Ch. 35.4 -- Early Modernist Tendencies in the United States

Artistic modernism developed more slowly in the U.S. than in Europe because the still-vital American realist tradition was fundamentally opposed

The Ashcan School is a realist artistic movement that came into prominence in the U.S. during the early twentieth century whose subjects were often scenes of the gritty urban life of New York City. The movement is most associated with a group known as The Eight whose exhibition in 1908 was a protest against the conservative exhibition policy of the National Academy of design.

JOHN SLOAN, Sixth Avenue and 30th Street, 1907, 1909.

George Bellows, Both Members of This Club (1909)Oil on canvas, 45 1/4 x 63 1/8 in. (115 x 160.5 cm)

The Armory Show•The Armory Show, was the first exhibition mounted by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors. It displayed some 1,250 paintings, sculptures, and decorative works by over 300 avant-garde European and American artists. Impressionist, Fauvist, and Cubist works were represented.[

•News reports and reviews were filled with accusations of quackery, insanity, immorality, and anarchy, as well as parodies, caricatures, doggerels and mock exhibitions. About the modern works, President Theodore Roosevelt declared, "That's not art!" The civil authorities did not, however, close down, or otherwise interfere with, the show.•Among the scandalously radical works of art, pride of place goes to Marcel Duchamp’s, Nude descending A Staircase, painted the year before, in which he expressed motion with successive superimposed images, as in motion pictures. An art critic for the New York Times wrote that the work resembled "an explosion in a shingle factory," and cartoonists satirized the piece.•However, the exhibition signaled an integration of modernism into the established New York museums. The exhibition went on to show in Chicago and Boston.

Installation photo of the Armory Show, New York National Guard’s 69th Regiment, New York, 1913.

MARCEL DUCHAMP, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, 1912. Oil on canvas, approx. 4’ 10 “x 2’ 11”. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia

Figure 33-30 ALFRED STIEGLITZ, The Steerage, 1907 (print 1915). Photogravure (on tissue), 1’ 3/8” x 10 1/8”. Courtesy of Amon Carter Museum, Fort

Worth.

EDWARD WESTON, Nude, 1925. Platinum print.

MAN RAY, Cadeau (Gift), ca. 1958 (replica of 1921 original). Painted flatiron with row of 13 tacks with heads glued to the bottom, 6 1/8” high, 3 5/8” wide, 4 1/2” deep. Museum of Modern Art, New York (James Thrall

Soby Fund).

MARSDEN HARTLEY, Portrait of a German Officer, 1914. Oil on canvas, 5' 8 1/4” x 3' 5 3/8”. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Alfred Stieglitz

Collection).

Influenced strongly by Cubism and Fuurism, Precisionism’s main themes included industrialization and the modernization of the American landscape, which were depicted in precise, sharply defined, geometrical forms. The themes originated from the streamlined architecture and machinery of the early 1900s.[2] Precision artists considered themselves strictly American and tried to avoid European artistic influences. There is a degree of reverence for the industrial age in the movement, but social commentary was not fundamental to the style

Precisionism

CHARLES DEMUTH, My Egypt, 1927.

Paul Strand's "Wall Street, 1915"

GEORGIA O’KEEFFE, New York, Night, 1929. Oil on canvas, 3’ 4 1/8” x 1’ 7 1/8”. Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, Lincoln, Nebraska

STUART DAVIS, Lucky Strike, 1921. Oil on canvas, 2’ 9 1/4” x 1’ 6”. Museum of Modern Art, New York (gift of The American Tobacco Company, Inc.). Copyright © Estate of Stuart Davis/Licensed by VAGA,

New York, NY.

The Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance reflected social and intellectual transformations in the African-American community. The Great Migration greatly expanded black communities, creating a greater market for black culture and Jazz and Blues, the black music of the South, came to the North with the migrants and was played in the nightclubs and hotspots of Harlem. At the same time, whites were becoming increasingly fascinated by black culture. A number of white artists and patrons began to offer blacks access to "mainstream" publishers and art venues. There would be no uniting form singularly characterizing the art that emerged out of the Harlem Renaissance. Rather, it encompassed a wide variety of cultural elements and styles. This diversity is reflected in the visual arts where artist like Aaron Douglas, Archibald Motley, and Romare Beardon incorporate different traditions into their works.

AARON DOUGLAS, Noah’s Ark, ca. 1927. Oil on masonite, 4’ x 3’. Fisk University Galleries, Nashville, Tennessee.

Harlem Renaissance

Archibald Motley, Blues, 1929