1920s American Art
The 1920s in American art was characterized by a shift towards modernism, with artists experimenting with new styles and techniques. This period saw the emergence of iconic figures such as Georgia O'Keeffe and Edward Hopper, who captured the spirit of the era through their distinctive interpretations of urban and rural landscapes. The art of the 1920s reflected the dynamism and cultural transformation of American society.
4 Key excerpts on "1920s American Art"
eBook - ePubA Concise History Of American Painting And Sculpture
Revised Edition
- Matthew Baigell(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Those who were more knowledgeable began to perceive in the paintings of Sheeler, Hopper, and Burchfield the emergence of a genuine American point of view, and they wanted desperately to encourage it (even if its images were not always flattering). Still others questioned the aesthetic basis of modernist art, believing that art must grow from interactions with local environments and experiences. Race, climate, geography, and shared experiences, it was held, generated an art of greater value than one reflecting the moods of a shifting, international, rootless intelligentsia loyal only to abstract ideas. Not surprisingly, the strongly nationalistic Mexican art movement of the 1920s grew enormously popular in the United States at the end of the decade. People hoped that it might serve as a model for the creation of an American art. When its leading figures, Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros, visited the country about 1930, they gained immediate, if short-lived, popularity, far exceeding that of Duchamp and Picabia some fifteen years before. Increasing numbers of artists began consciously to document the American scene rather than simply to paint landscapes or urban views, as if in their documentation they might learn to understand the country’s past and its present course, and perhaps be able to help chart its future. Their confusion in the face of enormous social change was the reverse of the optimism of most painters of the Hudson River School. The interest in the American landscape and the American character, which had been subsumed within the larger aesthetic concerns of Sheeler, Hopper, and Burchfield, now grew dominant. The onset of the Depression only catalyzed this trend. By the early 1930s, an American Scene movement was recognized...
eBook - ePubModern Art
A Critical Introduction
- Pam Meecham, Julie Sheldon(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...It stands at the apex of notions of individual self-expression and artistic freedom. However, a closer scrutiny of the movement within its historical context reveals a raft of major issues, not least of which was the transition of the avant-garde from adversarial culture to a petrified modernism. The erasure of a work by de Kooning, when seen within the broader political and social world of the post-war USA, is symptomatic of a crisis of confidence in the institutional success of a seemingly oppositional culture. Far from hanging on to its radical credentials, abstract expressionism was seen by many to have sedimented into mainstream orthodoxy. Just how the avant-garde came to renege on its radical promise is part of a broader story of exclusions and preoccupations in the USA in the 1950s that has its origins in the pre-war era of the 1930s. Reconstructing the art of Depression America Histories are constructed into totalities which operate through what Foucault called the ‘principle of exclusion’. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the history of modernism in the US. A model of culmination drives the standard history of US art, obscuring other histories along the way, and, crucially for our purposes, the relationship between histories. Even chronological accounts of US art are complicit in a ‘selective tradition’ and are seldom merely descriptive of development, neutral descriptions or style labels. Each work designated to a category is representative of a value judgement often dependent on the meaning we ascribe to another. The taxonomic labels ‘social realism’, ‘social art’, ‘social content’, ‘social comment art’ and ‘documentary expression’, terms typically applied to art produced during the 1930s Depression era such as Philip Evergood’s American Tragedy (see Figure 6.3), are often dependent on the value we ascribe to art works designated ‘non-objective’ or ‘abstract’, such as Jackson Pollock’s Number 1 (1948) (see Figure 6.4)...
eBook - ePub- Diana Newall, Grant Pooke(Authors)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...These new art forms were partly a conscious reaction to the largely painting-based abstraction advocated by Greenberg and other modernist critics such as Michael Fried in germinal texts such as ‘Art and Objecthood’ (Fried 1967). But this generational reaction also signified a changing social and political counterculture, traceable to the new world order which emerged after 1945. North America had largely escaped the direct privations experienced by its wartime allies in Europe and the Soviet Union between 1939 and 1945. During the interwar period, figurative art had been broadly linked in public consciousness to the economic depression of the 1930s and the attempts by the Roosevelt administration to alleviate unemployment and social hardship. Much of the urgent social purpose behind figurative painting had derived from the political need for a cohesive national identity at a time of political unrest abroad and high unemployment at home (Meecham 2004). But as one of the main beneficiaries of the post-war settlement, and with a robust and expanding economy, America’s global status seemed assured. Throughout the later 1940s and 1950s, the abstract art associated with Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, David Smith and others became iconic of an influential, Americanised avant-garde (Hopkins 2018 : 5–32). The end of the Second World War confirmed American and Soviet hegemony. The older imperial and colonial powers like Italy, France and Great Britain saw their political and economic influence curtailed in a re-ordered world. The rise of American abstraction and the dominance of Greenberg’s modernist theory meditated some of these underlying realities and tensions. However, there were other, more indirect reasons behind abstraction’s post-war popularity; figurative and naturalistic art had been widely employed as propaganda by the totalitarian regimes of Germany, Italy and Soviet Russia...
eBook - ePubArt in the Cinema
The Mid-Century Art Documentary
- Steven Jacobs, Birgit Cleppe, Dimitrios Latsis, Steven Jacobs, Birgit Cleppe, Dimitrios Latsis(Authors)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
...2 American art comes of age: documentaries and the nation at the dawn of the Cold War DIMITRIOS LATSIS Today American art has captured public interest. Thousands are flocking to museums and exhibits. There is a new nationwide art movement, which critics say is greater in scope, greater in public interest than anything since the Italian Renaissance. Is it just another fad? Or is there a deeper more fundamental reason for America’s new-found interest in art? Americaness and Art Discovers America This confident voice-over, coloured with hope and hyperbole, boosterist spirit and enthusiasm introduces the 1943 documentary Art Discovers America. Billed as ‘an American commentary’, the film embodies the can-do spirit of the early wartime years, but in a domain where Americans had not previously felt that much confidence: American art. For many decades leading up to the Second World War, American art was considered a poor cousin to continental modernism. 1 The same was arguably true of American cinema’s own claims to its status as an art form, rather than a form of commercial entertainment. More specifically, American directors and producers of non-fiction films had very rarely (even within educational contexts) dealt with the visual arts as a subject. That all changed during the mid-1940s when a number of factors converged to make American art a prominent player on the global scene and a significant topic for documentaries produced in the United States. The process through which this came about at the outset of the Cold War can be traced using two key documentaries as primary evidence: the government-produced Art Discovers America (1943) and the omnibus film Pictura: An Adventure in Art (1951)...
