first well-known school of painting -- the Hudson River school -- appeared
in 1820. 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.
Hudson River painters' directness and simplicity of vision influenced
such later artists as Winslow Homer (1836-1910), who depicted rural
America -- the sea, the mountains, and the people who lived near them.
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.
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 Robert
Henri (1865-1929). He was the leader of what critics called the "ash-can"
school of painting, after the group's portrayals of the squalid aspects
of city life. Soon the ash-can artists gave way to modernists arriving
from Europe -- the cubists and abstract painters promoted by the photographer
Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) at his Gallery 291 in New York City.
the years after World War II, a group of young New York artists formed
the first native American movement to exert major influence on foreign
artists: abstract expressionism. Among the movement's leaders were Jackson
Pollock (1912-1956), Willem de Kooning (1904-1997), and Mark Rothko
(1903-1970). The abstract expressionists abandoned formal composition
and representation of real objects to concentrate on instinctual arrangements
of space and color and to demonstrate the effects of the physical action
of painting on the canvas.
of the next artistic generation favored a different form of abstraction:
works of mixed media. Among them were Robert Rauschenberg (1925- ) and
Jasper Johns (1930- ), who used photos, newsprint, and discarded objects
in their compositions. Pop artists, such as Andy Warhol (1930-1987),
Larry Rivers (1923- ), and Roy Lichtenstein (1923- ), reproduced, with
satiric care, everyday objects and images of American popular culture
-- Coca-Cola bottles, soup cans, comic strips.
artists in America tend not to restrict themselves to schools, styles,
or a single medium. A work of art might be a performance on stage or
a hand-written manifesto; it might be a massive design cut into a Western
desert or a severe arrangement of marble panels inscribed with the names
of American soldiers who died in Vietnam. Perhaps the most influential
20th-century American contribution to world art has been a mocking playfulness,
a sense that a central purpose of a new work is to join the ongoing
debate over the definition of art itself.