I.

Introduction

American Art and Architecture, the European tradition of architecture, painting, sculpture, and related arts as developed in North America (subsequently in the United States) by early colonists and their successors, from the 17th century to the present day.

In its early days, American art and architecture was heavily influenced by styles already highly developed in Western Europe. In the course of the 19th century, however, the new nation created distinctively American variations on European models. Finally, by the end of the 19th century in architecture, and by the middle of the 20th century in painting and sculpture, American masters and movements had become world leaders. This growing artistic authority reflected the increasing prosperity and political dominance of the United States. Because of the great size of the country, regional variations developed within this mainstream of artistic growth. Areas that had been settled by different European nations reflected their early colonial heritage in artistic forms, particularly in architecture. Similarly, climatic variations across the country helped to shape distinctive regional architectural traditions. In addition, differences persisted between the art produced in cities and that produced in rural areas: rural artists, trained or untrained, were more isolated from current trends and competitive pressures and developed highly individual modes of expression. This type of American art sometimes falls within the tradition of folk art or naive art. Although this article is concerned essentially with architecture, painting, and sculpture, which are traditionally considered the major visual arts, it must be remembered that—especially during colonial times—the decorative arts have played a major role in American culture. Silver in the 17th century and furniture in the 18th century, for example, reached particularly high levels.

II.

The Colonial Era

The early colonists took with them their varied artistic traditions, albeit adapted to the dangers and harsh conditions of a vast wilderness. Spanish influences prevailed in the west, while British styles, with an admixture of Dutch and French, predominated in the east.

A.

Colonial Architecture

The earliest surviving colonial buildings were erected by Spanish settlers in the early 17th century in the south-west of the country, in what is now the state of New Mexico. They are built predominantly of adobe (sun-dried mud), which the local Native Americans had already been using for centuries. The governor's palace at Santa Fe (begun 1610) is a good example. Other building types of the period included churches, missions, and fortresses. All these buildings tend to be in a very plain, rugged style, virtually devoid of ornament.

In the areas colonized by the British, wood was initially the predominant material. Houses were built in a range of sizes, although only more modest dwellings have survived. The Parson Capen House (1683), in Topsfield, Massachusetts, is typical of the two-storey New England house built of overlapping weatherboards. Its gables, overhangs, and lack of symmetry lend it a late-medieval flavour. In Virginia and Maryland, brick construction was preferred for the typically storey-and-a-half homes, with chimneys at both ends and a more nearly symmetrical façade, as in the Thomas Rolfe House (1652), in Surrey County, Virginia. The New England colonists were predominantly Puritans and the buildings they used for their religious meetings were appropriately plain, externally looking very like houses.

Dutch influence on architecture was mainly in the region of New York (which was known as New Amsterdam before it was captured by the British in 1664). The manor house, Fort Crailo (1642), in Rensselaer, New York State, is a good example.

B.

17th-Century Painting and Sculpture

Like colonial architecture, 17th-century colonial painting reflects British styles of a century earlier, which had been perpetuated in the rural areas from which the colonists came. The earliest surviving paintings, all portraits and all by artists whose names are unknown, were made in New England and date from the 1660s, a long generation after the founding of the colony. The most notable are the portraits of John Freake and Mrs Elizabeth Freake and Baby Mary (c. 1674, Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts). The relatively flat figures are arranged decoratively, with attention to firm line and areas of patterning, the sitters stiffly posed in their finery, as in portraits of the Elizabethan age in England. Documentary evidence indicates that portraiture began at about the same time in the Hudson Valley area in the Catskill Mountains area of New York State. Although portraiture was the only kind of art for which there was much demand, religious paintings and church decoration were created in the American Southwest, the figure carving being at the level of sophisticated folk sculpture.

C.

The 18th Century

By the turn of the 18th century, the colonies had begun to take on a more permanent and established character, as the hardships of the wilderness were overcome and increasing commerce and production permitted the growth of prosperous cities. Newly founded cities, such as Williamsburg, in Virginia, Annapolis, in Maryland, and especially Philadelphia, in Pennsylvania, were laid out on a regular grid, with public squares—the kind of logical organization that planners had been unable to implement in London during the same period. In contrast, cities founded in the 17th century, such as Boston, did not develop along pre-planned lines and retain their unplanned layout to this day.

C.1.

