American Art and Architecture

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Painting Since World War II

During World War II, the United States emerged as the world's most powerful nation, both militarily and economically. This prosperity supported the nation's nascent leadership in art, as New York superseded Paris as the art capital of the world. Many leading European artists had found sanctuary in the United States during the war, and this helped to shift the balance of artistic power across the Atlantic, but the chief factor in the country's new artistic dominance was the emergence of Abstract Expressionism, perhaps the most influential movement in painting since Cubism.

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Abstract Expressionism

The Abstract Expressionists were a loosely affiliated group of painters, working mainly in New York in the 1940s and 1950s. They did not share a common style, but they believed in freedom of expression and thought that abstract art could convey powerful ideas and emotions. Often they worked on very large canvases, which underlined the scale of their ambitions. The most famous member of the group was Jackson Pollock, whose work is explosively energetic (Autumn Rhythm, 1950, Metropolitan Museum, New York). Characteristically he used a technique called Action Painting, in which his canvas was laid on the floor and he dripped and splashed paint on it while walking around or across it. During the process he would respond to the accidental quality of the drips to develop or balance what had occurred previously. The Abstract Expressionists were much influenced by the European Surrealists who had settled in the United States during the war, and Pollock's technique was in line with the Surrealist theory that chance and improvisation can help release subconscious creative forces.

Other Abstract Expressionists, while sharing the free, energetic brushwork and large scale characteristic of Pollock, achieved very different results. Willem de Kooning, never a truly abstract painter, is perhaps best known for his depictions of grotesquely leering women. A much less aggressive feeling is conveyed by the meditative paintings of Robert Motherwell and by the stark canvases of Franz Kline, whose bold black brushwork suggests calligraphy blown up to a huge scale. Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko both used broad, subtly varied expanses of colour, with relatively impersonal brushwork, and their work forms the starting point for a movement called Colour Field Painting, which can be regarded as an aspect or offshoot of Abstract Expressionism.

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In the Wake of Abstract Expressionism

In the early days of the movement the Abstract Expressionists were greeted with a good deal of incomprehension and sometimes abuse (Pollock was nicknamed “Jack the Dripper”), but during the 1950s they enjoyed such acclaim that their type of painting became established as a benchmark for the following generation of artists, who either took it as a starting point for their own work or reacted against its dominance. Many American artists continued to favour the format of large abstract pictures, for example, but some of them rejected the emotionalism and vigorous brushwork of Abstract Expressionism in favour of cooler and clearer composition and handling. The term Post-Painterly Abstraction is sometimes used as a general label for these various types of abstract painting. Leading figures of the trend include Ellsworth Kelly, Morris Louis, and Jules Olitski. Some of their work is so reductivist (particularly Kelly's canvases painted overall in a single colour) that it has been described as Minimal Art, although the term is more usually applied to sculpture. Op Art emerged in the 1960s from the same background; the leading American exponent is Richard Anuszkiewicz.

Other American artists reacted against Abstract Expressionism by returning to figuration and in the late 1950s created a style known as Pop Art. Pop artists drew their imagery from advertisements, comic strips, films, everyday objects, and popular culture, reflecting the prosperity and consumerism of post-war America, and the jokiness and slickness characteristic of their work contrasted with the high seriousness of Abstract Expressionism. Jasper Johns, with his deadpan depictions of flags and other ordinary objects, and Robert Rauschenberg, who incorporated mass-media material into his collages, set the stage for Pop Art in the 1950s, and in its 1960s heyday the leading figures of the movement included Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein.

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Late 20th-Century Pluralism

From the 1970s there has been no dominant movement in American painting, but rather a bewildering variety of styles and methods, and many leading avant-garde artists have preferred to work in newer media such as Conceptual Art and Video Art. Nevertheless, a few distinct movements have emerged in painting, notably Superrealism, Neo-Expressionism, and Graffiti Art.

Superrealism (sometimes called Photorealism) emerged in the late 1960s and flourished throughout the 1970s and beyond. Painters in this vein work with a precise, impersonal verisimilitude, imitating the effect of photographs (sometimes indeed they base their pictures directly on photographic images, projecting colour slides onto the canvas); typically their subjects are taken from banal everyday life (with an emphasis on consumer society reflecting the influence of Pop Art), although one of the best-known Superrealists, Chuck Close, has specialized in huge portrait heads (Self-Portrait, 1968, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis).

Neo-Expressionism emerged in the late 1970s and was a strong force in the 1980s. Neo-Expressionist paintings are typically large and intensely subjective in feeling, sometimes with deliberately crude handling or with materials such as straw or broken crockery embedded in the picture surface; subjects are often concerned with violence or disaster. The most famous exponent of this type of picture is Julian Schnabel, who was an enormous commercial success in the 1980s, even though many critics found his work lacking in any merit. A trend called New Image Painting was related to Neo-Expressionism and flourished at the same time. Paintings in this vein share with Neo-Expressionism an abrasive handling of paint, but the imagery is more cartoon-like. Leading exponents include Jennifer Bartlett and Jonathan Borofsky.

