U.S. Culture
The visual arts have traditionally included forms of expression that
appeal to the eyes through painted surfaces, and to the sense of space
through carved or molded materials. In the 19th century, photographs were
added to the paintings, drawings, and sculpture that make up the visual
arts. The visual arts were further augmented in the 20th century by the
addition of other materials, such as found objects. These changes were
accompanied by a profound alteration in tastes, as earlier emphasis on
realistic representation of people, objects, and landscapes made way for a
greater range of imaginative forms.
During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, American art was considered
inferior to European art. Despite noted American painters such as Thomas
Eakins, Winslow Homer, Mary Cassatt, and John Marin, American visual arts
barely had an international presence.
American art began to flourish during the Great Depression of the 1930s as
New Deal government programs provided support to artists along with other
sectors of the population. Artists connected with each other and developed
a sense of common purpose through programs of the Public Works
Administration, such as the Federal Art Project, as well as programs
sponsored by the Treasury Department. Most of the art of the period,
including painting, photography, and mural work, focused on the plight of
the American people during the depression, and most artists painted real
people in difficult circumstances. Artists such as Thomas Hart Benton and
Ben Shahn expressed the suffering of ordinary people through their
representations of struggling farmers and workers. While artists such as
Benton and Grant Wood focused on rural life, many painters of the 1930s
and 1940s depicted the multicultural life of the American city. Jacob
Lawrence, for example, re-created the history and lives of African
Americans. Other artists, such as Andrew Wyeth and Edward Hopper, tried to
use human figures to describe emotional states such as loneliness and
despair.
Abstract Expressionism
Shortly after World War II, American art began to garner worldwide
attention and admiration. This change was due to the innovative fervor of
abstract expressionism in the 1950s and to subsequent modern art movements
and artists. The abstract expressionists of the mid-20th century broke
from the realist and figurative tradition set in the 1930s. They
emphasized their connection to international artistic visions rather than
the particularities of people and place, and most abstract expressionists
did not paint human figures (although artist Willem de Kooning did
portrayals of women). Color, shape, and movement dominated the canvases of
abstract expressionists. Some artists broke with the Western art tradition
by adopting innovative painting styles—during the 1950s Jackson Pollock
"painted" by dripping paint on canvases without the use of brushes, while
the paintings of Mark Rothko often consisted of large patches of color
that seem to vibrate.
Abstract expressionists felt alienated from their surrounding culture and
used art to challenge society’s conventions. The work of each artist was
quite individual and distinctive, but all the artists identified with the
radicalism of artistic creativity. The artists were eager to challenge
conventions and limits on expression in order to redefine the nature of
art. Their radicalism came from liberating themselves from the confining
artistic traditions of the past.
The most notable activity took place in New York City, which became one of
the world’s most important art centers during the second half of the 20th
century. The radical fervor and inventiveness of the abstract
expressionists, their frequent association with each other in New York
City’s Greenwich Village, and the support of a group of gallery owners and
dealers turned them into an artistic movement. Also known as the New York
School, the participants included Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell, Franz
Kline, and Arshile Gorky, in addition to Rothko and Pollock.
The members of the New York School came from diverse backgrounds such as
the American Midwest and Northwest, Armenia, and Russia, bringing an
international flavor to the group and its artistic visions. They hoped to
appeal to art audiences everywhere, regardless of culture, and they felt
connected to the radical innovations introduced earlier in the 20th
century by European artists such as Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp. Some
of the artists—Hans Hofmann, Gorky, Rothko, and de Kooning—were not born
in the United States, but all the artists saw themselves as part of an
international creative movement and an aesthetic rebellion.
As artists felt released from the boundaries and conventions of the past
and free to emphasize expressiveness and innovation, the abstract
expressionists gave way to other innovative styles in American art.
