building an eccentric
combination in red brick using Byzantine, Romanesque, Lombard, and
eclectic themes.
Richard Upjohn (1802–1878) specialized in the rural churches of the
northeast, but his major work is still "Trinity Church" in New York. His
red sandstone architecture makes reference to the 16th-century forms in
Europe. The Gothic Revival style was also used in the construction of
universities (Yale, Harvard) and churches. The success of the Gothic
Revival was prolonged up until the beginning of the 20th century in
numerous Skyscrapers, notably in Chicago and in New York.
Victorian architecture
Following the American Civil War and through the turn of the 20th
century, a number of related styles, trends, and movements emerged, are
loosely and broadly categorized as "Victorian", due to their
correspondence with similar movements of the time in the British Empire
during the later reign of Queen Victoria. Many architects working during
this period would cross various modes, depending on the commission. Key
influential American architects of the period include Richard Morris Hunt,
Frank Furness, and Henry Hobson Richardson.
After the war, the uniquely American Stick Style developed as a of
construction that uses wooden rod trusswork, the origin of its name. The
style was commonly used in houses, hotels, railway depots, and other
structures primarily of wood. The buildings are topped by high roofs with
steep slopes and prominent decoration of the gables. The exterior is not
bare of decoration, even though the main objective remains comfort.
Richard Morris Hunt constructed John N. Griswold's house in Newport,
Rhode Island in 1862 in this style. The "Stick Style" was progressively
abandoned after c. 1873, gradually evolving into the Queen Anne Style.
On the west coast in California, domestic architecture evolved equally
towards a more modern style. San Francisco has many representations of
the Italianate, Stick-Eastlake, and Queen Anne styles of Victorian
architecture, c. 1850s-1900. Constructed with Redwood lumber they
resisted the 1906 San Francisco earthquake itself, though some burned in
the aftermath. They introduced the contemporary services of central
heating and electricity. The Carson Mansion conceived of by BuilderArchitects, Samuel and Joseph Cather Newsom and built by an army of
over 100 craftsman from the massive lumber operations of its owner, is
prominently situated at the head of Old Town Eureka, California on
Humboldt Bay. It is widely regarded as one of the highest executions of
Queen Anne style in California and the United States.
On the east coast the Queen Anne evolved into the Shingle Style
architecture. It is characterized by attention to a more relaxed rustic image.
Richardson designed the William Watts Sherman House (1874–1875) in
Newport, Rhode Island, and the Mary Fiske Stoughton House (1882–1883)
in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Charles Follen McKim the Newport
Casino (1879–1881) using shingle clad asymmetrical facades.
While medieval influence rode high, in the second half of the 19th century,
architects also responded to commissions for estate scale residences with
Renaissance Revival residences. Industry and commerce tycoons invested
in stone and commissioned mansions replicating European palaces. The
Biltmore Estate near to Asheville, North Carolina is in the Châteauesque
style of French Renaissance Revival, and is the largest private residence in
the U.S. Richard Morris Hunt interpreted the Louis XII and François I
wings from the Château de Blois for it.
Rise of the skyscraper
The most notable United States architectural innovation has been the
skyscraper. Several technical advances made this possible. In 1853 Elisha
Otis invented the first safety elevator which prevented a car from falling
down the shaft if the suspending cable broke. Elevators allowed buildings
to rise above the four or five stories that people were willing to climb by
stairs for normal occupancy. An 1868 competition decided the design of
New York City's six story Equitable Life Building, which would become
the first commercial building to use an elevator. Construction commenced
in 1873. Other structures followed such as the Auditorium Building,
Chicago in 1885 by Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan. This adopted
Italian palazzo design details to give the appearance of a structured whole:
for several decades American skyscrapers would blend conservative
decorative elements with technical innovation.
Soon skyscrapers encountered a new technological challenge. Loadbearing stone walls become impractical as a structure gains height,
reaching a technical limit at about 20 stories (culminating in the 1891
Monadnock Building by Burnham & Root in Chicago). Professional
engineer William LeBaron Jenney solved the problem with a steel support
frame in Chicago's 10-story Home Insurance Building, 1885. Arguably this
is the first true skyscraper. The use of a thin curtain wall in place of a loadbearing wall reduced the building's overall weight by two thirds. Another
feature that was to become familiar in 20th-century skyscrapers first
appeared in Chicago's Reliance Building, designed by Charles B. Atwood
and E.C. Shankland, Chicago, 1890 - 1895. Because outer walls no longer
bore the weight of a building it was possible to increase window size. This
became the first skyscraper to have plate glass windows take up a majority
of its outer surface area.
Some of the most graceful early towers were designed by Louis Sullivan
(1856–1924), America's first great modern architect. His most talented
student was Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959), who spent much of his
career designing private residences with matching furniture and generous
use of open space.
With the boom in the use of electric streetcars, the inner ring of suburbs
developed around major cities, later to be aided by the advent of bicycles
and automobiles. This boom in construction would result in a new,
distinctly American form of house would emerge: the American
Foursquare.
One culturally significant early skyscraper was New York City's
Woolworth Building designed by architect Cass Gilbert, 1913. Raising
previous technological advances to new heights, 793 ft (233 m), it was the
world's tallest building until 1930.[11] Frank Woolworth was fond of gothic
cathedrals. Cass Gilbert constructed the office building as a cathedral of
commerce and incorporated many Gothic revival decorative elements. The
main entrance and lobby contain numerous allegories of thrift, including an
acorn growing into an oak tree and a man losing his shirt. The popularity
of the new Woolworth Building inspired many Gothic revival imitations
among skyscrapers and remained a popular design theme until the art deco
era. Other public concerns emerged following the building's introduction.
The Woolworth Building blocked a significant amount of sunlight to the
neighborhood. This inspired the New York City setback law that remained
in effect until 1960. Basically the law allowed a structure to rise to any
height as long as it reduced the area of each tower floor to one quarter of
the structure's ground floor area.
Another significant event in skyscraper history was the competition for
Chicago's Tribune Tower. Although the competition selected a gothic
design influenced by the Woolworth building, some of the numerous
competing entries became influential to other 20th-century architectural
styles. Second-place finisher Eliel Saarinen submitted a modernist design.
An entry from Walter Gropius brought attention to the Bauhaus school.
International style
European architects who emigrated to the United States before World War
II launched what became a dominant movement in architecture, the
International Style. The Lever House introduced a new approach to a
uniform glazing of the skyscraper's skin, and located in Manhattan. An
influential modernist immigrant architect was Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
(1886–1969) and Walter Gropius (1883–1969), both former directors of
Germany's famous design school, the Bauhaus.
The Reliance Building's move toward increased window area reached its
logical conclusion in a New York City building with a Brazilian architect
on land that is technically not a part of the United States. United Nations
headquarters, 1949–1950, by Oscar Niemeyer has the first complete glass
curtain wall.
American government buildings and skyscrapers of this period have are a
style known as Federal Modernism. Based on pure geometric form,
buildings in the International style have been both praised as minimalist
monuments to American culture and corporate success by some, and
criticized as sterile glass boxes by others.
Skycraper hotels gained popularity with the construction of John Portman's
(1924-) Westin Peachtree Plaza Hotel in Atlanta followed by his
Renaissance Center in Detroit which remains the tallest skyscraper hotel in
the Western Hemisphere.
In reaction to the "glass boxes" issue, some younger American architects
such as Michael Graves (1945- ) have rejected the austere, boxy look in
favor of postmodern buildings, such as those by Philip C. Johnson (1906–
2005) with striking contours and bold decoration that alludes to historical
styles of architecture.