Visual art of the United States

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Visual art of the United States or American art is

But in the later 18th century two U.S. artists,

After 1850 Academic art in the European style flourished, and as richer Americans became very wealthy, the flow of European art, new and old, to the US began; this has continued ever since. Museums began to be opened to display much of this. Developments in modern art in Europe came to the U.S. from exhibitions in New York City such as the Armory Show in 1913. After World War II, New York replaced Paris as the center of the art world. Since then many U.S. movements have shaped Modern and Postmodern art. Art in the United States today covers a huge range of styles.

Beginnings

One of the first painters to visit British America was

After the

Robert Feke (1707–1752), an untrained painter of the colonial period, achieved a sophisticated style based on Smibert's example.^[3] Charles Willson Peale, who gained much of his earliest art training by studying Smibert's copies of European paintings,^[4] painted portraits of many of the important figures of the American Revolution. Peale's younger brother James Peale and six of Peale's nieces and sons— Anna Claypoole Peale, Sarah Miriam Peale, Raphaelle Peale, Rembrandt Peale, Rubens Peale and Titian Peale—were also artists. Painters such as Gilbert Stuart made portraits of the newly elected government officials,^[1] which became iconic after being reproduced on various U.S. Postage stamps of the 19th century and early 20th century.^[5]

• 
  Jeremiah Theus Portrait of Lady Liberty, 1765
• 
  John Singleton Copley, Paul Revere, c. 1768–1770, Museum of Fine Arts in Boston
• 
  The Treaty of Penn with the Indians, 1771–72, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia
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  Gilbert Stuart, The Skater, 1782, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
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  Museum of Fine Arts Houston
• 
  John Trumbull, The Death of General Montgomery in the Attack on Quebec, December 31, 1775, 1786, Yale University Art Gallery
• 
  Mather Brown, Portrait of Thomas Jefferson, 1786, National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.
• 
  Edward Savage, The Washington Family 1789–1796, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
• 
  Ralph Earl, Portrait of Oliver Ellsworth and Abigail Wolcott Ellsworth, 1792, Wadsworth Atheneum
• 
  James Peale, The Artist and His Family, 1795. Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
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  John Brewster Jr., Mother with Son (Lucy Knapp Mygatt and Son, George, of Danbury, Connecticut), 1799
• 
  Rembrandt Peale, Rubens Peale With a Geranium, 1801, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
• 
  Washington Allston, Moonlit Landscape, 1809, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts
• 
  Mather Brown, Self-portrait, c. 1812, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts
• 
  Benjamin West, Benjamin Franklin Drawing Electricity from the Sky, c. 1816, Philadelphia Museum of Art
• 
  Thomas Sully, The Passage of the Delaware, 1819, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Nineteenth century

The first well-known U.S. school of painting—the Hudson River School—appeared in 1820. Thomas Cole pioneered the movement which included Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Edwin Church, Thomas Doughty and several others. As with music and literature, this development was delayed until artists perceived that the New World offered subjects unique to itself; in this case the westward expansion of settlement brought the transcendent beauty of frontier landscapes to painters' attention.

The Hudson River painters' directness and simplicity of vision influenced and inspired such later artists as

Portrait painters in the U.S. in the 19th century included untrained limners such as Ammi Phillips, and painters schooled in the European tradition, such as Thomas Sully and G.P.A. Healy. Middle-class city life found its painter in Thomas Eakins (1844–1916), an uncompromising realist whose unflinching honesty undercut the genteel preference for romantic sentimentalism. As a result, he was not notably successful in his lifetime, although he has since been recognized as one of the most significant U.S. artists.^[11] One of his students was Henry Ossawa Tanner, the first African-American painter to achieve international acclaim.

A

The most successful U.S. sculptor of his era, Hiram Powers, left the U.S. in his early thirties to spend the rest of his life in Europe, where he adopted a conventional style for his idealized female nudes such as Eve Tempted.^[12] Several important painters who are considered American spent much of their lives in Europe, notably Mary Cassatt, James McNeill Whistler, and John Singer Sargent, all of whom were influenced by French Impressionism. Theodore Robinson visited France in 1887, befriended Monet, and became one of the first U.S. painters to adopt the new technique. In the last decades of the century American Impressionism, as practiced by artists such as Childe Hassam and Frank W. Benson, became a popular style.

Selection of notable 19th-century works

• 
  Edward Hicks, Peaceable Kingdom, c. 1834, National Gallery of Art
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  John J. Audubon, Washington Sea Eagle, c. 1836–1839, Smithsonian American Art Museum
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  George Caleb Bingham, Fur Traders Descending the Missouri, c. 1845, Metropolitan Museum of Art
• 
  George Catlin, An Indian Ball-Play c. 1846–1850, Smithsonian American Art Museum
• 
  George Caleb Bingham, Daniel Boone Escorting Settlers through the Cumberland Gap, 1851–52
• 
  Eastman Johnson, A Ride for Liberty – The Fugitive Slaves, oil on paperboard, ca. 1862, Brooklyn Museum
• 
  Frederic Edwin Church, Aurora Borealis, 1865, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.
• 
  Phillips Collection
• 
  John Kensett, The Old Pine, Darien, Connecticut, c. 1872, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
• 
  Nocturne: Blue and Gold - Old Battersea Bridge (1872), Tate Britain

