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.