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AMERICAN PAINTING IN THE T W E N T I E T H CENTURY
AMERICAN PAINTING
IN T H E T W E N T I E T H CENTURY

riGnry GGldzahlGr Associate Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture

HE METROPOLITAN M U S E U M OF ART, New York

D i s t r i b u t e d by N e w York G r a p h i c S o c i e t y , G r e e n w i c h , C o n n e c t i c u t
A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S : This historical survey, published in conjunction with the
large exhibition of American painting that the Metropolitan Museum is offering in 1965,
is concerned almost entirely with works selected from the Museum's permanent collection.
In four instances paintings have been borrowed to make the exhibition and discussion
more complete, and I begin by thanking the lenders: Mr. and Mrs. William N. Copley,
Jasper Johns, Mrs. Albert D. Lasker, and Robert Rauschenberg. My debt for information
is considerable to the principal writers of pioneer studies of modern American painters,
particularly J o h n Baur, Lloyd Goodrich, Elizabeth McCausland, J . T. Soby, and F. S.
Wight. Their work will remain a source for this period in our art. Also helpful has been
Milton Brown's American Painting from the Armory Show to the Depression, a study that has
established an art-historical standard for lucidity in writing about twentieth-century
American art. Others whom I wish to thank in print are Doris Bry, who read my material
relevant to Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O'Keeffe and made suggestions that I have used,
and J a m e s H u m p h r y I I I a n d the staff of the Museum's Library for their generous co-
operation. I a m also grateful to New Directions, publisher of the poetry of William Carlos
Williams, for permission to reprint " T h e Great Figure" from The Collected Earlier Poems
of William Carlos Williams, copyright 1938, 1951 by the author. Finally, I would like to
thank K a y Bearman, my secretary and assistant, whose aid and encouragement have
been of value beyond measure and thanks.
H. G.

© The Metropolitan Museum of Art 1965

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 65-16668

Contents

Introduction by Robert Beverly Hale and James J. Rorimer

;HAPTER

1 The Eight and Their Satellites 15

2 The First Wave of Modernism 48

3 Figurative Painters of the Twenties and Thirties 76

4 The Regionalists 90

5 Fourteenth Street: The City Scene 101

6 The Social Realists 111

7 Primitives and Naïves 119

8 The Hard Edge: Industrial and Abstract 128

9 Surrealists and Magic Realists 153

10 The Pacific Northwest Painters 161

11 Figurative Painters of the Forties and Fifties 169

12 The New Abstraction 177

Biographies of the Painters 209

Bib liography 227

Index 231
For my mother, my father, and my brother David
Introduction

The strength and breadth of the Metropolitan Museum's collection of twentieth-

century American art are to a great extent attributable to the foresight of George A.
Hearn. A collector himself, with a particular interest in the contemporary painting
of his day, he gave the Museum two funds, the first in his own name in 1906, the second
in memory of his son Arthur Hoppock Hearn in 1911, providing that the incomes
therefrom be spent for the purchase of paintings by living Americans. Not long
after the establishment of these funds, the American public, through an event not
connected with the Museum, was made suddenly aware of the new and radical
methods of expression that were to affect the whole development of American art.
The event, of course, was the Armory Show of 1913. With it began this century's
great battle between modernism and conservatism.
For a good many years after the Armory Show the Metropolitan hesitated to
recognize the more experimental elements in American art, and until the early
nineteen-forties the character of its acquisitions remained most conservative. Al-
though this policy displeased many advocates of the new in art, it had a beneficial
result in that the Museum now owns an excellent collection by academic artists of
the turn of the century, many of whom are again standing high in critical favor.
An increasing concern with contemporary developments finally led, in 1943, to
the appointment of an Advisor in American Art to the Trustees of the Museum, and
to the purchase of modern works. The advisor was the late Juliana Force, then
director of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Following Mrs. Force's recom-
mendations, more than forty thousand dollars drawn from the Hearn funds was
expended during the period 1943-1948 on works by contemporary Americans. A
second project of this period—one that did not proceed beyond the planning stage
—was the adding ofa new structure to the Metropolitan's building in Central Park
in which both the Metropolitan's and the Whitney's collections might be displayed.
In 1949 the Metropolitan established for the first time a Department of American
Art. Appointed Associate Curator of American Painting and Sculpture and head of
the department, Robert Beverly Hale was given, among other duties, the tasks of
10 INTRODUCTION

acquiring and exhibiting, particularly in the controversial contemporary field.

Roland J. McKinney, who as director of the Baltimore Museum of Art and of the
Los Angeles County Museum had had much experience in the assembling of large
exhibitions, was appointed Consultant. A Trustees' Committee on American Art
was also appointed, its original members being Elihu Root, Jr., Walter C. Baker,
the late Samuel A. Lewisohn, and Roland L. Redmond, ex officio. It was agreed
that the Museum's American collection should become national in scope, that
evident gaps in it be filled, that certain advanced trends not then represented should
be included, and that better works by artists poorly represented should be acquired.
Further, it was proposed that more exhibitions drawn from the holdings of the
Museum and from other sources be held from time to time, and that a series of
national competitive exhibitions be held.
Three such exhibitions were given. For the first, American Painting Today—
1950, five regional juries made preliminary choices from a total of 6,248 entries.
From these a national jury narrowed the selection to 307, and a jury of awards
consisting of the painters Franklin Watkins and Eugene Speicher and the director
of the Cleveland Museum of Art, William Milliken, gave four prizes totaling eighty-
five hundred dollars to Karl Knaths, Rico Lebrun, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, and Joseph
Hirsch.
For the second event, American Sculpture—1951, over eleven hundred sculptors
submitted photographs of their entries to a jury of admissions; from these the work
of ninety-four was chosen. Added were pieces by the jurors, bringing the total num-
ber exhibited to 101. The jury of awards, consisting of the sculptors José de Creeft
and Jacques Lipchitz and the then associate director of the Philadelphia Museum
of Art, Henri Marceau, gave prizes totaling eighty-five hundred dollars to Minna
Harkavy, Rhys Caparn, Abbott Pattison, and Joseph J . Greenberg, J r .
Our first competition had been criticized by a number of artists who considered
our juries too conservative; our second was criticized by others who felt that our
juries were too advanced. For our third, American Drawings, Water Colors and
Prints—1952, two sets ofjuries were set up and artists were invited to submit to the
jury of their choice. There were also two juries of award, each consisting of three
artists: Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Erie Loran, and Abraham Rattner constituting one,
Isabel Bishop, Julius J. Lankes, and Ogden M. Pleissner the other. Of the 7,109
entries submitted, 525 were accepted and prizes amounting to a total of nine
thousand dollars were distributed to eighteen winners. From this exhibition, as
from the exhibition of 1950, works were bought for the Museum's collection.
In addition to these events, the Museum presented, in the period since 1950,
nine notable exhibitions of American art.
The wrork of fifty-two painters under the age of thirty-six was shown in March
 INTRODUCTION 11

1950. Many of the young exhibitors, then new upon the scene, have since become
well known, among them Stephen Greene, Robert Motherwell, Theodoros Stamos,
Walter Stuempfig, George Tooker, and Andrew Wyeth. Also in 1950 over five
hundred works drawn entirely from the Museum's collection were shown as
Twentieth-Century Painters, U.S.A. In March 1951 an exhibition was opened
celebrating the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Art Students League. Museums
throughout the country contributed to this showing of work by seventy-five artists
associated with the League, among them Bellows, Calder, Eakins, Epstein, Henri,
Inness, Kuhn, Luks, O'Keeffe, Saint-Gaudens, and Sloan. In February 1953 the
Museum opened a large exhibition entitled American Painting 1754-1954, a tribute
to Columbia University's bicentennial celebration. Not only paintings but draw-
ings, prints, sculpture, and examples of the decorative arts were shown. All from the
Museum's collections, this material furnished a vivid picture of American life down
the years. In March 1954, after arrangements jointly undertaken with the Art
Institute of Chicago, we opened an exhibition of some two hundred works by Amer-
ica's three great expatriate artists, Sargent, Whistler, and Cassatt. Eighty-five of
the paintings were drawn from the Metropolitan's collection, with the rest lent
from public and private collections. In February 1956 an exhibition of works by
Feininger, Kuhn, Kuniyoshi, Marin, and Nordfeldt was held, with other museums
and private collections supplementing the Museum's examples. In October 1958 a
large exhibition opened entitled Fourteen American Masters—Paintings from
Colonial Times to Today. Drawn entirely from the Museum's collections, the paint-
ings were those of Cassatt, Copley, Curry, Eakins, Hassam, Hopper, Inness, John-
son, Kuhn, Marin, O'Keeffe, Sargent, Stuart, and Whistler. And in January 1959,
jointly sponsored by the National Gallery of Art, a retrospective exhibition of
Winslow Homer was held—the largest and most inclusive showing of Homer's
work ever presented in New York.
This series was suspended only when the Museum's building program made it
necessary to curtail special exhibitions. As for the American Department's acquisi-
tions, some six hundred works have been accessioned since 1949, many of them
purchased with income from the Hearn funds. During the past eight years, through
the generosity of Edward J . Gallagher, Jr., Mr. and Mrs. Roy R. Neuberger, the
late Hugo Kastor, and others, the Museum has acquired representation ofa very
broad field of contemporary talent. The Museum also now owns examples by all
the important Americans who were early influenced by the modern European
schools. Our holdings in this area were greatly strengthened in 1949 when Georgia
O'Keeffe gave us a generous selection from the Alfred Stieglitz Collection. The gift
included many of Miss O'Keeffe's own paintings and works by Demuth, Dove,
Hartley, and Marin among others.
12 I NTRODUCTION

While the Museum now owns the largest collection of American art extant, it has
galleries enough to show only a representative fraction of it at any one time. Perhaps
support may one day be found for an addition to our building that will enable us to
put the full collection on display. In the meantime the Museum is indicating the
strength of the collection in 1965 by offering a comprehensive exhibition — a selec-
tion of over four hundred paintings together with a small selection of sculpture.
The book we are introducing traces the development of painting in this country
from 1900 to the sixties. Its author, Henry Geldzahler, has based his survey on works
he has selected from our collection, and it is these works, supplemented by four
borrowed paintings, that comprise the final section of our exhibition.

ROBERT BEVERLY HALE

Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture

J A M E S J. R O R I M E R
Director
AMERICAN PAINTING IN THE T W E N T I E T H CENTURY
Chapter One

The Eight and Their Satellites

The point at which one begins the consideration of an extended period in the history
of art is necessarily arbitrary, since at any point the continuity with tradition can
lead us much further back than we wish to go or really need to go. For an under-
standing of the development of twentieth-century American art to its present state
of complexity and international significance, we may start with the pathbreaking
group of painters Robert Henri, George Luks, William Glackens, J o h n Sloan,
Everett Shinn, Arthur B. Davies, Maurice Prendergast, and Ernest Lawson. The
ascendancy of these men, who named themselves The Eight when they exhibited
together in New York in 1908, presents us with a decisive event in American art—
a clear breaking away from the directions being followed by other painters of the
day. Individuals to a man, The Eight nevertheless shared more than one crucial
attitude : an impatience with the approved academic art of their time, a wish to
depict specifically American life, a determination to be American painters rather
than painters in America. In addition to their friendships with one another and
their interest in the recent art of Europe, especially the work of Manet and the im-
pressionists, and back of this an interest in the old masters. One of the rewards of
the creation and the awareness of the art of one's own time is a reseeing, with new
insight, of the achievements of one's predecessors. Through eyes opened by the art
of recent European masters as well as by certain Americans of the older generation
—Frank Duveneck, William Merritt Chase, Whistler, Sargent—The Eight saw,
and learned how to apply, the lessons of Velazquez and Hals, Goya and Daumier.
But while The Eight had common aims and dedications, the act that th eir work
was entirely outside the mainstream of American art in the first years of the century
was chiefly responsible for their grouping. Their rejection of the official taste marked
the beginning ofa tradition of dissent in American painting.
In looking at the work of The Eight, we must not make the mistake ofjudging its
innovations by today's standards. While it is never an easy thing to think back into
the artistic climate of another day, we must try to understand how the paintings of
these men appeared when they were new. The radicality of these pictures was not

15
16 ROBERT HENRI

in their construction but in their subject matter. Today, we are apt to think of the
artistic radicality of the twentieth century in terms of formal breakthroughs, but
what The Eight brought to American painting was a change in content, expressed
in rather traditional formal terms.
It is perhaps in the words of the older American realist Thomas Eakins that the
ambitions of the Henri group were best expressed: "If America is to produce great
painters and if young art students wish to assume a place in the history of the art of
their country, their first desire should be to remain in America to peer deeper into
the heart of American life, rather than to spend their time abroad obtaining a super-
ficial view of the art of the Old World. . . . It would be far better for American art
students and painters to study their own country and portray its life and types. T o
do that they must remain free from any foreign superficialities. Of course, it is well
to go abroad and see the works of the old masters, but Americans must branch out
into their own field, as they are doing. They must strike out for themselves, and only
by doing this will we create a great and distinctively American art."
This, in effect, was the program for the art of The Eight and their followers. The
focus on peculiarly American subject matter was an important preliminary in the
deprovincialization of American painting. Later, the awareness of America, coupled
with firsthand experimental knowledge of the most advanced theoretical and prac-
tical ideas about art in Europe, was to be the foundation of a purely American art
of international significance. The first step was for painters to dare to be American.

R O B E R T H E N R I ' s realism, which was also to be the realism of his disciples

Sloan, Luks, Glackens, and Shinn, lay in the acute observation of the activity he
saw about him. It differed from the realism of his great predecessors Homer and
Eakins in that the scenes were almost exclusively urban. If in the nineteenth
century the crisis and passion of this country was lived in the confrontation of man
with nature (and our landscape tradition, especially that of the Hudson River
school, testifies to this), it was to be in the cities, with the increase of industrialization
and the absorption of the European immigrant populations, that the character of
the twentieth century was formed. It was the strength of Henri and his followers to
have recognized this shift at an early moment. Eakins, with paintings like The Gross
Clinic and Taking the Count, had pointed the way, as had his student and colleague
Thomas Anshutz in his Steelworkers—Noontime. The younger men were quick to
take the hint. The nature of their realism was not that it constituted a more veristic
technique than that, say, of Eakins. In truth, Henri's technique was broader and
looser than Eakins', his drawing less accurate. The change was rather in the focus
and function of art. Henri's view was that art must be a record of and an involve-
 ROBERT HENRI 17

ment in daily life, with no glossing over of its harsher aspects. The still life, the
mythological scene had no part in this program. The proper concerns, instead, were
the acutely observed portrait, the representation of the motion and activity of the
street.
When Sloan, Luks, Glackens, and Shinn first came into contact with Henri, they
were all actively working as newspaper illustrators, in an artistic tradition Winslow
Homer had made respectable with his Civil War illustrations. As artist-reporters
they were strongly aware of daily life around them. Under Henri's guidance, the
change they brought to American painting was the meeting of life and fine art.
Henri did not implant his own style and decisions in his students. His gift as a
teacher was to release whatever individuality and style was latent in the student.
His function in art at the turn of the century was to be repeated by Hans Hofmann
after the Second World War, Hofmann being another teacher who enabled a
generation of American painters to find the technique through which they could
best express themselves, helping each one to discover exactly where his strength lay.
Teaching in Philadelphia, Henri began, in 1893, to hold open house in his studio
for men of talent. The sessions were attended first by Sloan and Glackens, and
within a year by Luks and Shinn. All four were enrolled at the Pennsylvania
Academy of the Fine Arts, and all four felt their provincialism. Henri, to whom they
turned for direction, had studied for three years in Paris—then, as until recently,
the one place from which the American artist was expected to bring back news.
What Henri had brought back was his admiration for Manet (dead five years when
Henri first went to Europe), as well as Titian, Velazquez, Hals, and Goya. H e had
also returned with a new respect for Eakins, the teacher of his teacher, Anshutz.
Eakins, too, although he had been unaware of Manet, had been deeply impressed
by the older masters when he encountered their work in Europe during the eighteen-
sixties.
After 1901 Henri taught in New York, first at the New York School of Art, known
also as the Chase School after its founder, William Merritt Chase. Henri was closer
to his students than the other teachers of the time, a colleague as well as an instructor.
At meetings of the National Academy he took stands for the younger artists. Once,
when the Academy refused to consider hanging the paintings of some of the men
Henri felt closest to, he withdrew his own work in protest. He was especially bitter
when, in 1907, the Academy rejected a painting by George Luks. In 1908 Henri
left the Chase School and founded the Henri School of Art. Among his students of
these years were George Bellows, Rockwell Kent, Edward Hopper, Eugene Speicher,
Patrick Henry Bruce, Glenn Coleman, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Morgan Russell, and
Stuart Davis—all of them men who were to figure prominently in the art of their
time. Edward Hopper, looking back and paying tribute to Henri's power to energize
18 ROBERT HENRI

his students, said, "Few teachers of art have gotten so much out of their pupils, or
given them so great an initial impulse."
Henri himself continued to be conscious of the two directions being taken by
American art. "It's hard to foretell just what will be the result of the Academy's
rejection of painters," he said. " W h a t the outsiders ought to do is to hold small or
large group exhibitions so that the people may know what the artists who have
something important to say are doing." Henri not only placed himself among the
outsiders, he predicted correctly the course of events. The National Academy,
through its rejection of the younger artists, was to become steadily less important,
while the history of American art of the next decade was to be the history of the
independent exhibitions that were held in spite of the Academy: The Eight, The
Independents, the Armory Show, the Forum Exhibition. All were held between
1908 and 1916.
As a painter, Henri is today admired principally for his incisive portraits. But

HENRI : Paris Night, 1898. Oil on canvas, 25% x 32 inches. Arthur H. Hearn Fund, 63.218
 ROBERT HENRI 19

while he painted little else after about 1903, portraiture was only one aspect of his
art. J o h n Sloan pointed out in 1931, in the catalogue of the Metropolitan Museum's
Henri Memorial Exhibition, that Henri's "earlier canvases of city streets and land-
scapes are not to be overlooked. As one of those who profoundly felt his influence,
the writer regards this little-known phase of Henri's work as having had a distinct
influence on the American painting of today." The works Sloan had in mind date
from about 1898. One of them, painted in Paris, is Paris Night. It is in the broadly
brushed, notational style that was to influence not only Sloan but Glackens. The
palette is dark, the painter unaware of or at least uninterested in impressionist color
theories. The space is defined by the distance between the waiter and the lady in the
foreground. The true subject matter of the painting is the activity of the café and
the street, and perhaps also the social distance between the lady and the waiter.
Evident in this work is Henri's social awareness, part of the message he carried home
to Sloan, Glackens, Luks, and others from his studies in Europe during the years
1888-1891.
The facility is greater, although the message is slighter, in Dutch Girl in White,

HENRI : Dutch Girl in White,

1907. Oil on canvas, 2 4 x 2 0
inches. Arthur H. Hearn
Fund, 50.47
20

HENRI : The Masquer-

ade Dress : Portrait of
Mrs. Robert Henri,
1911. Oil on canvas,
76V2 x 36% inches.
Arthur H. Hearn Fund,
58.157
 ROBERT HENRI 21

which Henri painted in Europe in 1907. In an unpublished notebook of Henri's

of the period 1906-1909 these jottings occur: "Dutch girl of Italian type. Very deep
blue background. Yellow straw hat on back of head. Lemonish in color. Dark blond
brown hair. White waist loosely painted. Head much tilted." The accuracy of the
verbal description is testimony to the painting's success; its conciseness equals that
of the visual image.
Henri painted a much more formal work, The Masquerade Dress: Portrait of Mrs.
Robert Henri, in New York in 1911. Mrs. Henri, who posed for her husband often,
was herself an artist, known for her graphic work and water colors, which she
exhibited under her maiden name, Marjorie Organ. Again we find Henri's typical
directness of presentation. His wife stands with one foot forward, one arm slightly
extended, looking out of the canvas almost as if she were about to curtsy to the
viewer. The elegance of her figure is emphasized by the verticality of the composi-
tion. There is nothing to look at but the subject, no interest in the background except
as it serves to throw the figure into relief. Thanks to Henri's mastery of shorthand
indications, the texture of the paint that represents the dress exactly simulates
material.
Especially in his later work, this acute feeling for the paint medium itself was one
of Henri's greatest qualities. The fluency and seemingly spontaneous accuracy of
his brushwork, while not always appropriate to the subject, was in itself a strength,
and it was his chief technical gift to his students. Henri's art, in sum, owes much to
the examples of Manet and Hals, both of whom could organize apparently free and
almost abstract gestures of the brush into massed, highlighted, and perfectly placed
figures. It is when we look beyond the technical virtuosity in Henri that we find a
conflict between his teaching and his art. The following bold statement by the
teacher finds no equivalent passion in the painter: "When the artist is alive in any
person he becomes an inventive, searching, daring, self-expressive creature. He
disturbs, upsets, enlightens." Not only is there nothing disturbing in Henri's work,
it leans in the opposite direction, toward easy sentiments. He presents the appealing,
the picturesque, rarely anything more difficult. Thus, while he has left us many
pleasant paintings, it is surely as a liberating teacher that his true importance is to
be measured.

GEORGE LU KS was, by some critics of his day, set apart from his fellow painters
on the basis of his extraordinary personal vitality, a quality that earned him the
sobriquet "Lusty" Luks. However, it now seems obvious that the judgment of his
contemporaries was influenced more by his swashbuckling manner than by any
revelations in his paintings. His work indicates that he was very much of the time
22 GEORGE LUKS

LUKS: The Old Duchess, 1905.

Oil on canvas, 30 x 25 inches.
George A. Hearn Fund, 21.411

and tradition of Henri, a man only two years his senior. Stylistically, too, Luks was
close to the much younger painter George Bellows, who was to become one of the
chief adherents of the Henri group. The simplification of the human form into
separately articulated yet fused masses of light and shade without any loss of
specificity characterizes the portraits of both Luks and Bellows. Luks's studies in
Düsseldorf, London, and Paris, and with Henri in Philadelphia, left him with a
permanent conviction that Hals was the greatest of the old masters. It is under-
standable that the frankness of Hals's portraits appealed to this kindred spirit. Like
Hals, Luks was fascinated with characters, and like Hals he developed a technique
of noting down quickly and economically the exact individuality and quirks of the
sitter.
One of Luks's greatest pictures, and one of his few that really bear comparison to
Hals in acuity of characterization, is The Old Duchess. The critic James Huneker,
who knew the subject, described her in his book Bedouins as "an elderly hag with a
distinguished bearing, a depraved woman of rank, who wore five or six dresses at
once, on her head a shapeless yet attractive gear." It was Luks who dubbed her the
Duchess. He painted her several times, endowing his images with the haunted
majesty she must have presented in life. The blacks, browns, grays, and yellows of
 GEORGE LUKS 23

The Old Duchess establish its continuity with the old-master tradition. The only
tightly painted area is the face, which, with the vaguely configured body, shapeless
beneath its excessive clothing, forcefully carries the burden of the dissipated yet
still dignified personality. " T h e secret of portrait painting," Luks once declared,
"is a perfect likeness with the soul and character and personality built in." But
The Old Duchess contains more than reportorial accuracy—and more than soul and
character and personality. It shows us Luks's typical feeling of tenderness toward
his subject. It was rather a romantic attitude. To poverty Luks lent grace—the
definition, almost, of one aspect of romanticism.
Retaining his interest in the picturesque, in what he called the "character edge,"
Luks gave us one of the great portrait galleries in the art of his time. In his Boy with
Baseball, painted in the mid-nineteen-twenties, we see him dealing with a much less
complex personality than The Old Duchess: a child, hands in pockets, seated beside
the symbol both of his world and the limits of his ambition. The clear, simple paint-
ing, and the sharp, even, flooding light suit perfectly the innocence and forthright-
ness of the subject. The intricacies of the earlier portrait, with its echoes of Hals, are
replaced here by a technique that has more in common with the clarity of Bellows
and that of another of Luks's younger contemporaries, Edward Hopper.

LUKS : Boy with Baseball, about

1925. Oil on canvas, 30 x 25
inches. Edward Joseph Gallagher
III Memorial Collection,
54.10.2
24 WILLIAM G LACKENS

W I L L I A M G L A C K E N S produced the most consistently happy paintings of his

period. He had little if any theoretical baggage, even after his year of study and
painting in Paris, and when he gave up illustration and turned full time to painting,
he was in no sense out to improve the world or even to make it more aware of itself.
Determined simply to observe American life and record it in a personal style, he
depicted pleasant subjects in what the painter Guy Pène du Bois characterized as
"the picnic spirit." In Central Park in Winter and The Green Car we see Glackens' love
of movement and visual incident, his elevation of anecdote to fine art. The first
offers an American Bruegelesque scene, a landscape with children and older people
in the near, middle, and far distances, frolicking or maintaining their dignity,
depending on their age. The second, while somewhat simpler in subject, has a
comparable anecdotal interest.

GLACKENS: Central Park in Winter, 1905. Oil on canvas, 2 5 x 3 0 inches. George A. Hearn Fund,
21.164
GLACKENS: The Green Car, 1910. Oil on canvas, 2 4 x 3 2 inches. Arthur H. Hearn Fund, 37.73

Of all The Eight it was Glackens who depended most obviously on the impres-
sionist technique, more specifically on the small-brush, feathery technique of
Renoir. He spoke of this tendency himself, and it became increasingly apparent in
his later work. In his early work, represented by these two paintings, there still
persists some of the broader technique and the use of large brushes, as in Manet
and Henri, with the emphasis on color and brushing, not on drawing or detail.
While the paintings work as compositions, the figures are small, with indistinct
features, and at first the broadness of the treatment seems to work against the
specificity of the anecdote. Henri and Luks used the broad technique effectively in
their portraits; Glackens, using it to record details in his genre paintings, gave it a
function to which it is not suited. And yet it seems to be the antithesis between
technique and intention that gives this work its energy and sense of life. The loss of
detail leads to a certain naïve awkwardness that charms us.
Glackens' later work, showing a more acute sense of drawing and detail, was both
more accomplished and less vital, without the flicker of light and movement of his
early pictures. Sam Hunter, in his book on American painting, has written that
"Around 1910 the tempo of the realists' response to life slackened, and they began
26 JOHN SLOAN

to strain after 'style' and some more authoritative pictorialism." This development
seems especially true of Glackens, whose most interesting work belongs to the first
decade of the century.