Beginning in the 1930s Joseph Cornell created hundreds of boxed
assemblages, usually from found objects, with each based on a single theme
to create a mood of contemplation and sometimes of reverence. Cornell's
boxes exemplify the modern fascination with individual vision, art that
breaks down boundaries between forms such as painting and sculpture, and
the use of everyday objects toward a new end. Other artists, such as
Robert Rauschenberg, combined disparate objects to create large, collage-
like sculptures known as combines in the 1950s. Jasper Johns, a painter,
sculptor, and printmaker, recreated countless familiar objects, most
memorably the American flag.
The most prominent American artistic style to follow abstract
expressionism was the pop art movement that began in the 1950s. Pop art
attempted to connect traditional art and popular culture by using images
from mass culture. To shake viewers out of their preconceived notions
about art, sculptor Claes Oldenburg used everyday objects such as pillows
and beds to create witty, soft sculptures. Roy Lichtenstein took this a
step further by elevating the techniques of commercial art, notably
cartooning, into fine art worthy of galleries and museums. Lichtenstein's
large, blown-up cartoons fill the surface of his canvases with grainy
black dots and question the existence of a distinct realm of high art.
These artists tried to make their audiences see ordinary objects in a
refreshing new way, thereby breaking down the conventions that formerly
defined what was worthy of artistic representation.
Probably the best-known pop artist, and a leader in the movement, was Andy
Warhol, whose images of a Campbell’s soup can and of the actress Marilyn
Monroe explicitly eroded the boundaries between the art world and mass
culture. Warhol also cultivated his status as a celebrity. He worked in
film as a director and producer to break down the boundaries between
traditional and popular art. Unlike the abstract expressionists, whose
conceptual works were often difficult to understand, Andy Warhol's
pictures, and his own face, were instantly recognizable.
Conceptual art, as it came to be known in the 1960s, like its
predecessors, sought to break free of traditional artistic associations.
In conceptual art, as practiced by Sol LeWitt and Joseph Kosuth, concept
takes precedent over actual object, by stimulating thought rather than
following an art tradition based on conventional standards of beauty and
artisanship.
Modern artists changed the meaning of traditional visual arts and brought
a new imaginative dimension to ordinary experience. Art was no longer
viewed as separate and distinct, housed in museums as part of a historical
inheritance, but as a continuous creative process. This emphasis on
constant change, as well as on the ordinary and mundane, reflected a
distinctly American democratizing perspective. Viewing art in this way
removed the emphasis from technique and polished performance, and many
modern artworks and experiences became more about expressing ideas than
about perfecting finished products.
Photography
Photography is probably the most democratic modern art form because it can
be, and is, practiced by most Americans. Since 1888, when George Eastman
developed the Kodak camera that allowed anyone to take pictures,
photography has struggled to be recognized as a fine art form. In the
early part of the 20th century, photographer, editor, and artistic
impresario Alfred Stieglitz established 291, a gallery in New York City,
with fellow photographer Edward Steichen, to showcase the works of
photographers and painters. They also published a magazine called Camera
Work to increase awareness about photographic art. In the United States,
photographic art had to compete with the widely available commercial
photography in news and fashion magazines. By the 1950s the tradition of
photojournalism, which presented news stories primarily with photographs,
had produced many outstanding works. In 1955 Steichen, who was director of
photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, called attention to
this work in an exhibition called The Family of Man.
Throughout the 20th century, most professional photographers earned their
living as portraitists or photojournalists, not as artists. One of the
most important exceptions was Ansel Adams, who took majestic photographs
of the Western American landscape. Adams used his art to stimulate social
awareness and to support the conservation cause of the Sierra Club. He
helped found the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art in
1940, and six years later helped establish the photography department at
the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco (now the San Francisco
Art Institute). He also held annual photography workshops at Yosemite
National Park from 1955 to 1981 and wrote a series of influential books on
photographic technique.
Adams's elegant landscape photography was only one small stream in a
growing current of interest in photography as an art form. Early in the
20th century, teacher-turned-photographer Lewis Hine established a
documentary tradition in photography by capturing actual people, places,
and events. Hine photographed urban conditions and workers, including
child laborers. Along with their artistic value, the photographs often
implicitly called for social reform. In the 1930s and 1940s, photographers
joined with other depression-era artists supported by the federal
government to create a photographic record of rural America. Walker Evans,
Dorothea Lange, and Arthur Rothstein, among others, produced memorable and
widely reproduced portraits of rural poverty and American distress during
the Great Depression and during the dust storms of the period.
