The Neo Art Magazine

Few movements in art history have exemplified invention and change, such as American Modernism. This groundbreaking creative movement’s emergence in the early 20th century coincided with societal upheaval, and it served as a mirror for the profound changes of the period while also pushing American art into unexplored domains of expression and experimentation.

The cultural upheaval of American Modernism was a radical break from the academic norms that had long governed the art world; it was more than just a progression of style. In the face of the challenges posed by industrialization, urbanization, and the evolving social fabric of the United States, artists of that period strove to embody what it meant to be modern.

American Modernism

Disregard for established norms and an obsession with new ideas were central to American Modernism. Various painters adopted different styles and approaches, showcasing their perspectives on the changing world. Wassily Kandinsky was known for his brilliant abstractions, while Edward Hopper was known for his harsh realism.

However, American Modernism was more than just a copy of the avant-garde styles popular in Europe. The colorful metropolitan landscapes, the open spaces of the American West, and the diverse fabric of American culture served as its inspiration, contributing to its unique cultural, political, and social milieu.

In the early 20th century, the United States experienced rapid modernization. The arrival of mass industry and the railroad changed the face of America forever. Artists entered this environment, seeking meaning for themselves in this technologically advanced world of skyscrapers and industry. Their works mirrored ordinary Americans’ anxieties, the environment’s dynamic nature, and the isolation caused by the massive shadows cast by rapidly expanding cities.

The intellectual revolution in European painting was known to many painters who had been educated there. Some, like Stuart Davis, embraced Cubist and Surrealist methods; others, like Arthur Dove, Charles Burchfield, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Charles Sheeler, drew natural inspiration. Urban settings inspired artists like Oscar Bluemner and Edward Hopper as they developed their unique modernist styles. A second school of painters, including Milton Avery and Walt Kuhn, continued investigating figuration; Avery used figures to probe the boundaries between representation and abstraction, while Kuhn painted compelling portraits of circus artists. Some, like Charles Green Shaw and Josef Albers, forwent depiction entirely.

For American Modernism, each artist was like a victorious territorial conquest. An eclectic movement encompassing many forms and subjects emerged as a result, foreshadowing post-war tendencies like Abstract Expressionism.

The Stieglitz Circle and American landscape painting

The early American Modernist Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) was significant. He was an innovative gallery owner and photographer who tirelessly championed a collective of artists who aspired to portray the American countryside with a profound spirituality. Photographer Paul Strand, artists Georgia O’Keeffe, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, Charles Demuth, and John Marin were among them. The Stieglitz Circle was born from their exhibitions at The Intimate Gallery and An American Place, two of his many replicas.

In Upstate New York, near Stieglitz’s family home on Lake George, Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986) would go for walks, gathering objects like apples, leaves, and flowers to include in her paintings. She often crops the subject, paints it close up, or intensifies the colors to create powerful images.
John Marin (1870–1953) and Marsden Hartley (1877–1943) spent most of their lives depicting the rugged Maine shore, churning waves with bold, aggressive brushstrokes. Their method may have foreshadowed that of the Abstract Expressionists.

Arthur Dove (1880–1946), like Georgia O’Keeffe, painted landscapes to decipher their enigma. They developed an enduring creative discourse based on their mutual respect for one another’s work and their spiritual bond to the natural world. Dove had a natural, uncomplicated nature that paved the way for abstraction, according to O’Keeffe, who compiled her works. His belongings are unique. On reflection, I see now that I should have purchased more of them.
During the summer months, artists from the Stieglitz Circle and beyond, such as Edward Hopper and George Bellows, would also go to the New England beach to find inspiration.

The Precisionists and the Industrial Landscape

The industrial landscape surrounding Oscar Bluemner’s New Jersey home served as an inexhaustible source of inspiration for his imaginative depictions of the emerging city metropolis. Using his trademark red hue, he transformed these drab industrial settings into eye-catching masterpieces. ‘The whole city is alive; buildings, people, all are alive.’ John Marin, who was also engrossed in city life, wrote as much.