J O H N S L O A N began painting seriously in 1897, at the age of twenty-six, guided

by Henri. Like the others of the Henri group, he reacted strongly against the work
of the American impressionists, with their lightened palette and lack of feeling for
structure. Sloan was later to characterize this impressionism as "eyesight painting."
His own early paintings are indebted both to Henri's technique and his theories
about worthy subject matter. Simply yet strikingly composed is The Sewing Woman,
the woman's head, at left of center, balancing the strongly brushed material at the
lower right, while the abstract treatment of the machine throws the material for-
ward, the figure back. This is a deeply felt representation of a woman at work,
pensive and inward-looking.
In Dust Storm, Fifth Avenue we have a painting unmistakably triggered by some-
thing seen. The setting is Fifth Avenue at Twenty-third Street, as the triangular
form of the Flatiron Building makes clear. An entry in the painter's diary for J u n e ,
1906, reports that " I n the afternoon walking on Fifth Avenue we were on the edge
ofa beautiful wind storm, the air full of dust and a sort of panicky terror in all the

SLOAN : The Sewing Woman, 1 901. Oil on

canvas, 1 9 x 1 6 % inches. Bequest of Margaret
S. Lewisohn, 54.143.7
 JOHN SLOAN 27

SLOAN : Dust Storm, Fifth Avenue, 1906. Oil on canvas, 22 x 27 inches. George
A. Hearn Fund, 21.41.2

living things in sight. A broad gray curtain of cloud pushing over the zenith, the
streets in wicked dusty murk." As were almost all of Sloan's city scenes, Dust Storm
was painted in the studio, and directly on the canvas, without preliminary studies.
Incidentally, the artist achieved his first sale to a museum when the Metropolitan
acquired this painting in 1921.
Sloan had some sixteen years of his painting career behind him when in 1913 he
saw the Armory Show, the most publicized, ridiculed, and visited event in the his-
tory of American art viewing. While the exhibited works of Marcel Duchamp,
Cézanne, Gauguin, Picasso, Matisse, Brancusi, and Kandinsky brought to Ameri-
can viewers the full force of Europe's formal innovations in art, an equally historic
revelation was contained in the show's American work. Substantially more than
half the entries were by American artists, and in conjunction with the European
work, they looked brown and staid and safe. Unlike Henri, his mentor, Sloan man-
aged to maintain a perspective on the show. " I consciously began to be aware of the
technique of art," he said later. "While I have made no abstract pictures, I have
absorbed a great deal from the world of the ultra-moderns." For a man of Sloan's
background and training, this was a generous testimony. To Henri, who would
SLOAN : The Lafayette, 1928. Oil on canvas, 301/2 x 36% inches. Gift of Friends of John Sloan, 28.18

never admit its importance, the Armory Show was an influence away from truth
in art. Although Sloan was always to remain loyal to his teacher and friend, he
found that the brilliant brushwork of the Henri style began to look superficial. As
Sloan put it, what he found in the modern art of Europe was " a return to the root
principle of art; that art is the result of interest in Things, not effects." What this
meant in his own work was not a radical change of style but a development toward
clearer compositions and a greater structural clarity—a focus on the edges of forms.
While this is increasingly evident in his paintings done after the Armory Show, it
is only in his work after about 1930, when Sloan was in his sixties, that the full
force of his progressive attitude becomes clear, chiefly in his hatched and modeled
treatments of the female nude.
In The Lafayette of 1928 and The Wigwam, Old Tammany Hall, which dates from
about 1930, Sloan has recorded New York landmarks with accuracy and verve. Of
the Lafayette Hotel Sloan wrote, "This old hostelry on University Place has always
been famous for the fine quality of its cuisine. It has also been a favorite resort of
 JOHN SLOAN 29

literary and artistic personages. To the passerby not looking for modern glitter, it
has always had a look of cheer and comfort, particularly on such a wet evening as
this. I will admit that in painting its exterior I chose the aspect most familiar to me.
The picture seems to me to be a successful example of chiaroscuro. Colours and
forms are simultaneous. Painted from memory." Both affection and a mild sense
of amusement are evident in Sloan's handling of this scene of the twenties. Repor-
torially accurate when it was painted, the picture now conveys a sense of nostalgia
for a vanished time. The Wigwam, Old Tammany Hall, with its crowd sauntering
rhythmically by the old political headquarters, not only shows Sloan at his most
characteristic as a painter of New York scenes, but suggests something of the quality
of Reginald Marsh, a younger painter who was to carry the Henri tradition into the
nineteen-forties. The drawing is finer and sharper, more defined than in Sloan's
earlier work, or in any of the work of Henri, Luks, or Glackens. The representation
of the presidential banner, the neon lights, and the generally popular aspect of the

SLOAN: The Wigwam,

Old Tammany Hall,
about 1930. Oil on
composition board,
3 0 x 2 5 inches. De-
posited by the United
States Government,
L 3257.1
30 JOHN SLOAN

scene are confirmation of Sloan's abiding interest in the American scene. He said,
putting the question into its just perspective, " I t is not necessary to paint the
American flag to be an American painter. As though you didn't see the American
scene whenever you open your eyes ! I am not for the American Scene. I am for
mental realization. If you are American and work, your work will be American."
In 1950, speaking of the subject matter of his and his colleagues' early years,
Sloan said, " I t is now the fad to trace a connection between our work and that of
Dreiser, Norris and Crane. As far as I know, there was no direct contact, certainly
not in the nineties. We came to realism as a revolt against sentimentality and
artificial subject matter and the cult 'art for art's sake'. . . . We read realist writers
like Zola and Ibsen more than Americans who were beginning to work in this
field." Regardless of this comment, as we study the painting itself, it is easy to see
that the Henri group and the American realist writers of the time were all aware of
the same social environment. The question of who recorded it first is not nearly so
important as the harmony of point of view that linked the art and literature of the
period. We are apt to take a simplified view of cultural influences when we look
back on them, but we should remember that the painter is more than an eye, he is
a whole man. To counter a possibly simplistic idea of what motivated Sloan and
his contemporaries, we have the revealing comment of Sloan's widow : "It is difficult
for members of the generation that have grown up in the post-Freudian world to
understand the minds of artists whose philosophy of art was formed by the study of
Shakespeare, and the Bible, Dickens and Balzac, Emerson and Whitman."

EVERETT S H I N N , although he began his career as a member of The Eight,

was later carried in a tangential direction by his interest in the fantasy worlds of
the circus and theater, as well as by his painting of mural decorations in private
homes and public buildings. A vigorous example of his early involvement with the
classic subject matter of The Eight is his Herald Square. Shinn here sees the city both
typically and specifically. The typical aspect is the street on a snowy evening, in-
distinct figures rushing by, their faces unseen, their anonymity emphasized by the
repetition of the umbrellas viewed from exactly the same angle, as well as the
convincingly rendered puffs of snow. The specificity, of course, is in the depiction
of Herald Square, with its el, streetcar, railing, and buildings. Much of the picture's
energy derives from the contrast between the carefully controlled composition and
the freedom, yet accuracy, of the handling.
When the theatrical performance became Shinn's major concern, it was the
greatest of all painters of the theater, Degas, who influenced his style. The Circus
remained a particular favorite of the artist, and he agreed to its sale only in 1952,
 EVERETT SHINN 31

SHINN : Herald Square, 1951. Pastel and ink on paper, 21 %x 29% inches. Arthur H. Hearn Fund,
55.178.1

the year before his death. This work, and others by Shinn, presented to American
viewers of the early nineteen-hundreds a new kind of subject matter, one that not
only Degas but Seurat, Toulouse-Lautrec, Rouault, and Picasso made one of the
recurring themes of modern art. Like that of the Europeans, Shinn's interest in the

SHINN : The Circus, 1906. Pastel and monotype

on paper, 3% x 5 inches. George A. Hearn Fund,
52.161
 SHINN : London Music Hall,
1918. Oil on canvas, 1 0 x 1 2
inches. George A. Hearn Fund,
21.39

theater and circus was in part an interest in the glitter, spectacle, and artificiality
ofa world and profession whose object is to please, but it was also an interest in the
loneliness that makes the entertainer such a poignant figure.
In London Music Hall Shinn's debt to Degas is very much in evidence. The way
in which the stage is set at an angle to the picture plane, allowing three of the musi-
cians in the pit, along with their music, to form the lower left-hand corner of the
canvas, is a device that Degas used in several of his ballet and theater paintings.
The performer bows, his face, body, and legs lit from below, emphasizing the
artificiality of his presence, while the set behind him recedes into an indistinctness
verging on the abstract. This tiny painting concentrates the drama and pathos of
the scene and shows Shinn as an artist of considerable power.

A R T H U R B. D A V I E S was allied with The Eight chiefly through his belief in

the artist's right to artistic independence. His approach to painting and his career
eventually separated him from the group. His art, a gentle, lyric one, was based on
mythology and the world of the imagination. Despite this preoccupation, Davies
was to play a major role in organizing the Armory Show of 1913, the exhibition
that was to spell an end to the mood in art that made his own work possible. Sub-
sequently, Davies was to make his own modernist formal experiments, but it is for
his earlier paintings that he remains best known. The Unicorns, probably his most
famous work, has the timeless quality of a tapestry telling a story whose meaning
will always elude us. Yet it is not timeless, for it belongs specifically to the artistic
world of the Rossettis and Burne-Jones, of Moreau and Böcklin. With its stillness
and removal from the agitation of life, it could hardly be more ofa denial of Henri's
 A R T H U R B. DAVIES 33

exhortations to observe and record. Davies seems to be saying instead: Withdraw

and imagine. The unicorns, seen from their fullest side view, like impressions on
coins, the two cool, white-clad women (attendants, no doubt, in some purifying
rite), the clear, calm, distant mountains, the receding water—all of these are ele-
ments in a picture whose sum total makes a considerably greater impression than
its describable parts. There is something here of the moodiness of Albert Pinkham
Ryder, but it is a classic and open mood that we feel, rather than one romantic and
involuted.
The inspiration for Davies' Dream, once known as Measure of Dreams, came from
a portion of George Meredith's "A Faith on T r i a l " :

DAVIES : Unicorns, 1906. Oil on canvas,
18% x 40% inches. Bequest of Lizzie P. Bliss,
31.67.12
She, the white wild cherry, a tree,
Earth-rooted, tangibly wood,
Yet a presence throbbing alive ;
Not she in our language dumb:
A spirit born ofa tree;
Because earth-rooted alive:
Huntress of things worth pursuit
Of souls; in our naming, dreams.

The poem is lyrical, as is the painting, yet the poet's vision is more stark and stripped
than the painter's. The painting's strength lies in its softness, its dreamlike floating
quality. The figure moves with the heavy limbs of sleep from one landscape into
another. The paint, handled almost as softly as pastel, billows behind and before
her with the lack of precision of the dream. Only the figure is at all defined; every-
34 ARTHUR B. DAVIES

DAVI ES : Dream, about 1908. Oil on canvas, 18 x 30 inches. Gift of George A. Hearn, 09.72.4

thing else is what she dreams. A number of the pastel dreams of Odilon Redon were
hung in the Armory Show a few years after Davies painted Dream, and it is not
surprising that Davies sensed the affinities between his art and the Frenchman's.
Louvre—Autumn Afternoon, a late water color, is the work of an artist who, after
years of modernist experimentation, has not lost his ability to capture the quiet
moment. Davies, who died in 1928, remains a fascinating figure in the difficult
transition of American art from the nineteenth century into the twentieth. He re-
tained a withdrawn gentleness from the former but was friendly to the new energies
of the latter.

DAVIES : Louvre, Autumn Afternoon, 1 925.

Water color and crayon on paper, 9% x 12%
inches. Bequest of Lizzie P. Bliss, 31.67.4
 MAURICE PREN DERGAST 35

M A U R I C E P R E N D E R G A S T , born in 1859 and thus the senior member of

The Eight, produced worlfc of consistently high quality through all the years that
the other men were finding themselves. Both his technique and his personal,
schematic vision set him apart from other American painters of the eighteen-nineties. •
As a young man in Boston, Prendergast earned his living as a sign-letterer; in this
trade he learned the hand control that was to become the hallmark of his water-
color style. Studying and painting in Europe in 1886 and again in 1891, he lived
in an artistic atmosphere that was increasingly aware of Cézanne and Gauguin
and also of the painters known as the nabis (prophets)—Maurice Denis, Pierre
Bonnard, and Félix Valloton—men concerned with the swirling, plantlike rhythms
of nature as reduced to the two-dimensionality of painting. From the impressionists
Prendergast learned the separation of brushstrokes; from the nabis he learned the
curves and rhythms of his work: the hidden circles repeated in the compositions, the
concentration on the friezelike shaping and placing of the darkly outlined figures.
In one of his greatest water colors, the remarkable Piazza di San Marco, painted in
Venice, we look down on the square and out at the flags, probably from the top ofa
building. At the horizon line two perspectives meet: the plane of the ground, which

PRENDERGAST:
Piazza di San Marco,
about 1898. Water
color on paper, 16% x
1 5 inches. Gift of
Estate of Mrs. Edward
Robinson, 52.126.6
36 MAURICE PRENDERGAST

travels steadily up the picture, and the vertical plane of the flags, ending in the
figure atop the column. The flecks of white paper, tiny areas kept free of color, help
to pull the scene forward and establish the two-dimensionality of the picture surface.
This device is characteristic of Prendergast's water-color technique. Piazza di San
Marco is majestically composed and strikingly effective, the more so in view of its
relatively small size.
A later water color, Street Scene, with its greater frontality and even more formal
qualities, reveals Prendergast's fascination with the pageantry of crowds. The
crowd theme, as one element in his schematized patterns, recurs in many of his
pictures. Either of these paintings puts the artist in the great water-color tradition
of Homer and Sargent, an often neglected strength of American art.
Central Park in igoj, an oil painted in that year but worked on, according to the
artist's brother Charles, until 1915, is an excellent example of Prendergast's personal
adaptation of the European esthetic to a typical Eight scene. The shapes and
costumes, somewhat indistinct, serve simply as elements in the total weave of paint
across the canvas. The artist's interest was in visual organization, not journalistic
accuracy.

PRENDERGAST: Street Scene, 1901. Water color on paper, 161/8 x 21% inches. Gift of Estate of
Mrs. Edward Robinson, 52.126.7
 MAURICE PRENDERGAST 37

PRENDERGAST: Central Park in 1903, 1903. Oil on canvas, 20% x 27 inches. George A. Hearn
Fund, 50.25

E R N E S T LAWS ON, who studied with the American impressionists J o h n

Twachtman and J . Alden Weir, is today the least remembered of The Eight, per-
haps because he was the one member of the group whose work was exclusively
landscape. Although he visited Europe and studied in Paris, and later traveled
widely in the United States and Mexico, his characteristic subject matter was New
York City and its surroundings, more specifically the northern end of Manhattan
Island and the Harlem River. Winter is typical of his best work. It was painted out-
doors at Kingsbridge; the water is the old Tibbetts Creek, which once fed Spuyten
Duyvil Creek, now the Harlem Canal. In this painting we see Lawson's personal
version of impressionism, with a harsher, grittier effect than in any other follower
ofthat tradition, and with a greater range of values, from lightest to darkest, than
is to be found in the painting of his teachers and predecessors in American impres-
sionism. Where Cézanne reacted against the airy formlessness of impressionism by
concentrating on structure, Lawson reacted by toughening the surface, creating a
38 ERN EST LAWSON

LAWSON: Winter, 1914

Oil on canvas, 25 x 30%
inches. George A. Hearn
Fund, 15.44

grainy paint texture, uningratiating yet strong. While the man himself has been
somewhat forgotten since 1939, the year of his death, his style is still much imitated
by painters in many parts of the United States.

Several younger painters working in the same period as The Eight, and producing
paintings closely related in mood and program, were often reasonably considered,
in the period prior to 1920, as the group's satellites.

G E O R G E BELLOWS, who once seriously thought of becoming a professional

baseball player, began studying with Robert Henri in New York in 1904, at the age
of twenty-two. Two years later he opened his own studio, and three years after that
he was made an associate of the National Academy of Design. In 1910 he was teach-
ing life drawing at the Art Students League. In 1913, not ten years after he began
his studies, he was elected a National Academician. This was indeed a meteoric
career for a younger American painter of the time. His success was largely due to
his extraordinary technical facility and the ease with which he learned, but it is
also worth noting that by the time Bellows' work appeared, the major battles had
been fought and won by the Henri group.
Bellows' commitment to paint only what he saw is evident in his Up the Hudson.
This is a wide and open landscape, filled with air and light, very different in feeling
from the denser work of Ernest Lawson. As a painting, it seems more seen than
 GEORGE BELLOWS 39

BELLOWS: The Red

Vine, 1916. Oil on
wood, 22 x 28%
inches. Gift of
Chester Dale Collec-
tion, 54.196.3

BELLOWS: Up the Hudson, 1908. Oil on canvas, 35% x 48% inches. Gift of Hugo Reisinger, 11.17
 BELLOWS: Padre,
1917. Oil on wood,
40 x 32 inches.
Rogers Fund,
41.81

constructed. The Red Vine, which Bellows painted a few years later in Maine on the
island of Matinicus, is a much more compact, structured work. What had intervened
was Bellows' studies with J a y Hambidge, the exponent of Dynamic Symmetry, a
system that saw a geometric substructure as the secret of all great art. As an aid to
composition Bellows now kept in his studio a table of proportions set up in H a m -
bidge's system. "There are no successful pictures without a geometrical basis," he
once said, echoing an idea that Vitruvius, Piero della Francesca, Poussin, Cézanne,
and many others have shared across history. In The Red Vine we feel, concealed
beneath the richness of the painting, a new sense of compositional geometry. The
landscape recedes, and we are given the massing of the houses at angles to one an-
other to make the recession actual, to give the progression formal solidity.
In his four-square portrait Padre, painted in Carmel, California, in 1917, we see
a further example of the clarity of structure resulting from Bellows' use of the H a m -
bidge system. We encounter it again in the sophisticated Mrs. Chester Dale, painted
at Middletown, Rhode Island, in 1919. The massing and lighting of the lap and
 GEORGE B ELLOWS 41

knees and the simplicity of the shape of the head and hat present, at the same time
that they portray an individual, a clear, schematic, geometrical composition.
As a painter, Bellows stands halfway between his teacher, Henri, and another
Henri student, Edward Hopper, who was to carry the simplification and clarity of
forms in figure and landscape, through massing and light, still further. Bellows was
never to visit Europe, which was unusual for a painter of his time. Very much a
home-grown product, he was one of the most popular of American painters. The
vitality of his pictures, especially of the sporting subjects, remains impressive.

BELLOWS: Mrs. Chester Dale (Maud Murray, 1883-1953), 1919. Oil on canvas, 42% x 40 inches.
Gift of Chester Dale Collection, 54.196.2
42 CHARLES HAWTHORN E

HAWTHORNE : The Trousseau, 1 910. Oil on canvas mounted on wood, 40 x 40 inches. George A.
Hearn Fund, 11.78

C H A R L E S H A W T H O R N E , in the light of the painting so far discussed, was

not a revolutionary, but a good, solid painter, sure of his values and safe in his
technique. His paintings are a bit stiff, rather removed in effect from actual expe-
rience. They do not involve the viewer's emotions so dramatically as the work of
The Eight, yet Hawthorne shared some of the ideals of this group. After founding,
in 1899, his famous Cape Cod School of Art in Provincetown, Massachusetts, he
drew his subjects from the life he knew best, and his portrait gallery of the Cape Cod-
ders, New Englanders and Portuguese fishermen, is definitive. Hawthorne also
 JEROME MYERS 43

showed his relationship to The Eight in his palette, with its full range of values, and
in his regard for the quality of the paint itself. One of his most popular pictures
was The Trousseau. The New York Times of March 12, 1911, aptly called it "a charm-
ing piece of very intellectual painting." We have the word of the artist's wife that
the painting was done in Bermuda: "No one had ever posed for an artist on the
Island and it was difficult to get a model. Searched for a type for the dressmaker.
After searching all over the Island, found that the nearest neighbor would pose."
The picture is cool, composed, and lovely, but in the light of the best of the
contemporary painting of The Eight, lacking in excitement.

J E R O M E M Y E R S devoted himself to recording the life of New York's poor,

yet there was nothing grim about his art, nothing overly dramatic. He portrayed
his subjects as they were observable, their life in the street most especially, with
gentleness and warmth. In subject, The Night Mission is close to the precepts of
Henri, Luks, and Sloan, and yet there is a placidity in the work that we do not find
in the more hectic painting of those artists. Myers sees his slum-dwellers as classically
reposed elements in a carefully composed picture. The social message here is not a

MYERS : The Night Mission, 1 906. Oil on canvas, 25 x 30 inches. Rogers

Fund, 12.69
44

MYERS : Two Figures in the Park, 1911. Pencil on

paper, 11 % x 7% inches. Gift of Estate of Mrs.
Edward Robinson, 52.126.8

cry for change. Rather, it is a simple idealization of a difficult life. These people
carry on with dignity and in harmony despite the circumstances in which they find
themselves. As we know from his autobiography, published in 1940, the painter
regretted somewhat the passing of the worst of the slums. " I t is not for me to say
that conditions are not better in the beautified and sanitary New York of today,"
he wrote. "Yet I feel that the free play of children is more rare, and I know that
picturesque types are less often seen."
A drawing, Two Figures in a Park, offers further proof of Myers' tenderness toward
his subject matter. The leaning figures, gently asleep on the bench, are contrasted
meaningfully with the verticality of the trees and buildings. With his view of New
York differing in tone if not in subject matter from the view of his contemporaries,
Myers remains an artist whose work is underappreciated.

E U G E N E H I G G I N S , while socially conscious in his paintings in the manner of

Henri and Sloan, had most of his training in Paris under J e a n Paul Laurens,
Benjamin Constant, and J e a n Léon Gérôme. The chiaroscuro effects and senti-
mental imaginations of these men left their imprint, and as a consequence Higgins'
work is usually heavily handled, so involved in its artistic effect that the impulse to
anger or passion is submerged beneath thicknesses of paint. Further, the dead-end
 EUGENE HIGGINS 45

romantic treatment of his themes works against the vigor of his messages. Presenting
archetypal situations rather than naturally observed ones, and with his settings
often appearing more European than American, Higgins' art seems based on the
experience of other painters rather than on anything he saw about him. The Gamblers
is one of his most powerful and at the same time most sentimental works. We note
the careful triangular composition of the central figures, the wife and child standing
pathetically in Madonna-and-Child attitude while the husband compulsively
squanders their pittance on his vice. The cat, quietly lapping milk in the foreground,
is not only an intimation of what could have been if the lot of the oppressed were
different but a pictorial device to throw the human figures into the middle distance.
The picture's effects of light and dark are Rembrandtesque, its anecdotal quality
is Daumier-like, its sentimentality Millet-like. Higgins' basically nineteenth-century
approach, even in such effective canvases as this, tends to keep his work from having
the impact of the painting of his American contemporaries.

HIGGINS: The Gamblers,

about 1917. Oil on canvas,
1 6 x 1 2 inches. George A.
Hearn Fund, 35.33
46 GUY WIGGINS

Two further paintings will serve to round out this account of the achievement and
influence of The Eight.

Opposite :
LIE: The Conquerors : Culebra Cut, Panama Canal, 1913. Oil on canvas. 59% x 49% inches. George
A. Hearn Fund, 14.18

WIGGINS: Metropolitan Tower, 1912. Oil on canvas, 3 4 x 4 0 % inches. George A. Hearn Fund,
12.105.4

G U Y W I G G I N S has left us a sensitively executed cityscape in Metropolitan Tower.

