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What Were the Two Initial Ways in Which Modern Art Arrived in the United States?

Native American Art

Before Europeans colonized Due north America, rich, complex art traditions flourished among many indigenous tribes who had adult a highly stylized vocabulary that employed complex geometric patterns and used near abstracted forms that both evoked the natural world and symbolized ancestral and mythological stories. The objects were oft utilitarian and, at the same fourth dimension, imbued with ritual significance. However, the newly arrived colonists in the Eastern U.s.a. primarily viewed those traditions as curiosities or arts and crafts, while aspiring to British fine art traditions and cultural values. Native American artists adapted the new materials and techniques brought by the colonists, including floral embroidery, beads, and silver smithing.

<i>Three Iroquois in Various Costumes</i> (c. 1827) by David Cusick adapts European realism to depict Native Americans.

At the same fourth dimension, some indigenous artists developed a European style to depict native subjects. David Cusick, a Tuscarora artist, published his Sketches of Aboriginal History of the Six Nations in 1828, and, along with his brother Dennis, a watercolorist, established the Iroquois Realist School. The commencement Native American fine art motility included over 25 Iroquois artists, who employed drawing, painting, and printmaking to realistically depict their tribe's beliefs, history, way, and lifestyle. Edmonia Lewis, of Mississauga Ojibwe and African-American descent, became internationally known for her Neoclassical sculpture, like The Death of Cleopatra (1876), exhibited at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. In the early on 1900s, Native American art began to receive national and international attention. The Kiowa Six, Spencer Asah, James Auchiah, Jack Hokeah, Stephen Mopope, Lois Smoky, and Monroe Tsatoke, were historic for their Ledger drawings that employed stiff outlined, flat areas of bold color. The grouping exhibited at the 1928 First International Art Exposition in Prague and the Venice Biennale in 1932.

Folk Art

Harriet Powers' Bible Quilt (1885-86), a unique quilt that illustrates scenes from the bible.

Much American folk art is commonsensical in nature, as sculptures were primarily figureheads for ships, weathervanes, and carved gravestones, but framed embroideries and velvet paintings were also made for wall decorations. Early American folk painters were called limners, from a term limning, meaning, "to outline in clear, sharp detail." Frequently self-taught, limners travelled from town to town and fabricated a living by offering to paint anything, from signs for local merchants to farm implements and carriages. As the colonies reflected the British cultural values that viewed portraiture as a sign of social continuing, fine art portraitists like the French born Henrietta Johnston, who emigrated to Charleston, S Carolina around 1705, gravitated to the cities, while limners fabricated it possible for ordinary people in small towns to have their portraits painted. Boldly colored and outlined without modeling or shading, folk art portrayals were often intimate, depicting the sitter with a few objects that were of personal significance. Beginning his career equally limner, Edward Hicks became famous for his The Peaceable Kingdom (1829-31), a work that expressed his Quaker values in a dynamic folk style. Folk art too drew upon African American traditions; in the 1880s Harriet Powers, a former slave, began exhibiting her quilts, depicting powerful narratives in bold color and geometric forms and patterns.

American Compages

Thomas Jefferson's home Monticello embodied the Neoclassical ideals of the young nation.

Subsequently the Revolutionary War, when the young nation was building its identity, early on American architecture drew from British and Neoclassical compages. Based on the piece of work and theory of the Venetian Renaissance architect, Andrea Palladio, Neoclassicism was the dominant architectural style in 18th-century Europe. Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the U.s., was likewise an innovative architect, and his design for Monticello (1772-1809), his habitation in Virginia, exemplified the Neoclassical style, employing a Palladian portico with four colored columns. During his Presidency, his ideas also informed Benjamin Henry Latrobe's designs of the U.S. Capitol building, launching what became known as the Federal style, favored for official buildings.

Developing around 1830 inside the context of Neoclassicism, Beaux-Arts architecture rejected Neoclassicism's formality to incorporate elements from Renaissance, Bizarre, and Belatedly Gothic architecture. In the United States, the Beaux-Arts style, led past Richard Morris Hunt, became known as the "American Renaissance," or "American Classicism." Hunt actively promoted the popular style, which was employed in designs for private mansions and public buildings, including the Biltmore House (1889-95) congenital for the tycoon George Vanderbilt. In the 20th century, American Beaux-Arts architects returned to less ornamental and classical designs, exemplified by Henry Bacon and Daniel Chester French'due south Lincoln Monument (1914-22).

The Chrysler Building (1930) adapted Art Deco architecture, creating a streamlined, modern style.