Graffiti Art—imitating the effects of spraycan vandalism—had a brief but highly publicized vogue in New York in the 1980s. The two young stars of the movement, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, became rich and famous before their brief careers were ended respectively by a drugs overdose and AIDS.

Alongside such avant-garde movements, traditional figure painting has continued to flourish, for example in the work of Norman Rockwell and more recently Andrew Wyeth, both of whom have appealed to a huge popular audience.

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20th-Century American Sculpture

At the beginning of the 20th century most American sculpture was fairly conservative in style, and more modern attitudes were introduced mainly by a succession of European-born sculptors who settled in the United States. Among the earliest were the French-born Gaston Lachaise, who emigrated in 1906, living first in Boston and then New York, and the Polish-born Elie Nadelman, who moved from Paris to New York (via London) after the outbreak of World War I in 1914. Both of them used boldly simplified forms that broke with the academic naturalistic tradition.

The famous European-born sculptors who followed them to the United States included the Russian-born Alexander Archipenko, a leading Cubist, who settled in 1923, and Naum Gabo, also originally from Russia, who emigrated in 1946; he was the leading exponent of Constructivism, in which sculpture is created from industrial materials such as glass, standardized metal parts, and plastic. The French-born Marcel Duchamp, who lived intermittently in the United States from 1915 (and eventually became an American citizen in 1955) was one of the most influential figures in the whole history of 20th-century art, and his invention of the ready-made (in which an everyday, mass-produced article is displayed as a work of art) had an enduring legacy in modern sculpture.

The first native-born American sculptor to make a central contribution to modern art was Alexander Calder, whose invention of the mobile in 1931 made him one of the chief pioneers of Kinetic Art. These mobiles usually consisted of flat metal abstract parts suspended from wires. Originally they were moved by hand or electrical motor, but Calder soon devised the type for which he is best known, in which the movement is caused by the faintest air currents (Big Red, 1959, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York).

As with painting, however, it was not until after World War II that American sculpture took a central role on the world stage. Several sculptors were influenced by Abstract Expressionism, creating works with expressively textured surfaces, but the major figure of this generation was David Smith, whose most original works are in a completely different vein, using boxes, slabs, or cylinders of polished metal to create powerful tower-like structures (Lectern Sentinel, 1961, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York). More than anyone else Smith established steel as a suitable material for sculpture, and he was also one of the major figures in the adoption of scrap metal and industrial parts for sculptural purposes. He is widely considered to be the greatest and most influential American sculptor of the 20th century.

Many subsequent American sculptors have built on Smith's work, for example John Chamberlain, whose most characteristic pieces are made from crushed car parts welded together, Richard Serra, who has sometimes used industrial metal on a huge scale, and the Minimalist Donald Judd, whose work includes arrangements of box-like shapes industrially manufactured in metal.

Minimalism was one of the main sculptural currents of the 1960s and 1970s, the other leading representatives of the movement including Carl Andre, whose most famous work is Equivalent VIII (1966), consisting of 120 bricks arranged in a rectangle; it aroused sensational publicity in 1976, when there was a public outcry over its purchase by the Tate Gallery in London.

Minimalism was linked to several other trends of the time, including Land Art and Light Art, in which the shapes used were likewise often very simple. The most famous work of Land Art is Spiral Jetty (1970), created by Robert Smithson and consisting of a huge spiral earthwork running like a road into the Great Salt Lake, Utah. The best-known exponent of Light Art is Dan Flavin, whose work includes bare arrangements of fluorescent tubes. There is even a relationship between Minimalism and Pop Art, in that sculptors from both movements had a liking for slick, impersonal surfaces. The leading exponent of Pop sculpture has been Claes Oldenburg, whose most characteristic works are giant sculptures of foodstuffs.

Pop sculptors have used various materials, including plastics, which have been one of the most important additions to the equipment of modern artists in the period since World War II. In addition, fibreglass (plastic reinforced with glass) has proved a highly suitable material for casting. It is strong but much lighter in weight than bronze (traditionally used for casting), it can take fine detail, and it can be coloured. In particular it has been used by Superrealist sculptors such as Duane Hanson and John De Andrea in their highly lifelike figures.

As with painting, there has been no clear pattern of stylistic evolution in American sculpture in the last decades of the 20th century, but rather a great variety of activity. This ranges from installations such as Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party (1974, Through the Flower Corporation, Belen, New Mexico), probably the most famous of all works of Feminist Art, to the unclassifiable work of the Bulgarian-born artist Christo, which consists of wrapping buildings or stretches of landscape in materials such as canvas or plastic, to the disturbingly ghostly tableaux of George Segal, in which life-size, unpainted plaster figures are combined with real objects. One of the most renowned sculptors working at the turn of the 21st century is Louise Bourgeois, still vigorous and inventive as she entered her nineties.