The tallest of the city's skyscrapers when Wiggins painted it, the tower contrasts
forcefully with the buildings clustered below it, while the snowy sky and form-
dissolving smoke contribute to the somber loveliness of the scene. There is the
message of specific time and place here, as in most of the work discussed previously,
but no social message.
 JONAS LIE 47

J O N A S LIE, born in Norway, came to this country as a youth and became

known as a painter while still in his twenties. His painting The Conquerors, showing
the digging of the Panama Canal, is an unusual conception. Strongly vertical in
composition, it conveys the sense of massive work being done, both in the energy
of its own facture and in the subject matter.
Chapter Two

The First Wave of Modernism

American painting became modern more radically and abruptly than European
painting, essentially for a geographical reason. Modernity in Europe was part of an
evolutionary process, but in America painters, not a part of that process, were
presented suddenly with a new way of organizing forms and seeing color that came
to them as shock, discovery, and revolution.
A group of artists of the decade 1910-1920 quickly absorbed the shock and in-
corporated its lessons into their work. It is with the paintings of these men—Arthur
Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, and a number of others—that the split be-
tween the artist and his audience in this country can be dated. Even though the
painting of the nineteen-twenties and the thirties brought a re-establishment of
contact through the renewed insistence on native subject matter, the suspicion that
art is incomprehensible lingered, to be reinforced in time by the abstract painting
of the forties and fifties. After the particular emphases of the Henri group, it is
understandable that the importation from Europe of the new formal means and
color theories should have seemed to many people a betrayal. The American
modernists of circa 1910 found themselves responding to the new pace of American
life—in effect, the excitement of the twentieth century. Those of the audience who
interpreted the new pace in art as a loss of style and a loss of values were naturally
unsympathetic to a kind of painting that seemed to celebrate the fragmentation and
dislocation attendant on the forces that were making America over.
Yet the importation of European artistic ideals and methods was in itself nothing
new. O u r painters of an earlier period had learned from Europe the formal and
technical means, factualist and impressionist, by which they expressed their native
genius. Thus, for the viewer of 1910 to feel hostile to the one art, the more clearly
native, or to the other, the European-influenced, was to deny the depth and com-
plexity of American art. If the streams that flow together to make up this art can be
separated, we can perhaps isolate as typically American a practical, straightforward
simplicity, a concern with the directness of experience. Certainly this quality was

48
 THE F I R S T WAVE OF M O D E R N I S M 49

evident in the work of the first American modernists, regardless of European

influences.
These artists were not a formal group. Most of them did not even espouse a formal
program. But all of them in their individual ways were adventurous and searching,
willing to keep abreast of the researches of art in other countries. Working bravely
to invent and record the new image of America—that of the accelerating industrial
society of the first quarter of the century—they laid the foundations for the art that
was to follow, and they set examples for younger artists. Independent, self-generat-
ing, and to a degree lonely, they worked for a limited audience. They produced
work, often high in quality, that took its cue from Europe, but absorbed the lessons
of modernism so thoroughly that they created an American modern art more direct,
if occasionally more awkward, than the polished and somewhat devitalized work of
many of their European contemporaries. In their comparative isolation these men
fostered a dedication to a personal and often eccentric vision that still characterizes
our best advanced painting. Through their work American painting joined the
international modern art movement for the first time.
The key figure in the beginning of the American modernist movement was not a
painter but a photographer, Alfred Stieglitz. A remarkably evocative and effective
artist in his own right, Stieglitz made possible the atmosphere in which the new art
could be seen and evaluated. He accomplished this principally in the sequence of
galleries he directed, but of nearly equal importance, early in his career, were his
magazines Camera Notes, founded in 1897, and its successor, Camera Work, whose
publication began in 1903. Camera Notes was dedicated to Stieglitz' ideas about the
techniques and subject matter of photography, and it was illustrated by reproduc-
tions of photographs that he admired—the work of photographers whose inspira-
tions were the Barbizon painters in landscape and the Pre-Raphaelites in portraiture.
The brownish tonality and generally muted appearance of its prints are evidence
of one aspect of the turn-of-the-century ascendancy of painting as the dominant
technique in international art. Another aspect of this dominance appeared in the
sculpture of Rodin and Rosso, which in effect was eaten away by impressionist light,
or by the demands of impressionist effect. And in architecture, Gaudi, Horta, and
Guimard designed buildings whose pattern, swirl, and visual delectation cor-
responded to what Munch, Gauguin, and the nabis were concerned with in their
paintings. Thus, the fact that photography was not at this point breaking away
from painting and exploring its own peculiar possibilities need not excite our
contempt.
In the second of his magazines, Stieglitz sponsored the work of young Americans,
painters as well as photographers, and the work of the great contemporary Euro-
peans, including Matisse, Picasso, and Rodin. Far broader in outlook than its title
50 THE FIRST WAVE OF MODERNISM

suggested, Camera Work also explored related themes in the literature and theater
of the time. Stieglitz' thorough knowledge of the art of this period was gained in
part during his four trips to Europe, made between 1904 and 1911.
In 1905, Stieglitz established the first of his galleries. Formally entitled The
Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, it was more often known as the Photo-
Secession or even as 291, its door number on Fifth Avenue. For two years the gallery
showed only photography. T h a t it then became hospitable to the other arts was in
some measure the doing of Edward Steichen. Then a painter as well as a photog-
grapher, Steichen had met Stieglitz in 1900. Based in Paris during the next few
years, Steichen passed on suggestions about the art he encountered there. He had
access to the salon of Gertrude and Leo Stein, and through the Steins he was in
touch with the people best equipped to guide his eye. As a result of Steichen's con-
tinuing enthusiasm for the work of Rodin, Stieglitz presented an exhibition of
Rodin's drawings and water colors at the Photo-Secession. The show, Rodin's first in
America, opened in January, 1908, to considerable stir. A few months later Steichen
wras writing to Stieglitz of Matisse and of two American painters then working in
Paris, J o h n Marin and Alfred Maurer—and by 1909 Stieglitz had shown Matisse
for the first time in America, and given Marin and Maurer their first exhibitions
anywhere.
The following year Photo-Secession presented a group show, "Younger American
Painters." The artists represented were D. Putnam Brinley, Arthur B. Carles,
Arthur Dove, Lawrence Fellows, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Alfred Maurer,
Edward Steichen (his paintings), and Max Weber. The show represented an
admirably accurate appraisal of the best modern work being done by Americans.
If two of the painters, Brinley and Fellows, are today unfamiliar to us, that is
perhaps the natural price of erstwhile adventurousness. Stieglitz dared and most
often was right.
The quality of Stieglitz' championship of both the American and European
modernists is suggested by this partial list of Photo-Secession exhibitions during
the rest of the gallery's existence:

1909—Marsden Hartley, first exhibition anywhere. Toulouse-Lautrec, lithographs, his

first exhibition in America.
1910—Matisse, second exhibition. Rodin, second exhibition. Henri Rousseau, paintings
and drawings. Cézanne, lithographs, his first exhibition in America. Renoir,
Manet, Toulouse-Lautrec.

1 g 11—Max Weber, first comprehensive exhibition anywhere. Cézanne, water colors.

Picasso, drawings and water colors.
 THE F I R S T WAVE OF M O D E R N I S M 51

igi2—Hartley, second exhibition. Arthur Dove, first exhibition. Arthur Carles, first
exhibition. Matisse, first sculpture exhibition anywhere. Drawings by children.
Abraham Walkowitz, paintings.

1913—Francis Picabia, paintings, his first one-man show in America.

1914—Constantin Brancusi, sculpture and drawings, his first one-man show anywhere.
1915—Oscar Bluemner, paintings, his first one-man show anywhere. Elie Nadelman,
sculpture, his first comprehensive one-man show.
1916—Georgia O'Keeffe, first exhibition anywhere.
1917—Gino Severini, paintings. Stanton Macdonald-Wright, paintings.

It was not only Stieglitz' single-minded dedication to this art that made the
Photo-Secession so important. The Armory Show of 1913, with its shock and splash,
made more of an impression on the public, and it also helped to initiate many of
the great American collectors of modern art whose support was to be essential for
advanced American painting between the two World Wars. But an event like the
Armory Show could in no way create a mood in which artists might work. It left
no aftermath of involvement and acceptance. The gentler, steadier efforts of Alfred
Stieglitz were of much greater significance to the artists concerned and to American
art.
From 1925 to 1929 Stieglitz ran the Intimate Gallery at the Anderson Galleries,
after which he opened An American Place, his last gallery. " I am not a salesman,"
he said, speaking for An American Place, "nor are the pictures here for sale, al-
though under certain circumstances certain pictures may be acquired. But if people
really seek something, really need a thing, and there is something here that they
actually seek and need, then they will find it in time." In these words we sense not
only Stieglitz' belief that artistic truth will eventually make itself known but some-
thing of the rejection and hurt he felt after showing our most vital art for decades
without winning for it the full acceptance he felt it deserved. It was perhaps Marsden
Hartley who best captured the spirit of Stieglitz' achievement. "This room," he
wrote of Gallery 291, "was probably the largest small room of its kind in the world
—certainly then—probably now. Everybody in the wide world came there sooner
or later—everybody was free to come—it was an open room—and anyone said
what he liked. Many times it was interesting—sometimes not—but no matter what
anyone thinks ofthat room now—and the succeeding rooms with the numbers 303
[the Intimate Gallery] and 171 o [An American Place] — this room 291 left a lasting
impression in the development of art in America and no other room has had pre-
cisely this meaning or precisely this effect."
52 ARTH U R DOVE

Because the Alfred Stieglitz Collection was presented to the Metropolitan, the
Museum is now rich in the work of Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, J o h n Marin,
Charles Demuth, and Georgia O'Keeffe. Stieglitz' deep interest in the art he
sponsored caused him to retain, privately, major works by each artist he showed.
For this insight the Museum must be forever grateful, for it was not acquiring
paintings by these artists in the years when they were working. Its interest in
American painting was then more soberly conservative. With the arrival, in 1949,
of Stieglitz' four hundred and fifty pieces of American art, the Museum moved from
a position of weakness to one of strength in its representation of the beginning of the
modern movement in America.

DOVE: Pagan Philosophy, 1913. Pastel on DOVE : Sentimental Music, 1 917. Pastel on
paper, 21% x 17% inches. Alfred Stieglitz paper, 21 % x 17% inches. Alfred Stieglitz
Collection, 49.70.74 Collection, 49.70.77

A R T H U R DOVE's work offers a logical starting point for a closer look at this
art, for the reason that Dove painted the first American abstract pictures. Like
Wassily Kandinsky, who was at this time painting the first abstractions in Europe,
Dove, in his work of 1910 to 1920, always took off from the natural appearance of
landscape or animal. The history of the early European and American abstractions,
those of the years 1910-1914, is concerned with an increasing freedom in color and
shape in painting still bound to natural references. From van Gogh, Gauguin, and
 53

DOVE: Cow, 1914. Pastel on

linen, 17% x 21 % inches. Alfred
Stieglitz Collection, 49.70.72

the fauves, with ever increasing esthetic license, artists like Kandinsky and Dove
allowed their views of the rhythms of the visible free rein in their art, to such an
extent that at some point around 191 o their work passed over from the seemingly
natural, if distorted, to the seemingly abstract, though still based on nature. The
cubists, too, were always to remain with the visible, and work out from there. Two
other innovators, Frank Kupka and Robert Delaunay, are sometimes credited with
being the first totally abstract painters, but their disks, celebrating an idea about
light and its source, had an origin in nature. It was the Russian painter Kasimir
Malevich, in 1914, and later the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian, beginning about
1920, who produced the first wholly invented, nonnatural abstractions. Both men
became leaders of groups concerned with total abstraction, the Russian painters
calling themselves suprematists, the Dutch, united under the name de Stijl (the
Style), becoming known as neoplasticists.
The content of an Arthur Dove can be summarized as abstracted nature in its
happy aspect. His pictures have wit and gentleness, joyful colors, unique rhythms.
Some of these qualities are evident in his Pagan Philosophy, even though the artist is
here studying, and rather academically, the lessons of Picasso and Braque. Care-
fully controlling each corner of the picture, a procedure characteristic of the cubist
method, Dove distributes the insistently modeled geometric forms to suggest a
fragmented musical instrument. In his Cow, he returns to a lyrical abstraction that
is more congenial to him, and the result is more satisfying. There is the conviction
in this work of the oneness or singleness of natural appearances. The cow is rhyth-
mically abstracted and not quite separable from whatever in the picture constitutes
the background. This was the method of Dove's earlier abstractions of 1910-1911,
in which everything represented took on the mood and character of the artistic
impulse that generated it.
54 ARTHUR DOVE

In Sentimental Music the approach and achievement are much the same as in Cow.
There are reminiscences, too, of Pagan Philosophy, but the earlier stiffness is gone,
replaced by a buoyant quality. The subject matter might be described as nature in
movement. While it is certainly no more specific than that, the upward thrust of
arabesque lines is reminiscent of another work by Dove in which a poplar tree is set
in a landscape in much the same compositional relationship. Something of the spirit
of nonspecificity running concurrently with the artist's deep love of nature was
caught in 1912 by Bert Leston Taylor, a poetic newspaperman, when Dove had a
show in Chicago:

But Mr. Dove is far too keen

To let a single bird be seen ;
To show the pigeons would not do
And so he simply paints the coo.

Dove himself, in a letter to the Chicago collector Arthur Jerome Eddy, who bought
one of the paintings from the Chicago show, explained how the spirit of his subjects
was conveyed: " T h e first step was to choose from nature a motif in color and with
that motif to paint from nature, the forms still being objective. The second step was
to apply this same principle to form, the actual dependence upon the object (repre-
sentation) disappearing, and the means of expression becoming purely subjective."
In his Portrait of Ralph Dusenberry Dove makes a radical departure in technique.
Part ofa flag and what are perhaps abstracted indications of sky are painted in oil
on a canvas to which are affixed pieces of wood shingles, part ofa page from a hymn-
book, and, framing the whole, a carpenter's folding rule. The impulse for this sort
of mixture, or collage, came, of course, from the cubists. The cubists' recognition
that the means of art were not, after all, holy, and that the definition of what might
constitute an esthetic expression was not strict, was one of the great liberating events
of twentieth-century art. Collage became as valid an artistic idea as the older one of
applying paint to canvas. Dove's approach, in this and his other collages, is bold,
simple, even homespun. With very few elements he builds up a subtle characteriza-
tion at the same time that he presents a forceful picture image. Of this particular
work he wrote: "Apropos of the hymn in the 'Ralph Dusenberry,' the Dusenberrys
lived on a boat near us in Lloyd's Harbour. He could dive like a Kingfish and swim
like a fish. Was a sort of foreman on the Marshall Field Place. His father was a
minister. He and his brothers were architects in Port Washington. He drove in to
Huntington in a sleigh one winter and stayed so long in a café there they had to
bring a wagon to take him home. He came home to his boat one day with two bottles,
making his wife so mad that she threw them overboard. He dived in right after them
 DOVE: Portrait of Ralph Dusenberry
1924. Oil on canvas with applied
wood and paper, 22 x 18 inches.
Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 49.70.36

-'^^'••^•"'*'il&lTilWWilliilil

and came up with one in each hand. When tight he always sang 'Shall we gather
at the river.' " Thus, the page of song and the carpenter's rule have precise refer-
ences to a particular individual, but the viewer, even without this information, can
read the components as a witty, visually delightful picture. Founded as it was on
the cubist precedent, Dove's approach to collage was in turn, in the nineteen-fifties,
to serve as precedent for the larger-scaled, more complex creations in collage and
assemblage of Robert Rauschenberg.

DOVE: Goat, 1935.

Oil on canvas, 23 x 31
inches. Alfred Stieglitz
Collection, 49.70.37
56 ARTHUR DOVE

DOVE : Hand Sewing Machine, 1 927. Oil on metal with applied cloth, 14% x 1 9% inches. Alfred
Stieglitz Collection, 49.92.2

The wit of Dove is again an element in his Hand Sewing Machine. The painting is
done on heavy metal, expressive of the weight of the machine; a piece of blank
canvas is affixed to represent the material to be sewn. In his concentration of artistic
insight on such an unusual still-life subject, Dove reinforces the idea that there is no
improper subject for art. A good picture is a picture by a good artist; it is not neces-
sarily a picture ofa good subject. "When a man paints the El," Dove said, "a 1740
house or a miner's shack, he is likely to be called by his critics, American. These
things may be in America, but it's what is in the artist that counts. What do we call
'American' outside of painting? Inventiveness, restlessness, speed, change. Well,
then, a painter may put all these qualities in a still-life or an abstraction, and be
going more native than another who sits quietly copying a skyscraper." Hand Sewing
Machine has some of the American qualities that Dove was calling for.
His Goat of 1935 returns to the spirit of his Cow of twenty years earlier. Again we
have an animal so much a part of its habitat, or, in pictorial terms, so much a part
of its background, that its actual configuration is not quite definable. The peculiar
 MARSDEN HARTLEY 57

angle from which the subject is viewed and the freeing of the colors from their
expected roles contribute to the abstracting of the figure. This is not so much a
painting of a goat as an abstraction taking off from the sense memory, the visual
hint of the form ofa goat. Dove created a complex personal style out of his love for
nature and his understanding of the modern movement in painting. He was not
only one of our first truly modern artists but one of the most consistently accom-
plished, his art changing with the years and yet remaining recognizably his own.

M A R S D E N HARTLEY produced an art that is a triumph of the need for ex-

pression over a lack of facility. There is nothing gracious or easy about his talent,
and his finest work, dramatic rather than lyric, seems always blunt and stunted.
Despite his wide knowledge of the techniques and potentialities of modernism
gained through his repeated trips to the painting centers of Europe, Hartley was to
remain in spirit a primitive. In his work he projected a moodiness, suffused with his
sense of the world as a difficult, painful place in which to live. In feeling he comes
close to German expressionism, with a heavy, brooding view of life that is often
depicted, paradoxically, in bright colors.
It was at Stieglitz' gallery that Hartley first encountered modern art, notably the
work of Cézanne. The Dark Mountain No. 2, painted in 1909, shows his contact with
the work at 291. Its spare, twisted trees, its shapeless, engulfing mountain, its high
horizon line, allowing little sky or light or hope, all express the melancholy and

HARTLEY: The Dark

Mountain No. 2,1909.
Oil on composition
board, 2 0 x 2 4 inches.
Alfred Stieglitz Col-
lection, 49.70.41
 MARSDEN HARTLEY 59

loneliness of the artist's spirit of these years, years that Stieglitz referred to as the
painter's "dark-mountain period."
Stieglitz and Arthur B. Davies helped Hartley to raise the money for his first trip
to Europe, in 1912. Hartley spent his time in Paris and Berlin, and, it would seem,
he was more attracted to the German modernism, romantic and pained, than to
the clear and intellectual art of the Paris painters. After returning to the United
States, he went again to Berlin and lived there for the first two years of the war, 1914
and 1915. It was during this period that he executed a major painting, Portrait ofa
German Officer, and the group of six drawings that Elizabeth McCausland, the lead-
ing authority on Hartley, has entitled Military Symbols. The bold, clean drawings,
undoubtedly studies for the painting, stand as fine examples of forceful abstraction,
the equal of the best European abstractions of their time. Hartley's concern with
the abstract did not last long, perhaps from 1911 until 1916, but during this time
his hand seems to have been surer, his art more finished and controlled than at any
other time in his career.
The meaning of his subject matter in these works has been argued. While it is
quite clearly the symbolism of militarism that is represented, the implication need
not be drawn that either glorification or satire is intended. In a note accompanying
the exhibition of the drawings and the painting at Stieglitz' gallery in 1916 Hartley
wrote: " T h e forms are only those which I have observed casually from day to day.
There is no hidden symbolism whatsoever in them ; there is no slight intention of

Opposite :
HARTLEY: Portrait of a German Officer, 1914.
Oil on canvas, 68% x 41 % inches. Alfred
Stieglitz Collection, 49.70.42

HARTLEY : Military Symbols 3, about 1913-

1914. Charcoal on paper, 24%x18% inches.
Rogers Fund, 62.15.3
60 MARSDEN HARTLEY

HARTLEY: Military Symbols 1, Military Symbols2, about 1913-1914. Charcoal on paper, 24% x
18% inches. Rogers Fund, 62.15.1, 62.15.2

that anywhere. Things under observation, just pictures of any day, any hour. I have
expressed only what I have seen. They are merely consultations of the eye—in no
sense problem; my notion of the purely pictorial." This disclaimer perhaps protests
too much, a strong possibility in the light of the anti-German feeling in New York
at the time. In later years, however, Hartley reaffirmed that these were simply
pictorial arrangements. The fact remains that the subject matter contributes to
the mood.
Portrait ofa German Officer continues to impress one as a startlingly advanced and
integrated work, both in color and composition. The central form, with its disparate
elements, swells compellingly on the canvas, the flags and insignia defining the
officer's power, ambitions, and personality. The numbers and letters add further
meaning and precision to the other abstract, two-dimensional elements. The inclu-
sion of numbers and letters, used casually and naturally, anticipates the work of
Stuart Davis (see his Semé, for example), and was developed to its logical conclusion
by Jasper Johns in his work of the nineteen-fifties. The broad, expressive brushing
of Hartley's picture adds power to a composition already forceful in its imagery. In
this painting and in the related drawings Hartley created his most accomplished
pictures and made himself a pioneer and leader of American modernism.
 MARSDEN HARTLEY 61

HARTLEY: Banquet in Silence, 1935-1936. Oil on composition

board, 19% x 15% inches. Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 49.92.1

In later years, after he had finished with abstraction, Hartley made several more
trips to Europe, and also spent time in Mexico, the American Southwest, Bermuda,
and Nova Scotia, but through all this change of scene his work continued on its
personal course: heavy-handed, deeply felt, moving in its power and simplicity.
Banquet of Silence, a characteristic Hartley of 1935-1936, is a closely observed still
life, curiously formalized and simplified into a forceful pattern. In 1924 the critic
Paul Rosenfeld wrote of "the mournfulness which informs many of Hartley's
pictures." It is this quality that is strong in Banquet in Silence.
Lobster Fishermen is typical of Hartley's last manner. Born in Maine, the painter
returned there with a purpose toward the end of his life. "The quality of nativeness,"
he wrote, "is colored by heritage, birth, and environment, and it is for this reason
that I wish to declare myself the painter from Maine." He pointed out that of all the
Maine painters—Homer, Marin, and others—he was the only one native born.
Like a true romantic, therefore, he wandered for nearly a lifetime only to find that
he was most truly at home back home. Lobster Fishermen, with its bright reds and
blues, its coarse and honest figures of men whose way of life the artist respects, and
its continuity of sea into sky, shows the new openness in Hartley's work. There is a
concern here with the far off and unknown. The artist demonstrates his awareness,
rarely sensed in his earlier work, of what may lie beyond the picture plane. Thus, at
62 MARSDEN HARTLEY

HARTLEY : Lobster Fishermen, 1 940-1941. Oil on composition board, 29% x 40% inches. Arthur H.
Hearn Fund, 42.160

the height of his expressive powers, Hartley turned the lessons of modernism and his
hard-won ability to express his personal vision to the deeply meaningful celebration
of what was closest to him: the simplicity and directness of his contact with nature.

J O H N M A R I N ' s artistic career assumed importance only after his meeting with
Alfred Stieglitz. This occurred in 1909 when Marin was nearly forty. He was a
painter who had not yet found himself when Edward Steichen sent Stieglitz some
of his work from Paris, commenting in a letter: " T h e Marin watercolors are about
as good as anything in that line that has ever been done." T h a t same year, 1909,
Stieglitz presented Marin's work in New York; the following year he gave him a
one-man show. The atmosphere of audience and encouragement that Stieglitz
provided, and the financial security that resulted from his efforts on Marin's behalf,
proved the key to the artist's development.
 JOHN MARIN 63

Marin's earlier water colors, as well as those clone soon after his meeting with
Stieglitz, are delicate, quite straightforward city impressions. They show that he
was aware of impressionist technique, and perhaps also of Cézanne, although Marin
was later to insist that he first saw Cezanne's work in 1911. Marin's feeling for water
color was so natural that he may have arrived independently at a Cézanne-like
technique of recording his sensations of light and color.
Brooklyn Bridge, dating from about 1912, is of the period of Marin's first truly
personal expression. Brightly, wittily, it communicates his sense of the excitement
of urban life. Marin had probably acquired his sense of how far a structure can be
shattered and still retain a sufficient sense of form during his earlier years when he
worked in an architect's office. His control of the form in this case is impressive.
Certainly there is little of Cézanne in the looseness of brushstroke or in the frag-
mentation of the object. While Cézanne may be recalled in the transparency and
clarity of the color, this speaks as much of the nature of the water-color medium as
it does of influence. A more apposite name in this connection is Robert Delaunay,
whose shattered Eiffel Towers, the first of which he painted in 1912, Marin may
well have seen either in the originals or in photographs.
Marin's writing about his art was folksy and bright with imagination, another

MARIN : Brooklyn Bridge, 1910.

Water color on paper, 18% x 15%
inches. Alfred Stieglitz Collection,
49.70.105
64 JOHN MARIN

expression of his need to communicate his sense of the excitement of life. In conjunc-
tion with one of his Photo-Secession shows he wrote for Camera Work this statement
of purpose about his New York water colors: "Shall we consider the life ofa great
city as confined simply to the people and animals on its streets and in its buildings ?
Are the buildings themselves dead ? . . . I see great forces at work: great movements;
the large buildings and the small buildings; the warring of the great and the small;
influences of one mass on another greater or smaller mass. Feelings are aroused
which give me the desire to express the reaction of these 'pull forces,' those influences
which play with one another; great masses pulling smaller masses, each subject in
some degree to the other's power. . . . While these powers are at work pushing,
pulling, sideways, downwards, upwards, I can hear the sound of their strife and
there is great music being played. And so I try to express graphically what a great
city is doing. Within the frames there must be a balance, a controlling of these
warring, pushing, pulling forces." Such a declaration reminds us of the pantheistic
attitude expressed in the remarks of Arthur Dove. And as in Dove's case, the pathetic
fallacy leads to important art, whether it is the natural or the man-made that is
endowed with human feelings.
In Tree Forms, Maine Marin has taken his style and technique to the country. And
here, largely, they were to remain throughout his long career. Marin saw the archi-
tecture of nature as not radically different from the architecture of cities, with the
"warring, pushing, pulling" of natural forces in the same need of balance and
control. In Tree Forms, Maine there is a more controlled excitement, with a sparer
use of elements, than in Brooklyn Bridge. We see some indication of horizon line, a
portion o f a tree trunk, some branches, a bit of sky. These elements are organized
in terms of their energy, the forces working between them. Marin's view of the world
did not include the static.
While this painting is more advanced toward complete abstraction than the
painting of 1912, Marin, like Dove, was never to take the ultimate step. He comes
close to it in Sun Spots, a work in a benign, even lyrical mood. Were there no horizon
line (and no title to give the clue), we would be faced with a complete abstraction,
and a tremendously successful one, with its bright, concentrated colors. Allusions to
things seen, enriching associations, were to remain even in the most advanced of
Marin's paintings. As he stated the case for himself in the nineteen-twenties, "It's
a question as to whether open sight vision—that is of things you see—isn't better
than the inner, I mean, vision things."
In Europe, after Cézanne, water color ceased to be considered an energetic
medium and it was largely abandoned. In America, on the other hand, its speed,
accuracy, spontaneity, light, and color clarity continued to appeal. Other American
painters of Marin's day, notably Charles Demuth and Lyonel Feininger (the latter
 JOHN MARIN 65

MARIN : Tree Forms, Maine, 1915.

Water color on paper, 19% x 16%
inches. Alfred Stieglitz Collection,
49.70.113

MARIN : Sun Spots, 1 920. Water

color on paper, 16% x 19% inches.
Alfred Stieglitz Collection,
49.70.121
66 JOHN MARIN

producing water colors in Europe until he settled in the United States in 1937),
used the medium to express ideas of clarity and order; Marin used it to express
ideas of disorder and energy, developing a convincing sense of personal order that
was wide enough to include and subsume all the disordering energy he saw in life.
All his life Marin was to feel some disappointment that his oils were less noticed than
his water colors, but in contrast to his water-color technique, we see that his use of
oil was rather dry. Quite naturally, because of the differences in the media, the oils
are less spontaneous, less accurate in feeling. The drawing in them is more obtrusive.
Everything about them seems more carefully thought out, yet somehow less com-
municative. Circus Horses was painted from memory, and its removed quality sug-
gests this. Each element in the painting holds its plane, remains where it belongs,
and we do not feel Marin's characteristic interpénétration of energies. With its
rearing black horse in a white nimbus, and each member of the crowd in the fore-
ground enclosed in an architectonic element, the picture is amusing, but it is also,

MARIN : Circus Horses, 1 936. Oil on canvas, 26 x 32 inches. Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 49.70.229
MARIN : Off Cape Split, 1938. Oil on canvas, 22% x 28% inches. George A. Hearn Fund
46.42

in Marin's work, surprisingly cool. Another oil, Off Cape Split, has more of the ec-
centric energy we expect in Marin. Seemingly, the horizon line and boat were
represented explicitly and simply so that they would offset the less explicit, more
complicated heave and swell of the sea. Repeated here, in a newer and fuller context,
is the opposition between straight lines and lines of rhythmic movement that oc-
curred in the 1915 water color Tree Forms, Maine.