Beginning in 1890 and influenced past the British Arts and Crafts movement and Japonism, the highly influential Art Nouveau movement featured organic, flowing, floral motifs. Fine art Nouveau architects viewed the building, its interior spaces, and details, as a unified whole. Louis Comfort Tiffany, Louis Sullivan, and Frank Lloyd Wright were influenced by Art Nouveau. Sullivan's Wainwright Building (1891) used a frieze with a decorative motif of celery-leaf foliage, decorative spandrels, and an elaborate entrance door. Such architectural motifs became popular for skyscrapers and loftier rises, as seen in New York'due south Decker Building (1892). Later, in the 20th century, Fine art Deco was adapted to Public Works projects and iconic buildings such as William Van Alen'due south Chrysler Building (1930).

Richard Neutra's Lovell Health House showcases the International Style's use of steel, glass, and concrete.

Kickoff in 1914, the International Style emphasized the use of steel, glass, and concrete. Emerging during the aftermath of World War I and viewed as reflecting the modern age, information technology was often used for postwar housing. Austrian architects Richard Neutra and R.M. Schindler introduced the fashion when they moved to America in the 1910 and worked with Frank Lloyd Wright. Though both men created notable International Manner buildings, as seen by Neutra's Lovell Health House (1929), the aesthetic did not truly flourish in the U.s. until after Globe War Ii, when economical expansion led to a blast in skyscraper construction. Leading architects, including Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, came to the United States in the post-war period and taught a new generation of American architects, while designing notable buildings. Mies for instance, built the Seagram Building (1954-58) in New York and the campus of the Illinois Plant of Applied science in Chicago (completed in 1956). The International Mode, with its drinking glass curtains and industrial construction, was as well used for fast-nutrient restaurants and gas stations every bit America undertook construction of new interstates, connecting the country from coast to coast.

Beginning in 1950, Brutalism, likewise called New Brutalism, was a way of massive architecture that primarily employed unfinished, precast physical. The style became pop for university campus buildings, performance art venues, libraries, government buildings, and corporate offices throughout the U.s.a.. Paul Rudolph was a leading proponent of the fashion as seen in his Yale Art and Architecture Building (1958). Due to American enthusiasm for the style, European architects adopted the style in their major commissions; Le Corbusier with Oscar Niemeyer, Wallace Harrison, and Max Abramovitz designed the United Nations Headquarters (1948-52), and Marcel Breuer worked with a number of American architectural teams to blueprint Boston City Hall (1963-68). Breuer and Hamilton Smith's Breuer Building (1966), abode to the Whitney Museum of American Art and later an expanded Metropolitan Museum, was also a trendsetting Brutalist design.

Hudson River School (1826-70)

The Hudson River School, led by Thomas Cole, who was born in Britain but emigrated to the United States when he was seventeen, was the first recognized American art movement. Centered in upper New York state, which was then wilderness, the artists associated with the motility emphasized the sublime and unique beauty of the American landscape. Influenced by Romanticism's concept of the sublime and Naturalism's emphasis on precise observed detail, Cole's landscapes similar Kaaterskill Upper Fall, Catskill Mountains (1825) and Dunlap Lake with Dead Trees (Catskill) (1825) depicted American scenes to evoke the limitless possibilities of the new nation.

Albert Bierstadt's <i>Among the Sierra Nevada, California</i> (1868) is 1 of many paintings that helped shape the epitome of nineteen<sup>th-</sup>century America as a promised land.

Following Cole's expiry in 1848, Asher B. Durand, influenced by the French Barbizon School, led the plow toward a more naturalistic painting. The artists Frederic Edwin Church, Albert Bierstadt, John Frederick Kensett, George Inness, and Thomas Moran formed the second generation. Their works became enormously popular, as the exhibition of just 1 panoramic painting could draw thousands of visitors. In the 1860s, as Manifest Destiny with its telephone call to go Westward became a dominant national strength, Bierstadt and Moran turned their attention to panoramas of the dramatic western landscape, and, along with William Keith and Thomas Colina, were sometimes called the Rocky Mount School. Their works as well inspired and informed the move to preserve America's natural wonders, including the Yellowstone and Thou Tetons Parks. Alternatively, the intimate scale and feeling of George Inness'south works like The Delaware Valley (c.1863), and John Frederick Kensett's depictions of light reflecting on bodies of h2o played a pioneering role in developing what later came to exist chosen Luminism.

Luminism (1850-75)

<i>Lake George</i> (1869) is one of many scenes of the upstate New York lake that John Frederick Kensett favored.