  , London, England
• 
  Thomas Eakins, The Gross Clinic, 1875, Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
• 
  Boston Museum of Fine Arts
• 
  Albert Pinkham Ryder, The Waste of Waters is Their Field, early 1880s, Brooklyn Museum
• 
  Ralph Albert Blakelock, Moonlight, 1885, Brooklyn Museum
• 
  Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.
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  Ralph Albert Blakelock, Moonlight Sonata, 1889–1892, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
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  The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
• 
  Frederic Remington, Aiding a Comrade, 1890, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
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  Charles M. Russell, The Buffalo Hunt, 1899, Amon Carter Museum of American Art
• 
  oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

Controversy soon became a way of life for American artists. In fact, much of American painting and sculpture since 1900 has been a series of revolts against tradition. "To hell with the artistic values," announced

Images of the Southwest became a popular form of advertising, used most significantly by the Santa Fe Railroad to entice settlers to come west and enjoy the "unsullied landscapes." Walter Ufer, Bert Geer Phillips, E. Irving Couse, William Henry Jackson, Marsden Hartley, Andrew Dasburg, and Georgia O'Keeffe were some of the more prolific artists of the Southwest. Georgia O'Keeffe, who was born in the late 19th century, became known for her paintings featuring flowers, bones, and landscapes of New Mexico as seen in Ram's Head White Hollyhock and Little Hills. O'Keeffe visited the Southwest in 1929 and moved there permanently in 1949; she lived and painted there until she died in 1986.

Harlem Renaissance (1920s-1930s)

The

When the

Not all of the artists who emerged in the years between the wars were Regionalists or Social Realists; Milton Avery's paintings, often nearly abstract, had a significant influence on several of the younger artists who would soon become known as Abstract Expressionists.^[19] Joseph Cornell, inspired by Surrealism, created boxed assemblages incorporating found objects and collage.

Abstract expressionism

In the years after World War II, a group of New York artists formed the first American movement to exert major influence internationally: abstract expressionism. This term, which had first been used in 1919 in Berlin, was used again in 1946 by

Though the numerous artists encompassed by this label had widely different styles, contemporary critics found several common points between them. Gorky, Pollock, de Kooning, Kline, Hofmann, Motherwell, Gottlieb, Rothko, Still, Guston, and others were an American painters associated with the abstract expressionist movement and in most cases Action painting (as seen in Kline's Painting Number 2, 1954); as part of the New York School in the 1940s and 1950s.

Many first generation abstract expressionists were influenced both by the

Color field painting continued as a movement in the 1960s, as Morris Louis, Jules Olitski, Kenneth Noland, Gene Davis, Helen Frankenthaler, and others sought to make paintings which would eliminate superfluous rhetoric with repetition, stripes and large, flat areas of color.^[23]

After abstract expressionism

Lyrical Abstraction along with the Fluxus movement and Postminimalism (a term first coined by Robert Pincus-Witten in the pages of Artforum in 1969)^[25] sought to expand the boundaries of abstract painting and Minimalism by focusing on process, new materials and new ways of expression. Postminimalism often incorporating industrial materials, raw materials, fabrications, found objects, installation, serial repetition, and often with references to Dada and Surrealism is best exemplified in the sculptures of Eva Hesse.^[25]

Lyrical Abstraction,

Lyrical Abstraction shares similarities with Color Field Painting and Abstract Expressionism, especially in the freewheeling usage of paint texture and surface. Direct drawing, calligraphic use of line, the effects of brushed, splattered, stained, squeegeed, poured, and splashed paint superficially resemble the effects seen in Abstract Expressionism and Color Field Painting. However the styles are markedly different.^[27][28]

During the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s painters as powerful and influential as Adolph Gottlieb,

Members of the next artistic generation favored a different form of abstraction: works of mixed media. Among them were Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) and Jasper Johns (1930- ), who used photos, newsprint, and discarded objects in their compositions. Pop artists, such as Andy Warhol (1928–1987), Larry Rivers (1923–2002), and Roy Lichtenstein (1923–1997), reproduced, with satiric care, everyday objects and images of American popular culture—Coca-Cola bottles, soup cans, comic strips.

Realism has also been continually popular in the United States, despite modernism's impact; the realist tendency is evident in the city scenes of Edward Hopper, the rural imagery of Andrew Wyeth, and the illustrations of Norman Rockwell. In certain places Abstract Expressionism never caught on; for example, in Chicago, the dominant art style was grotesque, symbolic realism, as exemplified by the Chicago Imagists Cosmo Campoli (1923–1997), Jim Nutt (1938- ), Ed Paschke (1939–2004), and Nancy Spero (1926–2009).

Contemporary art into the 21st century

At the beginning of the 21st century, contemporary art in the United States in general continues in several contiguous modes, characterized by the idea of Cultural pluralism. The "crisis" in painting and current art and current art criticism today is brought about by pluralism. There is no consensus, nor need there be, as to a representative style of the age. There is an anything goes attitude that prevails; an "everything going on" syndrome; with no firm and clear direction and yet with every lane on the artistic superhighway filled to capacity. Consequently, magnificent and important works of art continue to be made in the United States albeit in a wide variety of styles and aesthetic temperaments, the marketplace being left to judge merit.

References