U.S. Culture

forms are usually seen as more representative American products. In the

United States in the recent past, there has been a blending of popular and

elite art forms, as all the arts experienced a period of remarkable cross-

fertilization. Because popular art forms are so widely distributed, arts

of all kinds have prospered.

The arts in the United States express the many faces and the enormous

creative range of the American people. Especially since World War II,

American innovations and the immense energy displayed in literature,

dance, and music have made American cultural works world famous. Arts in

the United States have become internationally prominent in ways that are

unparalleled in history. American art forms during the second half of the

20th century often defined the styles and qualities that the rest of the

world emulated. At the end of the 20th century, American art was

considered equal in quality and vitality to art produced in the rest of

the world.

Throughout the 20th century, American arts have grown to incorporate new

visions and voices. Much of this new artistic energy came in the wake of

America’s emergence as a superpower after World War II. But it was also

due to the growth of New York City as an important center for publishing

and the arts, and the immigration of artists and intellectuals fleeing

fascism in Europe before and during the war. An outpouring of talent also

followed the civil rights and protest movements of the 1960s, as cultural

discrimination against blacks, women, and other groups diminished.

American arts flourish in many places and receive support from private

foundations, large corporations, local governments, federal agencies,

museums, galleries, and individuals. What is considered worthy of support

often depends on definitions of quality and of what constitutes art. This

is a tricky subject when the popular arts are increasingly incorporated

into the domain of the fine arts and new forms such as performance art and

conceptual art appear. As a result, defining what is art affects what

students are taught about past traditions (for example, Native American

tent paintings, oral traditions, and slave narratives) and what is

produced in the future. While some practitioners, such as studio artists,

are more vulnerable to these definitions because they depend on financial

support to exercise their talents, others, such as poets and

photographers, are less immediately constrained.

Artists operate in a world where those who theorize and critique their

work have taken on an increasingly important role. Audiences are

influenced by a variety of intermediaries—critics, the schools,

foundations that offer grants, the National Endowment for the Arts,

gallery owners, publishers, and theater producers. In some areas, such as

the performing arts, popular audiences may ultimately define success. In

other arts, such as painting and sculpture, success is far more dependent

on critics and a few, often wealthy, art collectors. Writers depend on

publishers and on the public for their success.

Unlike their predecessors, who relied on formal criteria and appealed to

aesthetic judgments, critics at the end of the 20th century leaned more

toward popular tastes, taking into account groups previously ignored and

valuing the merger of popular and elite forms. These critics often relied

less on aesthetic judgments than on social measures and were eager to

place artistic productions in the context of the time and social

conditions in which they were created. Whereas earlier critics attempted

to create an American tradition of high art, later critics used art as a

means to give power and approval to nonelite groups who were previously

not considered worthy of including in the nation’s artistic heritage.

Not so long ago, culture and the arts were assumed to be an unalterable

inheritance—the accumulated wisdom and highest forms of achievement that

were established in the past. In the 20th century generally, and certainly

since World War II, artists have been boldly destroying older traditions

in sculpture, painting, dance, music, and literature. The arts have

changed rapidly, with one movement replacing another in quick succession.

Visual Arts

The visual arts have traditionally included forms of expression that

appeal to the eyes through painted surfaces, and to the sense of space

through carved or molded materials. In the 19th century, photographs were

added to the paintings, drawings, and sculpture that make up the visual

arts. The visual arts were further augmented in the 20th century by the

addition of other materials, such as found objects. These changes were

accompanied by a profound alteration in tastes, as earlier emphasis on

realistic representation of people, objects, and landscapes made way for a

greater range of imaginative forms.

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, American art was considered

inferior to European art. Despite noted American painters such as Thomas

Eakins, Winslow Homer, Mary Cassatt, and John Marin, American visual arts

barely had an international presence.

American art began to flourish during the Great Depression of the 1930s as

New Deal government programs provided support to artists along with other

sectors of the population. Artists connected with each other and developed

a sense of common purpose through programs of the Public Works

Administration, such as the Federal Art Project, as well as programs

sponsored by the Treasury Department. Most of the art of the period,

including painting, photography, and mural work, focused on the plight of

the American people during the depression, and most artists painted real

people in difficult circumstances. Artists such as Thomas Hart Benton and

Ben Shahn expressed the suffering of ordinary people through their

representations of struggling farmers and workers. While artists such as

Benton and Grant Wood focused on rural life, many painters of the 1930s

and 1940s depicted the multicultural life of the American city. Jacob

Lawrence, for example, re-created the history and lives of African

Americans. Other artists, such as Andrew Wyeth and Edward Hopper, tried to

use human figures to describe emotional states such as loneliness and

despair.

Abstract Expressionism

Shortly after World War II, American art began to garner worldwide

attention and admiration. This change was due to the innovative fervor of

abstract expressionism in the 1950s and to subsequent modern art movements

and artists. The abstract expressionists of the mid-20th century broke

from the realist and figurative tradition set in the 1930s. They

emphasized their connection to international artistic visions rather than

the particularities of people and place, and most abstract expressionists

did not paint human figures (although artist Willem de Kooning did

portrayals of women). Color, shape, and movement dominated the canvases of

abstract expressionists. Some artists broke with the Western art tradition

by adopting innovative painting styles—during the 1950s Jackson Pollock

"painted" by dripping paint on canvases without the use of brushes, while

the paintings of Mark Rothko often consisted of large patches of color

that seem to vibrate.