The term Luminism was developed past art historians in the 1950s to identify a style that flourished from 1850-1870 among a number of American landscape painters. They drew upon a number of influences, including the landscape painting of the Dutch Gold Age, photography, and the genre landscapes of George Harvey, William Sidney Mount, and George Caleb Bingham. John Frederick Kensett, who led the movement, emphasized the landscape itself, with very piddling, if whatever, human presence; he focused on the play of light and atmosphere upon a body of water, as seen in his View of the Shrewsbury River, New Bailiwick of jersey (1859). Rather than exploring new vistas and rugged landscapes, each of the Luminists was associated with a particular locale, as the artist returned to the aforementioned scenes, painting the irresolute light and atmosphere from solar day to solar day or season to season. The Luminists, who included Kinsett, Fitz Henry Lane, Jasper Francis Cropsey, Sanford Robinson Gifford, and Martin Johnson Heade, preferred small-scale intimate works that emphasized the private's communion with nature, reflecting Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau'due south philosophy of Transcendentalism, which held that spiritual truth was revealed in the contemplation of nature.

Tonalism (1870-1915)

James McNeill Whistler's <i>Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket</i> was radical for its abstraction and caused much controversy when shown in London.

Tonalism emerged in the early 1870s in James McNeill Whistler's serial of Nocturnes that emphasized tonal harmonies, often in muted greens, blues, and dark colors, to depict landscapes at twilight. Of works like his famous and controversial Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket (c.1875), Whistler said, "A nocturne is an organisation of line, form and color first," simply he also felt tonal harmonies were the visual equivalent of musical compositions. Born in America, Whistler lived near of his life in Britain where he played a pioneering function in a number of movements, including Japonism, the Aesthetic Movement, and the Anglo-Japanese aesthetic. Tonalists George Inness and Albert Pinkham Ryder were also influenced by the Barbizon School. Using gold and brown tones to depict a landscape at sunrise or dusk, Inness emphasized spiritual expression in works like Sunrise (1887), while Ryder often introduced a mythological narrative element into his mysterious landscapes that were precursors of Symbolism. In 1899 Henry Ward Ranger founded the Old Lyme Colony in Connecticut, seeing it as an "American Barbizon." A 2nd generation of Tonalists, including Allen Butler Talcott, Henry Cook White, Bruce Crane, William Henry Howe, Louis Paul Dessar, and Jules Turcas, joined the artistic colony. In 1903 Childe Hassam joined the colony and briefly took up the style before abandoning information technology in favor of American Impressionism.

American Impressionism (1880-1920)

Mary Cassatt often painted intimate domestic scenes in an Impressionist style, including <i>Lydia Crocheting in the Garden at Marly</i> (1880).

American Impressionism was primarily inspired and influenced by the French Impressionists, including Claude Monet, Pierre-August Renoir, and Alfred Sisley among others, who first exhibited together in Paris in 1874. French Impressionism influenced both the expatriates John Singer Sargent and James McNeill Whistler, though neither fully embraced the movement. Mary Cassatt became America'southward first well-known Impressionist. Moving to Paris in 1866, she became close friends with Edgar Degas and associated and exhibited with many of the leading Impressionists. Her works, total of vibrant color, expressive brushstrokes, often portrayed intimate gatherings in relaxed bourgeois environments, as well equally many depictions of a mother and kid, and were enormously popular in the United states. In 1883, the first U.S. exhibition of the French Impressionists Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, and Manet influenced the artists William Merritt Chase, Childe Hassam, and Edmund C. Trabell. A number of thriving artist colonies devoted to American Impressionism developed throughout the country.

Ashcan Schoolhouse (1900-15)

John Sloan elevates the workers and regulars in <i>McSorley'south Bar</i> (1912) with his straightforward and generous depiction.

The Ashcan School was a group of artists including John Sloan, George Luks, Everett Shinn, and William James Glackens, all students of Robert Henri, then located in Philadelphia. Drawing upon before masters, including Diego Velázquez, Francisco de Goya, and the later Realists similar Édouard Manet, the group employed classical methods to create realistic and gritty scenes of modern, working-form life, or what Henri chosen "art for life'due south sake." Later on the grouping relocated to New York City, a second generation of artists followed, including George Bellows, whose Disappointments of the Ash Can (1915) gave the movement its proper name. In 1908, Edwin Lawson, Arthur B. Davies, and Maurice Prendergast joined the core group, known as The Eight, as they formed their ain exhibition in opposition to the then dominant system of juried exhibitions by the National Academy of Design. Using gestural brushwork and a dark color palette, the artists' unidealized subjects aligned them with an innovative modern sensibility, which influenced the later Social Realism movement and the artists Edward Hopper and Ben Shahn. Sloan and Henri also taught and influenced many of the artists of the Fourteenth Street School.