J O S E P H STELLA, of the early American modernists, was one of two who be-
came closely associated with the contemporary artistic developments of Europe.
(The other, Stanton Macdonald-Wright, will be discussed further on.) Dove,
Hartley, and Marin, Stella's contemporaries, culled eclectically from European
painting. Stella, on the other hand, allied himself for a richly productive decade
with one of Europe's dominant movements: futurism.
Arriving in New York in 1896 as an immigrant from Italy, young Stella originally
thought ofa career in medicine. His switch to art study occurred in 1898. As had
Sloan, Luks, Glackens, and Shinn, he found his way into serious art from the trade
of illustration. In 1907 he was sent by The Survey, a magazine of social interpretation,
to Pittsburgh to bring back impressions of the steel mills. Perhaps even earlier Stella
68 JOSEPH STELLA

STELLA: Coal Pile, about 1908. Charcoal on paper, 2 0 x 2 6 inches. Elisha

Whittelsey Collection, 50.31.4

had been struck by the visual aspects of America's new industrial society. In any case
Coal Pile, a drawing that stemmed from his experiences in Pittsburgh, prefigures the
sense of excitement that he was to find and paint in America after his return in 1912
from a four-year sojourn in France and Italy. It is a delicate yet forcefully observed
work, with the great, swelling mass of coal imaginatively balanced by the catlike
grace of the schematically rendered bridge. Without conveying any specific social
comment Coal Pile dramatizes the power of industry.
Stella's Landscape, done in Europe in 1911, indicates his consciousness of the cur-
rent European style change to simplification of form. Decoratively and skillfully he
plays upon the geometric purity of the building, a church. Against its monumental-
ity are set the rhythms, almost art nouveau in their insistence, of circle within circle,
beginning with the landscape in the foreground, repeating into the trees and sky,
culminating in the major circle that involves the tower. The work, if slight, shows
Stella's skill and his understanding of two key European styles : cubism and orphism.
The mark of the first is seen in the simplification of the architecture. The orphie
principle, the decorative analysis of light and color in overlapping circles as de-
veloped by Robert Delaunay and Frank Kupka and used by them between 1911
and 1914, accounts in part for Stella's style.
 JOSEPH STELLA 69

But it was futurism, the Italian offshoot of cubism, that was to give Stella his finest
equipment as a painter. While the futurists' program included a nihilistic political
orientation, it was their artistic concern with the speed and contemporaneity of
modern life that attracted Stella. As a futurist, he abandoned most of the natural
references he had made in Landscape and expressed his new outlook by means of the
characteristic abstract motifs of the Italian painters.
The inspirations Stella returned to in 1912 are recorded in his manuscript state-
ment o f a later period: " I was thrilled to find America so rich with so many new
motives to be translated into a new art. Steel and electricity had created a new world.
A new drama had surged . . . a new poliphony was ringing all around with the
scintillating, highly-colored lights. The steel had leaped to hyperbolic altitudes and
expanded to vast latitudes with the skyscrapers and with bridges made for the con-
junction of worlds. A new architecture was created, a new perspective."
The pictures that were to come from this sense of American urgency, painted
between 1913 and 1923, are the finest of Stella's career. The best known of these
works, next to his many variations on the Brooklyn Bridge theme, are his Coney
Island canvases. One of these, once entitled Madonna of Coney Island, is now simply
called Coney Island. In it the artist combines the speed and fragmentation of America,
symbolized by the lights of Coney Island, with an ageless Italian subject: the

STELLA: Landscape, 1911. Pastel on

paper, 22 x 17 inches. Bequest of
Katherine S. Dreier, 53.45.4
70 JOSEPH STELLA

Madonna at the foot of the Cross. Out of respect for his religious theme, or perhaps
simply as a stylistic development, this is a calmer and more harmonious picture than
most of Stella's futurist works. Understanding the formal innovations and color
ideas of his contemporaries, Stella captured the newness of America in paintings
that never lost his personal decorative sense, seen particularly in his penchant for
the rhythmic and subtly repeated circle.

STELLA : Coney Island, about 1 91 5. Oil on canvas, diameter 41 % inches. George A. Hearn Fund,
63.69
 ¿ ß
RAY : Dance, 1915. Oil on canvas, 36 x
28% inches. Lent by Mr. and Mrs.
William N. Copley, L 64.25

M A N RAY, in the years 1915 to 1921, produced what were very nearly the most
advanced paintings to be seen in America, experimental works that shattered ac-
cepted conceptions of form, space, and even technique. In 1921 Ray moved to Paris,
and here his work as a photographer (including both portraiture and innovational
photography) lessened his effectiveness as a painter. Before 1915 he had studied
architecture and engineering and then had worked in New York as an advertising
illustrator. It was his meetings with Joseph Stella and another painter, Louis
Bouché, and then with Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia, that drew him into
art. With Duchamp, whose innovative paintings had caused such a stir in the Ar-
mory Show, and Picabia, whose work had been exhibited by Stieglitz as well as in
the Armory Show, Ray became a force in the dada movement, first in New York,
then in Paris. His Dance of 1915, sometimes known as Dance Interpretation, might al-
most be called a painted collage with the cut-out, pasted-down look of the body's
forms and edges and the general insistence on two-dimensionality. Strangely enough
such a look anticipated by some years the full development of the collage technique
in Europe. In his autobiography, Self Portrait, Ray describes his painting style of
this time as the reduction of human figures to flat-patterned, disarticulated forms.
Dance is a case in point, with the joints of the figure unhinged and free, the head a
mere indication ofa masklike face, the whole resembling something freshly cut by a
tailor. Done in the period of Ray's first maturity as an artist, Dance stands as a
painting of quality, originality, and elegance.
72 STANTON M A C D O N A L D - W R IG HT

MACDONALD-WRIGHT:
Aeroplane Synchromy in
Yellow-Orange, 1920. Oil on
canvas, 24% x 24 inches.
Alfred Stieglitz Collection,
49.70.52

S T A N T O N M A C D O N A L D - W R I G H T is to be credited with founding the

only American modernist movement of the period ig 10-1920. Characteristically,
it was founded in Paris, where Macdonald-Wright received most of his training,
and during the years of the proliferating European isms—fauvism, cubism, futurism,
suprematism, orphism. Macdonald-Wright and his fellow theoretician, Morgan
Russell, once a pupil of Robert Henri, called their practice synchromism. Its concern
was with the use of color as a disembodied element. The two artists announced that
" I n our painting colour becomes the generating function." Having offered this as
the key to their own work, they laid clown the general principle, "Painting being the
art of colour, any quality of a picture not expressed by colour is not painting."
There was more to synchromism, of course, than theory. In the recurrence of the
circle or disk as their characteristic motif, Macdonald-Wright and Russell referred,
as did the orphie painters Kupka and Delaunay, to the sun and its aura as the source
of color. While there was some rivalry between the orphists and the synchromists,
we can now see (as even the painters themselves must have sensed) that both groups
were making a similar approach to the problem of creating a nonliteral abstract art.
Regardless of priorities, when the synchromists showed in Paris and in Munich in
1913 they were considered to be the first American innovators in painting since
Whistler.
 ALFRED MAURER 73

By 191 g Macdonald-Wright had given up most of the rigorous theoretical dis-

cipline of his movement and returned to live in the United States. His Aeroplane
Synchromy in Yellow-Orange, painted in Los Angeles in 1920, hints at structure in its
recognition of objects. Along with the synchromist color, there are reflections here
of the cubist breakup of space, and even of the drawing of Cézanne. In its mildness
and delicacy the picture indicates a pulling back from the extreme modernism that
became so evident in the art of both America and Europe in the nineteen-twenties.
It was as if Macdonald-Wright, like many of his peers, felt that all the extremes had
been tested and proved during the war decade. In Europe, Picasso, Matisse, and
Derain, among others, and in America Macdonald-Wright, Hartley, and Dove all
seemed to sidestep to firmer, more traditional ground at about this time, taking with
them the equipment they had developed in their years of experiment and innovation.

A L F R E D M A U R E R was, at the age of thirty-one, a highly proficient academic

painter in the Sargent-Chase tradition, as may be gathered from his winning of the
Carnegie International prize in 1901. His artistic outlook began to change in Paris,
where during his second stay, from 1902 to 1904, he frequented the salon of Leo and
Gertrude Stein and saw on their walls the paintings of Cézanne, Rousseau, Picasso,
and Matisse. As Maurer became familiar with the new art his own moved from the
elegant portrait style of his early years through impressionism, fauvism, and cubism.
In one of his late paintings, Still Life with Fish, the cubist approach is still evident. A

MAURER: Still Life with

Fish, about 1927-1928. Oil
on canvas mounted on board,
1 8 x 2 1 % inches. Arthur H.
Hearn Fund, 55.101
74 ARTHUR B. CARLES

major concern of much modern painting, when it ceased attempting to fool the eye
with representations of three-dimensional objects, was in maintaining a tension be-
tween one's awareness of the three-dimensionality of the object depicted and the
two-dimensionality of its representation in paint. In Still Life with Fish Maurer pre-
sents us with a cool solution to the problem. He tips up the table and its load in the
manner indicated by Cézanne and worked out further by Picasso and Braque, so
that while we look straight out at the legs of the table, we also look down at the top.
As early as 1916, Maurer suggested that art and nature are not comparable in their
effects. Nature, he wrote, because it is not consciously composed, cannot provide a
purely esthetic emotion. In order for art to express an inherent feeling not obtainable
from nature except through a process of association, it should be the intensification
of nature.

A R T H U R B. C A R L E S , an artist whose achievement was great although un-

fashionable in its time, was one of the few American painters to keep alive between
the two World Wars the possibility ofa rich and expressive abstraction. After trips
to Europe in 1905 and 1907 (where, in Paris, he knew the group at the Café du
Dôme: Matisse, Picasso, Delaunay, Hans Hofmann, and J o h n Marin among others),
he exhibited both at Stieglitz' Photo-Secession and in the Armory Show, the touch-
stones of American modernism. Later, painting in Philadelphia in the twenties and
thirties, he no longer exhibited, and his audience was restricted to a few discerning
friends and collectors. A prediction the painter-teacher Hans Hofmann offered
about Carles's work has begun to be justified: "Art starts where construction ends,
and Carles rose far above construction. His paintings have a rare, a 'cultivated'
quality. H e really understood color as a plastic means, as a monumental building-
process in which forms do not precede but rather develop out of color. He will be
understood and appreciated by the new generation which is on the way."
These remarks, while made specifically about the abstract work Carles was paint-
ing after the mid-nineteen-twenties, aptly characterize the whole of his mature
output. His L'Eglise is a landscape remarkable both for its structure and its color
plasticity. There are hints of fauve color freedom in it—colors, that is, that depart
from nature for an existence of their own—but this freedom is tempered by the
tremendous solidity and earthbound quality of the church, and by the subtle but
forceful repetition of vertical and horizontal impulses throughout the painting. The
road, walls, buildings, and even the hedges — the man-made elements—are all op-
posed, quite consciously, to the heaving and twisting of the natural growth. Al-
though this is an early work it nonetheless shows Carles at the height of a power
he was to maintain.
 A R T H U R B. C A R L E S 75

CARLES: L'Église, about 1910. Oil on canvas, 31 x 39 inches. Arthur H. Hearn Fund, 62.203
Chapter Three

Figurative Painters of the

Twenties and Thirties

In the period between the two World Wars some experiments in modernism con-
tinued in America, but the major energy went toward the consolidation of tech-
nique. There were no breakthroughs in subject matter, no formal innovations of
consequence. The emphasis was on craft, on painting well. Nonetheless, the lessons
taught by the European and American moderns of the teens — the lessons of color
freedom and emphasis on structure for its own sake—had their effect on the best art
of the twenties and thirties. The subject matter was largely observations of America,
still life, and the female nude, and the Henri and the academic tradition were car-
ried into greater formal clarity.
By this time also there was a less self-conscious attitude toward the modern art of
Europe. It was no longer felt necessary either to reject it totally or to accept it
totally. The growing ease of its acceptance led to the use of certain of its aspects to
reinforce the characteristic American strain of realism and observation. The con-
frontation with the new was absorbed and greater familiarity with the very art that
had once been shocking made it possible to reassert older values in fresh and new
color, light, and structure. With their insistence on technique, their proficiency, and
their familiarity with the possibilities of the advanced art of their time, a number of
figurative painters of the twenties and thirties created sound and sober works, works
of value in themselves and of value as teaching examples for the next generation.
These painters kept open the legitimacy of certain conservative approaches in a
period when experimentation for its own sake was a distinct danger. Perhaps the
most important point of all, these painters made it clear that it was possible to be
eclectic in the choice of modern influences and still maintain both personality and
style.

76
 EDWAR D HOPPER 77

HOPPER: House of the Fog-

horn, 1 927. Water color on
paper, 1 2% x 1 9% inches.
Bequest of Elizabeth Amis
Cameron Blanchard, 56.216

E DWA RD H O P P E R has given meaningful continuity to our tradition of objec-

tive painting—the matter-of-fact quality of Homer and Eakins—in the broader,
simplified terms of contemporary art. A painter notable for the integrity and logic
of his style and attitude, Hopper has for forty years been a gentle force in American
art. His essential subject, the recording of the moods of American life through a
personal outlook, has led to paintings that have remained astonishingly timeless in
feeling. " M y aim in painting," Hopper wrote in 1933, "has always been the most
exact transcription of my most intimate impressions of nature."
After his studies in New York with Robert Henri and Kenneth Hayes Miller,
Hopper made three trips to Europe in the years 1906-1910. While he spent most of
his time in Paris, it is typical of the man that he was not pulled into the almost ir-
resistible whirlpool of innovative painting ofthat time. Instead, it was the impres-
sionists and Cézanne who interested him. By 1910 all the elements of his style were
accounted for. From Henri he had learned the desire to depict life about him. From
Henri, too, he had learned the facture ofa Manet, rather loose when studied closely,
but always giving the effect of realism. And from the impressionists he had learned
to lighten his palette. With this as his principal equipment he went his own way,
clear of movements or schools, and his approach over the years has shown little
change. One may look at an early Hopper—his Corner Saloon of 1913, for example—
and discover that it has all the elements of his style and mood as we find them in his
work of the nineteen-sixties.
Hopper's present nearly universal popularity dates from the mid-twenties. He
painted for a good many years before that with almost no recognition. The one work
he sold out of the Armory Show was his only sale until 1923. After 1915 he earned
HOPPER : The Lighthouse at Two Lights, 1929. Oil on canvas, 29% x 43% inches. Hugo Kastor
Fund, 62.95

HOPPER : From Williamsburg Bridge, 1 928. Oil on canvas, 29 x 43 inches. George A. Hearn Fund,
37.44

C k far*

- ^ E ... I.JIII« M l . l r w i r
 EDWAR D HOPPER 79

his living by illustrating and through commercial art, but he was not happy with
this work. " W h a t I wanted to do," he has said of this period, "was to paint sunlight
on the side o f a house." By 1925 he was able to devote himself entirely to his art.
A water color done in 1927, House of the Fog Horn, confirms Hopper as one of
America's great water colorists. Concentrating as it does on the clear definition of
mass by means of walls of light and shadow, it is clearly anticipatory of one of
Hopper's best-known pictures, Lighthouse at Two Lights. While the range of Hopper's
subject matter is wide, his essential subject is light: the depiction of light and the
definition of scene and mood by light. After his Maine-coast buildings, the scene
changes completely in a work like From Williamsburg Bridge, and again in Office in a
Small City, and yet in all of these paintings we are aware of both Hopper's light and
a common mood: isolation and loneliness. Hopper's inhabited paintings, we find,
have the same feeling of isolation as his uninhabited ones. If anything, the sense of
spiritual distance is increased with his use of figures.
In the large and ambitious Tables for Ladies we again see the artist's detached
examination of life. The window through which we look is implied rather than

HOPPER : Office in a Small City, 1953. Oil on canvas, 28 x 40 inches. George A. Hearn Fund, 53.183
80 EDWAR D HOPPER

HOPPER : Tables for Ladies, 1930. Oil on canvas, 48% x 60% inches. George A. Hearn Fund, 31.62

shown (as it is, also, in Office in a Small City), while the figures are simplified, with
little regard for characterization. These are not specific people but simply types,
and as such they are merely an important element, not the total subject of the
painting.
This curiously American theme of detachment and loneliness running through
all of Hopper's work strikes a responsive note, and he remains the one contemporary
American artist who is greatly admired by other painters, critics, and collectors of
every persuasion, from those of the avant-garde to the most securely traditional.
Hopper's paintings give the impression of tremendous attention to outline and
crispness of detail, but on closer examination we see that this is an illusion created
by the sureness of his touch. The facture is loose but the placement is so exact, the
light depicted so effectively and with such economy that we read the whole as crisp
and sure. In some of the pictures there are extraordinary passages of bravura paint-
ing (the glass case and its contents next to the cash register in Tables for Ladies, for
example) that read as convincing realism from a safe viewing distance.
 WALT KUHN 81

WALT K U H N figures in the history of American painting both for his own work
and for his role in the Armory Show. Although the lyricism of Arthur B. Davies had
nothing in common with the blunt, almost expressionist painting of Kuhn, Kuhn
often said that his friendship with Davies was the great influence on his career. He
was referring to their association in the receptivity to new ideas about art that led
to their virtually directing the choices for the Armory Show. In the planning stage
Davies saw a catalogue of the Sonderbund Exhibition in Cologne, a great gathering
of advanced European work. He sent the catalogue off to Kuhn, who was then in
Nova Scotia, and Kuhn went immediately to Cologne, just in time to select from
the pictures as they were being taken down. From Cologne he went to Munich and
Berlin and in both cities found further work to his liking, after which he went to Paris
where Alfred Maurer and the New York painter Walter Pach helped him choose
additional works.
Like so many artists in the pre-World War I period, Kuhn came to art from a
background of magazine illustration. Despite his intimate contact with the innova-

KUHN : Clown with Black Wig,

1930. Oil on canvas, 40 x 30
inches. George A. Hearn Fund,
56.73
82

KUHN : Acrobat in Red and Green, 1942. Oil on

canvas, 24% x 20% inches. George A. Hearn
Fund, 50.28.3

tions in Europe, his own work was to remain a basically straightforward observation
of his subjects, although with a rougher handling of the paint than the academics
approved—perhaps under the influence of the German expressionists—and a bright
and dramatic palette. Like Hopper, Kuhn took from the modern art of his time
what was useful for his own rather conservative aims. Although he painted still lifes,
his more usual subjects were clowns and acrobats: the entertainers whom the artist
knows to be sadder in private than they hint of being in public. Clown with Black Wig
is a gentler, sweeter painting than most of Kuhn's. The firm drawing about the
hands and arms is played down in the masklike face that yet betrays, despite its ap-
parent impassivity, an appealing inwardness. In Acrobat in Red and Green the subject
is again projected against a nonspecific background. As in most of Kuhn's work the
figure is all. The flatness, the two-dimensionality of the body, serves to throw the
head forward in relief, placing the emphasis on the man's expression. In this canvas
the brushwork is coarser, the face more expressive, modeled sharply with shadow to
point up the bone structure and to concentrate our attention on the soulful eyes.
Kuhn's painting is clearly in touch with the feelings of his sitters.

S A M U E L HALPERT, going to Paris in 1902 and in subsequent years, became

familiar with advanced painting before he was twenty. H e was particularly im-
pressed with the work of Cézanne, Matisse, and the somewhat more delicate paint-
ing of Albert Marquet. His Notre-Dame, Paris is the work ofa man who has come
thoughtfully through fauvism to the mellowing process that was evident in so much
painting of the twenties. Its composition and point of view are impressive. We look
out at the cathedral, the mass of trees beside it, and the sky; we look down at the
street with its pedestrians and motor traffic. Halpert has included everything, the
 83

HALPERT: Notre-Dame,
Paris, 1 9 2 5 . Oil on canvas,
25% x 31 % inches. A n o n y -
HI ' mous gift, 38.34

transient as well as the permanent. While no explicit social comment is offered, in

a sense this painting acknowledges the artistic message of its time: that the old and
the new, the traditional and the contemporary, are not mutually exclusive. Hal-
pert's work, pleasantly observed and expertly crafted, can be thought of as the
painting ofa classicizing modernist.

H E N R Y LEE M c F E E was another American painter who benefited from the

message of the school of Paris modernists, notably Renoir, Cézanne, Picasso, and
Braque, but unlike Halpert, who worked in Paris, McFee found his way in the

M c F E E : Still Life with

Striped Curtain, 1 931.
Oil on canvas, 3 0 % x
4 0 inches. George A.
Hearn Fund, 3 3 . 1 0 5
84 EUGENE SPEICHER, YASUO KUNIYOSHI

States, working with the American painter Andrew Dasburg. Like Dasburg, McFee
painted intelligently though somewhat dryly. His approach can be sensed in his
statement " T h e essential thing is that the completed picture shall be a living unit
of design, strong in tactile values and plastic in every sense." McFee limited his
ambitions to the perfection of a technique and to the rendering of the plasticity of
objects in a shallow, controlled space. These qualities are apparent in Still Life with
Striped Curtain, which is the work ofa man who has staked his claim in the corner of
the territory prospected by Cézanne and the cubists. McFee's later artistic researches
became academic because he continued to paint essentially the same picture long
after he had solved the intellectual problems it presented.

E U G E N E S P E I C H E R , after studying art in New York, in part at the Henri

School, made three trips to Europe during the prewar decade. Here he encountered
and admired the work of Velazquez and Hals, as expected in a Henri follower, and
also Holbein and Gainsborough. Speicher became greatly concerned with craft as
such, like so many of his American contemporaries. "Above all it must have rare
flavor and strong grace," he once said of his work, "be warm, simple and well
ordered." These are the qualities of The Mountaineer, one of the artist's most impres-
sive canvases. In pose and massing it reminds us of George Bellows' Padre, but the
difference in execution is marked. The Bellows portrait, for all its studied placing,
is painted with bravura, and with a more immediate sense of the sitter's personality ;
the Speicher portrait is morecareful, painted with finish and somewhat withdrawn
in attitude. There can be little doubt that part of this emphasis on painting well, in
Speicher and others, was a reaction against the freer and seemingly undisciplined
work of the moderns. The firm drawing of The Mountaineer serves the artist's purpose
excellently. Speicher's vision may be reserved and objective, but this does not
detract from his obvious sympathy for his subject.

Y A S U O K U N I Y O S H I has given us work that is fanciful and personal, often

humorous and somewhat mystical. It has a rather exotic look, yet one is hard put
to find in it cither specifically Japanese or generally Oriental characteristics. Al-
though he was born in J a p a n , the artist himself denied that his origin could be
ascertained from his paintings. He once wrote, " M y art training and education
have come from American schools and American soil. I am just as much an Ameri-
can in my approach and thinking as the next fellow."
After preliminary study in Los Angeles, Kuniyoshi came to New York in 1910,
while still a youth, and studied first at the Henri School and then from 1916 to
SPEICHER: The Mountain-
eer, 1929. Oil on canvas,
52 x 42 inches. Bequest of
Stephen C. Clark, 61.101.24

KUNIYOSHI -.Accordion,
1938. Oil on canvas, 38% x
48 inches. Edward Joseph
Gallagher III Memorial
Collection, 56.6
 KUNIYOSHI: Exit, 1948-
1950. Oil on canvas, 50 x
30 inches. Morris K.
Jesup Fund, 50.49

1920 with Kenneth Hayes Miller. He credited Miller with giving him his artistic
direction. Best known as a painter in the nineteen-twenties and thirties, Kuniyoshi
chose to work within the conservative vein of his time. Well observed, painted with
the dry yet dreamlike precision that is unmistakable in all his work, are his Accordion
and Exit. In both we see the scene from above, but there is an important difference.
In Accordion the objects on the table exist in space and are surrounded by space. In
Exit the forms are flattened up against the picture plane. The two-dimensional color
areas of Exit are perhaps a reflection of the artist's interest in such early Italian
masters as Giotto and Piero della Francesca.
 LEON KROLL 87

LEON KROLL, B E R N A R D K A R F I O L , and J U L E S P A S C I N show us, in

their paintings of the nude, the variety of American figurative painting between
the two World Wars. Kroll's Nude is a beautifully analyzed and constructed formal
presentation of the power and shape of the female body. If the technique is academic
in the positive sense of the word (informed with the knowledge of accepted values
and procedures), the spirit and celebration of the subject are far from academic in
the dusty sense. Kroll once wrote that he favored "motifs that are warm with human
understanding." The appeal of his work continues to lie in its warmth and simplicity.