Abstract expressionists felt alienated from their surrounding culture and

used art to challenge society’s conventions. The work of each artist was

quite individual and distinctive, but all the artists identified with the

radicalism of artistic creativity. The artists were eager to challenge

conventions and limits on expression in order to redefine the nature of

art. Their radicalism came from liberating themselves from the confining

artistic traditions of the past.

The most notable activity took place in New York City, which became one of

the world’s most important art centers during the second half of the 20th

century. The radical fervor and inventiveness of the abstract

expressionists, their frequent association with each other in New York

City’s Greenwich Village, and the support of a group of gallery owners and

dealers turned them into an artistic movement. Also known as the New York

School, the participants included Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell, Franz

Kline, and Arshile Gorky, in addition to Rothko and Pollock.

The members of the New York School came from diverse backgrounds such as

the American Midwest and Northwest, Armenia, and Russia, bringing an

international flavor to the group and its artistic visions. They hoped to

appeal to art audiences everywhere, regardless of culture, and they felt

connected to the radical innovations introduced earlier in the 20th

century by European artists such as Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp. Some

of the artists—Hans Hofmann, Gorky, Rothko, and de Kooning—were not born

in the United States, but all the artists saw themselves as part of an

international creative movement and an aesthetic rebellion.

As artists felt released from the boundaries and conventions of the past

and free to emphasize expressiveness and innovation, the abstract

expressionists gave way to other innovative styles in American art.

Beginning in the 1930s Joseph Cornell created hundreds of boxed

assemblages, usually from found objects, with each based on a single theme

to create a mood of contemplation and sometimes of reverence. Cornell's

boxes exemplify the modern fascination with individual vision, art that

breaks down boundaries between forms such as painting and sculpture, and

the use of everyday objects toward a new end. Other artists, such as

Robert Rauschenberg, combined disparate objects to create large, collage-

like sculptures known as combines in the 1950s. Jasper Johns, a painter,

sculptor, and printmaker, recreated countless familiar objects, most

memorably the American flag.

The most prominent American artistic style to follow abstract

expressionism was the pop art movement that began in the 1950s. Pop art

attempted to connect traditional art and popular culture by using images

from mass culture. To shake viewers out of their preconceived notions

about art, sculptor Claes Oldenburg used everyday objects such as pillows

and beds to create witty, soft sculptures. Roy Lichtenstein took this a

step further by elevating the techniques of commercial art, notably

cartooning, into fine art worthy of galleries and museums. Lichtenstein's

large, blown-up cartoons fill the surface of his canvases with grainy

black dots and question the existence of a distinct realm of high art.

These artists tried to make their audiences see ordinary objects in a

refreshing new way, thereby breaking down the conventions that formerly

defined what was worthy of artistic representation.

Probably the best-known pop artist, and a leader in the movement, was Andy

Warhol, whose images of a Campbell’s soup can and of the actress Marilyn

Monroe explicitly eroded the boundaries between the art world and mass

culture. Warhol also cultivated his status as a celebrity. He worked in

film as a director and producer to break down the boundaries between

traditional and popular art. Unlike the abstract expressionists, whose

conceptual works were often difficult to understand, Andy Warhol's

pictures, and his own face, were instantly recognizable.

Conceptual art, as it came to be known in the 1960s, like its

predecessors, sought to break free of traditional artistic associations.

In conceptual art, as practiced by Sol LeWitt and Joseph Kosuth, concept

takes precedent over actual object, by stimulating thought rather than

following an art tradition based on conventional standards of beauty and

artisanship.

Modern artists changed the meaning of traditional visual arts and brought

a new imaginative dimension to ordinary experience. Art was no longer

viewed as separate and distinct, housed in museums as part of a historical

inheritance, but as a continuous creative process. This emphasis on

constant change, as well as on the ordinary and mundane, reflected a

distinctly American democratizing perspective. Viewing art in this way

removed the emphasis from technique and polished performance, and many

modern artworks and experiences became more about expressing ideas than

about perfecting finished products.

Photography

Photography is probably the most democratic modern art form because it can

be, and is, practiced by most Americans. Since 1888, when George Eastman

developed the Kodak camera that allowed anyone to take pictures,

photography has struggled to be recognized as a fine art form. In the

early part of the 20th century, photographer, editor, and artistic

impresario Alfred Stieglitz established 291, a gallery in New York City,

with fellow photographer Edward Steichen, to showcase the works of

photographers and painters. They also published a magazine called Camera

Work to increase awareness about photographic art. In the United States,

photographic art had to compete with the widely available commercial

photography in news and fashion magazines. By the 1950s the tradition of

photojournalism, which presented news stories primarily with photographs,

had produced many outstanding works. In 1955 Steichen, who was director of

photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, called attention to

this work in an exhibition called The Family of Man.

Throughout the 20th century, most professional photographers earned their

living as portraitists or photojournalists, not as artists. One of the

most important exceptions was Ansel Adams, who took majestic photographs

of the Western American landscape. Adams used his art to stimulate social

awareness and to support the conservation cause of the Sierra Club. He

helped found the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art in

1940, and six years later helped establish the photography department at

the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco (now the San Francisco

Art Institute). He also held annual photography workshops at Yosemite

National Park from 1955 to 1981 and wrote a series of influential books on

photographic technique.

Adams's elegant landscape photography was only one small stream in a

growing current of interest in photography as an art form. Early in the

20th century, teacher-turned-photographer Lewis Hine established a

documentary tradition in photography by capturing actual people, places,

and events. Hine photographed urban conditions and workers, including

child laborers. Along with their artistic value, the photographs often

implicitly called for social reform. In the 1930s and 1940s, photographers

joined with other depression-era artists supported by the federal

Страницы: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9