Photography: Pictorialism, Straight Photography, and Beyond (1902-Nowadays)

Modern Photography, emerging out of scientific explorations of botany, archaeology, and move, incorporated a host of creative styles. Pictorialism was an international photographic motility that used darkroom manipulations, blended images, posed and staged scenes, and blurred and soft focus to emphasize individual expression. Beginning in U.k. in the 1840s, by the mid-1880s Pictorialism had get a flourishing movement. In 1902 in New York, Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen advocated for the importance of photography and launched the journal Photographic camera Piece of work in 1903 and The Piffling Galleries of the Photograph-Secession in 1905.

The composition of Paul Strand's <i>Porch Shadows</i> (1916) uses light, shadow, and line to create an almost-abstract photograph.

Direct Photography, emphasizing the applied science of the camera itself, rejected Pictorialism in favor of sharply focused images that were rich in detail. In 1907, Stieglitz in his photographs like The Steerage began to explore the "direct" image without prior posing of the discipline or subsequent use of darkroom manipulations. He influenced a number of leading photographers and ardently promoted the works of Paul Strand in a 1917 issue of Photographic camera Work. Many of these works employed close-up shots with tight cropping to emphasize near abstruse patterns and form, as seen in Strand's Porch Shadows (1916). Straight Photography became a dominant tendency that continues to the present day.

The emphasis upon abstract design and class influenced the evolution of Abstract Photography, which began in 1916 with Alvin Langdon Coburn'due south Vortographs (1916). Stieglitz called him the "youngest star" of the Photo-Secession grouping, and Coburn began exploring abstract images equally early as 1912. Both Paul Strand and Stieglitz were to explore near abstraction besides.

Ansel Adam's <i>Tetons and the Snake River</i> (1942) captures Group f/64's pure photography aesthetic in one of his signature landscapes.

In 1931, Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, Ansel Adams, and Willard Van Dyke formed Group f/64 in San Francisco. The movement emphasized what Van Dyke described as "pure photography...defined as possessing no qualities of technic, composition or thought, derivative of any other art-form" and fabricated its public debut in a 1932 exhibition at the M.H. de Young Museum. Though many of the photographers had begun their careers every bit Pictorialists, they now firmly rejected that movement's accent on fuzzy "artistic" effects, equanimous scenes, and darkroom manipulations. Their subject thing was oft ordinary and ofttimes taken from nature, as Cunningham became known for her series of Magnolia blossoms, Weston for his images of a single green pepper, Adams for his images of Yosemite Park. Group f/64, and in particular Weston and Adams, also revitalized Abstract Photography, which re-emerged in the 1940s in the works of Minor White and Aaron Siskind.

Synchromism (1912-24)

Morgan Russell, <i>Cosmic Synchromy</i> (1913-14) manipulated color and form to create compositions he likened to musical scores.

Synchromism emphasized abstract paintings that primarily employed the color scale to create a visual "symphony," or musical result. Morgan Russell and Stanton Macdonald-Wright, both young Americans living in Paris, founded America's outset avant-garde movement in 1912. They adopted the color theories of Ernest Percyval-Tudor, a Canadian living in Paris, who believed that twelve colors of the spectrum corresponded to the twelve steps of the musical calibration, and Russell coined the name for the movement by combining "symphony" with "chrome." Russell's Synchromy in Light-green (1913) launched the movement at the 1913 Salon des Indépendants in Paris, where it influenced Lee Simonson, a modernist theater prepare designer, and John Edward Thompson who after became known as the "dean of Colorado fine art" for introducing modern art to the surface area.

Harlem Renaissance (1920 - early 1940s)

Meta Vaux Warrick'due south <i>Ethiopia</i> Awakening (1921) captured Alain Locke's idea of the

The term Harlem Renaissance defines a period when music, literature, theater, painting and sculpture flourished within the rich and vibrant civilization of New York'due south Harlem neighborhood. The movement, known for various styles, celebrated the "New Negro," a concept advanced by author Alain Locke that emphasized a new African American sense of dignity, founded in equal rights and connected to the rich cultural traditions of Africa and Egypt. Following the Great Migration that began around 1910 when many African Americans left the southern states for the greater opportunity and freedom of the n, vibrant communities adult in Harlem as well as Chicago and Philadelphia. Meta Vaux Warrick'southward sculpture Ethiopia (1921) was an early pioneering influence, and international success of the before African American artists Mary Edmonia Lewis and Henry Ossawa Tanner became a defining model. Working in a diversity of styles, artists including Aaron Douglas, Augusta Cruel, Archibald J. Motley Jr. and the lensman James Van Der Zee became leading figures of the new motion. Their work and teaching subsequently informed a subsequent generation that included Jacob Lawrence, Beauford Delaney, and William H. Johnson.