Architecture Before the War of Independence

Architects began to adopt current European (particularly British) styles in larger and more ambitious buildings. Modest versions of London's late 17th-century styles can be seen in the so-called Wren Building (begun 1695) at William and Mary College, in Williamsburg, with its symmetry and central pediment; the Capitol (1699-1705), in Williamsburg; and the Philadelphia Courthouse (1709). The adoption of more up-to-date ideas was aided by the increasing availability of architectural pattern books. Of these, the most influential was A Book of Architecture (1728) by James Gibbs. Its impact is seen in the impressive St Michael's Episcopal Church (1751-1753), in Charleston, South Carolina, with its distinctive steeple, which is clearly based on Gibbs's London church, St Martin-in-the-Fields. Domestic architecture in the first quarter of the 18th century is represented by the McPhedris-Warner House (1718-1723), in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, two rooms deep with a central-staircase hall. Country houses built around the mid-century show the influence of the English Palladian style (see Andrea Palladio), most obviously in the use of a central entrance portico. An early example is Drayton Hall (1738), near Charleston. Important public buildings were also treated in the Palladian style, as for example in the Pennsylvania Hospital (begun 1754) in Philadelphia.

C.2.

Painting Before the War of Independence

At the beginning of the 18th century, artists were active in several parts of the colonies. Henrietta Johnston (active 1705-1729), the first recorded American woman artist, worked in Charleston, executing the earliest-known pastel portraits in the New World. However, the most active school of painting was in the Hudson River valley, where the major Dutch landholders required portraits for their manor houses. These landowners were known as patroons, and the semi-trained artists who worked for them are called patroon painters. They produced relatively flat images that show little control of modelling, often basing their compositions, including the elaborate backgrounds, on English prints. The school culminated in the monumental full-length portraits Pieter Schuyler (c. 1719, City Hall, Albany, New York State) and Ariandtje Schoomans (c. 1717, Albany Institute of History and Art), which have an imposing, almost iconic quality.

As the century advanced, artists with more training began to migrate to the colonies. The best of them (though he was undistinguished by European standards) was John Smibert, who had enjoyed a fairly successful career in London as a portraitist working in the tradition of Sir Godfrey Kneller. In 1730 Smibert settled in Boston, where as well as painting he opened a shop selling artists' materials and engravings. His own collection of engravings, copies, and casts was displayed above the shop, forming a kind of art gallery (America's first), which was a stimulus to other painters in the locality.

By 1750 the pace of artistic activity had quickened considerably, with many more artists working than before. Smibert's principal successor in New England was the talented native-born portraitist Robert Feke, whose sense of line and surface design contrasts with Smibert's bulky manner. Among the other leading artists were Joseph Blackburn (active in America 1753-1764) in New England and John Wollaston (active c. 1734-1767) in New York and the mid-Atlantic colonies.

Shortly after the middle of the 18th century, the first two American artists of international significance came to prominence: Benjamin West and John Singleton Copley. West spent almost all his career in England, where he settled in 1760 after spending three years in Italy. He was the first American artist to make a mark in Europe, and he was so successful and admired that he succeeded Sir Joshua Reynolds as president of the Royal Academy. Because of his fame he acted as a magnet for other American artists visiting Europe, and he was unstintingly generous in encouraging and helping them. His work consisted mainly of portraits and ambitious figure compositions, and he holds a significant place in the history of art through his role in popularizing history paintings in modern dress rather than in the “timeless” draperies that had become customary. His breakthrough work in this vein was the Death of Wolfe (1770, National Gallery, Ottawa).

Copley spent the first part of his career in his native Boston, then followed in West's footsteps by settling in London in 1775 after a visit to Italy. The portraits he painted in Boston are far and away the best of the colonial era, showing a sense of life and characterization that made the figures of his predecessors look like puppets: John Adams, the second president of the United States, summed this up when he said of Copley's portraits: “You can scarcely help discoursing with them, asking questions and receiving answers.” After settling in England, Copley's greatest achievements were in history painting (in which he followed West in using modern dress), but after initial successes his career went into decline, partly because of the jealousy of rivals, and he died in debt.

III.

The New Nation: From 1776 to 1865

Copley's decision to move to Europe was influenced by the stirrings of revolution that were beginning to be a threat to his practice, and the American War of Independence (1776-1783) had an adverse effect on the arts, especially architecture, with building virtually coming to a halt. In the generation after the war, however, the self-confidence of the newly independent country was expressed in a resurgence in art and architecture, with distinctly national idioms beginning to emerge.

A.

Architecture

In the 1790s the post-war prosperity of such cities as Boston and Salem, in Massachusetts, New York, Baltimore, in Maryland, and Savannah, in Georgia, produced much building activity in the distinctive Federal style, which was largely based on the work of the British architects Robert and James Adam, whose graceful manner became well known through publications (the first volume of their Works in Architecture appeared in 1773). The large flat surfaces, simple columns, and refined classical detail characteristic of the Federal style can be seen in its purest form in the stuccoed homes of Savannah, such as the Richardson-Owens-Thomas House (1817-1819).