KROLL: Nude, 1933-1934. Oil on canvas, 4 8 x 3 6 inches. Arthur H. Hearn Fund, 49.127
88 BERNARD KARFIOL

Karfiol, born in Hungary in 1886, came to this country as a boy, studied art in
New York, and then at the age of fifteen continued his study in Paris. Returning to
New York in 1903, he found the contrast in artistic climates startling. In the United
States "Art seemed dormant," he wrote. " T h e new movements were unknown, or
laughed at. A few Impressionists slipped through into the American consciousness,
but generally it was a desert land." On his return to Paris Karfiol met Picasso,
Matisse, and other masters of the time. However, like many of his American con-
temporaries, Karfiol experienced the excitement of modern art in his student years,
and thereafter dedicated his own art to taming the extremes of form and color in-
novation to more traditional purposes. His Cuban Nude, painted in New York from
sketches he had made in Cuba, is executed simply, even primitively. While certain
of its cues are taken from the mainstream of world art (there are echoes here of
Velazquez' Rokeby Venus, Goya's Maja, and Manet's Olympia), the essential energy
is conserving and normalizing.
A considerably more sophisticated painting of a woman is Pascin's Semi-Nude.
Even with only one breast bared, she is certainly more naked, if less nude, than

KARFIOL: Cuban Nude, 1935-1937. Oil on canvas, 3 6 x 5 0 inches George A. Hearn Fund, 37 76
 89

PASCIN : Semi-Nude, about

1925. Oil on canvas, 39% x
32 inches. Lent by Adelaide
Milton de Groot, L 52.24.173

Kroll's Nude. Kroll's subject turns her face away from the picture plane in modesty;
Pascin's looks haughtily out at the painter and viewer.
Born in Bulgaria of a mother half Serbian, half Italian, and a Spanish Jewish
father, Pascin added to this cultural mixture by studying art informally in Vienna,
Berlin, and Paris and then becoming an American citizen in 1915, when he was
thirty. Although his style evolved before he came to the United States, much of his
best work was painted in this country. With echoes of Toulouse-Lautrec and Degas
and stylistic allegiances to his contemporaries George Grosz and Egon Shiele, Pascin
forged a pained lyricism, an out-of-focus reality, that conveys an honest record of
his sensuality. Treading the line between observation and poetry, his paintings,
despite their often tawdry subject matter, were never coarse, and for all their soft
evocativeness, rarely sentimental.
Chapter Four

The Regionalists

The movement in American art of the twentieth century that was undoubtedly the
best received by the public was regionalism. While its principal exponents, Thomas
Hart Benton, John Steuart Curry, Grant Wood, and (although not all of his work
fits into the category) Charles Burchfield, actually had few stylistic mannerisms in
common, their work was easily identifiable by its celebration of American life—not
the city life of the eastern seaboard but the great body of rural experience. These
artists shared a revulsion, it is clear, against the modernist art that had alienated
the public. They wished to paint both in subject and style pictures that could and
would be understood and accepted by the ordinary American, whom they consid-
ered to be the rural Midwesterner.
It would be unfair to the artists to associate them forever with the fanatical
Americanism of Thomas Craven, the critic who made himself their chief spokesman.
In the first place he helped their cause only after much of the work itself had been
executed. In the second, while his advocacy was very effective in stamping rcgion-
alist art upon the public imagination, his criticism was finally more energetic when
it attacked the art he disapproved of. For example, in his widely read book of 1934,
Modern Art, Craven dismissed the great achievement of the Photo-Secession thus :
"Stieglitz, a Hoboken J e w without knowledge of, or interest in, the historical
American background, was—quite apart from the doses of purified art he swallowed
—hardly equipped for the leadership ofa genuine American expression; and it is a
matter of record that none of the artists whose names and work he had exploited
has been noticeably American in flavor." Craven's use of the word "exploited" to
describe Stieglitz' dedication to his artists, and his phrase "a matter of record" to
give weight to his personal opinion, are the measure of his bias, as was his bitter
comment on the Armory Show : " W h a t fine old American families were represented
in this assault on the fortresses of academic culture! Bcnn, Bouché, Bluemner,
Dasburg, Halpert, Kuhn, Kuniyoshi, Lachaise, Stella, Sterne, Weber, Walkowitz,
Zorach—scions of our colonial aristocracy!" Craven's interpretation of the pull
and hold of modernist art on so many of the artists of his time ascribed shallow
motives to those he considered a threat: "When all is said and done, it would seem
that artists flocked to the new gospel for precisely the same reasons that have lured

90
 THOMAS HART BENTON 91

young intellectuals to the red flag; incapable of thinking for themselves, they
adopted, with unquestioning alacrity, European plans and specifications which,
besides giving them something to do and talk about, held the promise of security
and superior position in an unfeeling world. But it is well to remember that their
art, bad as it is, is no worse than any other form of bad art." In his denial of the
interaction between European style and form with the American romantic and
naturalistic traditions, Craven was obliged to write off much of the best art pro-
duced in this century.
It is not necessary today to reject so much in order to accept the work of Benton,
Curry, Wood, and Burchfield. And as a matter of fact, the paintings of the region-
alists are seldom so determinedly American as their propagandist was. While they
record with affection and some sense of amusement the homelier, less glamorous
aspects of the American experience, they do not, as we shall see, entirely forget
their relationship to the historical tradition of Western European art. Nor was the
regionalist development in America, after all, an isolated phenomenon. Although
Craven overlooked this point, the same tendency was evident in European painting.
In Germany, Italy, and to a lesser degree France there was an artistic revulsion in
the nineteen-twenties against the still-new formal inventions of the cubist years.
In large part this was the reaction to the shock and dislocation, the upheaval and
destruction of the war. The new objectivists, as the German painters were called,
and their counterparts in the other countries resurrected older techniques and
attitudes and brought them to bear on a theme that, while not new, was yet timely:
the representation of national identity. This kind of regionalist art, regardless
of which side of the Atlantic it was painted on, was very much concerned with
restating what it meant to be the citizen ofa nation. In America the period of the
nineteen-twenties and early thirties saw a growing political isolationism and a
growing artistic isolationism. The problems of absorbing the waves of European
immigration, of adjusting to the deep involvement with continental Europe that
was the legacy of the war, and, in the thirties, of coping with the depressed national
economy coincided in art with the period of apparent dominance of the Paris-based
modernism. In art as in politics, one answer for such tensions was to turn away from
them in an attempt to locate, isolate, represent, and cherish something that could
be considered uniquely and invincibly American.

T H O M A S HART B E N T O N , the most famous, lively, and cantankerous of the

regionalists, has always surrounded himself with controversy, usually through his
attacks on complacent attitudes and institutions. His work, while memorable in its
images, does not have quite the maverick appeal of his public statements. In it we
92 THOMAS HART B ENTON

sense an art-history-minded effort to create a popular native visual vocabulary,

rather than a spontaneous welling up of images that could be the natural develop-
ment ofa continuing experience with our national artistic life. " M y chief aims have
been . . . social . . . publicly directed," Benton has written. " I believe I wanted,
more than anything else, to make pictures, the imagery of which would carry un-
mistakably American meanings for Americans and for as many of them as possible."
The artist's approach was not always this uncomplicated. After studying at the
Art Institute of Chicago in 1907, Benton made the traditional pilgrimage to Paris.
Here, over a period of five years, he was strongly attracted to innovative art. When
he showed in the Forum Exhibition in New York in 1916, his entry was a rhythmic
grouping of eight male figures. It was accompanied by this declaration: " I wish to
say that I make no distinctions as to the value of subject-matter. I believe that the
representation of objective forms and the presentation of abstract ideas of form to
be of equal artistic value." Benton's title for the picture, Figure Organization No. 3,
advertised his rejection of mythological or storytelling intent. In later years, when
he had come to scorn this period and its contributions, he said in his character-
istically anti-intellectual, romantically simple frontier manner: " I wallowed in
every cockeyed ism that came along and it took me ten years to get all that modern-
ist dirt out of my system. . . . In the company of such hardened internationalists as
George Grosz, Wyndham Lewis, Epstein, Rivera, and that Stein Woman, I was
BENTON: July Hay, 1943. Oil and
egg tempera on composition board,
38 x 26% inches. George A. Hearn
Fund, 43.159.1

Opposite :
BENTON : Cotton Pickers, Georgia,
about 1932. Oil and egg tempera
on canvas, 30 x 35% inches.
George A. Hearn Fund, 33.144.2

merely a roughneck with a talent for fighting, perhaps, but not painting—as it was
cultivated in Paris."
Benton felt that it was his stint in the Navy in 1918-1919 that put him back on a
path he could comfortably follow. Here he was assigned work as an architectural
draftsman. "I was forced to observe the objective character of things—buildings,
airplanes, dredges and ships—things so interesting in themselves that I forgot my
esthetic drivelings and morbid self-concern. I abandoned once and for all my little
world of art for art's sake and entered into a world which, though always around
me, I had not seen. This was the world of America." However, not satisfied to have
discovered a painting manner and subject that suited him, Benton went on to
castigate the group he had left as "an intellectually diseased lot, victims of sickly
rationalizations, psychic inversions, and God-awful self-cultivations." It often hap-
pens that as a period in art recedes in time, its controversies seem less inevitable
than they once did. Thus we no longer feel, as we may once have felt, that a choice
must be made between modernism and regionalism. Both had their worthy practi-
tioners and high artistic moments.
94 JOHN STEUART CURRY

In Cotton Pickers, Georgia, Benton, painting in his rhythmically controlled expres-

sionist manner, has carefully composed one of the compact, rolling scenes that made
him famous. His familiarity with the Western European tradition of composition
as invented and perfected during the Renaissance is clear. The triangle of the cotton,
center front, is consciously repeated by the triangle of the central figures, this ar-
rangement owing as much ofa debt to Europe as the more radical experiments that
Benton disowned. The fact that he was taking his cue from an older European
system in no way either diminishes his debt or the accomplishment of this forceful
painting, although it does make more ironic the once hot argument about a truly
national art.
In July Hay the drawing is less pronounced, all the elements of the style are more
integrated, and the rich alternations of light and dark with their simplified, almost
sculptural modeling, are the work of a mature artist. The angularities of Cotton
Pickers, Georgia have been left behind; all is flow and rhythm, perhaps in the spirit
ofa latter-day Barbizon painter or of Millet. It is the nature of work rather than the
specific personalities of workmen that is conveyed. The men, the trees, the leaves,
the foreground insect are all given equal emphasis in their hard and massively
simplifying detail. Benton has presented us with a totally woven pattern, almost
tapestrylike in the identity of its elements and means.

J O H N S T E U A R T C U R R Y ' s ambition was to paint plainly and feelingly the

spirit of America, and toward the end of the nineteen-twenties, after studies in both
the United States and Paris, he began to produce the pictures that soon made him
a well-known figure in American art. Praising his esthetic, Thomas Hart Benton
said after Curry's death in 1946, "Curry never forgot that he came offa Kansas
farm, that his folks were plain Kansas folks whose lives were spent with the plain,
simple, elemental things of the earth and sky. His Art and the meanings of his Art
were never cut loose from the background. To this end his ideal was a Kansas
audience." This statement, with its combination of sincerity and studied simplicity
actually reveals as much about Benton as about Curry, and helps account for both
the directness and charm of their art and its slightly strained chauvinism. Curry
himself once admitted his feeling of discomfort at being categorized. "I learned that
I belonged to the Regional school of art," he said, "long after I had done the work
as I pleased, without once giving a thought to what 'school' it might fit."
His paintings John Brown and Wisconsin Landscape demonstrate the range of his
subject matter and his feeling for drama. In the first, an evocation of an historical
figure, Curry created an image that has become permanent in the American visual
memory. The second is an affectionate depiction ofa landscape that Curry came to
CURRY: John Brown, 1939. Oil on canvas 6 9 x 4 5 inches. Arthur H. Hearn Fund, 50.94.1
CURRY : Wisconsin Landscape, 1 938-1 939. Oil on canvas, 42 x 84 inches. George A. Hearn Fund,
42.154

know intimately during his years as artist in residence at the Agricultural College
of the University of Wisconsin. The American past relived and rural America
observed—this might be the formulation for the subject matter of the regionalists.
The John Brown is a preliminary study for the figure in Curry's The Tragic Prelude,
a mural the artist executed in the state capítol at Topeka, Kansas, in 1940. The
mural version shows Brown holding a Bible in his left hand and a rifle in his right.
The dramatic close-up of the painting, in which the outstretched arms are effectively
cut off, shows Brown looking like the popular conception of an Old Testament
prophet, perhaps Moses descending with the tablets of the Law. All the elements of
the composition are melodramatically effective, from the juxtaposed head of the
Negro to the tornado that echoes Brown's wrath. There is something magnificent
in the overstatement, the forceful and uncomplicated presentation of the theme and
its message that Americans are capable of righteous wrath when the cause is just.
Wisconsin Landscape, while presenting an utterly different kind of image, has some
of the sense of drama oí John Brown. Its theme is the harmony and beauty of one of
the most prosperous farm regions in the country, but there is a good deal here that
has nothing to do with serenity. The streaks of sunlight spreading over the fields not
only help to carry the eye back toward the horizon line but lead to the tension of
the clouds with their menace of rain. Curry, like Benton, portrayed aspects of indus-
trial America in some of his murals, but the true passion and energy of his work went
into his representations of rural America. Wisconsin Landscape, which won First
Purchase Prize in the Metropolitan Museum's Artists for Victory Exhibition in
1942, is a knowing and affectionate painting, a celebration of the land that is a pride
of America.
 GRANT WOOD 97

G R A N T W O O D painted as the most self-consciously primitive of the trained

artists of his generation. It is the technical mastery of his work, as well as the asperity
of comment in certain of his better-known paintings, that have made his reputation
secure. Although his subject matter and point of view are very different, the work
of Wood appeals to the popular imagination in much the way that the work of
Salvador Dali does. The magically represented exactness ofa reality that is height-
ened and exaggerated beyond the commonplace gives the viewer the feeling that he
is in the presence of painting that carries technique to its highest persuasiveness.
Wood's paintings are admired in part because they look so difficult to do. His
esthetic actually has much in common with that of his contemporaries of the
twenties and thirties who are often grouped as precisionists : Stuart Davis, Niles
Spencer, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Charles Sheeler. While the work of these painters
is generally more abstract, more contemporary in formal structure, they shared
with Wood the concentration on exactness of contour—the hard, sharp clarity—
that has been a major thread in the fabric of American art from the work of the
seventeenth-century limners through George Caleb Bingham in the nineteenth
century to Ellsworth Kelly in the nineteen-sixties. Wood asserted his relationship
to the precisionist esthetic in a statement dealing with his subject matter. "At first I
had difficulty in finding subject matter," he said. "I felt that I had to search for old

WOOD : Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, 1931. Oil on composition board,

30 x 40 inches. George A. Hearn Fund, 50.11 7
98 GRANT WOOD

things to paint—something soft and mellow. But now I had discovered a quality in
American newness." This attraction to what might be called the machine-tooled
aspect of America permeates all his best work and is what makes it most different
from that of his fellow regionalists.
Wood made four trips to Europe in the twenties. As it turned out, the most
important for his art was the one he made to Germany in 1928. It was in Munich
that he first became fully aware of the techniques of the Flemish and German
primitive painters. Not only their technique of glazing impressed him. He realized
that these painters had taken the ageless stories of the Bible and of mythology and
clothed them in contemporary costume and housed them in contemporary archi-
tecture and done this without any loss of power, indeed with an increase in im-
mediacy and conviction. Wood put the method to work in his Midnight Ride of Paul
Revere. This is far from an attempt at a historical reconstruction. The flooding light
within the houses, for example, is surely not of the Revolutionary period. But if the
scene is more timeless than archaeologically exact, Wood has also evoked the
tradition of naïve and clearly limned American primitive painting. Another lesson
that Wood learned in the German museums was aerial perspective. We see it put
to use to convey the dollhouse unreality of the scene (Wood had once worked
professionally as a constructor of miniature model houses). The compelling arti-
ficiality is further emphasized by the fact that everything is in perfect focus, from
the farthest stretch of road to the masonry of the chimneys in the foreground.

C H A R L E S B U R C H F I E L D , by his own word as well as his painting, must be

considered the least doctrinaire of the regionalists. " T h e American Scene, in its
more limited aspect," he has said, "has no more significance than any other subject
matter. While I feel strongly the personality of a given scene, its 'genius loci' as it
were, my chief aim in painting it is the expression ofa completely personal mood."
It is in the work of what might be called his middle period, that of the nineteen-
twenties and early thirties, that Burchfield is most obviously a regionalist. But he
is not out systematically to record the American landscape; he simply finds it the
objective starting point for the projection of his own mood and feeling. Of his
November Evening the artist has said: " I have tried to express the coming of winter
over the middle-west as it must have felt to the pioneers—great black clouds sweep
out of the west at twilight as if to overwhelm not only the pitiful attempt at a town,
but also the earth itself." With the houses looking almost deserted, suggesting some-
thing of the spurious reality ofa set for a Western movie, the painting convincingly
projects the familiar American theme of isolation and loneliness. Regionalist though
the picture may be in its programmatic aspects, stylistically it shows a relationship
BURCHFIELD : November Evening, 1934. Oil on canvas, 32% x 52 inches. George A. Hearn Fund,
34.43

to Burchficld's other more luxuriant manner in which he has painted his mysteri-
ously animated evocation of nature. We see the kinship in the overlapping brush-
work of the fields, the eccentric shapes of the clouds, the almost facelike house fronts.
The Coming of Spring, one of Burchficld's best-known works, bears the dates ig r 7—
1943, and they provide the link between his early work and that of the past two
decades. Burchfield's theme in this work and others has been characterized by
Lloyd Goodrich as "life in nature—the cycle of the seasons, the drama of death and
renewal, the miracle of growth, the moving pageant of weather, light and hour."
I n 1917 Burchfield had done a water color of two hollows, one still locked in winter,
the other showing the first signs of spring. Two years later he tried to overpaint it in
gouache, but put it aside as a failure. In 1933 he began a larger version of the
picture. Subsequently he concluded that what was necessary was to restore it com-
pletely to the 1917 manner and to paste strips of paper about the edges so that he
could add "the kind of elements I would have put in at that time, and in the same
manner." So, quite deliberately, Burchfield decided to resume his earlier, more
fanciful manner. A rejection of the public subject matter of the regionalists was
implied. Burchfield has summed up his own development thus: " T o me now, the
1920-40 period (roughly speaking) has been a digression, a necessary one, but not
truly in the main stream that I feel I am destined to travel. . . . During that middle
period I was searching for an appreciation of form and solidity and a painting
quality that the 1917 things lacked. Now, it seems to me, I am in clanger of painting
100 CHARLES BURCHFIELD

BURCHFIELD: The Coming of Spring, 1917-1 943. Water color on paper mounted on presswood,
34 x 48 inches. George A. Hearn Fund, 43.159.6

too realistically, and must try to recapture the first imaginative and romantic out-
look." Burchficld's animation of inanimate objects, so well epitomized in The
Coming of Spring, was to enter the American consciousness in a more generally
available form in the motion-picture cartoon style of the thirties, in which such
craftsmen as Walt Disney made all nature come alive with human sentiments.

The regionalists' decision to paint the life they knew intimately was a crucial one,
but in rejecting so many of the formal lessons and examples of the art of their time
they found it impossible to grow and change. Their first daring insight, the ap-
propriation of tried techniques to a mythic visual definition of America, was not
enough. Their inability to create a correspondingly fresh formal language made
much of their work stale and repetitive. Looking back, it is easy to see that a good
American painter need not be so quite self-conscious about his Americanism.
Chapter Five

Fourteenth Street: The City Scene

During the years that the regionalists were personifying America in its rural aspect,
other painters were continuing the Henri group's tradition of urban observation in
the cooler and more careful styles of the later day. While the painting of this group
cannot be thought of as constituting an homogeneous movement, the artists had in
common an awareness of the social forces at work in America, and they were all
keen observers of the city and its character. By remaining in touch with their vision
and their feelings, they created work that was less elevated and removed than the
regionalists' but more truly touching. The regionalists were the designers of the
American myth ; the New York painters, whom Milton Brown has identified as the
Fourteenth Street school, were interested in a more homely scene and art. As both
types of painting recede into the past, we see them as related manifestations of the
American desire in the twenties and thirties to establish a national identity.
Within their generally conservative technique the New York urbanists differed
widely in style. What they chiefly shared was their awareness of the emergence ofa
new sophistication in American life. What they recorded was not the ease and
self-assurance of an old aristocarcy but an America of vibrant contradictions. It was
with Henri and his followers that the observation of our twentieth-century urban
reality began; by the late twenties the complexity of this observation had increased
manyfold.

KENNETH H AY ES M I L L E R, the mentor of the Fourteenth Street school, was

also one of the most influential American art teachers of the twentieth century, his
career in this field extending from 1900 to 1951, the year before his death. Among
the first of his best-known students were George Bellows and Edward Hopper,
while those of later years included Alexander Brook, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Niles
Spencer, Peggy Bacon, and George Tooker. His Fourteenth Street group included
Reginald Marsh, Isabel Bishop, the three Soyer brothers (Raphael, Moses, and

101
102 KEN N E T H HAYES MILLER

MILLER : The Fitting Room, 1931. Oil on canvas, 28 x 34 inches. Arthur H. Hearn
Fund, 31.117

Isaac), and Morris Kantor. The name refers to Miller's and his followers' favorite
subject matter, the life of the New York streets, especially in the area of the city that
was near their studios. This was not the New York of Park Avenue, with its wealth
and composure, but the more vivid and turbulent New York of Greenwich Village
and its nearby Italian, Jewish, and Chinese communities. Miller's interest in the
area below Fourteenth Street was nothing new in American art ; Greenwich Village
had been a traditional center for American artists ever since the days of Albert
Pinkham Ryder, who began to paint there in the eighteen-nineties. The bohemian-
ism of the Village, with its acceptance of the artist's role and way of life, was as
stimulating and necessary to both the individuality and sense of community of the
artist in the nineteen-twenties as it continues to be in our own day for the abstract
expressionists. Looking about him one day on Fourteenth Street, Miller said, "This
is the greatest landscape in the world. It is made by man. Nature we cannot under-
stand." It was this involvement with the life the artist knew best, sometimes so-
phisticated, sometimes commonplace, but always interestingly observed, that Mil-
ler communicated to his students. But this was by no means all that he brought to
 KENNETH HAYES MILLER 103

his teaching. He followed Henri, both in his insistence on familiarity with the great
art of the past (Reginald Marsh remembered his saying, "Go to the Metropolitan.
I go each week.") and his insistence on a thorough knowledge of craft.
The Fitting Room is typical of Miller's work. In the reminiscence of a Judgment of
Paris or possibly of the Three Graces in the figures at the left, in the calm and balance
of the three arched panels, two of them mirrored, that control the space and back-
ground of the painting, and in the careful one-point perspective of the checkered
floor, we see Miller's respect for the art of the Renaissance. At the same time we note
a dated topicality in the fashions that so concern his ladies. This portrayal of the
ephemeral contrasts amusingly with the timelessness of the compositional sub-
structure. If there is some triviality and awkwardness in the drawing and character-
ization of the faces, there is compensating strength in the disposition of the figures
and the knowledgeability of the composition. The charm in much of Miller's best
work is that it remained somewhat clumsy and naïve despite his deep knowledge
of art.

R E G I N A L D M A R S H , following Miller's examples, brought a greater liveliness

and sense of life to his work. All the more colorful aspects of the city were his sub-
jects : the Bowery, the Third Avenue el, burlesque shows, the beach at Coney Island.
Shortly after Marsh's death in 1954, Edward Laning wrote in Art News: "Let
practical men like Mr. Moses clean up Coney Island, close the burlesque shows and
tear down the El. Hollywood will restore them all in pirated versions of Reginald
Marsh." Younger artists today, aware again of the city about them after more than
a decade of abstract expressionism, are turning to the work of Marsh, not for its
specific style or subject matter but for the exuberance and vitality with which he
invested the ordinary as well as the glamorous in the urban world about him.
During the period of his studies with John Sloan, George Luks, the anatomist
George Bridgman, and Miller, from 1920 to 1924, Marsh worked as an illustrator
for a number of New York magazines and newspapers. In his graphic reports of
events in courtrooms, night clubs, theaters, and the like, he became familiar with
his basic subject matter. A further season of study with Miller in 1927-1928 led
Marsh to say, " O n e of the greatest things that has happened to me is his guidance."
And as late as 1944 Marsh said of his teacher, " I still show him every picture I
make."
Marsh loved to walk in New York and he knew the city well. He also continued
throughout his career to draw from the model. These two absorbing interests, the
life of the citv and the exercise of his drawing hand, are combined in his advice,
"How to learn to draw? Go out into the street, stare at the people. Go into the
104 REGINALD MARSH

MARSH : The Bowery, 1 930. Oil on canvas, 48 x 36 inches. Arthur H. Hearn Fund, 32.81.2
 REGINALD MARSH 105

subway. Stare, stare, keep on staring. Go to your studio; stare at your pictures,
yourself, everything."
In The Bowery, a tempera of 1930, we see Marsh's characteristic emphasis on
drawing. The painting, while done early in the Depression, captures all the feeling
of the years that were to follow : the mood of despondency and isolation, the sense
of waiting for nothing that will ever happen, the timelessness that takes over when
hope is abandoned. Typical of Marsh, and seen in this picture, was his interest in
signs and posters as specific indicators. The strength of Marsh's appeal to the
younger painters of the nineteen-sixties lies partly in his mastery of the city as
subject, partly in his use of signs.
Marsh was able to invest his art with both the vitality of traditional drawing and
anatomy and an awareness of the energy that he observed about him. Fascinated
with the human figure, he left many notebooks of energetic and well-observed
anatomical drawings. It was this interest that led him to discover for art a hitherto
unexploited resource, Coney Island, where, as he wrote, "a million near-naked
bodies could be seen at once, a phenomenon unparalleled in history. . . . Crowds
of people in all directions, in all positions, without clothing, moving—like the great
compositions of Michelangelo and Rubens. I failed to find anything like it in
Europe." This reaction suggests the essence of Marsh's art. He presented specifically
American phenomena with the exuberance and the technical mastery ofa Renais-
sance draftsman.

G U Y PÈNE d u B O I S is an interesting minor artist whose work falls somewhere

between the realism of the Henri students Bellows and Hopper and the social
awareness of the Fourteenth Street painters, and in fact both Henri and Miller
were among du Bois's teachers. The artist chose as his principal subject the char-
acterization of the well-to-do. His technique, which at first showed a simplified
concentration on form, later became softer and Renoir-like. I n The Doll and the
Monster, painted in 1914, we find something of the melodrama and oversimplifica-
tion of the popular theater of the period: the theater oí East Lynne. The monster is a
wealthy lecher in formal dress, the doll a lady in evening gown, hugging a wall and
probably feigning innocence. By isolating and exaggerating a normal social en-
counter, du Bois has given it a satiric character and some drama as well. The surface,
smoothly painted with wide strokes of the brush, is in the Henri tradition. Royal
Cortissoz, a leading critic of this period, wrote of the wit and sympathy of du Bois's
work and asserted that he was following in the tradition of Daumier and Forain.
106

DU BOIS: The Doll and the Monster, 1914.

Oil on canvas, 20 x 1 5 inches. Gift of Mrs.
Harry Payne Whitney, 21.147

DU BOIS : Mr. and Mrs. Chester Dale Dining

Out, mid 1920s. Oil on canvas, 30 x 40 inches.
Gift of Chester Dale, 63.138.1
 GUY PÊNE DU BOIS 107

Through the twenties du Bois's powers as a social commentator continued to

grow. The forceful forms and energetic confrontation of his Mr. and Mrs. Chester
Dale Dining Out mark one of the high points of his career. Du Bois has here taken the
portrait out of its usual formal frontality and isolated his sitters in a conventional
situation. As in a painting by Edward Hopper, we are given a rather simplified
formal arrangement in a specific social setting, but with the personalities more
sharply etched, less generalized than they ever are in Hopper's work.