Fourteenth Street School (1920-40)

In the 1950s, the term Fourteenth Street Schoolhouse was adult to define the works of Kenneth Hayes Miller, Isabel Bishop, and Reginald Marsh fabricated in the 1920s and 1930s. Their subjects were taken from the New York neighborhood around Union Foursquare and Fourteenth Street. The area, known equally the "poor human being'due south 5th Avenue," was a rising mercantile center, featuring retail department stores, whose sales, featuring the latest manner at inexpensive prices, drew thousands of middle-grade shoppers. Miller, a leader of the movement, began painting portrayals of the women shoppers in the 1920s. Teaching at the Fine art Heart League, he influenced Bishop and March, as well every bit Raphael Soyer and Edward Laning, who as well became later members of the group. Influenced by the Renaissance and Bizarre masters, the group's figurative treatments ofttimes lent a kind of classical dignity to the portrayals of matronly shoppers, office girls, and career girls, who were seen as the apotheosis of the "New Woman" and progressive prosperity. Due to realistic treatment of mod life, the movement is ofttimes included under Social Realism, though it shared fiddling of that movement's attack upon the status quo or interest in political content.

American Regionalism (1928-43)

John Steuart Back-scratch's <i>Baptism in Kansas</i> (1928) is typical of Regionalism's depiction of rural life in the Midwest.

American Regionalism was not a deliberately formed movement just a mode and arroyo that developed organically in the works of Thomas Hart Benton, John Steuart Back-scratch, and Grant Wood. The three emphasized realistic depictions of rural life and ordinary situations, and each of them was associated with a item region: Curry with Kansas, Benton with Missouri, and Forest with Iowa. They drew upon a number of divergent influences: Forest was influenced past the Northern Renaissance artist Hans Memling, Benton had been part of the Synchromist movement, and Curry utilized his prior experience in illustration, but their work consistently rejected modern European art and brainchild, in favor of a figurative arroyo to subjects that reflected what they saw as a uniquely American spirit. Wood'southward American Gothic (1930), when awarded a bronze medal at an Fine art Establish of Chicago contest, publicly launched the movement, as the work received national attention in newspapers and magazines. Past the end of the 1930s, equally Fascism threatened Europe, the move'southward identification with a nationalist art came nether critical fire, though other artists, including the well-known illustrator Norman Rockwell and the creative person Andrew Wyeth continued to portray realistic scenes of ordinary American life, often connected to particular regions.

Social Realism (1929 - tardily 1950s)

In <i>Construction of a Dam</i> (1939) William Gropper emphasizes the role of labor in dynamically building the modern era.

Social Realism developed organically among artists who emphasized realistic depictions of the lower and working class, often within an urban surround, in lodge to radically transform society. Focusing on the plight of workers, the artists associated with the movement were influenced by the murals of José Clemente Orozco, the rise of labor rights organizations, and the call to worker'southward rights from leftist organizations like the John Reed Social club. The move initially drew upon the optimism following the Mexican and Russian revolutions and was farther shaped past the global depression that began in 1929 also equally the rise of Fascism in the 1930s. Rejecting European avant-garde movements for their isolation from social bug, artists like William Gropper, Hugo Gellert, Max Weber, and Moses and Raphael Soyer viewed fine art equally a weapon to fight the capitalist exploitation of the working class. The artists Ben Shahn, Philip Evergood, and Antonio Berni were also of import members of the motion, as were Aaron Douglas and Jacob Lawrence, both also part of the Harlem Renaissance. In the 1930s, WPA-sponsored documentary photographers, including Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, were loosely associated with the movement as they depicted the rural poor and the devastating impact of the Great Depression, as well every bit the Dust Bowl that ravaged the agronomical Midwest.

Abstract Expressionism, Color Field Painting, Mail-Painterly and Hard-Border Abstraction (1943-65)

An early on pioneer of Abstruse Expressionism, Clyfford Still's works, equally shown in <i>1957-D No. 1</i> (1957), also informed the development of Color Field Painting

Abstract Expressionism began in the early 1940s, centered in New York and led by Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, and Adolph Gottlieb. Every bit the leading Surrealists fled Europe during Earth State of war II for New York, the Abstract Expressionists were influenced by Surrealism's emphasis on automatism, an fine art that tapped into the unconscious. While the artists had begun their careers painting representational images, they moved toward increasing abstraction. Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century Gallery exhibited and supported the emerging movement, and she deputed Pollock'due south monumental and innovative Mural (1943). The critic Clement Greenberg played a leading role in advocating for the movement, emphasizing purely visual and abstruse effects of the paintings. American's offset international art movement, Abstract Expressionism as well finer established New York as the heart of the modern art world and led to a number of other developments, including Colour Field Painting, Activeness Painting, Post-painterly brainchild, and hard-edge painting.