 

Although they did not officially establish a movement, the Precisionists were a loose confederation of artists who shared a desire to capture the new industrial landscape with its flat, hard-edged shapes and clean, exact lines. Painters Charles Demuth, Elsie Driggs, Joseph Stella, George Ault, Charles Sheeler, and Ralston Crawford were among them. By obfuscating their identities, these artists mirrored the faceless metropolis. They pioneered a new aesthetic that was chilly, dispassionate, and incredibly atmospheric. Despite their association with cityscapes, precisionists also employed a spare style in their depictions of still life, country scenes, and interiors.

The Parisian Americans

During the latter half of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, Paris became home to many avant-garde writers, musicians, and painters. It is well known that the cultural demi-monde attracted a number of famous Americans: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and George Gershwin were all regulars in Gertrude Stein’s salon, where they would use their shrewd minds.
The city served as a meeting place for American artists Patrick Henry Bruce, Marsden Hartley, Joseph Stella, and Elie Nadelman, who met the Fauvist and Cubist pioneers whom they reinterpreted as American Modernists.

Because of its energy and eclectic blend of modern and traditional buildings, Montparnasse was the site of Stuart Davis’s (1892–1964) 1928 relocation. His journey into abstract cityscapes, which he began after meeting Fernand Léger and Alexander Calder, included overlapping lines and color planes.

Analyzing Davis’s later work, one can discern his familiarity with and engagement with European Modernism and Abstraction. The color palette of Paul Gauguin, the Synthetic Cubism of George Braque and Pablo Picasso, and the work of Henri Matisse were all influences on Davis’s work. Over the course of his fifty-plus-year career, Davis exhibited an extraordinary commitment to presenting traditional American subjects.

Park Avenue Cubists and American Abstraction

Josef Albers, Ilya Bolotowsky, Byron Browne, Werner Drewes, Paul Kelpe, and Vaclav Vytlacil were among the American artists who came together in the late 1930s to form the American Abstract Artists (AAA). Their goal was to create a fresh style of painting that used primary colors and geometric forms.
A select group of New York City-based, well-off abstract artists—the Park Avenue Cubists—were also founding members of the AAA. Charles Green Shaw, George L.K. Morris, Albert Gallatin, and Suzy Frelinghuysen were all part of the group. The group’s works fused constructivist and Cubist ideas, drawing inspiration from artists like Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris, George Braque, and Fernand Léger.

Before he became an abstract artist, Charles Green Shaw (1892–1974) attended Columbia University to study architecture. The New York City skyline was reflected in his polygonal designs in bright colors, while Alexander Calder’s mobiles from the same era are reminiscent of the wire-like lines. Like Fernande Lager, Blanche Lazzell studied cubism in 1923; in 1937 and 1938, she studied with Hans Hoffman.

The Cubists also frequently used collage. Suzy Frelinghuysen (1911–1988) was an artist who employed corrugated cardboard to create works that shifted the focus from depiction to abstraction and from two-dimensional to three-dimensional space.

Figurative Art

Walt Kuhn, who was born in Brooklyn, played a pivotal role in bringing European Modernism to the United States as a founding member of the 1913 Armory Show. Kuhn was greatly influenced by modern artists like Paul Cézanne during his time at the Royal Academy in Munich and the Académie Colarossi in Paris. Kuhn founded the Association of American Painters and Sculptors after his return to the US, which allowed him to become a prominent advocate of American Modernism. For the first time, the American public was exposed to new art during the landmark Armory Show, the Association’s sole exhibition.

Among the many prestigious collections that own examples of Kuhn’s work, the most notable are the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. A Broadway director and designer in the early 1920s, Kuhn helped support his family throughout the Great Depression. He became a regular at Ringling Brothers performances in the 1930s and 1940s, obtaining a press pass in 1941 for better access to the backstage area. Behind the scenes, he had close relationships that informed his focused paintings.