I S A B E L B I S H O P , who studied with both Reginald Marsh and Kenneth Hayes

Miller, has given us an art that is technically superb and deeply felt. Her technique
is careful—oil and tempera on wood panel—and she works slowly, producing
relatively little. Her feeling is quiet, somewhat introspective, never sentimental.
The art historian Milton Brown has written of her, "Interested, as are most of
Miller's protégés, in techniques, she has developed a method close to Rubens'
sketching style, with its transparent shadows and loaded lights." In the artist's
Two Girls we find the color and light ofa Rubens sketch, if not the heave and swell

BISHOP: Two Girls, 1935. Oil

and tempera on presswood, 20
x 24 inches. Arthur H. Hearn
Fund, 36.27

of Rubens' forms. The scene, costume, and anecdote (the discussion ofa letter over
tea) are all kept simple, concentrating our attention on the two almost identical
women. They might almost be one person, seen simultaneously in full face and
profile. Isabel Bishop's drawings and paintings are generally more acutely observed
108 ISABEL BISHOP

and far more finished than the work of her teacher Miller. In Two Girls, after the
careful build-up of layers of tempera, we find that she has worked with pencil lines,
as in the blouse of the nearer woman, giving directness to the studied character.
While her subjects are often of the Fourteenth Street milieu, the quintessential
elements in Isabel Bishop's work are her sensitivity and technical mastery.

BOUCHÉ : Ten Cents a Ride, 1 942. Oil on canvas, 45 x 30 inches. George

A. Hearn Fund, 42.157
 LOUIS BOUCHÉ 109

L O U I S B O U C H É , after studying in Paris and later in New York, his birthplace,

first exhibited in 1917. Over the years he continued a methodical way of working,
first making a careful diagrammatic drawing of his subject on tracing paper and
later, in his studio, transferring the subject to canvas. The care in preparation and
execution are evident in his Ten Cents a Ride, a hard and impressive view of the side
aisle of a ferry, softened somewhat by the sensitivity with which the fall of light is
depicted. The perspective lines of the wall on the left and the bench at the right lead
inevitably through the half arch at the center. By reversing the usual humanist
concentration on figures and landscape, Bouché has made the aisle the subject of
the picture, rather than what we will see when we get out on deck. This painting,
which has all the naturalness and charm of Bouché's best work, was awarded Third
Prize in the Metropolitan Museum's Artists for Victory Exhibition in 1942. It
continues to be one of the most popular canvases in the Museum's collection of
modern American painting.

R A P H A E L S O Y E R i s a more obviously sentimental painter than Isabel Bishop.

His sympathy for the people he paints is enormous, and he puts the poetry they
evoke in him into each of his paintings. Of the evolution of this style the painter's
brother Moses has written (speaking of their student days at the National Academy
in the nineteen-twenties) : "Times were different then. There was hardly any art
movement of importance in New York. We were taught that Sargent was the world's
greatest painter. Trick lighting and clever painting was our goal. We knew nothing
of Homer, Eakins, Ryder." And Raphael himself has written, " I t is interesting to
me now as I look back at all these years, to realize that as soon as I left the Academy,
I made a conscious effort to forget everything I learned there." When the Soyer
brothers began casting about for their own direction, they produced pictures,
Raphael has written, of "slightly Pascinish character (at that time considered the
height of sophistication)." It was finally the study of Degas (who of course was
partly behind Pascin's style) that enabled Raphael Soyer to find his manner. Degas
was for him "worldly, analytical, refined, the antithesis of everything naïve."
Girl in White Blouse expresses the feelings of sadness and poetry that are the es-
sentials of Soyer's art. He has said, "If the art of painting is to survive it must describe
and express people, their lives and their times. It must communicate." And,
obviously, what it must communicate is the artist's feelings through his subject.
While we cannot speak of any specific social message in Girl in White Blouse, it is
saturated with the attitudes of inner burden and brave passivity, conveyed in the
girl's stance, the choice and state of her clothes and shoes, her generally uncoquct-
110 RAPHAEL SOYER

tish aspect. The painting speaks of New York's Lower East Side, of the immigrant
generation at sea in a culture that can neither be ignored nor totally accepted, of
the general misery of the Depression years. It is a simple, moving statement.

SOYER: Girl in White

Blouse, 1932. Oil on
canvas, 38 x 21 % inches.
George A. Hearn Fund,
33.107
Chapter Six

The Social Realists

One of the innovations in American painting of the nineteen-thirties was an identi-

fication with social protest. While criticisms of injustice, economic inequities, and
racial discrimination were nothing new in American society, the expressions of such
criticism in art had largely been confined during the first two decades of the century
to drawings in left-wing political journals. With the onset of the Depression a
number of gifted young painters began to crusade through their pictures on behalf
of the Americans who appeared not to have an effective voice of their own : the
dispossesed, the exploited, the unwanted. It was no coincidence that this artistic
protest developed during the worst and most extended depression this country
has known.
The brave and vital mural paintings of the Mexican artists José Clemente
Orozco and Diego Rivera served most immediately as the liberating factor in the
approach of the American painters. Orozco's murals at Dartmouth College in
New Hampshire, Pomona College in California, and the New School for Social
Research in New York City, and Rivera's murals in San Francisco, Detroit, and
in the newly built Rockefeller Center in New York City all did much to challenge
American imaginations and make the artistic representation of social criticism
acceptable.
While a number of the Americans of the nineteen-thirties who turned to social
themes produced work of permanent interest, it is worth noting that the painting
itself, like so much other painting of the period, was quite traditional. The radicality
was in the subject matter, which came as a strong contrast to the rather blank mate-
rial of the academic painting of the twenties. The painters' desire to communicate
their impatience with the social and economic structure of the world gave rise to the
term social realism: social, because the painting was aware of the problems of
society; realism, because the technique was always literal enough to make the
artists' specific feelings and meanings clear to all.
The mood of the social realists has been aptly caught by Jack Levine in speaking
of his own painting: " I took my place in the late 30's as part of the general uprising
of social consciousness in art and literature. It was part of the feeling that things

111
112 THE SOCIAL REALISTS

were going the right way; we were all making a point . . . we had a feeling of con-
fidence about our ability to do something about the world." Today, the assumption
that the world can be changed through the awareness and education that art
provides no longer seems quite so sound as it did when this kind of painting was
new. Yet the commitment of these painters to the understanding and description
of the situation of the less privileged, their identification with the economically,
racially, and socially oppressed, places them in a special relation to the art of their
time. In a period of art for art's sake, they stood somewhat alone in their dedication
to art for society's sake.

BEN S H A H N , who became one of the best known of the protest painters of the
thirties, is, with his arresting visual images, an artist of power, deep feeling, and
consistent concern for the better world that might be. His bitterly incisive Sacco-
Vanzetti and Tom Mooney paintings, done in the late twenties and early thirties,
were like the crack ofa whip after the relatively uncommitted painting being done
by, say, the Fourteenth Street artists and such contemporary figurative painters as
Speicher, Kroll, and Karfiol. " I hate injustice," Shahn once said, in explaining his
point of view. " I guess that's about the only thing I really do hate . . . and I hope
to go on hating it all my life." It is this anger, controlled by a sense of irony, that is
always present in his best work.

SHAHN : Death of a Miner, 1949. Tempera on muslin-covered panel, 27 x 48 inches. Arthur H.

Hearn Fund, 50.77
 BENSHAHN 113

His painting is of its time, not only in its themes but in some of its stylistic elements.
He learned his nervous, skipping line, for example, from the drawing of Paul Klee.
(Another artist of the period, Saul Steinberg, put Klee's line to very different use.)
But while Shahn's drawing is of the twentieth century, his technique as a painter is
of another time. " I like painting that is light and clear and under control," he has
said. "That's why I use tempera instead of oil. . . . Of the old masters I like . . .
Giotto and the Florentines." (A similar interest in the Italian masters left its mark
in the work of Yasuo Kuniyoshi.) The frequent distortion and stunting of Shahn's
human forms, a device that makes them both pathetic and powerful, is another
reminder of Shahn's study of early Italian painting.
Shahn's characteristic line and his figure distortion are amply evident in his
Death of a Miner, his comment on the disaster at Centraba, Pennsylvania, in 1948.
Typically, he does not attempt a panorama of all that happened. He concentrates
instead on an individual death and its relationship to the fire that caused it and the
grief that it caused. The painting is as forceful and poignant as the disaster was
shocking and senseless. The facelessness of the miner and of most of his mourners
emphasizes the general nature of the tragedy.

JACK LEVINE, another of the important social painters, began the serious study
of drawing in 1927, at the age of twelve. His teacher was Denman Ross, a professor
of art at Harvard University. Levine's surviving work of this time, together with
that of Hyman Bloom, another of Ross's young students, is astonishingly fresh and
technically competent. It is a tribute both to their teacher and to their own in-
tegrity that Levine and Bloom moved away from the technical proficiency of their
student days with Ross into the unfashionable and personal art they separately
developed.
The liveliness of Levine's handling of paint and his selection of subjects from a
wide spectrum of American experience make him not only one of the most interest-
ing figurative painters of his generation but an acute commentator on aspects of
our national life. His String Quartette, begun in 1934 when he was nineteen, and
finished in 1937, is an amazingly controlled and fully realized work, the painting
of an artist already mature. The center of the composition is the white music paper,
around which the musicians give the appearance of doing a ritual dance. The play
between focus and dissolved indistinctness in a single painting is the hallmark of
Levine's style. His figures are seen with clarity, yet through a haze of beautifully
handled paint. Levine has talked of being influenced by Soutine and Rouault, El
Greco and Rembrandt, and we can see all of these influences, although they have
been assimilated and made to work in a new way. But it is the late Titian, the Titian
114 JACK LEVINE

LEVINE : String Quartette, 1943-1947. Tempera and oil on composition board, 47% x 67% inches.
Arthur H. Hearn Fund, 42.156

Opposite :
LEVINE: Medicine Show, 1955-1956. Oil on canvas, 7 2 x 6 3 inches. Gift of Hugo Kastor, 56.233

of the Ecce Homo in the St. Louis City Museum and of the Christ Crowned with Thorns
in the Munich Pinakothek, to whom Levine is closest in execution.
The sharp observation of String Quartette becomes more astringent in Levine's
later work. While the earlier painting captures the posturing of the musicians, it
also celebrates them, but in The Medicine Show the attitude is openly satiric. The
details—the sailor on leave, the chic young woman in sunglasses, the showman's
brass band, the all but naked lady assistant, the dominating presence of the huckster
—add up to an effective statement about man's willingness to deceive and to be
deceived. Levine has written of this painting, "This tableau while (I hope) plausible,
is not based on any situation seen recently. It is based partly on memory, partly on
rule, and somewhat on fantasv."
P H I L I P E V E R G O O D , one of whose teachers in America (he also studied art in
England and France) was the early realist George Luks, shares Shahn's acute
social sense and hatred of injustice. Like Shahn, too, he uses a vivid palette and
projects his stories by means of line, often superimposed on the color. He differs by
having more ofa sense of personal fantasy than Shahn. If Shahn reacts most often
in a personal way to a public event or condition, Evergood seems to be more con-
cerned with what he has described as "a world full of mystery, movement and excite-
116 PHILIP EVERGOOD

EVERGOOD :Her World,

1 948. Oil on canvas, 48 x
35% inches. Arthur H. Hearn
Fund, 50.29

ment." His painting Her World, he has said, is "a figure piece, not intended as a
portrait ofa particular Negro child but using this figure to symbolize the tragedy of
isolation and prejudice." Evergood has also said, " I feel very conscious when I
develop a theme that it must have universal connotations before I want to put it
down in paint." In Her World the girl leans on the fence that is the limit of her
family's land, or more likely the land on which her parents are tenants. She stares
beyond her world to a wider one, and behind her the known world of her experience
shrinks. This is a tender work, not necessarily about the condition of an individual
child, or about the Negro, but about youth in general and the natural desire to
extend the boundaries of experience.
 GEORGE GROSZ 117

G E O R G E G R O S Z , who came to the United States from Germany in 1932, ar-

rived at both his style and his view of the contemporary world through an entirely
different set of circumstances than Shahn, Levine, or Evergood. A gifted caricaturist
before he was twenty, Grosz had gone through World War I as an infantryman, an
experience that left him filled with a horror of war itself and all its attendant
phenomena. By 1918 he was an important member of the Berlin dada group. If the
aims of the dadaists were sometimes obscure, it is clear that one of the reactions
which brought them together was their conviction of the absurdity of war. Grosz's
strength as an artist during these years was in his ability to pinpoint in ferocious
imagery the depravity of life in postwar Berlin: the general with his sword lifted to
destroy, the gloating black marketeer, the prostitute dressed up and empty, all the
period's victims and victimizers. Of Grosz's contemporaries, only the playwright
Bertolt Brecht matched him in capturing with such accuracy the raucous anguish
of the time.
Berlin Street dates from near the end of Grosz's experiences in Germany. The
composition is fragmented, the planes interpenetrating in the cubist manner, but
the edges of the forms are softer than they were earlier in Grosz's work, and an
interest in the varied textures of the surface is becoming apparent. In a typical Grosz
confrontation a beggar extends his cap to an unpleasantly elegant, gangsterlike

GROSZ: Berlin Street, about 1931. Oil on

canvas, 32 x 23% inches. Hugo Kastor
Fund, 63.220
118 GEORGE GROSZ

couple. In response, the man may be reaching for money; the gesture is not clear.
In the background, as a symbolic contrast to the beggar, we see a chef, wine, and
beer.
After Grosz came to the United States and became an American citizen, he
found himself unable to maintain the high pitch of his observant satire. " I never
wanted to become a caricaturist," he once said, as if to account for the ruthless
force of his more characteristic work. "Events forced me into it, almost against my
will." In time, Grosz's American painting was to show his hatred of the Nazis and
his reactions to events of World War I I , but in this return to his earlier themes we
see a gentler treatment, a more generalized surface. The very circumstances that
inspired the social painting of Shahn, Levine, and Evergood were such an improve-
ment over what Grosz had known in Berlin that the bite of his work inevitably
relaxed.
Chapter Seven

Primitives and Naïves

Interest in the self-taught artist, the artist completely out of the mainstream of the
art of his time, is basically a twentieth-century phenomenon. It is an obvious result
of the systematization of the history of art, the attempt to find a scientific, historical
basis to the sequence of art styles and movements. With the late nineteenth century
came a categorization of art, primarily German at first. It became clear that there
were data (works of art) that did not fit the schema (recognized styles of a given
period). These, then, could be grouped conveniently into still another schema,
primitive art. Thus, part of the impetus to establish the primitive artist was simply
the need to tidy the field.
The term primitive is applied by the highly cultured Western European tradition
to any art that does not express the canons of the highest stylistic periods, the periods
that we have come to call classic. Early Greek sculpture, the painting of the early
Renaissance, the art of Africa and the South Sea Islands are all called primitive. In
American art, within our own period of great formal sophistication and persuasive
sequence of styles, we give the name to paintings we cannot account for in any more
sophisticated way, and which yet cannot be dismissed because of the force of the
response they evoke.
The American primitive artist, in our self-conscious age, is often one who has
been schooled and has then intentionally forgotten his lessons. Such matters as the
jettisoning of one-point perspective and the ignoring of the diminution in size of
distant forms can be deliberate, just as they can be the result of naïveté.

L O U I S E I L S H E M I U S i s a n example of a primitive artist who abandoned his

training. He studied academic painting, first at the Art Students League in New
York, beginning in 1884, and later at the Académie Julien in Paris, and his paint-
ings of the eighteen-nineties are well-mannered, sensitively effective impressionist
pictures of American landscapes. The compulsion of his personal vision, a combina-
tion of the idyllic and the fantastic, began to take over somewhat later. His Haunted

119
120 LOUIS EILSHEMIUS

House, probably painted in 1917, is a subtle yet naïve evocation ofa mood through
landscape. Based on a sketch Eilshemius had made in New Zealand in 1901, it has
the look o f a post-card picture reseen and reinterpreted. The road diminishes into
the distance as it should in an academic landscape, and the house is drawn cor-
rectly, yet there is an air of mystery and simplicity in this painting. Much detail has
been eliminated. The strong and striking tree at the right confirms the artist's
ability to reject what was unusable from his training. The rounded corners of the
painted frame—a device favored by Eilshemius—help to make the picture seem
more distant as well as to remove it from the convention of the picture window. In
effect, we feel that we are looking at a picture ofa picture.
New York at Night, probably painted at about the same time as The Haunted House,
is similar to it in composition. A street instead ofa road cuts across the picture at the
same angle, a building looms at the right instead ofa tree, a streetcar occupies the
position of the house, and distant streets are equivalent to the mountains. In both
pictures the sky is dominant. The mood in the second picture, however, is dramatic
rather than lyrical. The moon and the street lamp illumine a curiously restless scene,
the figures and their shadows only momentarily frozen, the main figure stepping
 LOUIS EILSHEMIUS 121

Opposite :
EILSHEMIUS : The Haunted House,
about 1917. Oil on cardboard, 30 x
39% inches. George A. Hearn Fund,
37.41

EILSHEMIUS: New York at Night,

about 1917. Oil on cardboard
mounted on masonite, 28 x 22%
inches. Lent by Adelaide Milton de
Groot, L 52.24.152

gingerly forward, behind him a couple walking away arm in arm. The scene comes
close to telling a story or to illustrating a familiar theme, but we cannot quite iden-
tify either one.
Work such as this led to two distinct periods of acclaim for its creator. In 1917
Marcel Duchamp and the American artists Gaston Lachaise, Joseph Stella, and
Abraham Walkowitz hailed Eilshemius as an important painter when he showed
in the juryless Independents exhibition. But while a few critics discussed his paint-
ings seriously, and a few collectors bought them, to the general art audience his work
remained obscure. Then in the nineteen-thirties the eccentricity of his personality
and his ardent self-publicity led to the belated rediscovery of his work. As so often
happens, recognition came too late, for by the time interest was mounting, the old
man had slipped too far into his persecution fantasies to appreciate his audience.
Commenting on the tragedy of Eilshemius' failure to find his public at the right
time, Marcel Duchamp called his paintings "the expression o f a subtle America"
and declared that "he was a poet and painted like one, but his lyricism was not
related to his time and expressed no definite period. . . . His allegories were not
based on accepted legends."
122

KANE : The Monongahela Valley, 1 931. Oil on canvas, 28 x 35 inches. Lent by

Adelaide Milton de Groot, L 52.24.166

J O H N KANE, born in Scotland in i860, came to the United States when he

was nineteen and worked first as a miner, and later, when he went to live in Pitts-
burgh, as a street paver, carpenter, and house painter. He wanted to attend art
schools but could never afford the fees. By the time he was fifty, he had made him-
self into an accomplished painter. In 1924 he tried to exhibit, submitting a painting
to Pittsburgh's Carnegie International Exhibition. It was rejected, and his luck
was no better in succeeding tries until 1927, when the painter Andrew Dasburg, a
member of the jury, not only got Kane's painting admitted but bought it himself.
From that moment Kane's reputation began to grow.
Kane's work is sharper and more frontal, more direct than that of Eilshemius.
The concern for atmosphere, the technical ability to portray softness of mood, are
legacies from Eilshemius' schooling; nothing so poetically sophisticated infuses the
work of the self-taught artist.
The vitality of Kane's vision is fully evident in his Monongahela Valley. While there
is some diminution of the forms in the distance, there is no diminution in the clarity
and hardness of edge of his distant buildings, hills, and smokestacks. Kane paints
as a child draws, not so much what he can see as that which he knows to be there.
Thus we are given more visual information about his scene than we could possibly
get from a view of the original. Kane himself was quite aware of this. "No camera
was ever constructed to get the view of objects that I, as artist, see in paint," he said.
 JOHN KANE 123

Such painters as Charles Sheeler and Charles Demuth are cool and withdrawn
in the face of industry; Kane is involved. Presenting the wonder and power of the
industrial scene in The Monongahela Valley, he has managed to unify a tremendous
complexity of curves, diagonals, and uprights. Kane's accurate and touching sum-
mary of his artistic creed is much to the point here: " I think a painting has a right
to be as exact as a joist or a mould or any other part of building construction. I think
the artist owes it to people to make his painting as right and as sound as he can
make it."
His Tightness and soundness are again evident in From My Studio Window. The
visual impact of an industrial valley is complex, and Kane loaded that complexity
into his small painting; the city, on the other hand, is crowded and close, and with
an additive simplicity Kane expressed that closeness. Thanks to the research work
of Sidney Janis, whose study of Kane appears in his book They Taught Themselves, we
know that the artist combined two views to give the required sense of pile-up. The
row of two- and three-story houses was opposite his front windows, the skyscrapers
were visible from his side windows. Kane's technical means were as simple and
forthright as his attitude, and he produced paintings of great control and power.

KANE: From My Studio Window, 1932. Oil on canvas, 22% x 37% inches. Lent by Adelaide Milton
de Groot, L 52.24.165
124 HORACE PIPPIN

H O R A C E P I P P I N drew for years as a self-taught artist and then, at the age of

forty-two, he began to paint. His work has a naïve charm, although it seems
rather delicate after the work of Kane. Victorian Interior, done the year before Pippin
died, is, in its heraldic simplicity, typical of his best painting. It also shows us key
traits of the primitive esthetic. The forms are isolated and shown as dark against a
light background, as if to insist on their uniqueness, and they are positioned to
present their most characteristic aspect—the chairs with their antimacassars and
the table with its dominant flower arrangement, facing front, the two pitchers on
the bookcase, placed in profile, back to back. Typical, too, is the balance of the
symmetrically placed paintings and the small table and lamp counterweighting
the bookcase. In the late nineteen-thirties, from his home in West Chester, Penn-
sylvania, Pippin began to visit the Barnes Foundation in Merion, and it is probably
to his familiarity with the foundation's great collection of Matisses that we can
attribute the beautifully painted rug in Victorian Interior, with its bright red flowers
and green arabesques.

PIPPIN : Victorian Interior, 1946. Oil on canvas, 25% x 30 inches. Arthur H. Hearn
Fund, 58.26
 ANNA MARY ROBERTSON MOSES 125

MOSES: Thanksgiving Tur-

key, 1943. Oil on composi-
tion board, 15% x 19% inches.
Bequest of Mary Stillman
Harkness, 50.145.375

A N N A M A R Y R O B E R T S O N M O S E S , first known in the artworldas Mother

Moses and later as Grandma Moses, began to paint regularly in 1927, when she
was sixty-seven. Part of the popularity of her work is to be accounted for by its
reminders of an older, less complicated America, and part, surely, by the picture
she herself presented of an aged farm widow making a triumphant success of her
self-taught skill. Her statement "Painting is a pleasant hobby, if one does not have
to hurry" has a winning lack of pretension. It is also worth noting that this variant
of the American success story caught the public's interest at the moment when folk
art and primitive art were coming strongly to general notice. Grandma Moses'
Thanksgiving Turkey has all the childlike clumsiness, especially in the drawing, that
we expect in the work of the self-taught, but it also has something more: imagina-
tion in the placing of the people and turkeys in profile, and wit in the treatment of
the half-concealed hound. If her work is slight and repetitive, it charms through its
innocent sentiment and overall air of quiet dignity.

FLO RI NE S T E T T H E I ME R's art, in its delicacy, femininity, and individuality,

is almost unclassifiable. It is the work of a socially sophisticated artist with an
essentially innocent vision. Her technique is somewhat naïve, her figures are slight
and attenuated, and her palette is sweet pastel. Yet these were conscious choices,
for the artist had received training at the Art Students League in New York and
had studied the old masters in the museums of Europe. As in the case of Eilshemius,
126 FLORINE STETTHEIMER

we are confronted with an artist who was aware of the art around her but went her
own independent, imaginative, unfashionable way. The subject matter was limited
almost entirely to the celebration of the artist's family (her mother and her sisters)
and her close circle of friends. Because these friends included most of the notable
presences in the New York art world, Stettheimer's paintings now constitute a
unique visual record of this world from 1915, when the first of her characteristic
work was done, to 1944, the year of her death. The artist had only one show during
her lifetime, in 1916. When it was suggested that she might sell her pictures, the
critic Henry McBride tells us, "She used to smile and say that she liked her pictures
herself and preferred to keep them."
The Cathedrals of Art, painted in 1942 and left unfinished, presents a lively, witty,
and most sophisticated view of art officialdom. When the painting was included in
the Museum of Modern Art's Stettheimer retrospective exhibition in 1946, Henry
McBride provided this identification of the figures: " I n the foreground, left and
right : Compère and Commère, Robert Locher and the artist. On the left, at the
foot of the column inscribed 'Art in America' : A. Everett Austin, J r . ; and behind
him on the right, Julien Levy and R. Kirk Askew, Jr., and on the left, with hand
flung up, Pavel Tchelitchew. Seated in the upper left corner amid paintings by
Picasso, Mondrian and Rousseau : Alfred H. Barr, Jr. The painting in the rear is by
Frans Hals whom the artist admired. Standing in the upper right, in front of a
sculpture figure by Gertrude Vanderbilt is Juliana Force. Lower right, at the foot
of the column inscribed 'American Art,' with small flags marked Stop and Go:
Henry McBride. Left of the column : Monroe Wheeler and two unidentified figures.
Center foreground, adored by an anonymous female art lover, an infant personify-
ing the state of the arts in this country, in an effulgence of spotlights, being photo-
graphed by George Piatt Lynes. On steps: left, Alfred Stieglitz; right, holding a
bust by Elie Nadelman, Marie Sterner. At the head of the stairs, with children :
Francis Henry Taylor and Harry B. Wehle."
In retrospect, Stettheimer's work increases in strength and interest. Paintings
that seemed merely eccentric during the artist's lifetime have turned out to be
prophetic of a concern with Americana that is shared by a number of painters in
the nineteen-sixties. The movie screen in her Cathedrals of Broadway, and the Statue
of Liberty, the American flag, and the Caruso poster that appear in other paintings
are making this art once again relevant.
 FLORINE STETTHEIMER 127

STETTHEIMER : Cathedrals of Art, 1942. Oil on canvas, 60% x 50% inches. Gift of Ettie Stettheimer,
53.24.1
Chapter Eight

The Hard Edge: Industrial and Abstract

The clean, concentrated, hard-edged picture, a stylistic possibility for American

painters ever since the days of the colonial limners, has been a strong native current
during the past forty years. Cool and controlled, its emotion is hidden but none the
less moving for that. One is tempted to consider it as classical in comparison with
the more romantic work of Sargent, Henri, Hartley, and the abstract expressionists,
theirs being a painting in which the brushing, the personal handwriting, absorbs
much of the energy of the artist and interest of the viewer. However, this dichotomy
of styles is always handier and neater in theory than in fact. Regardless of their ob-
jective, restrained, cleanly articulated images, surely Charles Demuth's and Charles
Sheeler's admiring depictions of American industrial power convey a strongly
personal, even a romantic sense of celebration, as do Georgia O'Keeffe's sharply
focused and moving examinations of natural forms.
We cannot speak of a school of hard-edge or clean-contour painting, although
such labels as precisionist and cubist-realist describe certain links between some of
the artists to be discussed here. Rather than a program common to their work, there
is a shared attitude toward reality, an imposition of order on a world others perceive
as chaotic, a searching out ofa rationally ordered basis for visual phenomena. The
opposition between the controlled and the freely expressive is old, and the choice
between them is open in each generation, no matter what the dominant style.
Rubens and Poussin, Delacroix and Ingres are the famous examples of men who
worked in the same generation in what appeared at the time to be opposed manners,
but who are seen in retrospect to share characteristics. Both views of the universe,
the one in which we control, the other in which we follow our emotions, seem to be
necessary. The appreciation of only one at the expense of the other, whichever is the
decision, means the rejection of much great art.