Colour Field Painting, which began in the late 1940s, led by Clyfford Withal, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, emphasized color as a powerfully expressive object. Notwithstanding's canvases deployed bold colors in jagged forms; Rothko turned toward diaphanous rectangles of color, and Newman created "zilch" paintings, where vertical strips of color intersected big horizontal fields of colour. Greenberg championed Color Field Painting, with its emphasis on flatness and non-illusionistic infinite, every bit the style forrard for avant-garde painting.

In 1952, influential art critic Harold Rosenberg in his essay "The American Activeness Painters" focused on the act of the creative person in deciding to paint, thus coining the term Activity Painting in favor of Abstract Expressionism. Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock were associated with the term, as Rosenberg saw their works as emphasizing the event and process of painting itself. The spontaneous movements of the artist, random drips and splashes, and energetic gestures, resulted in a work that conveyed the action of the work'due south making.

In 1964, Greenberg curated the exhibition Post-Painterly Abstraction for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The testify included work past 31 artists, including Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaler, too equally the W Coast artists Sam Francis and John Ferren. Ellsworth Kelly, Howard Mehring, Jules Olitski, and Kenneth Noland were also included. Greenberg wrote that these artists "have a tendency...to stress contrasts of pure hue rather than contrasts of light and dark...In their reaction against the 'handwriting' and the 'gestures' of Painterly Abstraction, these artists also favor a relatively anonymous execution." The Washington Color School, led by Noland and included Factor Davis, Morris Louis, and Thomas Downing amid others, emphasized abstract art where color was emphasized to create form.

Drawing from the Color Field Painters, hard-edge painting was a term that defined a trend toward economic forms, impersonal execution, and clean lines. In the 1950s, Californian art critic Jules Langsner described the trend that used "forms [that] are finite, flat, rimmed by a difficult, clean border...They are autonomous shapes, sufficient unto themselves every bit shapes." In the 1960s the trend was likewise associated with Al Held, Ellsworth Kelly, Morris Louis, Frank Stella, Miriam Schapiro, and Kenneth Noland.

Around 1950 in the Bay Surface area of San Francisco, David Park, Richard Diebenkorn, and Elmer Bischoff rejected pure abstraction in favor of figurative subjects. The Bay Expanse Painters also included Manuel Neri, Nathan Oliveira, and Joan Brownish. Many of the artists had begun their careers equally Abstruse Expressionists and retained elements of that motion in their landscapes and portraits, while at the same fourth dimension celebrating local culture and mural.

Also, past the mid-1950s a number of Second Generation of Abstract Expressionists, including Jack Beal, Jane Freilicher, and Nell Blaine, rejected the move and turned toward figurative art. Including Fairfield Porter, Alex Katz, and Lois Dodd, the loose association of New York artists spearheaded a new emphasis on realism that became known equally Gimmicky Realism.

Neo-Dada (1952-70)

Robert Rauschenberg combined plant objects and images from newspapers and magazines to create <i>Monogram</i> (1955-59)

Beginning in 1952, Neo-Dada developed, every bit Jasper Johns, Allan Kaprow, and Robert Rauschenberg, began to apply "readymades," mass media, and performances. The artists rejected the existentialist heroics continued with Abstract Expressionism in favor of mundane subjects and blurred the traditional boundaries between media. Influenced by Marcel Duchamp and Dada, the motility had its start at Black Mountain College in Northward Carolina in 1952 and included Rauschenberg, the choreographer Merce Cunningham, and the composer John Cage. Cage'southward Theatre Slice No. i (1952) exemplified the group's emphasis on audition interaction, multiple media, and the function of chance.

Allan Kaprow created "environments," using sculptural collages to create installation pieces and subsequently, after taking Muzzle'south course, added aural components. He developed the term "happenings" to describe the quasi-theatrical events where, influenced by Futurism's concept of the issue every bit overwhelming all boundaries and Dada's accent on the role of chance, the boundary between event and audience was cleaved.

