U.S. Profile
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America's first well-known school of painting - the Hudson River school - appeared in 1820. This development was delayed until artists perceived that the New World offered subjects unique to itself; in this case the westward expansion of settlement brought the transcendent beauty of frontier landscapes to painters' attention.
The Hudson River painters' directness and simplicity of vision influenced such later artists as Winslow Homer (1836-1910), who depicted rural America, and the people who lived near them. Middle-class city life found its painter in Thomas Eakins (1844-1916).
Since 1900 has been a series of revolts against tradition. "To hell with the artistic values," announced Robert Henri (1865-1929). He was the leader of what critics called the "ash-can" school of painting. Soon the ash-can artists gave way to modernists arriving from Europe - the cubists and abstract painters promoted by the photographer Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) in New York City.
In the years after World War II, a group of young New York artists formed the first native American movement to exert major influence on foreign artists: abstract expressionism. Among the movement's leaders were Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), Willem de Kooning (1904-1997), and Mark Rothko (1903-1970).
Members of the next artistic generation favored a different form of abstraction: works of mixed media. Among them were Robert Rauschenberg (1925- ) and Jasper Johns (1930- ), who used photos, newsprint, and discarded objects in their compositions. Pop artists, such as Andy Warhol (1930-1987), Larry Rivers (1923- ), and Roy Lichtenstein (1923- ), reproduced, with satiric care, everyday objects and images of American popular culture.
Today artists in America tend not to restrict themselves to schools, styles, or a single medium. A work of art might be a performance on stage or a hand-written manifesto.Perhaps the most influential 20th-century American contribution to world art has been a mocking playfulness, a sense that a central purpose of a new work is to join the ongoing debate over the definition of art itself.
- American Masters from Bingham to Eakins: The John Wilmerding Collection National Gallery of Art
- American Association of Museums
- Art Museum Network
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art
- Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
- National Design Museum
- National Gallery of Art
- NYFA Source New York Foundation for the Arts National Database Directory for Artists
- Photographs from the Chicago Daily News 1902-33
- Smithsonian Archives American Art
- U.S. Senate Art Collection
- Visual Arts resources Internet Public Library