128
 129

O'KEEFFE: Drawing No. 13, 1916. Charcoal

on paper, 24%x18% inches. Alfred Stieglitz
Collection, 50.236.2

G E O R G I A O'KEEFFE is a painter we may not immediately associate with

Charles Demuth and Charles Sheeler, or with Josef Albers and Ellsworth Kelly,
but she shares with the first two an observation of the physical world in cool and
precise terms, and with the second two an interest in invented forms and geometry.
Her style might be called a personal, invented, nature-inspired geometry. She knew
from her youngest years that she would be an artist, but her early training, both at
the Art Institute of Chicago and in New York at the Art Students League, made her
technically proficient and at the same time discouraged her. She has said, concern-
ing this period in her life, that she could not paint a better Hals than Hals, and that
this was all her teachers had trained her to do. It was only later, through the inspira-
tion of Arthur Wesley Dow, a student of the Orientalist Ernest Fenellosa, that the
possibility ofa personal statement was opened to her. At Teachers College, Colum-
bia University, Dow stirred O'Keeffe with such ideas as, "Art is decadent when
designers and painters lack inventive power and merely imitate nature or the crea-
tion of others. Then comes realism, conventionality, and the death of art. . . . The
Japanese know no such divisions as representative or decorative; they conceive of
painting as the art of two dimensions; as art in which roundness and nature-imita-
tion are subordinate to the flat relations." Today, Dow's teachings read almost as
an appreciation of the special qualities in O'Keeffe's work: " T h e first step is the
drawing of lines as the boundaries of shapes ; in the making of these lines there is
opportunity for great beauty of proportion and a powerful, vital touch." Dow also
suggested and anticipated O'Keeffe's working method when he said that in Oriental
art "the same theme appears again and again with a new beauty, with different
130

O'KEEFFE: Black Iris, 1926. Oil

on canvas, 36 x 29% inches.
Alfred Stieglitz Collection,
L 49.37.4

quality and complex accompaniments." O'Keeffe has almost always stayed with a
theme through enough paintings to indicate the many possible ways of seeing and
experiencing it.
It was in 1915, in Texas, that O'Keeffe began the series of drawings that was to
free both her hand and her imagination. A friend in New York to whom she sent
the drawings showed them to Alfred Stieglitz, and he was so moved by their origi-
nality and power that he exhibited them. At the time he made his famous remark,
hitting off O'Keeffe's strongly feminine but unsweet, unsentimental, talent:
"Finally a woman on paper."
Drawing No. iß is one of the group that Stieglitz exhibited. If it retains vestiges of
landscape elements, it is, in its extreme verticality and opposition of jagged with
flowing and rounded forms, as much of an invention and an abstraction as anything
the artist ever did.
A statement O'Keeffe wrote in 1923 for an exhibition of her work shines with the
special qualities of her mind and spirit: " I grew up pretty much as everybody else
grows up and one day seven years ago found myself saying to myself—I can't live
where I want to—I can't go where I want to—I can't do what I want to—I can't
even say what I want to—Schools and things that painters have taught me even
keep me from painting as I want to. I decided I was a very stupid fool not to at
 GEORGIA O'KEEFFE 131

least paint as I wanted to and say what I wanted to when I painted as that seemed
to be the only thing I could do that didn't concern anybody but myself." This at-
titude of isolation and individuality not only characterizes O'Keeffe's work but
much of the most forceful and original painting that America has produced in
this century.
After O'Keeffe and Stieglitz were married, in 1924, she began to paint her series
of close-ups of flowers, of which Black Iris and Black Flower and Blue Larkspur, with
their controlled lushness and sensitive strength, are representative. Later, there was
some speculation about the influence of the photography of the twenties on this
work. But while sharp focus, two-dimensional control, and extreme enlargement
are evident in much of O'Keeffe's best work, it would seem that she was as much of
an innovator in these matters as any photographer. She herself, during an interview,
offered an explanation that sheds a partial light on the matter: "I'll tell you how I
happened to make the blown-up flowers. In the twenties, huge buildings sometimes
seemed to be going up overnight in New York. At that time I saw a painting by
Fantin-Latour, a still-life with flowers I found very beautiful, but I realized were
I to paint the same flowers so small, no one would look at them because I was un-

O'KEEFFE : Black Flower and

Blue Larkspur, 1929. Oil on
canvas, 36 x 30 inches. George
A. Hearn Fund, 34.51
known. So I thought I'll make them big like the huge buildings going up. People
will be startled; they'll have to look at them—and they did." This statement com-
bines and conceals a self-mockery and an ironic attitude toward the interviewer and
the art public, an amalgam we have become familiar with in public statements by
other artists, notably Picasso. In inception, such pictures as Black Iris and Black
Flower and Blue Larkspur had nothing to do with worldly ambition. They are ob-
viously the vision of an artist compelled to do paintings, and only later, after they
proved important to people who look at paintings, did they have to be discussed in
intellectualizing terms. It is this that O'Keeffe found amusing.
In Cow's Skull; Red, White, and Blue O'Keeffe presents us with a symbol of her
 GEORGIA O'KEEFFE 133

favorite landscape, that of northern New Mexico. (She has spoken of the desert as
"the same big wonderful thing that oceans and the highest mountains are.") The
skull is emblematic and mysterious at the same time that it is lucid and clearly
present as form and painting. Behind the skull the canvas is divided into vertical
bands of color—the kind of abstract simplification that makes O'Keeffe's work
appealing to many much younger abstractionists.
White Canadian Barn, No. 2, painted on a trip to Canada in 1932, has the clarity
of the pictures previously discussed but in still greater focus. The relationship in
tones and planes to photography is particularly clear. The structure's cool, hand-

Opposite :
O'KEEFFE: Cow's Skull : Red, White, and Blue, 1931. Oil on canvas, 39% x 35% inches. Alfred
Stieglitz Collection, 52.203

O'KEEFFE : White Canadian Barn No. 2 A 932. Oil on canvas, 12 x 30 inches. Alfred Stieglitz
Collection, L 49.37.10

some horizontality, punctuated by the open doors, makes this as close to an abstrac-
tion of rectilinear forms as the painter's adherence to what she sees will allow.
Changes of style in American painting have not affected O'Keeffe. She has
continued to paint in her own manner. Her stature as an individualist, loyal to her
vision and to the integrity of her art, becomes more rather than less relevant as our
art continues to change.

C H A R L E S DEM UT H, during a career whose maturity lasted only twenty years,

produced a body of work that continues to make him an admired artist. As a person
he was also admired. " H e had a curious smile," Marcel Duchamp wrote in tribute,
"reflecting an incessant curiosity for every manifestation life offered. An artist
134 CHARLES DEMUTH

DEMUTH : Bermuda No. 1—Tree and

House, 1917. Water color on paper,
10x13% inches. Alfred Stieglitz
Collection, 49.70.55

r
«ïçr'it *r
y

DEMUTH : Bermuda No. 2—the

Schooner, 1917. Water color on paper,
1 0 x 1 3% inches. Alfred Stieglitz
Collection, 49.70.56

worthy of the name, without the pettiness that afflicts most artists; worshipping his
inner self without the usual eagerness to be right. Demuth was one of the few artists
whom all other artists liked as a real friend, a rare case indeed."
Characteristic of Demuth's art are its combinations of delicacy and strength,
personal observation and formal preconception. The precision of his water-color
technique was apparent in his first notable works, the series of illustrations he did
in 1915 and 1916 for Zola's Nana. Wintering in Bermuda in 1917, he painted the
water colors Bermuda No. 1, Tree and House and Bermuda No. 2, the Schooner. In both
we see a fragile yet forceful structuring through futurist beams of light. The areas
of color are quite freely handled, and it is the contrast between the rigidity of the
structure and the looseness of the water-stained paper that creates much of the
pictures' charm. The schooner and the house are man-made; the air and the light,
the trees, water, and sky are not. Demuth contrasts the two, the man-made as
controlled, the natural as free.
 CHARLES DEMUTH 135

In Machinery we find Demuth concerned exclusively with the man-made; con-

sequently all is hard and in focus. If there is some sensibility in the brushed areas,
we become aware of it only slowly. The medium, tempera and pencil on cardboard,
is denser; the composition, concentrated and centralized, is denser as well. The
seemingly invented forms, based no doubt on separate bits of observation (windows,
boiler, steam pipes), are overlapped and intertwined to present an effectively
strong image.
I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold continues to stand as one of Demuth's most important

DEMUTH : Machinery, 1920. Tempera and pencil on cardboard, 24 x 19% inches.

Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 49.59.2
136 CHARLES DEMUTH

paintings. It was dedicated to his close friend William Carlos Williams, the great
poet of the American idiom in this century. Williams and Demuth first knew one
another in Philadelphia in 1905, in their student days. " I met Charles Demuth

DEMUTH : / Saw the Figure 5 in Gold, 1928. Oil on composition board, 36 x 29% inches. Alfred
Stieglitz Collection, 49.59.1
 CHARLES DEMUTH 137

over a dish of prunes at Mrs. Chain's boarding house on Locust Street," Williams
wrote in his autobiography, "and formed a lifelong friendship on the spot with
dear Charlie. . . ." (It is typical of Williams' writing and of Demuth's paintings
that they pin down an experience by reference to everyday aspects. It is through
the specific, the homely in their work that the universal is reached.) " I n spring
among the back streets," Williams continues, "when supper would be over and we
felt disinclined to return to our rooms, Charlie Demuth used to take long walks with
me in West Philadelphia (where Grandma Wellcome, my father's mother, had just
come to live). There was a high brick wall along the south side of Locust Street, just
west of Thirty-sixth, inside of which there must have been an old garden, long
neglected. The thought of it fascinated me. Charlie laughed when I spoke of it.
'Not many could enjoy such a thing as that,' he said, 'by merely looking at the
outside ofa wall.' "These men were obviously in sympathy. In later years, Williams
tells us, the pictures he always went to see were those by Demuth, Charles Sheeler,
and Marsden Hartley.
ƒ Saw the Figure 5 in Gold, which was based on one of Williams' poems, was de-
scribed by the poet as a "literary" picture. From one of his letters, written in 1928,
we know that he saw the picture while Demuth was still working on it : "Dear Deem :
the unfinished poster is the most distinguished American painting that I have seen
in years. I enjoy it for five or six distinct reasons, color, composition, clarity, thought,
emotional force, ingenuity—and its completeness. Well, it's very satisfying to me
and I congratulate you." It was Demuth who named the painting, and it is some-
times thought that he chose the first words of the poem. In fact, the poem begins
with the mention of rain and light, setting the mood for the central image. In the
painting, too, rain and light are secondary factors :

THE GREAT F I G U R E
Among the rain
and lights
I saw the figure 5
in gold
on a red
firetruck
moving
tense
unheeded
to gong clangs
siren howls
and wheels rumbling-
through the dark city.
138 CHARLES DEMUTH

The painting has futurist and cubist features : the prismatic breakdown of space
and light, which in part refers to the rain and light in the poem, the use of words and
numbers to help establish the two-dimensionality of the picture plane, as in the
largest 5, the word BILL, and, at the bottom of the painting, the initials C.D. and
W.G.W., referring to the artist and the poet. However, the letters and numbers
arc used not only to establish the surface plane but also to suggest the opposite:
deep space. We see this in the diminishing and therefore receding 5's and in the
word CARLOS, the latter cut off by an element that lies behind the planes of the
5's. The painting is pulled back from complete abstraction only by the use of words
and letters and by the street lamp and distorted buildings. The angularity of the
prismatic background is played off against the recurring circles : those of the four
lights in the top half, the curve of the street-lamp standard, the bulbs at the lower
tips of the 5's, and the quite arbitrary curve at the lower left and upper right of the
painting. We feel the tremendous activity within the painting and also its final calm
and control. Despite the directional lines borrowed from the futurists and the intel-
lectually organized space that comes from cubism, the cumulative effect of direct-
ness, sense of scale, and clarity is American. Of his relationship to the art of Europe
Demuth once observed, "John Marin and I drew our inspiration from the same
source, French modernism. He brought his up in buckets and spilt much along the
way. I dipped mine out with a teaspoon but I never spilled a drop."

C H A R L E S SHEELER has made industrial America his subject, with the hard-
headed objectivity of his observation tempered by the sensitivity of the artist who
must make choices and establish the painting.
In 1909 Sheeler went to Europe for the third time, accompanied by Morton
Schamberg, the artist to whom he felt closest. Together they arrived at their ideas
about objectivity and about the machine as the proper subject for genre and still
life, most likely with Schamberg taking the lead. This, at least, is the evidence from
their work. Schamberg, one of the most promising artists of his generation, died in
the influenza epidemic of 1918. Afterward, Sheeler continued to speak of him as an
inspiration and as an artist of achievement.
Sheeler's own work was on its way to abstraction before 1920, when he drew flat
overlapping planes that described such scenes as the Pennsylvania barns he loved.
From these, he moved into the absolute clarity of painting based on photography
(a medium in which he has also worked with great sensitivity), with the values and
contours completely respected, whether the subject was a stairwell in his home, a
pitcher on a table, or a display of industrial machinery. Sheeler has stated his need
for precision and a finished effect in these words: "I favor the picture which arrives
 CHARLES SHEELER 139

SHEELER : Water, 1 945. Oil on canvas, 24 x 29% inches. Arthur H. Hearn Fund, 49.1 28

at its destination without the evidence ofa trying journey rather than the one which
shows the marks of battle. An efficient army buries its dead." One sees from this why
Sheeler admires what he calls photography's "possibility of accounting for the visual
world with an exactitude not equaled by any other medium." He has never regarded
painting and photography as competitors, since they attain their ends differently,
"the painting being the result ofa composite image and the photograph being the
result ofa single image."
Water sums up Sheeler's artistic knowledge and technical mastery. Based on
Tennessee Valley Authority material, it is an objective, dispassionate statement
about a machine-created environment. The feeling we get is of stateliness and
dignity, the forms portrayed in all their geometry, the lights and shadows falling so
as to accentuate the sequence and make it more rhythmical. While this painting of
1945 shows him as a master of industrial subjects, wc can look far back in Sheeler's
experience for his approach. On an early trip to Italy he had what he called a
revelation. "Not conditioned by a temporary mood of nature," he later wrote, " I
discovered Piero della Francesca at Arezzo—you saw pictures that were really
planned like a house. By an architect. One doesn't build a house just on impulse.
SHEELER, Golden Gate, 1955. Oil on canvas, 25 x 34 inches. George A. Hearn Fund, 55.99

They didn't start piling bricks hoping it would turn out to be a house. They really
did have blueprints." It is this sense of blueprint, of predetermination, that is strong
in Water. Golden Gate is a more programmatic picture. It aspires, moving the gaze
upward, even heavenward. In 1929, in France, Sheeler had photographed the
cathedral of Chartres. The feeling here is ofa return, if not to the subject, surely to
the feeling of Chartres. Of the painting, Sheeler has written: " I hope that the title
Golden Gate will remain, it conveys my thought. More fluid than if bridge were
added. Then it would be limited to be the connecting link between two dots on the
map. It is an opening to wherever the spectator feels desirable." In this late work
we see Sheeler turned romantic, not in his handling of the paint or image, which is
controlled as always, but in the spirit.

N I L E S S P E N C E R , a student of both George Bellows and Robert Henri, turned

in 1921 to the painting of city walls in a cool, objective manner. In his choice of
subjects in the urban and industrial landscape, and in the precision of his painting,
he showed his admiration for the art of Charles Sheeler. However, a lack of finality,
an aura of mystery, hangs about a completed Spencer. His Erie Underpass conveys
 NILES SPENCER 141

an ambiguity that Sheeler could never have rested with. With a surface rougher
than that of most precisionist work, it projects something of the metaphysical spirit
ofa painting by Giorgio de Chirico, who, of course, was one of the most important
influences on the surrealists. The accentuated windows or arch openings, painted
evenly and darkly, look through to nothing; the staircase leads not quite anywhere.
This is a deserted cityscape, built of shifting planes and spatial ambiguities, with an
acute psychological sense of the emptiness and fearfulness of the city.

LYONEL F E I N I N G E R , born in New York in 1871, moved to Germany with

his family when he was sixteen, and returned to the United States permanently
only some fifty years later. In this age of international movements in art there seems
little need to argue the question of Fcininger's artistic nationality. His work can be
fitted into the context of the art of Europe in his time—the cubist-derived Bauhaus
esthetic — or, equally well, he can be shown as related to the American precisionists,

SPENCER : Erie Underpass, 1 949. Oil on canvas, 28 x 36 inches. Arthur H. Hearn Fund, 50.31.3
142 LYONEL FEININGER

FEININGER : Church at Gelmeroda, about 1936. Oil on canvas, 39% x 31 % inches. George A. Hearn
Fund, 42 158
 LYONEL FEININGER 143

especially Demuth, in his choice of subjects, his use of certain cubist and futurist
devices, and his fondness for both oil and water color. A comparison of Feininger's
Church at Gelmeroda with Demuth's Bermuda No. 2, the Schooner makes the relationship
clear.
In Germany, between 1893 and 1907, Feininger worked as a cartoonist and il-
lustrator. The delightful comic strips he drew for the Chicago Tribune, " T h e Kinder
Kids" and "Wee Willie Winkie's World," were expressionist in manner (anticipat-
ing the sets and costumes of the post-World-War-I movie The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari).
It was through this cartooning that Feininger maintained his connections with the
United States.
In 1911, in Paris, Feininger knew Delaunay, and his style and thinking about art
were affected by Delaunay's cubist-inspired experiments with the analysis of light
and color. From 1919 to 1924, along with Kanclinsky and Klee and the architect
Gropius, Feininger taught at the Bauhaus, the German art school that exerted
tremendous influence in the fields of architecture and design, and whose legacy
may still be seen in the design of our magazines, the homogeneous façades of New
York's Park Avenue, and even in much of our recent painting.
Church at Gelmeroda, with its prismatic breakdown of light, is characteristic of
Feininger's fully developed style. The light emanates from the central form and
subject of the church and, at the same time, defines it and concentrates our atten-
tion on it. The painting, while precise in its armature and angularity, is sensitively,
if dryly, brushed. The romantic and the objective are fused in much the way that
Demuth solved the same problem. Besides being a painter, Feininger was an ac-
complished musician and in talking of his art he often referred to his musical hero,
Bach: " I t seems to me of the utmost importance to become more simple. Again and
again I realize this when I come to Bach. His art is incomparably terse, and that is
one of the reasons that it is so mighty and eternally alive. I must avoid becoming
entangled and fettered in complexities." Feininger's best works are quiet studies in
the delicately architectonic. If they do not suggest the majesty of Bach's music, they
have a low-keyed charm and a control that make them unmistakably personal.

P A T R I C K HENRY B R U C E was an early American adherent to the Paris-

based stylistic revolution that changed the course of the history of art in the years
before the first World War. Born in Virginia in 1881, he studied with Robert Henri
in New York in 1902-1903 and then settled permanently in France. There, in-
cidentally, he knew as fellow-painters Edward Hopper and Guy Pène du Bois.
Bruce studied in Matisse's classes in 1908 and was briefly involved with the work
and theories of Delaunay. It is now chiefly through his six works in the Société
144 PATRICK HENRY BRUCE

BRUCE: Still Life,

1922-1925. Oil on
canvas, 23% x 28%
inches. George A.
Hearn Fund, 53.4

Anonyme collection at Yale University that his painting is known. His Still Life is
a breakdown of Cezanne's apples into the cubes, triangles, cones, and squares that
were their logical outcome. It is almost as if Bruce were painting a representation
of literal blocks of wood set out on a table (perhaps this was indeed his method),
rather than breaking down observed natural forms. The three-dimensional quali-
ties of the forms are insisted upon at the same time that the forms are successfully
integrated into the planar composition that is the final result. The analysis of the
composition into pure rectangles, broken by the volumetric forms, is quite daring,
as is the use of the vertical form that lies in front of the still life and defines the two-
dimensionality of the surface at the same time that it suggests, with its slightly
receding plane, the play between two kinds of space. This is a complex and well-
resolved visual puzzle and an interesting picture as well.

S T U A R T D A V I S single-mindedly and with intelligence and spirit devised his

own vocabulary of forms and a distinctive palette. This is the way of the obsessive
artist, the artist who continues to develop and to paint through changes of style in
a manner of his own invention. (The Dutch painter Mondrian did much the same
thing but with sparer, more restricted means.) At the same time that Davis' work
has been in direct line with aspects of the paintings of Léger, Mondrian, Picasso,
and Matisse, he has interpreted and given visual concreteness to the native spirit of
 STUART DAVIS 145

his time, legitimizing an entire new area of American culture : that ofjazz and noise
and lights. During the thirties and the early forties, when it looked as if Thomas
Hart Benton and the other Midwest regionalists, with the literary assistance of
Thomas Craven, were going to make the American scene the official art, Davis
spoke out against the idea with wit and vigor, saying that being American was a
way of life, not an actor's part in a Chamber of Commerce morality play. Davis'
biographer, Rudi Blesh, has pointed out that this attitude helped to clear the way
for the American abstract developments of the forties and fifties. In Davis' words,
"If the principle were once established that it was 'the artists,' not the subject mat-
ter, locale, social-consciousness, or no subject at all, to which one must look for
artistic progress, I think something would have geen gained."
The child of artist-parents, Davis, at the age of sixteen, began studying with

DAVIS : Percolator,
1927. Oil on can-
vas, 36 x 29 inches.
Arthur H. Hearn
Fund, 56.195
146 STUART DAVIS

Robert Henri in New York. At nineteen he exhibited in the Armory Show. Of this
event he wrote, " T h e Armory Show was the greatest shock to me—the greatest
single influence I have experienced in my work. All my immediately subsequent
efforts went toward incorporating Armory Show ideas into my work." In the years
following the show Davis learned from Picabia and Duchamp, among the most
advanced artists of the time, that there was no subject matter unsuitable for art,
and in 1921 he painted his famous Lucky Strike, one of the earliest integrations of
popular, commercial culture into the fine arts.
In his search for what he has called "an objective attitude toward size and shape
relations," Davis, in the nineteen-twenties, did many drawings of the same subject,
then selected from them, thus bringing several truths into focus in a finished paint-
ing. Paintings that derived from complexities were presented as simply as possible
without ever denying the complexity of the original vision; conceptual and visual
truths were united on a single canvas. "Having already achieved this objectivity to
a degree in relation to color," Davis once said, "the two ideas (the conceptual and
the optical) had now to be integrated and thought about simultaneously. The
'Abstract' kick was on. The culmination of these efforts occurred in 1927-1928,
when I nailed an electric fan, rubber glove and an eggbeater to a table and used
it as my exclusive subject matter for a year."
Percolator shows Davis capable of presenting an intricate visual puzzle, with
planes that shift from two- to three-dimensionality as we relate them to different
forms and functions within the picture, and inventing arbitrary geometrical shapes
that still refer to the visual experience that triggered them. Patrick Henry Bruce's
Still Life, of approximately the same period, is, in its composition, its allusion to the
familiar subject matter of still life, and its almost predictable space, a traditional
painting compared to Davis' more inventive and searching Percolator.
Davis' Semé uses elements with which wre have associations—letters, numbers,
and crosses—in a way strikingly reminiscent of Marsden Hartley's Portrait of a
German Officer of forty years earlier. The Davis is, of course, tighter and cooler than
the expressionist Hartley, but there is a similarity in the kinds of elements used and
in the intention to build a concrete image through the abstract use of associational
forms. Semé, said Davis, means "strewn, lots of things. . . . In this painting ANY
means any subject matter is equal in art, from the most insignificant to one of
relative importance." The word EYDEAS, Davis suggested, refers to visual ideas,
with a specific reference to the eye. It is clear and exciting in this painting that the
viewer's focus must be on the entire painting, for each area is alive and attention-
grabbing through extreme color contrasts, formal activity, or associational density.
The colors, as in much of the recent hard-edged painting, are the manufactured,
chemical colors of the twentieth century.
 STUART DAVIS 147

DAVIS : Semé, 1953. Oil on canvas, 52 x 40 inches. George A. Hearn Fund, 53.90
 DILLER : Second Theme, 1 937-
1 938. Oil on canvas, 30% x 30
inches. George A. Hearn Fund,
63.72

B U R G O Y N E DILLE R, beginning in the nineteen-thirties, pursued an art of the

strictest economy, his subject matter being rectangles of flat primary colors com-
posed with apparent simplicity. With his great knowledge of the European move-
ments, Hans Hofmann was an important instructor to Dillcr, and at the younger
artist's first one-man show, in 1933, Hofmann proclaimed him one of the most
promising of American painters.
The seeming simplicity of Diller's art is something ofa deception, for we continue
to find his painting interesting and impressive, far beyond the total effect of its
analyzable elements. His Second Theme is obviously reminiscent of Mondrian in its
strict rectilinear geometry and its restriction to primary colors and black and white.
At a time when Mondrian's work was apparently out of step with the socially con-
scious American painting of the thirties, Diller understood that artist well enough
to create, with almost identical devices, spatial effects quite different from Mon-
drian's. He does this in Second Theme with a red superstructure behind which the other
forms lie. Diller is one of the American artists who kept alive through the thirties the
possibility ofa significant native art of abstraction in a climate that was hostile to an
art apparently so self-referential, so much out of the arena of social activity and
potential social change.