Many Fluxus artists, including George Brecht, Robert Whitman, and Robert Watts, were interested in Neo-Dada and happenings. Fluxus, described as an "anti-art" movement, had utopian goals of wanting to change one'due south relation to fine art and to underscore the artfulness of everyday objects and actions. Leading members of the group Dick Higgins, Jackson Mac Low, and Al Hans met in Muzzle'due south 1959 course at the New Schoolhouse. Fluxus artists often used sense of humor to undercut and dismiss high art. George Maciunas, the founder of Fluxus, described Fluxus as "a fusion of Fasten Jones, gags, games, Vaudeville, Cage, and Duchamp." Fluxus was an international move that likewise included Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, and Joseph Beuys. Paik pioneered the development of Video Fine art, when he presented his video footage of the Pope'south visit to New York every bit a serious artwork in 1965.

Pop Fine art and Photorealism (mid 1950s-1970s)

Pop Art was an international movement that had begun in U.k. in 1952, led past the Independent Group, including Richard Hamilton, Eduardo Paolozzi, and the architects Alison and Peter Smithson, but the American version became the trendsetting and dominant form. Led past Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, and James Rosenquist, the artists used images taken from mass media and pop civilization to challenge the stardom between "high" and "low" fine art and to critique and celebrate consumer culture. Warhol, Rosenquist, and Ed Ruscha were influenced by their early work as graphic designers and illustrators.

Photorealism, also called Hyperrealism, painted photographic images projected onto a large canvas, often with an airbrush, to resemble a finished photo. Richard Estes, Chuck Close, Robert Bechtle, Ralph Goings, and Audrey Flack drew upon unlike influences, including Pop Art and Minimalism, and employed a diverseness of techniques, as they worked independently of one another. They often depicted objects from consumer culture, equally in Ralph Goings' McDonalds Pickup (1970) or Richard Estes's Supreme Hardware Store (1970).

Minimalism and Post-Minimalism (1960 - Present)

Tony Smith'southward <i>Complimentary Ride</i> (1962) is fabricated from steel to create a minimal composition.

In New York in the early 1960s, Minimalist artists such as Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt, and Robert Morris created works from industrial materials while employing a absurd and bearding approach. Influenced past Russian Constructivism, Minimalists emphasized the materiality of the medium as perceived by the viewer and preferred industrial materials and fabrication. Rejecting Greenberg's formalist conception of painting, they emphasized an approach that, using a minimum of shape, color, and other elements, was also called "Systemic Painting," or "Reductive Fine art." Frank Stella, Tony Smith, Richard Serra, Ronald Bladen, and Dan Flavin were associated with the movement that apace became dominant in America and internationally, while informing other developments, including Post-Minimalism and the Light and Space move.

Mail service-Minimalism included a number of trends, including Process Art, Functioning and Trunk Fine art, Site-Specific Fine art, and some aspects of Conceptual Fine art. Fine art critic Lucy Lippard curated Eccentric Abstraction in 1968, an exhibition that included work by Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, and Bruce Nauman, whose pieces were made of soft or pliable materials. Some artists associated with Post-Minimalism extended the Minimalist interest in anonymous and abstract objects into other areas, while others reacted confronting Minimalism'south cool anonymous approach in favor of emotional expression. Lynda Benglis, Eva Hesse, and Louise Conservative used resins and latex, while Nancy Graves used materials to simulate animal hides, and the resulting works created an organic expressive effect. Sol LeWitt, Richard Serra, and Vito Acconci were besides included among the Post-Minimalists.

Based in California and influenced by Minimalism, Robert Irwin began creating big installations using light sources in 1969 and pioneered what became known as the Light and Space movement. Larry Bell, James Turrell, John McCracken and Helen Pashgian were all associated with the movement that used industrial materials, including neon and argon lights, bandage acrylic, and polyester resins to create perceptual experiences. Drawing upon new scientific research and technologies, they created works that emphasized the interaction of light and space.

World Art and Environmental Art (1960s - Nowadays)

<i>Sun Tunnels</i> (1973-76) by Earth artist Nancy Holt installed in Great Basin Desert, Utah

Also called Land Art or Earthworks, Earth Fine art was an outgrowth of Minimalism, as the earth itself became both the fabric object and the site specific to art, and artists used the site'south available natural materials, such as mud, world, and stone, to pattern large-scale projects that were keyed to the site'south significance. Often including some chemical element of performance, Earth Fine art shared sure trends with Mail-Minimalism, including Performance Art, process art, and Installation Art. The 1969 Earth Art exhibition at Cornell University, which including the works of Robert Smithson, Walter de Maria, Michael Heizer, Robert Morris, Dennis Oppenheim, and Hans Haacke, launched the motility. The artists, like Smithson, were oft inspired by aboriginal sites, including Stonehenge or the Native American Ophidian Mound, and saw their works every bit subject to irresolute weather condition and entropy, the devolution of a system over fourth dimension. Nancy Holt, Richard Long, Agnes Denes, and Andy Goldsworthy were also leading Earth Work artists.