Contemporary with the Federal style, a weightier Neo-Classical idiom was introduced. Significantly, the nation's leaders associated the young republic with the great republics of the ancient world, and Thomas Jefferson (a distinguished architect as well as the third president of the United States) was a particularly important sponsor of Neo-Classicism. The influence of the ancient world is seen most clearly in his State Capitol at Richmond, Virginia (1785-1799), which he based on the Maison Carée, a Roman temple, in Nîmes, France. He was in Europe at the time he received the commission and was assisted in his designs by a French architect, Charles-Louis Clérisseau.

Jefferson was involved in planning the new capital city of Washington, D.C., and the most important architect in creating its buildings was his protégé Benjamin Henry Latrobe. Born and schooled in England, Latrobe was the first fully trained architect to work in the United States. Some of his work can be described as Greek Revival, for example Baltimore Cathedral (1805-1818), and in the years 1820-1850 this became what might be called the national style. The pedimented and colonnaded Greek-temple form was used not only in public buildings (for example the Second Bank of the United States in Philadelphia, 1818-1824, by William Strickland, a pupil of Latrobe), but also in houses. (See also Greek Art and Architecture; Roman Art and Architecture.)

By the middle of the century, various other revivalist styles were in vogue, notably Gothic, which became established as the principal style for churches. The leading specialist in Gothic churches was the English-born Richard Upjohn, who emigrated to the United States in 1829. His best-known work is Trinity Church, New York (1839-1846).

B.

Painting After the War of Independence

As with architecture, portraiture flourished in the prosperous era that followed the War of Independence. The leading figures included Ralph Earl, who worked in various places in New England; Charles Willson Peale, active mainly in Philadelphia (he was the head of an artistic dynasty and helped to establish the city as one of the country's main art centres); and Gilbert Stuart, who spent most of his early career in Britain before working in New York, Philadelphia, Washington, and finally Boston, where he settled in 1805. Of these three, Stuart was the outstanding artist—second only to Copley as the greatest American portraitist of his age. He is particularly renowned for his portraits of George Washington; he created three distinctive types, all of which were much copied and became national icons. One of them still appears on the country's $1 banknote.

Another notable painter of the time was John Trumbull. He had fought in the War of Independence and he is best known for paintings in which he recorded its great moments, notably The Declaration of Independence (1794) and The Battle of Bunker Hill (1789; both Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven). Later versions (1817-1824) may be seen in the rotunda of the US Capitol in Washington, D.C. The War of Independence continued to inspire painters long after this, most notably in the famous Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851, Metropolitan Museum, New York) by the German-born Emmanuel Gottlieb Leutze.

B.1.

Romantic Portraiture and Genre Painting

Until at least 1840 American painting continued to be dominated by portraiture in the Romantic manner. The leading portraitist around the middle of the century was Thomas Sully, whose glossy Romantic style shows his admiration for the English portraitist Sir Thomas Lawrence. Another leading Romantic portraitist was Samuel F. B. Morse; he was one of the most talented artists of his generation before giving up art for science and developing the system of electric telegraphy that bears his name—Morse code.

There were also some outstanding achievements in genre painting at this time. The first prominent American specialist in the field was William Sidney Mount, who recorded the daily lives of Long Island farmers in paintings such as Bargaining for a Horse (1835, New-York Historical Society, New York). In Missouri his contemporary George Caleb Bingham painted scenes of the lives of fur traders and flatboatmen, most notably the much-reproduced Fur Traders Descending the Missouri (1845, Metropolitan Museum, New York).

B.2.

Landscape Painting

Mount and Bingham's works often include prominent landscape elements, and in the course of the 19th century landscape painting become one of the strongest currents in American art. The father of this great tradition was Washington Allston, who set the tone for much of what followed with his dramatic and visionary views of nature, for example Moonlight (1819, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston).

In the late 1820s a distinctive tradition of American landscape arose in what is now called the Hudson River School. The outstanding figure among the founders of the school was Thomas Cole, who was inspired by the awesome majesty of the American wilderness, especially along the banks of the Hudson River. Thomas Doughty and Asher B. Durand were among his contemporaries who worked in a similar vein. Their patriotic spirit appealed greatly to the American public, and the Hudson River School not only flourished for about 50 years but also helped inspire painters to depict other areas of the country in a similarly reverential spirit. Cole's pupil Frederic Edwin Church, for example, became famous with a spectacular picture of Niagara (1857, Corcoran Gallery, Washington), and a number of painters (now known as the Rocky Mountain School) celebrated the mountain scenery of the far West in comparably dramatic images, sometimes of huge size. Among them were the German-born Albert Bierstadt and the English-born Thomas Moran.