In 1959, after touring the United States for two years, Swiss-born
photographer Robert Frank published The Americans, one of the landmarks of
documentary photography. His photographs of everyday life in America
introduced viewers to a depressing, and often depressed, America that
existed in the midst of prosperity and world power.
Photographers continued to search for new photographic viewpoints. This
search was perhaps most disturbingly embodied in the work of Diane Arbus.
Her photos of mental patients and her surreal depictions of Americans
altered the viewer’s relationship to the photograph. Arbus emphasized
artistic alienation and forced viewers to stare at images that often made
them uncomfortable, thus changing the meaning of the ordinary reality that
photographs are meant to capture.
American photography continues to flourish. The many variants of art
photography and socially conscious documentary photography are widely
available in galleries, books, and magazines.
A host of other visual arts thrive, although they are far less connected
to traditional fine arts than photography. Decorative arts include, but
are not limited to, art glass, furniture, jewelry, pottery, metalwork, and
quilts. Often exhibited in craft galleries and studios, these decorative
arts rely on ideals of beauty in shape and color as well as an
appreciation of well-executed crafts. Some of these forms are also
developed commercially. The decorative arts provide a wide range of
opportunity for creative expression and have become a means for Americans
to actively participate in art and to purchase art for their homes that is
more affordable than works produced by many contemporary fine artists.
Literature
American literature since World War II is much more diverse in its voices
than ever before. It has also expanded its view of the past as people
rediscovered important sources from non-European traditions, such as
Native American folktales and slave narratives. Rediscovering these
traditions expanded the range of American literary history.
American Jewish writing from the 1940s to the 1960s was the first serious
outpouring of an American literature that contained many voices. Some
Jewish writers had begun to be heard as literary critics and novelists
before World War II, part of a general broadening of American literature
during the first half of the 20th century. After the war, talented Jewish
writers appeared in such numbers and became so influential that they stood
out as a special phenomenon. They represented at once a subgroup within
literature and the new voice of American literature.
Several Jewish American novelists, including Herman Wouk and Norman
Mailer, wrote important books about the war without any special ethnic
resonance. But writers such as novelists Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and
Philip Roth, and storytellers Grace Paley and Cynthia Ozick wrote most
memorably from within the Jewish tradition. Using their Jewish identity
and history as background, these authors asked how moral behavior was
possible in modern America and how the individual could survive in the
contemporary world. Saul Bellow most conspicuously posed these questions,
framing them even before the war was over in his earliest novel, Dangling
Man (1944). He continued to ask them in various ways through a series of
novels paralleling the life cycle, including The Adventures of Augie March
(1953), Herzog (1964), and Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970). One novel in the
series earned a Pulitzer Prize (Humboldt's Gift, 1975). Bellow was awarded
the Nobel Prize for literature in 1976. Like Bellow, Philip Roth and
Bernard Malamud struggled with identity and selfhood as well as with
morality and fate. However, Roth often resisted being categorized as a
Jewish writer. Playwright Arthur Miller rarely invoked his Jewish
heritage, but his plays contained similar existential themes.
Isaac Bashevis Singer was also part of this postwar group of American
Jewish writers. His novels conjure up his lost roots and life in prewar
Poland and the ghostly, religiously inspired fantasies of Jewish existence
in Eastern Europe before World War II. Written in Yiddish and much less
overtly American, Singer’s writings were always about his own specific
past and that of his people. Singer's re-creation of an earlier world as
well as his stories of adjusting to the United States won him a Nobel
Prize in literature in 1978.
Since at least the time of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, American
writers of African descent, such as Richard Wright, sought to express the
separate experiences of their people while demanding to be recognized as
fully American. The difficulty of that pursuit was most completely and
brilliantly realized in the haunting novel Invisible Man (1952) by Ralph
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