Milton Avery is another American figuration master; his dedication to fusing representation and abstraction influenced many artists of the post-war era. When Avery first encountered Modern art in New York City after relocating there, his use of flat patterns and bright colors began to take shape. The ‘American Fauve school of painting, founded by Milton Avery, took its cues from the color-focused work of French Modernists like Matisse and Cézanne. As an obvious forerunner of Color Field painting, Avery’s late washes of glowing paint were beloved by Abstract Expressionists Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, and Barnett Newman.
Avery began spending summers in New England starting in 1920, when she painted landscapes and other natural scenes. The Modernist flattening and minimization of form, vibrant use of color, and calligraphic mark-making that brought him fame were all on display in his beachscapes and landscapes. The characteristic features of Avery’s most famous works, which include simplified shapes and blocks of color, are present in the artist’s work from the mid to late 1940s. Avery never had a dedicated studio; instead, he painted whatever was around him, including people and landscapes.

The Regionalist Movement in American Art

Among the American Regionalists who aspired to depict the countryside in all its pastoral glory were artists like Dale Nichols, Grant Wood, and Thomas Hart Benton.

Thomas Hart Benton devoted himself to truthfully depicting the unique environment of rural America as the champion of that movement in the twentieth century. Benton spent the early years of his career studying at the Art Institute of Chicago and Paris, where he interacted with fellow American Modernists Morgan Russell and Stanton MacDonald-Wright and admired the work of French artists Paul Cézanne and Henri Matisse. Still, Benton was unfulfilled in his pursuit of artistic meaning by these locations or the viewpoints of his contemporaries. After enlisting in the US Navy in 1918 and being tasked with sketching their operations, Benton finally discovered his artistic calling: a dedication to both subject matter and technique.

During the early stages of this new working method, in 1920, Benton first went to Martha’s Vineyard to escape the hot summers in New York. Visiting the island for the first time in 1920, long before it became a major tourist destination, gave Benton the opportunity to gain fresh perspective, which he used to create his own unique creative vocabulary.
Along with his technicolor depictions of the West, Benton also began to paint landscapes in the American West later in his career. He even worked with Hollywood on Western films.

The Magnificent American West

The unadulterated and frightening beauty of the dry Southwest drew the attention of several American painters. A few individuals made their home there, including the artists from the Taos Society of Artists, and rose to fame by painting the area’s vast sky and inhabitants. The exquisite seclusion of this place enticed others from New York, such as Marsden Hartley, John Marin, and Georgia O’Keeffe.

Rebecca Salsbury and Georgia O’Keeffe James (1891–1968) made his first westward trip in 1929, residing in Taos with Mabel Dodge Luhan, the Southwest’s Gertrude Stein, who entertained authors and painters such as D.H. Lawrence and Ansel Adams. Because of the vividly colored porcelain roosters on the roof, the mansion was known as Los Gallos, or The Roosters.

Eventually, O’Keeffe moved to New Mexico, where he resided in the “big house” in Abiquiu as well as Ghost Ranch. The surroundings, particularly the adobe architecture of the area and the black door of her covered patio, served as inspiration for a series of paintings she made.

When Marsden Hartley first arrived in New Mexico in June 1918, the bright light and vibrant colors of the surroundings drew him in. Even in the early 1920s, while he was living in Berlin, he portrayed the terrain as if it were otherworldly.

Finally, American Modernism is a representation of the American character traits of perseverance, creativity, and invention. This revolutionary movement made an everlasting impression on the cultural landscape of the 20th century and beyond by altering the trajectory of art history through its fearless experimentation, defiance of convention, and embrace of change. We are reminded of the power of art to reflect, question, and inspire as we contemplate the rich mosaic of styles, voices, and perspectives that comprise American Modernism. Despite the chaos and unpredictability of the time, artists had the courage to portray the spirit of a world that was changing at a dizzying rate. Their work serves as an inspiration for those who seek creative truth via perseverance, originality, and bravery. The spirit of American Modernism lives on in the works of artists and audiences today, encouraging us to welcome difference, find beauty in flux, and see our voice within the complex web of human experience.