The movement influenced the development of Environmental Art, too known every bit ecological art. Emphasizing a non-invasive approach, Environmental artists saw themselves every bit collaborating with the environment and exploring homo interaction with natural environments. Betty Beaumont, Andy Goldsworthy, Agnes Denes, Meg Webster, Olafur Eliasson, herman de vries, Nils Udo, and Chris Jordan are the leading artists of the motility. They employed a variety of approaches; Beaumont transformed power plant waste into an underwater reef in her Ocean Landmark (1978-80), while Goldsworthy, over a period of 4 years, working, equally he said, "in collaboration with nature," arranged pieces of limestone from fields where he worked as a gardener to create his Pinfold Cones (1981-85).

The Multinational Flavors of Postmodernism (1960s - Present)

Sculpture <i>Another Twister (João)</i> by American sculptor Alice Aycock, installed in front the entrance of Sprengel Museum Hannover, Germany.

In the 1960s, a heady atmosphere of experimentation reigned, leading to the evolution of Conceptual Art, Feminist Fine art, Body Art, and Functioning Fine art. Though these art movements were international, American artists played a significant role in their development, and their subsequent expansion into a number of trends.

Influenced past Minimalism's reductive simplicity, Conceptual art emphasized that the concept of a work was more important than its class or even completion. Sol LeWitt'southward "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art" (1967) became the de facto manifesto of the movement; he wrote that the artwork "no thing what grade it may finally accept it must begin with an idea." Walter de Maria, Ed Ruscha, Marina Abramović, Dan Graham, and the German artist Joseph Beuys were only a few of the leading artists who became office of the movement. In the temper of experimentation, new trends developed, including Institutional Critique, led by an international array of artists, including Hans Haacke, Michael Asher, Daniel Buren, and Marcel Broodthaers, and The Pictures Generation, including Sherrie Levine, Cindy Sherman, Robert Longo, Barbara Kruger, and Richard Prince. A number of Conceptual artists created installation pieces, as Installation Art became a main trend, employed in a number of movements. Additionally conceptual practices informed Neo-Geo, or Neo-Geometric Conceptualism, a term that defined the works of Peter Halley, Ashley Bickerton, Jeff Koons, and Meyer Vaisman post-obit their 1986 exhibition in New York. Using appropriative strategies, the group used geometric form to ironically altitude itself from abstract painting, while also using previous works equally readymades that could be appropriated.

Judy Chicago's <i>The Dinner Party</i> (1974-79) combines installation, craft, and feminist ideas to create an arresting and controversial work.

Out of the Civil Rights movement, the emerging Gay Pride movement, and anti-war fervor, Feminist Fine art developed in the late 1960s. Women'south art organizations similar the Art Worker's Coalition and Women Artists in Revolution were formed to address gender inequity and other feminist issues within the fine art community. Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro founded the California Institute of the Art's Feminist Fine art Project and Womanhouse, a project where women artists could interact and create major installations. Mary Beth Edelson, Lynda Benglis, Martha Rosler, Carolee Schneemann, Suzanne Lacy, Leslie Labowitz, Bia Lowe, Barbara Kruger, and the Guerilla Girls were leading feminist artists, as the move explored various approaches, and the artists involved became associated with several movements simultaneously. Judy Chicago became famous for her Dinner Party (1974-79), an iconic example of both Feminist Fine art and Installation Fine art, while Carolee Schneemann's performances were pioneering in the Feminist, Trunk Art, and Performance movements. Feminist Fine art actively supported and inspired the development of Queer Art, focused on queer identity and connected to the Gay Pride movement and the AIDS crisis, and ushered in an era of Identity Art and Identity Politics that focused on the experience of marginalized groups and the inequities they faced.

In the 1960s, Performance art emphasized alive events where the artist, sometimes with collaborators or performers, erased all boundaries between the artist and the artwork. The international motility drew upon a number of early avant-garde trends, including Dada, Futurism, and Surrealism, but was more recently sourced in the 1950s works of John Cage, Fluxus artists, and Allan Kaprow'due south happenings. Staging what were sometimes called "actions," performance artists frequently confronted the audition. The motility was closely linked to the development of Body Art, equally American artists, including Chris Burden, Carolee Schneemann, and Hannah Wilke, employed their own torso equally the medium.

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Source: https://www.theartstory.org/definition/american-art/history-and-concepts/