American Art and Architecture

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Painting After the Civil War

The development of American painting after the Civil War became much more complex, as the number of artists greatly increased, as their communication with Europe and their awareness of a wider range of current styles grew, and as they expanded their interests to include new subjects and a wider range of media.

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Late 19th-Century Painters

The leading American painters of the time included several expatriates working in Europe, but many others spent their careers predominantly in their homeland, and some of them developed specifically American themes or outlooks. Among the expatriates the most significant figures were probably Mary Cassatt, John Singer Sargent, and James McNeill Whistler.

Cassatt worked mainly in Paris, where she exhibited with the Impressionists and enjoyed a highly successful career. She specialized in everyday life scenes, a mother with her child or children being a favourite theme (A Mother About to Wash her Sleepy Child, 1880, Los Angeles County Museum of Art). She came from a wealthy and well-connected family, and by encouraging her friends to buy Impressionist pictures she played an important role in acclimatizing the style in the United States, where it was taken up by painters such as Childe Hassam. Sargent was born in Italy and had an international upbringing and career, working mainly in Paris and then London (although he made several visits to the United States and had strong patriotic feelings). He was the most successful society portraitist of his day on both sides of the Atlantic, working in a dashing and fluid style in which he captured the glamour of his rich and often famous clients (Lady Agnew of Lochnaw, 1892, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh). Whistler too worked mainly in Paris and London, but his career followed a very different course to Sargent's. A wit and dandy who loved controversy, he was more interested in qualities of colour, tone, and texture than in the ostensible subjects of his pictures (mainly portraits and landscapes), and his insistence that painting should exist for its own sake, rather than to embody literary or moral ideas, made him an important precursor of modern art. His most famous work is Arrangement in Grey and Black No 1: Portrait of the Painter’s Mother (1871, Musée d’Orsay, Paris).

The two foremost painters of American life in the late 19th century are now seen to be Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins. Homer's first paintings include scenes of rural life, particularly the world of children, as in Snap the Whip (1872, Butler Institute, Youngstown, Ohio). In the 1880s he turned his attention to the dangerous life of deep-sea fishermen, finding in the struggle against the treacherous sea a metaphor for the helplessness of human beings before their fate (he loved the sea and spent much of his career at Prout's Neck on the Maine coast). His vision became even blacker in such austere late works as The Fox Hunt (1893, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia) and The Gulf Stream (1899, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), showing a lone sailor at the mercy of the sea. In his finest works he achieved a depth of vision and mastery of design that have seldom been surpassed in American art.

Eakins spent almost all his career in Philadelphia. His early work included memorable scenes of outdoor activities, including bathing (in which he showed off his prowess with the nude) and boating, but he became renowned chiefly as a portraitist. His portraits are marked by a sombre naturalism, as in The Gross Clinic (1875, Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia), which shows Dr Samuel Gross demonstrating a surgical procedure to a class. Contemporary audiences were shocked by the unflinching realism of this large canvas, particularly by the blood on Gross's hand. Eakins's work and ideas were often controversial in this manner, and it was only near the end of his career that he was generally acknowledged as a major master. Now, however, he is considered by some critics to be the greatest of all American painters, and The Gross Clinic is regarded as one of the supreme masterpieces of American art.

A more populist view of American life is seen in the work of Frederic Remington, who was the best known of the numerous artists who depicted scenes of the Wild West, and a wide range of contemporary themes and events is depicted in the prints issued by the New York firm of Currier & Ives. These lithographs, produced by a team of artists, were advertised as “Colored Engravings for the People”, and they include portraits, landscapes, political and sporting subjects, scenes of rural and urban life, and much more.

Other aspects of the painting of the time are represented by landscape, still life, and figure paintings of allegorical and symbolic subjects. George Inness is acknowledged as the leading American landscape specialist of the later 19th century. He began working in the tradition of the Hudson River School, but his later work became much freer and more atmospheric, sometimes with a mystical flavour. This mystical feeling is much more pronounced in the work of Albert Pinkham Ryder, a solitary dreamer whose work is eerie and deeply personal.

Still life became a significant strand in American painting in the final quarter of the 19th century. The most notable exponents were William Michael Harnett and John Frederick Peto, both of whom painted in a highly realistic manner. The high-flown figure paintings of the period are now comparatively little known, but at the time they were regarded by many as representing the noblest aspirations of painting. John Singer Sargent, for example, virtually gave up portraiture in 1907 and devoted much of his later career to murals for public buildings in Boston—on the history of religion (1890-1916) in the city's Public Library and on classical mythology (1916-1925) in the Museum of Fine Arts. Also representative of this trend is Abbot Handerson Thayer, who specialized in images of beautiful young women in flowing robes, representing angels and suchlike.

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Early 20th-Century Painters

The most influential figure in American painting at the turn of the 20th century was probably Robert Henri. He was a renowned teacher (at various art schools in New York) and by encouraging his students to concentrate on the world they saw around them he had a profound impact on a generation of artists. His personality and ideas inspired two groups of painters active in the period leading up to World War I—The Eight and the Ashcan School. The Eight was a group of eight painters who organized an exhibition of their work in New York in 1908 because of their discontent with the conservative views of the National Academy of Design, which for many years had been the country's main art institution and exhibition venue. The Ashcan School is the name given to a broader trend in which artists favoured subject matter from everyday urban life. Four of the main artists of the Ashcan School had been members of The Eight—William Glackens, George Luks, Everett Shinn, and John Sloan—so the two terms overlap to a certain extent.

The exhibition held by The Eight (which toured to various venues) is regarded as a milestone in American art, preparing the way for the Armory Show, held in New York in 1913 (and subsequently shown in reduced form in Chicago and Boston). This was a huge exhibition of painting and sculpture (mainly recent and contemporary works) that aroused great public interest and did more than anything else to put modern art on the map in the United States.

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Late 19th- and Early 20th-Century Sculpture

In the period following the Civil War, Paris supplanted Italy as the mecca for American sculptors, and a warmer, more realistic style replaced the Neo-Classicism characteristic of the early 19th century. The leading figure of this transition was Augustus Saint-Gaudens, whose work has lively, flickering surfaces, in contrast to the smooth polish of the Neo-Classicists. He settled in New York in 1874 after studying in Paris and Rome, and made his reputation with the Admiral Farragut Monument (1878-1881) in Madison Square Park. This is in bronze, which—as a more romantic and potentially more realistic medium—tended to replace the marble favoured by Neo-Classical sculptors. However, Daniel Chester French, the leading American sculptor of public monuments in his day, used marble for his famous seated figure of Abraham Lincoln (dedicated 1922) on the Lincoln Memorial in Washington.

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Modern American Art and Architecture

Following World War I, American art achieved international stature and worldwide influence as architects, painters, and sculptors continued to devise new forms, new styles, and even new means of artistic expression.