American art

The development of painting in the USA. The Colonial Period. The First American Revolution and the young republic. The Era of Jacksonian Democracy. The main genres of painting and their representatives. Landscape painting, still life and history painting.
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Introduction

American art encompasses the history of painting and visual art in the United States. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, artists primarily painted landscapes and portraits in a realistic style. A parallel development taking shape in rural America was the American craft movement, which began as a reaction to the industrial revolution. Developments in modern art in Europe came to America from exhibitions in New York City such as the Armory Show in 1913. Previously American Artists had based the majority of their work on Western Painting and European Arts. After World War II, New York replaced Paris as the center of the art world. Since then many American Movements have shaped Modern and Post Modern art. Art in the United States today covers a huge range of styles.

After the Declaration of Independence in 1776, which marked the official beginning of the American national identity, the new nation needed a history, and part of that history would be expressed visually. Most of early American art (from the late 18th century through the early 19th century) consists of history painting and portraits. Painters such as Gilbert Stuart made portraits of the newly elected government officials, while John Singleton Copley was painting emblematic portraits for the increasingly prosperous merchant class, and painters such as John Trumbull were making large battle scenes of the Revolutionary War.

America's first well-known school of painting--the Hudson River School--appeared in 1820. The Hudson River painters' directness and simplicity of vision influenced such later artists as Winslow Homer (1836-1910), who depicted rural America--the sea, the mountains, and the people who lived near them. Middle-class city life found its painter in Thomas Eakins (1844-1916), an uncompromising realist whose unflinching honesty undercut the genteel preference for romantic sentimentalism. Henry Ossawa Tanner who studied with Thomas Eakins was one of the first important African American painters.

Many painters who are considered American spent some time in Europe and met other European artists in Paris and London, such as Mary Cassatt and Whistler.

There are a lot of museums in the USA which are filled of tourists every year. The most famous of them are American Museum of Natural History which includes anthropological collections from Mexico and Central America, the Museum of Modern Art which is famous for its modern works of architecture, drawings, paintings, sculpture, books, etc. The National Gallery of Art includes collections of paintings, prints, medals donated by Andrew W. Mellon, Paul Mellon, Samuel Henry Kress and so on.

This course work seeks to provide an accurate and systematic description of American art. The work is aimed at the studying the development of American art, the effect of various events in the country on it, the most famous museums, art galleries, genres of painting and its representatives.

While preparing this course work the material has been taken from the books on American Art, the articles in encyclopedia and Internet.



1. The development of painting in the USA

1.1 The Colonial Period

American culture has not been isolated from world culture. The American art in its development absorbed and assimilated many different influences. In spite of numerous influences American art in its best examples is not imitative; it is characterized by bright national peculiarities. It is American in subject matter, in emotional and intellectual content, and in style. It is much younger than the art of the Old World. It was roughly a hundred years after the death of Raphael that the first permanent English settlements appeared in America. The earliest American painting that has come down to us dates from about the middle of the seventeenth century when Velasquez in Spain and Rembrandt in the Netherlands were creating their masterpieces.

In the course of three centuries, American painting has passed through a long and complex period of development from earnest attempts by early limners through a budding florescence in the late eighteenth century to its highly contradictory state in modern times, which are torn by a fierce struggle between progressive realist traditions and the reactionary formalistic experimentation of modernism. It is a strong realist tradition which constitutes a distinct feature of American painting. It is this realist tradition that has given the world a long list of brilliant, gifted artists who have reflected in their art the spirit of the advanced social movements and progressive ideas of the American people.

American art had to develop under adverse conditions: engaged in subduing the wilderness and struggling for survival in the new, unexplored land, the colonists had little time and interest in any but utilitarian art.

Most of the colonial artists, including some of the best, were self-taught. Many of them were artisans -- carpenters, shipwrights, house painters, sign and carriage painters. Some went on to more sophistication, but most remained essentially primitive. Early America had a much larger proportion of folk artists than Europe.

The folk artist had certain qualities that the more sophisticated artist had lost. He went straight to the heart of things. Instinctively, without theorizing, he knew that art is not the photographic copying of nature, but the `creation of a pictorial equivalent of nature in physical materials -- canvas, pigment, stone or wood. He retained the craftsman's respect for the physical substance and structure of the work of art. His eye was an innocent one, concerned more with the object itself than its appearance. He had an innate gift for simplification, for recording the essentials. And he had an instinctive feeling for form and line and colour, and the patterns they created. Hence his art, within definite limits, represented something sound and pure.

Most folk art was created directly out of reality, out of local and specific content, which gave it a strong native flavour. Sometimes it contained reminiscences of whatever art its producer might have seen -- prints, textiles, porcelain or the instruction books that took the place of art schools. But all this was translated into folk language.

This native flavour appeared early in the untrained limners who painted portraits in the colonies from the middle seventeenth century on. Many of them were travelling artists - who went from town to town, sometimes with stock portraits already painted except for the sitter's individual face, hands and accessories. They seldom bothered to sign their works. So most of them have remained anonymous.

In style the limners varied from colony to colony and from artist to artist, ranging from the severity of certain New England painters to the naive elegance of the New York and Hudson River artists. But they had in common the primitive virtues of honesty, an instinct for colour, line and decorative pattern, and above all. the physical integrity that marks the primitive in every age and land.

In the eighteenth century the colonies had become prosperous enough to attract professional painters from England and European countries, Justus Engelhardt Kuhn, a German artist, settled in 1708 at Annapolis; GustavusHesselius, a Swede, in 1711 in Philadelphia; Jeremiah Theus, a Swiss, in 1739 in Charleston; John Smibert in 1730 in Boston. John Wollasion arrived in New , York in 1749 and Joseph Blackburn in Boston in 1753. Both of them painted in the colonies for about twenty years. These artists of European origin and training represented professional standards and had some influence on American art as it emerged. But , by the middle of the eighteenth century it was already not the immigrant artists but the -native ones who left a significant heritage.

The two most gifted native-born artists who grew out of the general colonial tradition were R. Feke and J. S, Copley[1, p. 10-14 ].

1.2 The First American Revolution and the young republic

The American Revolution of 1775--83 laid the basis for the rapid development of industry, culture and art in the young republic. The general patriotic and heroic enthusiasm of the period gave rise to an upsurge in the spiritual and creative sphere of activities. A new, important stage in the history of American art began. National consolidation, growth of national consciousness and wide dissemination of democratic ideas were powerful factors in the formation of American art. Without severing its ties with European culture it was acquiring an increasingly national character. If the self-taught artist was typical in colonial American painting, now professional artists trained in the established academies of England or France took over the leadership. A distinct American school in portraiture and depiction of historical events was evident by 1800. It was characterized by the choice of American subject matter and the blending of native genius with influences from abroad. Portraiture remained dominant but the artists of the revolutionary generation filled their portraits with heroic, romantic content; they produced historic paintings commemorating contemporary events filled with revolutionary pathos [ 6, p. 386 ].

This contemporary pathos...