American Art and Architecture

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Architecture After World War I

Alongside the more innovative work found especially in skyscrapers, a rich classical style derived from the École des Beaux-Art in Paris was much used in American public buildings in the period after World War I until the stock market crash (see Wall Street Crash) of 1929 ended the building boom of the period.

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Frank Lloyd Wright

At the same time, certain pioneers struck out in individual directions that were part of the progression towards modern design. Most notable was Frank Lloyd Wright, the greatest of all American architects. He began his career in the Chicago office of Louis Sullivan, and in the years before World War I he first made his mark with a series of buildings known as prairie houses—suburban dwellings mainly in the vicinity of Chicago. They are low and spreading, the emphasis on horizontal lines suggesting the wide prairie expanses of the Midwest. There is little ornament, and space flows between interior and exterior. In 1935-1939 Wright developed these ideas further in Fallingwater, a country house near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which is boldly cantilevered over a waterfall. It was not until late in his long life that Wright's genius was widely acknowledged, and it was only in his final two decades that he regularly received large commissions, among them his last great work, the Guggenheim Museum in New York (1956-1959), in which the exhibition space—a huge, continuous spiral ramp—is a radical departure from traditional ideas of museum design.

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The International Style and Recent Trends

An important change of direction occurred with the arrival in the United States around 1930 of a number of German and Austrian architects who left Europe partly because of the Nazi suppression of avant-garde architecture. Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra, in Los Angeles, Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, in Chicago, brought to the United States the clear, rational style known as International Modern (see International Style). They continued their teaching role in America, developing schools of architecture that were the most advanced of their day.

Of these architects, the most influential was Mies, who was one of the principal figures in creating the type of “glass-box” skyscraper that dominated post-war American architecture. His masterpiece in this vein is the Seagram Building (1954-1958) in New York (designed in collaboration with the American architect Philip Johnson), which shows the poise and lucid precision for which Mies's work was renowned. The main channel in spreading this kind of “Corporate Modernism” skyscraper style (not only in the United States, but worldwide) was the firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), founded in Chicago in 1936 (later, as it grew greatly in size, it established offices in New York and other cities). Its most famous buildings include Lever House, New York (1950-1952), and the Sears Tower, Chicago (1970-1974), which at the time was the tallest building in the world.

Although the International Modern style continued to flourish, various American architects reacted against it around the middle of the century, among them the Estonian-born Louis Kahn, the Finnish-born Eero Saarinen, and the Chinese-born I. M. Pei. Kahn's style was strongly geometrical, but it was more bold and severe than International Modern, often using concrete in a rugged and majestic fashion. Much of his best work was for educational, cultural, or scientific bodies, for example the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences (1959-1965) at La Jolla, California. Saarinen's style in his mature work was more sculptural and organic, as in his TWA Terminal Building (1956-1962) at Kennedy International Airport, New York, where the dramatically curving rooflines consciously suggest a bird in flight. Pei's work has been varied stylistically, but is often characterized by an elegant simplicity, as in his East Building wing (1978) of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

In the 1970s and 1980s a new trend arose to challenge the pre-eminence of the International Modern style—Postmodernism. In reaction against the austerity of International Modernism, Postmodern architects introduced colour and ornament to their buildings, and often incorporated stylistic elements from earlier periods, sometimes in a playful or eccentric spirit. Leading examples are the Portland Public Services Building (1980-1982), which was designed by Michael Graves, in Portland, Oregon, a huge slab enlivened by bold colour contrasts, and the headquarters for the AT&T telephone company in New York (1978-1984), designed by Philip Johnson, a skyscraper topped by a giant classical pediment; Johnson had earlier been one of the leading exponents of the International Modern style.

Other contemporary American architects have taken more independent paths, among them the Canadian-born Frank O. Gehry and the German-born Helmut Jahn. Gehry has a highly idiosyncratic approach to buildings, often using unusual shapes and materials. The house (1979) he built for himself at Santa Monica, California, for example, uses low-cost materials such as corrugated metal panels and wire-mesh fencing. His most famous building is the huge Guggenheim Museum (1991-1997) in Bilbao, Spain, which is irregularly shaped and clad largely in titanium. Jahn's work likewise has a refreshing unconventionality and often a spirit of exuberance. His “user-oriented” public buildings include the State of Illinois Center (1985), Chicago; Cityspire (1989), New York; and the United Airlines Terminal (1988) at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport.

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Painting Since World War I

During the early years of the 20th century, American artists visiting or studying in Paris came into direct contact with the work of Paul Cézanne, the Fauves, and Pablo Picasso, as well as other early forms of modern art. For those Americans who did not go abroad, the main channel for introducing them to modernism was the New York gallery (opened in 1905) of the photographer and art dealer Alfred Stieglitz. It held, for example, the first American exhibitions devoted to Henri Matisse (1908) and Constantin Brancusi (1914), and it also showed the work of avant-garde American artists, including Arthur Dove (one of the first painters anywhere to produce pure abstracts), John Marin, the Russian-born Max Weber, and Georgia O'Keeffe, whom Stieglitz married in 1924.

An even greater stimulus in publicizing modern art came from the Armory Show of 1913, which was seen by more than a quarter of a million people and had a major impact on many American artists. Among them was Stuart Davis (only 18 at the time), who wrote that “All my immediately subsequent efforts went toward incorporating Armory Show ideas into my work”; he promptly began experimenting with various modern idioms, and in the 1920s he became the most sophisticated and original American exponent of Cubism. Among the other American artists of the time who engaged vigorously with modernism was Joseph Stella. He was Italian by birth and became the chief American exponent of Futurism, a movement that had originated in Italy. It was much concerned with expressing the dynamism of modern life, and one of Stella's favourite subjects in his paintings was Brooklyn Bridge, which he described as “a shrine containing all the efforts of the new civilization of America”.

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American Scene Painting and Regionalism

Many American artists of the time, however, were uninterested in avant-garde ideas or even felt a patriotic desire to repudiate them. This led to a broad trend called American Scene Painting, in which artists depicted their everyday surroundings in a straightforward naturalistic style. The leading figure of this trend, which was a dominant force in American art in the 1920s and 1930s, was Edward Hopper, who in 1933 wrote “We are not French and never can be”, and who considered that to imitate European styles “is to deny our inheritance and to try to impose upon ourselves a character that can be nothing but a veneer upon the surface”. Hopper used specifically American subject matter and often dealt with the loneliness of big city life, as in his most famous work, Nighthawks (1942, Art Institute of Chicago), which shows an almost deserted all-night diner.

A number of American Scene Painters who worked in the Midwest are known collectively as the Regionalists. The three main artists involved were Thomas Hart Benton, John Steuart Curry, and Grant Wood, whose pictures were mainly concerned with the daily life of the farm or small town in their region, as in Wood's famous American Gothic (1930, Art Institute of Chicago), depicting a couple in front of their farmhouse (which has a pointed, Gothic-like window).

The American Scene Painters and Regionalists flourished during the Great Depression, and in this troubled period they helped to maintain national pride, giving the public pictures with which they could easily identify. The government recognized this, and from 1933 to 1943 it ran various projects aimed at helping artists through the years of economic depression, partly by commissioning them to decorate public buildings. Wood supervised several such undertakings in his native Iowa, and a great many of the leading artists of the time were involved in this kind of work in one way or another. Among them were Philip Evergood and Ben Shahn, both of whom were much concerned with themes of social justice.