Another aspect of mid-19th century American landscape painting is a trend known as Luminism. Artists working in this vein were interested in light and atmosphere rather than sheer spectacle, and their work tends to be fairly modest in size. Among them were the marine painter Fitz Hugh Lane, whose work included crystalline views of New England harbours, and Martin Johnson Heade.

C.

Sculpture Before the Civil War

The first American sculptor to break free of the folk art tradition and be recognized as a distinctive artistic personality was William Rush, who worked in Philadelphia. The son of a ship's carpenter, he began his career as a carver of figureheads for vessels and progressed to monumental freestanding figures, notably Comedy and Tragedy (1808, Edwin Forrest Home, Philadelphia), which were made for a theatre.

Rush's preferred medium was wood, but most of the leading American sculptors of the next generation were strongly influenced by Neo-Classicism and worked mainly in marble, which was the material of the bulk of the sculpture that had survived from the ancient world. Among these sculptors were Horatio Greenough and Hiram Powers, both of whom spent much of their careers in Italy, where there was plentiful marble and a strong tradition of working it. Greenough is best known for the huge figure of George Washington (1833-1841) made for the Capitol in Washington (it is now in the National Museum of American History, Washington); it was the first major state commission carried out by an American sculptor. Powers became famous with his female nude The Greek Slave (1841-1843), of which he made several replicas (one is in the Corcoran Gallery, Washington). It was much acclaimed at the Great Exhibition in London in 1851 and was for a time one of the most reproduced and discussed works of art in the world.

IV.

From the American Civil War to the Armory Show: 1865 to 1913

A.

Architecture After the Civil War

An important aspect of American architecture after the Civil War (1861-1865) was an increase in influence from Continental Europe, particularly France. Studying abroad was now customary, and Paris—recognized as the art capital of the world—was the strongest draw of all. Even before the Civil War, Richard Morris Hunt had had a thorough French training, and when he returned to the United States in 1855 he became the leading exponent of a French Renaissance style, inspired by 16th-century châteaux. He used it particularly in mansions for extremely wealthy clients, for example that of W. K. Vanderbilt on Fifth Avenue, New York (1879-1882; destroyed).

Other architects looked to the Italian rather than the French Renaissance for inspiration, notably the firm of McKim, Mead & White, as in the palatial Boston Public Library (1887-1895). Perhaps the greatest architect of the generation was Henry H. Richardson, whose bold sense of mass and control of detail is evident in his Trinity Church (1872-1877), in Boston, a revival of the Romanesque style, which became popular in the United States during the 1880s.

Revival of historical styles represents only one aspect of the story, however, for in the late 19th century Americans led the way in two architectural forms: the country house and the skyscraper. The most advanced country houses were in the shingle style. This takes its name from the wooden tiles (shingles) used to cover the roofs, which were typically large and sweeping, but in fact the most important aspect of the houses built in the style is the planning. Organized in an informal, rambling fashion around a large living hall, they show the development of the open plan and easy transitions between indoors and outdoors that were to become hallmarks of the best modern architecture of the early 20th century. A good example is the Isaac Bell House (1881-1883) at Newport, Rhode Island, by McKim, Mead & White.

The development of the skyscraper was made possible by two innovations: the elevator (see lift), which was introduced to New York office buildings in the 1850s; and metal-frame construction, with which it was possible to build higher than with traditional methods. The ten-storey Home Insurance Company Building (1883-1885, demolished 1931), designed by William Le Barron Jenney, in Chicago, was the first office building to use such a metal skeleton to support the weight of all the walls and floors, and Chicago was initially the leading centre in the development of the skyscraper. The city had been virtually destroyed by fire in 1871, and the rebuilding of the commercial district gave the opportunity to use modern methods and materials on a grand scale.

The term “Chicago School” is applied to the architects who gave the city such an important position in the development of modern architecture. Chief among them was Louis Sullivan, whose work includes two of the most famous early skyscrapers: the Wainwright Building in St Louis (1890-1891) and the Guaranty Building in Buffalo (1894-1895). The powerful, clearly articulated façades of these buildings directly express the underlying frame construction, but Sullivan was also a master of decoration, the Guaranty Building, for example, being faced with delicate terracotta ornamentation. Such decoration of skyscrapers continued into the 20th century. For example, the graceful Woolworth Building (1909-1913), designed by Cass Gilbert, in New York, has Gothic ornamentation; at the time it was the tallest building in the United States.

B.

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.

B.1.

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.

B.2.

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.

C.

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.

V.

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.

A.

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.

A.1.

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.

A.2.

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.

B.

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”.

B.1.

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.

C.

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.

C.1.

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.

C.2.

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.

C.3.

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.

D.

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.