Introduction to 20 th Century American Art Visual Art II.

Introduction to 20th Century American Art

Visual Art II

George Bellows, Stag at Sharkey’s

George Bellows• George Bellows was born and raised in Columbus, Ohio. He was an only child,

born four years after his parents married, at the ages of fifty and forty respectively. His mother, Anna Wilhelmina Smith, was the daughter of a whaling captain.

• Bellows attended The Ohio State University from 1901 until 1904. There he played for the baseball and basketball teams, and provided illustrations for the Makio, the school's student yearbook. He was encouraged to become a professional baseball player, and he worked as a commercial illustrator while a student and continued to accept magazine assignments throughout his life. Despite these opportunities in athletics and commercial art, Bellows desired success as a painter. He left Ohio State in 1904 just before he was to graduate and moved to New York City to study art.

• Bellows was soon a student of Robert Henri at the New York School of Art, and became associated with Henri's "The Eight" and the Ashcan School, a group of artists who advocated painting contemporary American society in all its forms. By 1906, Bellows was renting his own studio, on Broadway.

Cliff DwellersGeorge Bellows

Cliff Dwellers (1913) is a clever title for a painting of the tenement dwellers of New York City in the early twentieth century. Bellows took the mass confusion of elements and organized simple composition of darks and lights, eliminating much of the detail of the actual scene. The activity in the painting is intense and varied yet is handles with care and compassion.

John Singer Sargent, Daughters of Edward D. Boit

Albert Beirstadt, The Rocky Moutnains

The Banjo LessonHenry O. Tanner

The Banjo Lesson (1893) is a simple scene of African-American life. The figures are rendered realistically, without sentimentality. This deceptively simple-looking work explores several important themes. Blacks had long been stereotyped as entertainers in American culture, and the image of a black man playing the banjo appears throughout American art of the late 19th century. Tanner works against this familiar stereotype by producing a sensitive reinterpretation. Instead of a generalization the painting portrays a specific moment of human interaction

Henry O. Tanner• Henry Ossawa Tanner (June 21, 1859 – May 25, 1937) was an African-

American artist. He was the first African-American painter to gain international acclaim. Tanner was born in Pittsburgh, PA. His father, Benjamin Tucker Tanner was a minister, editor, and political activist. His mother Sarah Tanner had escaped slavery via the Underground Railroad. The family moved to Philadelphia when Tanner was young; his father becoming a friend, sometime supporter, sometime critic of Frederick Douglass.

• Tanner is often regarded as a realist painter, focusing on accurate depictions of subjects. While his early works, such as "The Banjo Lesson" were concerned with everyday life as an African American, Tanner's later paintings focused mainly on the religious subjects for which he is now best known. It is likely that Tanner's father, a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, was a formative influence in this direction

John Sloan, Renganeschi’s Saturday Night

Georgia O’Keeffe, From the Plains I

Charles Seeler, City Interior

The KentuckianThomas Hart Benton

The Kentuckian (1954) illustrates the type of historical subject that Benton favored in his paintings. There is a slight distortion of humans, plant life, and nature. However, the strongly lit forms, deep shadows, and simplified design create a realistic image.

Thomas Hart Benton

• Thomas Hart Benton (April 15, 1889 – January 19, 1975) was an American painter and muralist. Along with Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry, he was at the forefront of the Regionalist art movement. His fluid, sculpted figures in his paintings showed everyday people in scenes of life in the United States. Though his work is strongly associated with the Midwest, he studied in Paris, lived in New York City for more than 20 years and painted scores of works there; summered for 50 years on Martha's Vineyard off the New England coast; and also painted scenes of the American South and the American West.

Grant Wood, Stone City Iowa

Edward Hopper, NighthawksNighthawks (1942) is a powerful and dramatic portrayal of loneliness of life in big cities. His strong light is always garish and piercing. The subjects look exposed, as though they were put under glaring spotlight. This is an example of how Hopper visually expresses his view of American life.

American GothicGrant Wood

American Gothic (1930) is Wood’s best know work. The simple plainness of this farming couple conveys the austerity of rural American life at this time and leaves a lasting impression on the viewer. This painting is a good example of Social realism.

Social Realism

• Social Realism, also known as Socio-Realism, is an artistic movement, expressed in the visual and other realist arts, which depicts social and racial injustice, and economic hardship through unvarnished pictures of life's struggles; often depicting working-class activities as heroic. The movement is a style of painting in which the scenes depicted typically convey a message of social or political protest edged with satire. This art movement is closely related to regionalism.

Fredrick Remington, The Outlaw

Jacob Lawrence, One of the Largest Race Riots Occurred in East St. Louis

One of the Largest Race Riots Occurred in East St. Louis is one of the best-known panels from Lawrence’s sixty panel The Migration of the Negro series. The race riot is not depicted realistically. Instead, Lawrence gives us a stylized and perfectly balanced dance of almost abstract shapes, which only make the work more chilling. The painting universalizes the hatred, lifting it above a more specific clash of individuals.

Jacob Lawrence• Jacob Lawrence was born in 1917 in Atlantic City, New Jersey and died in 2000 in

Seattle, Washington. He was thirteen when he moved with his sister and brother to New York City. His mother enrolled him in classes at an arts and crafts settlement house in Harlem, in an effort to keep him busy.

• After dropping out of school at sixteen, Lawrence worked in a laundry and a printing plant. More importantly, he attended classes at the Harlem Art Workshop, taught by the African American artist Charles Alston. Alston urged him to also attend the Harlem Community Art Center, led by the sculptor Augusta Savage. Savage was able to secure Lawrence a scholarship to the American Artists School and a paid position with the Works Progress Administration. In addition to getting paid, he was able to study and work with such notable Harlem Renaissance artists as Charles Alston and Henry Bannarn in the Alston-Bannarn workshop.

• In October 1943 (during the Second World War), he enlisted in the United States Coast Guard and served with the first racially integrated crew on the USCGC Sea Cloud, under Carlton Skinner. He was able to paint and sketch while in the Coast Guard.

• In 1970 Lawrence settled in Seattle and became an art professor at the University of Washington.

Ben Shahn, The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti

Ben Shahn, Handball

Conclusion

• America changed in the first half of this century with a dynamic force, full of ideas and discoveries. Extreme social, economic, and political changes too place in the first half of the twentieth century with greatly influence the subject matter and style of the art world. Most art was very focused on depicting life and scenery of the US.