American realism

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Charles Demuth: Aucassiu and Nicolette (1921)

American Realism , even American Scene called, refers to a in the first two decades of the 20th century in the United States resulting (USA) style of painting of realism . Features are the most realistic reproduction possible and the often socially critical portrayal of the “typically American” lifestyle and feelings. American realism is considered the USA's first national art style; Abstract Expressionism , also known as the New American Scene , developed from it in the 1940s . American Realism is stylistically close to New Objectivity and genre painting .

History of origin

Beginning

Alfred Stieglitz: Old and New New York , 1910, published in Camera Work , No 36, 1911
Armory Show poster , New York 1913

The beginning of a Americanization in the modern art of the 20th century is generally with the outbreak of World War I linked. An important pioneer was the New York gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz , who held his first exhibitions with European artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia in his gallery 291 , but who was soon to turn away from European modernism . In his own photographic work, Stieglitz focused on the modern urban landscape of New York ( Old and New New York , 1910) and symbolically documented the change from the Old to the New World .

Art historians generally consider the extensive Armory Show , which was also held in New York in 1913, so drastically illustrated the European “hegemony” in the visual arts that American critics perceived it as a shocking affront to domestic culture. Many artists who over the traditional, dominant art world of Europe and its protagonists had felt so far "inferior" or "faceless", were initially snubbed and countered after a short self-discovery phase later than the early 1920s with an unusually patriotic - conservative regionalism in statement and imagery.

American precisionism

Charles Demuth: The Figure 5 in Gold (1928)

The search for identity and the accompanying authenticity initially took place through the thematization of the expanding urbanization and industrialization of the New World : stylistic borrowings from Cubism and Futurism initially gave rise to American precisionism : it mainly contained geometric and technoid style elements. The main exponents of precisionism were Ralston Crawford , Charles Demuth , Georgia O'Keeffe and Charles Sheeler . Sheeler experimented with the photo-realistic representation of huge industrial plants; as he preferred to use photographs as templates for his work, he can be described as the first photorealist ever. Georgia O'Keeffe expanded this photographic approach to an almost microscopic view of things by realistically depicting organic forms and structures, but at the same time again creating an abstraction through their format-filling enlargement. Her first solo exhibition at Galerie 291 in April 1917 showed semi-abstract charcoal drawings that were not based on European contemporaries. Ralston Crawford, who depicted clear, two-dimensional and geometric street and industrial landscapes, can already be described as an early pioneer of color field painting and Pop Art .

Socially critical and psychologizing realism

George Bellows: Dempsey and Firpo , 1924

Among the early representatives of socially critical painting were the members of the Ashcan School (initially also called The Eight ), founded in New York in 1908 , which primarily addressed socially critical issues with scenes from the urban environment. Her works, which were often stylistically based on early press photographs, depicted poor people in the slums , drunks, criminals, accidents and crimes. Members included George Wesley Bellows , Robert Henri , George Benjamin Luks , Maurice Prendergast and John French Sloan . Some of the artists later joined left-wing political movements or unions .

The prosperous economy of the Roaring Twenties followed in the shadow of " Black Thursday " In 1929, the global economic crisis , which in the US Great Depression led the 1930s to drastic cuts in the social and cultural life. The art world reacted with a socially critical discussion of an “ American way of life ” that was suddenly determined by unemployment and renewed migration . Edward Hopper's work in particular reflects this new state of mind, which was now characterized by emptiness, meaninglessness and aimlessness.

Hopper was able to increase his psychologizing realism through a virtuoso play with light and shadow as well as the relentless depiction of the loneliness and anonymity of the "modern man" in puzzlingly strange, almost surreal imagery. Hopper consistently opposed the subjects of his contemporaries, which were still determined by technocratic euphoria: his unmasking themes are the bleak scenarios of a village and petty bourgeois pseudo-idyll with crumbling huts and abandoned houses that offer neither warmth nor protection. The lonely protagonists of his metropolitan scenes, mostly offices or shabby motels, are depicted as cool, distant and without any sympathy; they are subject to sober analytical observation, in which the viewer, ergo the painter himself, does not seem to be emotionally involved. One of Hopper's best-known works is Nighthawks from 1942, which is one of the most popular paintings of the 20th century.

