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PROBLEMS OF THE AMERICAN ARTIST
Second Closed Session
New School for Social Research
Jerome Klein, Chairman

TENDENDCIES IN AMERICAN ART
SAUL SCHARY

By the beginning of 1900 American art can be said to have come into its own.  There was a background of tradition and created work and a sufficient knowledge of technical method to serve as a foundation on which to build. From the time of the American Revolution to the War of 1812 most of our painters have been products of English training.  Men like Stuart, Copley, and West had brought back a working knowledge of the English school of portraiture.  This was the type of art most in demand by that class of wealthy bourgeoisie which still looked to England as its cultural model.  After the Revolution John Trumbull and others, influenced by a nascent spirit of nationalism, painted pictures with such subjects as "The Battle of Bunker Hill" and "The Declaration of Independence."

The period of rapid territorial expansion immediately following the War of 1812 led to a cultural and economic decentralization.  The difficulties of transportation and communication forced the far-flung communities of the growing republic to a greater degree of intellectual self-sufficiency.  This gave rise to a folk and popular art which can be called truly provincial in feeling.  

After the Civil War we find a chaotic period of reconstruction having little time or interest in the pursuit of cultural activity.  It was during this ear that the tradition of the expatriate American artist began.  Most of the outstanding artists of the decades before 1900 - Whistler, Inness, Duveneck, and a host of others - went to Europe for their training.  Winslow Homer, on the other hand, best represents the type of artist little affected by European currents, and stayed at home to interpret the American scene.  Thomas Askins, although he studied abroad, returned to express in his work the factual preoccupation.  Here we have the crystalization of two divergent  
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trends:  Whistler would best represent the "pure" esthetic trend; Homer, the realistic.

The work of the next generation of painters - Henri, Luks, Bellows and others - had a tinge of social insight, though it appears mostly by inference.  Bellows' social and political awareness did not prevent him, during the World War, from painting pictures of a violent chauvinistic nature, based on atrocity stories created by the Allied propaganda bureaus.  These men continue the tradition of the local and factual character of American art.  

In the meantime there were new forces at work in Europe undermining the academic formula.  Painters like Cezanne and Renoir and their followers, Matisse, Picasso and Derain, were exploring the art of the museums.

Most of the tendencies developed by these and other artist - Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Expressionism, and Futurism - were first seen by our present generation of painters at the Armory Show of 1913.  This show, coming one year before the outbreak of the World War, marks, as did the War itself, the dividing line between the old and the new.

Few, if any, of our American painters today were uninfluenced by the healthy stir the Armory Show created.  it swept away the mustiness of academic formulas and initiated an era of unlimited freedom of expression.  The temper of the time was ripe for experimentation.  It was during the time of post-war activity that many of our artists again went to Europe to study.  Returning to America they carried on the tradition of European painting, modifying it according to the needs of their own personalities.  This was the heyday of "Art for art's sake."  Various tendencies in this movement of "Art for art's sake," overlapping to a degree, may be distinguised.

Men like Preston Dickinson, Samuel Halpert, Henry Lee McFee and Bernard Karfiol worked in what might be called "the Cezannesque method."  Others like Max Weber, John Marin, Charles Demuth, Joseph Stella, Stuart Davis, Arthur Dove, and Georgia O'Keefe branched off in modified and personalized versions of Expressionalism and Cubism.  Frank realism, mostly characterized by sensitivity and taste, was not neglected.  Such painters as Eugene Speicher, Edward Hopper, Charles Burchfield, Alexander Brook, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, and Franklin Watkins developed their personal vision to a high degree.  A "realistic pursim" was developed by Charles Sheeler, Niles Spencer and others.  How far this work differs from realism may be seen in the work of Billings and Blume, who have, by a series of logical steps, worked out a form of American Surrealism.

With the advent of the depression the artist's dream of individual salvation through his art was rudely shattered.  The laws of economic change intervened to awaken him to the threat of sterility contained in the blind alley of "Art for art's sake."  His ivory tower, erected on the "economic plateau" of Hoover's delirium, was dispelled with the rustle of ticker tape and the crashing of markets.  In his dilemma he turned to his fellow artists to discuss his problem and found that it was also their problem.

With the realization that as individuals they were powerless came the desire, on the part of some artists, to identify themselves in their work with progressive social movements.  Now the romantic pictorial subjects of crowds  [[61]]