Visual art of the United States  

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Dempsey and Firpo (1924) by George Bellows
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Dempsey and Firpo (1924) by George Bellows

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20th century American art

Visual arts of the United States refers to the history of painting and visual art in the United States. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, artists primarily painted landscapes and portraits in a realistic style. A parallel development taking shape in rural America was the American craft movement, which began as a reaction to the industrial revolution. Developments in modern art in Europe came to America 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. Painting in the United States today covers a huge range of styles.

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Eighteenth century

After the Declaration of Independence in 1776, which marked the official beginning of the American national identity, the new nation needed a history, and part of that history would be expressed visually. Most of early American art (from the late 18th century through the early 19th century) consists of history painting and portraits. Painters such as Gilbert Stuart made portraits of the newly elected government officials, while John Singleton Copley was painting emblematic portraits for the increasingly prosperous merchant class, and painters such as John Trumbull were making large battle scenes of the Revolutionary War.

Nineteenth century

19th century art

America's 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.

The 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. Henry Ossawa Tanner who studied with Thomas Eakins was one of the first important African American painters.

Paintings of the Great West, particularly the act of conveying the sheer size of the land and the cultures of the native people living on it, were starting to emerge as well. Artists such as George Catlin broke from traditional styles of showing land, most often done to show how much a subject owned, to show the West and it's people as honestly as possible.

Many painters who are considered American spent some time in Europe and met other European artists in Paris and London, such as Mary Cassatt and Whistler.

Twentieth Century

American modern art

Notable figures

A few American artists of note include Ansel Adams, John James Audubon, Milton Avery, Thomas Hart Benton, Albert Bierstadt, Alexander Calder, Robert Capa, Mary Cassatt, William Merritt Chase, Dale Chihuly, Frederic Edwin Church, Thomas Cole, John Singleton Copley, Edward S. Curtis, Stuart Davis, Richard Diebenkorn, Thomas Eakins, Sir Jacob Epstein, Jules Feiffer, Helen Frankenthaler, Arshile Gorky, Marsden Hartley, Al Hirschfeld, Hans Hofmann, Winslow Homer, Georgia O'Keeffe, Lee Krasner, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Dorothea Lange, Roy Lichtenstein, Morris Louis, John Marin, Agnes Martin, Joan Mitchell, Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, Man Ray, Robert Rauschenberg, Frederic Remington, Norman Rockwell, Mark Rothko, Albert Pinkham Ryder, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Dr. Seuss, Ben Shahn, Cindy Sherman, David Smith, Frank Stella, Gilbert Stuart, James Thurber, Louis Comfort Tiffany, Andy Warhol, Frank Lloyd Wright, Andrew Wyeth, N.C. Wyeth.

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Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Visual art of the United States" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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