American regionalism

Grant Wood: American Gothic , 1930

Just like Hopper's work, Grant Wood 's works, which are characterized by the local color of the Midwest, are characterized by their stylistically precise and distant implementation. Wood's work reflects the puritanical bigotry of American country life. Wood, who had stayed in Europe for several years and studied there, complained like many of his American artist colleagues about the lack of acceptance by the European artist scene. In his work in later years Wood concentrated almost exclusively on a peculiar regionalism , the style and iconography borrowing from late Gothic and old Dutch painting . The artist was barely influenced by the European avant-garde , at most a stylistic proximity to the New Objectivity of Franz Radziwill and Christian Schad can be proven. Grant Wood's best-known work is the portrait of a farmer couple, painted in 1930 and entitled American Gothic , standing in front of a house. Though rejected by critics suspecting satirical indictment, the painting gained immense popularity in the 1930s. The way in which people portrayed and the composition of the images was copied by numerous artists in the following years, and the title "American Gothic" became synonymous with this variant of American realism. In general, the subjects of the regionalists were characterized by provincial-small-town pictorial themes (farms, agricultural landscapes, farmers working in the fields, etc.), which pointed to the pathos of the free American pioneering spirit, which was dwindling in the mid-1930s due to the economic crisis was.

Marsden Hartley: Blueberry Highway, Dogtown , 1931, High Museum of Art , Atlanta

Other well-known regionalists were Thomas Hart Benton , George Biddle or Marsden Hartley . Hartley originally came from traditional painting and oriented himself towards the European avant-garde, here primarily Kandinsky , until he finally found his “very own” figurative-abstract imagery, which he implemented in genre paintings or seascapes that deal with his homeland, Maine . Hartley became a leader of the regionalist movement of his time in the 1930s.

The new national consciousness of the young American art movement also aroused the interest of the US government, so that artist aid programs were initiated under the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt . At this time, the federal agency Works Progress Administration (WPA) was formed, the job creation measure both to promote " folk art " and to establish a "standard quality" of American art. This so-called "project realism" or "WPA realism" was important for the history of the development of modern American art in the 20th century.

Muralists and Social Realism

Also supported by the WPA and an important source of inspiration for the American realists were the Mexican murales , wall paintings that go back to the Mexican Revolution . The main representatives of this Latin American -influenced social realism were the artists Diego Rivera , David Alfaro Siquiros and Ben Shahn, also known as “muralists” . (see also Socialist Realism ).

End of the era

The American Realism lost with the outbreak of the Second World War in the early 1940s in importance and was soon by the New American Scene called Abstract Expressionism replaced. The misleading term “New American Scene” for this style of painting, which is stylistically opposed to figurative realism, should point to the still immanent national moment with America as the place of origin.

American Realism Artists (selection)

literature

  • Matthew Balgell: The American scene: American painting of the 1930's. Praeger, New York, 1974, ISBN 0-275-46620-5
  • Edward Lucie-Smith: American Realism . Seemann, Leipzig 1994, ISBN 3-363-00624-1
  • Elizabeth Prelinger: Scenes of American Life: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Watson-Guptill Publications Inc., 2001, ISBN 0-8230-4654-0
  • Patricia Phagan (Ed.), Matthew Baigell: The American Scene and the South: Paintings and Works on Paper 1930-1946 . Georgia Museum of Art exhibition catalog; University of Georgia / Georgia Museum of Art, 1996, ISBN 0-915977-24-9
  • Gerry Souter: American Realism - American Realistic Painting . Parkstone International, New York, 2009, ISBN 978-1-84484-605-4 .

Web links

References and comments

Unless otherwise noted, the main article is based in excerpts on Karin Thomas: Until Today - Style History of Fine Art in the 20th Century , DuMont Buchverlag, Cologne, 1986, p. 182f, ISBN 3-7701-1939-8

  1. ↑ Barbara Buhler Lynes: Georgia O'Keeffe, 1916 and 1917, My Own Tune in: Modern art and America , Washington DC 2001, ISBN 0-8212-2728-9 , pp. 261-269
  2. ↑ Edward Hopper: Nighthawks. Art Institute of Chicago , accessed July 15, 2008 .
  3. ^ Volker Gebhardt: Art history painting. DuMont, Cologne, 2001, ISBN 3-7701-4059-1 , pp. 180f
  4. ^ Grant Wood: American Gothic. Art Institute of Chicago, accessed July 15, 2008 .
  5. ↑ American Gothic. In: The large art dictionary by PW Hartmann. BeyArs.com, accessed July 15, 2008 .
  6. ↑ Catalog Martin Disler . Museum Folkwang , Essen and Musée d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris , Paris , 1985

Illustrations

  1. ↑ Edward Hopper: Nighthawks , 1942, oil on canvas, 76.2 × 144 cm, Art Institute of Chicago