J O S E F A L B E R S came to the United States in 1933 after thirteen years of as-

sociation with the Bauhaus, first as student, then as teacher. Of his teaching he has
said, " I believe that art as such cannot be taught, but a lot can be clone to open
eyes and minds to meaningful form. Teaching can prepare a readiness to reveal and
 JOSEF ALBERS 149

evoke insight." Throughout his career in America, which included sixteen years at
Black Mountain College in North Carolina (a school that was an outstanding center
of artistic activity from the thirties to the fifties) and a decade as head of the Art
Department at Yale University, Albers has functioned as one of the two great
teachers of American painters. The other was Hans Hofmann, who also came to
the United States in the thirties. In the manner of Robert Henri and William Merritt
Chase, the great teachers at the turn of the century, a major aspect of their influence
has been to alert American students to the art of Europe, both past and recent. The
achievement is more obvious in the case of Albers and Hofmann because of the art

ALBERS : Homage to the Square: With Rays, 1 959. Oil on masonite, 48% x 48% inches. Arthur H.
Hearn Fund, 59.160
150 JOSEF ALBERS

ALBERS : Homage to the Square : Precinct,

1951. Oil on masonite, 23% x 23% inches.
George A. Hearn Fund, 53.174.1

they brought with them. The cubism of Picasso and the color of Matisse, brought
by Hofmann, and the Bauhaus esthetic of rationality, which Albers introduced,
were much more radical in the thirties than were Velazquez, Hals, and Manet,
when these painters were introduced in 1900.
As a painter, Albers worked in the tradition of the Russian suprematist Malevich
and the Hollander Mondrian, developing from their art of geometric universals a
personal art that observes the strictest economy. In his Homage to the Square: With
Rays and Homage to the Square: Precinct he has limited himself to the square format
and used only four colors. Restrictions such as these, current in much modern
painting, may be compared to the discipline that the sonnet form exerts on the poet,
with its consequent paradoxical freedom. Albers' restriction to simple shapes and
only a few colors allows us to concentrate on color as has never been possible in
painting before. "Color, in my opinion," Albers has said, "behaves like a man—in
two distinct ways : first in self-realization and then in the realization of relationships
with others. In my paintings I have tried to make the two polarities meet—inde-
pendence and interdependence." This describes Albers' social-artistic ambition:
to reflect the situation of man in life. Albers has also said, in reference to the visual
basis of his art, "All color perception is illusional. Due to the . . . phenomenon of
the after-image we do not see colors as what they factually are. In our perception
they change each other so that, for instance, two different colors can look alike, as
two like colors look different, or opaque appears translucent, definite shapes become
unrecognizable. This 'acting' of color—the change of identity—is the objective of
my study. It leads me to change my color instrument—my palette—from painting
to painting."
 ELLSWORTH KELLY 151

ELLSWORTH KELLY'S art, while similar to Albers' in its restriction to a few

cleanly articulated shapes and a few flatly painted colors, is based on natural rather
than architectural forms. There have been two major tendencies in the totally
clean-edged abstraction of the past forty years, one based on the structure and
architecture of man's ordering of nature, as typified in the neoplasticism of Mon-
drian and the Bauhaus school, the other based on the curvilinear forms, representa-

KELLY: Blue, Red, Green, 1962-1963. Oil on canvas, 91 x 82 inches. Arthur H. Hearn Fund, 63.73
152 ELLSWORTH KELLY

tive of living organisms, that are typified in the biomorphic art of J e a n Arp, Joan
Miró, and Arshile Gorky. The late paper cutouts of Matisse are also in the bio-
morphic tradition, and lie behind Kelly's work. Blue, Red, Green shows Kelly at the
height of his powers. What reads at first as clear and simple becomes ambiguous.
Three colors and two shapes—a cut-off ellipse and a rectangle—are enough to en-
gage and hold our attention. The canvas cannot quite contain the floating shape,
which is in the process of expanding, inhaling, nudging the limits of the rectangle.
The painting is precise, yet possibilities are left open to the viewer. The image or
shape is cut off in such a way as to allow us to finish it in our minds, off the canvas,
in one of several possible ways. Kelly's art is one of control; there is no stain or acci-
dent, no interest in the sensibility of the hand or the individuality of the brush-
stroke. What adjustments are made are away from the implied symmetry; a curve
flattens, a shape swells, as in a Matisse line drawing. While the painting itself is
continuous with the European biomorphic tradition, its scale is that of the huge
close-ups of billboards and movie screens. The outlook is contemporary, the impact
American.
Chapter Nine

Surrealists and Magic Realists

Surrealism has two distinct aspects: one the concentrated naturalism that focuses
on the unreal, the other automatism, the belief in the intelligence of the unconscious
that directs the hand meaningfully to make automatic paintings. The second, as
we will see later, is one of the bases of the abstract expressionist movement. The
first, which Salvador Dali once characterized as hand-painted dream photographs,
while it opened interesting possibilities to American painters in the nineteen-thirties,
never assumed the proportions of a major movement. It coexisted with the art of
the American regionalists and the social realists, but it differed from their work in
that its commitment was to a personal vision based on the acute realization of the
artist's fantasy.
There has been an element of elegance in this art, an almost theatrical chic, that
has dated it more quickly than once seemed possible. A concern with attitudes of
taste and style, while it need not be self-conscious, is of course an element in every
art, and the dated look is embarrassing only to the generation that reacts against it.
Thus, we are interested once again in Victoriana, and our grandchildren will no
doubt treasure Bauhaus lighting fixtures. We now see the period between the World
Wars as partially dominated by the new artistic techniques suggested by the study
of the discoveries of Freud and his colleagues. The American surrealists belong to
this intellectual climate. The unifying factor in their work was the use of a classic
representational technique in conjunction with eccentric and psychologically acute
subject matter. It is only this that the artists considered here have in common.

IVAN A L B R I G H T , in addition to his studies at the Art Institute of Chicago,

the Pennsylvania Academy of the .Fine Arts, and the National Academy of Design
in New York, could look back on a period when he was a medical draftsman in the
first World War—an experience that would seem to have had some influence on
his point of view.
In Fleeting Time Thou Hast Left Me Old he has concentrated all that he has learned

153
 A L B R I G H T : Fleeting Time Thou
Hast Left Me Old, 1 9 2 9 - 1 930.
Oil on canvas, 3 0 % x 20%
inches. George A. Hearn Fund,
50.95

Opposite :
BER M A N : Muse of the Western
World, 1942. Oil on canvas,
50% x 3 7 % inches. George A.
Hearn Fund, 43.159.2

of structure and technique to present the unpleasant image of man in decay. This is
humanism turned against itself. Man is at the center of the universe still, but he is
depicted as a specific individual and not in an ideal state. (The subject, a seventy-
eight-year-old horse trainer named McCain, sat for the artist in Warrenville,
Illinois.) Once asked whether he felt himself unduly preoccupied with themes of
dissolution, Albright answered, "Are there such things as death and decay? In any
part of life you find something either growing or disintegrating. All life is strong and
powerful, even in the presence of dissolution. . . . Whenever possible I like to create
a feeling of the unknown. Any object can be the unknown. . . . After all, there is no
sorrow like existence, but the thought of anything existing is so marvelous that I
doubt its reality." These are the words ofa romantic and a mystic who is not less so
because of the photographic naturalism of his draftsmanship. His subject in Fleeting
Time Thou Hast Left Me Oidi?, the familiar, so concentratedly examined that it seems
unreal. The generally dark and shadowed palette and the emphasis on minute
textures of hair, knit cap, and horsehide jacket all contribute to giving the work its
 IVAN ALBRIGHT 155

unpleasant effect. No attempt is made to create an object of esthetic delight. But

in a successful work of art, no matter how horrifying the subject, esthetic considera-
tions intervene. The pretty subject does not make a pleasing painting any more than
the ugly subject makes a strong one. An artist in control makes a good painting, and
Albright convincingly welds his subject to his manner of painting it.

E U G E N E B E R M A N, born in Russia in 1899, studied in Paris with Jean Edouard

Vuillard and Maurice Denis, painters whose careers stretched back to the last
decade of the nineteenth century. Both had begun as postimpressionists, both had
156 EUGENE BERMAN

rejected the more advanced possibilities opened up by the fauves and cubists. They
provided young Berman with an enlightened yet not avant-garde training. Berman
was next influenced by de Chirico, as well as the early Picassos of the Blue and Rose
periods. A naturalistic romanticism, tinged with a melancholic sense of the pretty,
was characteristic of Berman's work in the twenties and thirties. The surrealist sense
of dislocation of the object or situation and the placing of the human figure or group
in a dreamlike context, absent in the early work, began to dominate in the later.
Muse of the Western World, painted in California six years after Berman became an
American citizen, is a fantasy of drapery, bonelike wood, and fringe crowned with
a flower. The components add up to what should be a disturbing allusion to the
human figure, but the effect is actually one of a rather tasteful arrangement. The
whole is set in a magic landscape that is arched at the left to resemble architecture,
leads smokily back to the horizon line, and is then brought forward to the right by
the draped material that seems to exist in the same plane as the figure. In the seven-
teenth century the Italian painter Arcimboldo created fantastic still lifes of vege-
tables assembled in such a way as to represent human faces. Berman achieves much
the same result with his disembodied cloth, creating a picture that is at once haunt-
ing and stylish.

PAVEL T C H E L I T C H E W, also born in Russia, moved into the surrealist circle

in Paris in the early twenties, at about the same time as Eugene Berman, and like
Berman he later came to the United States and became an American citizen. He
worked often with metaphors: visual resemblances between disconnected phenom-
ena. The Whirlwind, painted in 1939, makes an equivalence between wind-whirled
leaves and children whose play can seem and become warlike. The children's
raggedness and emaciation and their expressions of pain and fear, in conjunction
with the date of the painting, provide us with a chilling omen of the war years. The
light, washlike handling of the oil, almost as in water color, suggests an innocence
that is cruelly denied by the subject matter.

Y V E S T A N G U Y , born in Paris in 1900, experienced an artistic revelation in

1923 when he chanced to see, in a dealer's window, a painting by Giorgio de Chirico.
What triggered Tanguy's imagination was the approach in which the quality and
description of objects is accurate and convincing, but in which the relationship be-
tween objects, the context in which they are found, while poetically true, is logically
dislocated. Tanguy's experience, like all such revelations, established in a coherent,
comprehensible pattern data and intuitions that had lain unrelated in his conscious-
rft •-•••• - . - . - . -
157

TCHELITCHEW: Whir/wind, 1939. Oil on

canvas, 28% x 23% inches. Arthur H.
Hearn Fund, 50.38

TA N G U Y : Mirage le Temps,
1954. Oil on canvas, 39 x
32 inches. George A.
Hearn Fund, 55.95
158 YVES TANGUY

ness. It was as a leading surrealist painter that he, like Berman and Tchelitchew,
came to the United States during the war period. His Mirage le Temps is a typical
and beautifully executed work, its subject the landscape of the mind. All the ele-
ments of this painting have something to do with sight, vision, or painting. We see
repeated, particularly at the right, stones whose striations make them look like eye-
balls, the pupils staring sightlessly. Other forms are the disassembled bones of
anatomical study, formalized and machined. The rectangles recall the artist's easel
and his canvas. It is as if the whole furniture of the artist's studio and mind were
stacked together in a desert landscape. The unreality and the immediacy, the
dreamlike stillness, are emphasized by the precision of the edges and the lucidity
of the forms.

PETER B L U M E , born in Russia, came to the United States at the age of five
in 1911. All his art training took place in New York. His work proves, if such proof
is still needed, that the linking of artists in schools or groups is a fairly arbitrary
business. South of Scranton, done when Blume was twenty-six, can be considered a
surrealist fantasy with its leaping sailors, telescoped landscape, and sense of the
dream, but it might equally well have been discussed with the prccisionist paintings
of Sheeler and O'Keeffe. The point here is that no painting or style of interest can
be exhausted by aligning it with another; a work of art exists in an endless series of
possible relationships not only with life but with other works of art.
Blume has given us a full account of the genesis of South of Scranton, which is
one of his best-known paintings. The story begins with his packing all his belongings
on top of and inside a Model-T Ford and driving "very slowly up to the coal fields
around Scranton, down to the steel mills in Bethlehem, and finally down south by
way of the Shenandoah Y'alley." He settled in Charleston and equipped a house for
a long stay. Here the idea of the picture began to shape itself. " I t became, in a
strange way, a record of the trip, a mixture of the things I had seen—the mountains
of waste coal around Scranton, the deep quarries like bottomless chasms that seemed
to tear the earth apart, the coal breakers that sprawled over the landscape like huge
prehistoric monsters, the miniature locomotive that puffed with busy agility around
them—all these began to formulate a picture. To these industrial details I next
added the old streets with false-front houses, made up of miscellaneous building
material and thrown together in the most fantastic style; elaborate Main Streets
that grew up overnight and died the following morning. From Charleston I took
the broad flat waters of its harbor and the German cruiser 'Emden' which came
into port one day, with its bristling fighting masts and its German sailors whom I
watched doing complicated calisthenic exercises on its enormous deck—all making
 PETER BLUME 159

BLUME : South of Scranton, 1 931. Oil on canvas, 56 x 66 inches. George A. Hearn Fund, 42.1 55

a curious contrast with the atmosphere of the old town. . . . As I tried to weld my
impressions into the picture, they lost all their logical connections. I moved Scranton
into Charleston, and Bethlehem into Scranton, as people do in a dream. The Ger-
man sailors appeared to lose the purpose of exercising and became, in a sense, like
birds soaring through space."
The unity of the painting is such that only a careful reading of the artist's state-
ment can force us to examine it element by element. The swing and rhythm are so
right that we accept the details without questioning the incongruities. The three
figures moving through the air and the single planted one seem to be stills in the
motion ofa single figure through various stages ofa circular movement. This sense
of arrested motion is both the charm and the strongest element in the painting. It
takes our attention from the specifics of the scene and lends the air of fantasy.
160 GEORGE TOOKER

G E O R G E TOOKER, who studied in New York in the nineteen-forties with

Reginald Marsh, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and Paul Cadmus (Cadmus taught him
the tempera technique), has painted some of the most ominous of American sur-
realist pictures. We have the artist's word that the impulse for his Government Bureau
came from his knowledge of Brooklyn's Municipal Building. The theme, perhaps
too obviously, is the facelessness—the loss of individuality and will—of modern man
when confronted with bureaucracy, the order to which he must submit and over
which he has no control. A man-made system that dehumanizes man; this is
Tooker's paradox. The structure of his painting, like the architecture it depicts, is
cool and repetitive, reinforcing the theme of distance and isolation. The credible is
evoked in the parts that read as straightforward representation; it is the repetition
that causes unease, giving us a frightening scene, an insane and compelling totality.

TOOKER : Government Bureau, 1 956. Egg tempera on gesso panel, 1 9% x 29% inches. George A.
Hearn Fund, 56.78
Chapter Ten

The Pacific Northwest Painters

Geographically, the United States is so big that major regional artistic expressions
have developed in it from time to time, and flourished more or less independently
of the concerns of New York-based art. We have already considered one of these in
the Midwest regionalism of Benton, Curry, Wood, and Burchfield. Another, orig-
inating from wholly different factors and productive of a wholly different kind of
painting, may be identified as the school of the Pacific Northwest. While the four
principal painters of this group are as much individuals as any painters that one
attempts to discuss together, it can readily be seen that their work has much in
common in its approach, its themes, and not least important, in its relatively small
size. In the late nineteen-forties, when the New York abstract painters were working
in increasingly heroic sizes, the painters of the Northwest all stayed within the
intimacy and control of the easel picture, with the careful placing of their brush
marks differing, too, from the loosely brushed activity of gesture that characterized
such eastern contemporaries as de Kooning, Kline, and Pollock. Thematically, the
Northwest artists have been chiefly interested in the relationship between man and
nature. Two of the four, in addition, have been alert through their concerns with
Oriental philosophy and artistic techniques to the expressive possibilities in J a p -
anese and Chinese calligraphy. It is the relative closeness of the Pacific Northwest
—Washington and Oregon—to the Orient with the flow of influence and attraction
from that region, that has made the art of this region so unlike that of the Europe-
influenced art of the east coast.

MARK TOBEY, perhaps the best known nationally of the Pacific Northwest
group, also has one of the strongest international reputations among present-day
American artists. When he was awarded first prize at the Venice Biennale in 1958,
he was the first American painter since Whistler to be so honored. Born in Wisconsin
in 1890, Tobey had some training at the Art Institute of Chicago in his seventeenth
year, but was otherwise largely self-taught. It was in 1918, after he had already
begun to establish himself (his drawings had been shown in New York the year

161
162

TOBEY: Broadway, 1936. Tempera

on masonite board, 26 x 1 9% inches.
Arthur H. Hearn Fund, 42.170

before), that he became a convert to Bahaism, one of whose tenets emphasizes the
spiritual unity and equality of mankind. Tobey's religion was to serve as the organ-
izing point of view of his life and as the subject, in the deepest sense, of his art. H e
has said that for him there can be no separation of nature, art, science, religion, and
personal life. This belief in the relationship of all meaningful phenomena is the key
to his vision and to his sometimes mysterious paintings.
One of Tobey's most significant pictures, Broadway, reflects his interest in J a p a -
nese calligraphy, a subject he studied in J a p a n in 1934. Tobey has called the Japanese
esthetic one of hidden beauty, "that which doesn't look like anything, but in time
discloses its jewels." The importance oí Broadway in Tobey's work is that it shows
his brush for the first time freed to follow its own course. Its almost autonomous
movement, with its possibility of a private calligraphy, has come to be called
Tobey's "white writing." This weaving ofa line into a meaningful interrelatedness
with itself was to become Tobey's form of abstraction. But for all the overlays of
brush in Broadway, Tobey does not lose contact with the descriptive scene, Broadway
at night. The one-point perspective, directed to the center of the picture, the
diminution in size of the abstracted elements as they recede, and the careful sym-
metrical composition provide a traditional substructure for the vision of freedom,
wit, light, and force.
 MARK TOBEY 163

Broadway, which won a purchase prize in the Metropolitan Museum's Artists for
Victory Exhibition in 1942, was painted in England during the period when Tobey
was artist in residence at the school known as Dartington Hall. " I did it because I
loved it, because I experienced it," he has said. " I t was in my bones, but I could
paint it best when I was farthest from it." Tobey's career has been varied enough
that his paintings of cities, done in the thirties and forties, stand somewhat apart
from the work that one associates with the Pacific Northwest. "No doubt I did
them," he has said, "because I am an American painter. I cannot be indifferent
to the swarming crowds, multitudes, neon signs, movie theaters, to the noises that
I hate of modern cities."
Two of Tobey's later paintings, Transit and World Dust, have in a sense taken the
surface autonomy oí Broadway and made the movement of the brush and the relation
of the space and the surface the subject matter. "I made lines into mass," Tobey has
said of his method. " I want vibration in it so that's why it takes so long to build this
u p ; because I want it to have air pockets." In Transit the units are larger and more
articulated. They overlie one another and cast their shadows in such a way as to

TOBEY: Transit, 1948. Tempera on

board, 24% x 18% inches. George
A. Hearn Fund, 49.160.1
164 MARK TOBEY

create a shallow space. It is as if an alphabet we can almost read has been frag-
mented. The white writing of World Dust is more densely meshed. It has become so
tightly compact that we must look for a considerable time before it "discloses its
jewels"—before its organization becomes clear. This is Tobey's art: the inter-
relatedness of all things in the universe, with pluralistic centers, foci of interest,
bound together by an allover unity.

TOBEY: World
Dust, 1957.
Tempera on
Japanese paper,
36% x 24% inches.
Arthur H. Hearn
Fund, 58.25
 KEN N E T H CALLAHAN 165

CALLAHAN : Revolving World, 1944. Gouache on paper, 14% x 18% inches.

Gift of Francis Henry Taylor, 49.139

KENNETH CALLAHAN, a native of the Northwest, had a protracted expe-

rience with the region itself as a seaman and then as a forest ranger before he
became a painter. He has described the basic subject matter of his painting as
"humanity evolving in and out of nature," and of his abiding interest in the world
of nature he has said, " T h e orderly universe of truth is the simply incredible and
wonderful order that exists when the universe as a whole is contemplated—it's this
order I'm trying to find for myself." In his Revolving World everything swirls in the
self-referential, circular movement that Mark Tobey's art has prepared us for. We
see reminiscences, too, of Michelangelo's painting of The Last Judgment and of the
drawing style of William Blake. At the same time it is perhaps the figurative content
of Callahan's work and his more explicit compositional devices that tend to make
his vision seem less intense than Tobey's, his painting less universal, less profoundly
original.

C L A Y T O N S. P R I C E , the least well known of the important Pacific North-

west painters, was born in Iowa in 1874, had a year of study at the St. Louis School
of Fine Arts when he was thirty-one and thereafter taught himself. He once said
166 CLAYTON S. P R I C E

PRICE : Bird by the Sea, 1 949. Oil on canvas, 36% x 42 inches. George A. Hearn Fund, 49.160.2

that it was "the felt nature of things" that he wanted to capture. He expressed this,
typically, in paintings of directly presented animals. Beginning in 1925, he carved
and painted wood and cork models of animals in an effort to simplify the formal
problems involved in their representation on a two-dimensional surface. We see
some of the result of this study, and feel some of the emotion and struggle of the
artist, in the convincingly simplified, touchingly awkward, and (if we may anthro-
pomorphize) introspective bird in Price's Bird by the Sea, painted the year before his
death. The work is expressionistic in the width of the brush and the density of the
paint; it expresses a feeling about nature through the manipulation of paint. Like
the other Northwest painters, Price sees the unity of man with nature.
 MORRIS GRAVES 167

M O R R I S G R A V E S , another native of the Northwest, has won his reputation

through subject matter similar to Price's, but arrived at independently and handled
very differently. A much more articulate and sophisticated artist, Graves is mystical
and magical in his art, whereas Price was heavier and more direct. Graves's work is
delicately drawn, carefully placed on its fragile paper, yet his images are as forceful
and memorable as anything in recent figurative art.
The major influences on his work have undoubtedly been the art of his friend
and older colleague Mark Tobey, Chinese and Japanese art in paper and bronze,
and the spirit of Zen Buddhism. Graves has said that he was "attracted by Zen wit,
the insight through paradoxes, the jest and humor in the riddle of creation." This
works, too, as a description of the power and attraction of Graves's art.
The influence of Tobey's white writing is apparent in Graves's Bird in the Spirit.
This mysterious and humorous creature is no bird that has yet been seen on sea or
land, but a spirit bird, as Graves has said of Zen, "stilling the surface of the mind
and letting the inner surface bloom."
In his Spirit Bird Transporting Minnow from Stream to Stream Graves has moved
away from the angular, prismatic fracturing of line and light of Bird in the Spirit
into a calmer, wavelike motif, isolating the bird in a space of its own, and projecting

GRAVES : Bird in the Spirit, 1943. Gouache on paper, 24 x 30 inches.

Arthur H. Hearn Fund, 50.30
168 MORRIS G RAVES

a stillness that is most special in his work. Graves has characterized his art thus :
" I paint to rest from the phenomena of the external world—to pronounce it—and
to make notations of its essences with which to verify the inner eye." His statement,
like his art, speaks for much of the painting of the Northwest group. Produced in a
relative privacy and isolation, this is a gentler, quieter, more introspective art than
other American painting of its time. These painters speak in the small, clear voice
that touches us directly.

GRAVES : Spirit Bird Transporting Minnow from Stream to Stream, 1953. Sumi ink, tempera, and
gilt on paper, 24% x 42% inches. Arthur H. Hearn Fund, 54.115
Chapter Eleven

Figurative Painters of the

Forties and Fifties

There is obviously no "correct" way to paint at any given time, and the dominance
ofa style does not exclude the possibility of the rich continuation ofa former style.
In France, for example, Pierre Bonnard painted his handsome postimpressionist
pictures long after cubism had made them unseasonable, and they continue to have
more interest than the misunderstandings of many of his contemporaries in their
stylish impulse toward cubism—the latter being pictures that once looked modern
and now appear merely modernistic. While it is true that the greatest vitality and
originality in the American painting of the nineteen-forties and fifties went into
abstract expressionism, there remained other avenues for those with the inclination
and single-mindedness to pursue them. During this period four artists in particular,
each one aware of the history of painting, classic and recent, and each making his
own decisions that led to the articulation of his individual voice, showed the con-
tinuing possibility of meaningful figurative art.

E D W I N D I C K I N S O N , who first exhibited in 1916, had William Merritt

Chase and Charles Hawthorne as his principal teachers, with Hawthorne remem-
bered as the man who taught him the most. Working with Hawthorne at his summer
school at Provincetown, Dickinson painted celebrations of the Cape Cod dunes,
capturing their light, air, and color. The same sort of spontaneous, delicate painting
is to be found in his Villa la Mouette, painted at Sanary sur Mer, France, in 1938.
The sketchy brushstroke is broad and open, the emphasis is on light and atmosphere
rather than on the exact configurations of the houses and trees.
While Dickinson has painted many small, intimate works like Villa la Mouette, he
is best known for, and considers more important, his large, ambitiously composed
works. One of these is Ruin at Daphne, begun in 1943 and worked on until 1953. This
and the artist's other thoroughly planned paintings might be the contemporary

169
170 EDWIN DICKINSON

versions of the nineteenth-century Salon picture—the painting that was worked

and reworked in the hope that it would make the artist's reputation with the public
and the critics. This, of course, was not Dickinson's motive; rather the large, slow,
careful works are the summings up at various moments in his career of all that he
knows artistically at the time.
According to Dickinson, Ruin at Daphne grew out of his interest in Roman archi-
tecture. The painting is a fascinating one. An air of mystery surrounds the ruins,
an aura of wonder, expressed in the treatment o f a subject—the heritage of classic
architecture—that has been a constant theme in Western art since the Renaissance.
The concern with half-tumbled structures, broken columns, arches that no longer
support anything and lead nowhere is reflected in the play between sharply focused
forms and vague, unfinished areas. Of the basic underdrawing that still shows
around the edges of the picture Dickinson has said: " T h e painting fell through
before I could finish it. And, by the way, this was the only large picture for which I
did a preliminary drawing directly on the canvas from the bottom up. I can't throw
away the investment of so many years—nine years in the case oí Ruin at Daphne. . . .
If a painting takes many years one hasn't stood still from the beginning to the end.
As time goes on, one starts to disapprove of the earlier work." Of course the artist's
point is that the picture often "falls through"—falls into place, is finished—at a
point that has nothing to do with an homogeneously treated surface. When he has
emphasized the elements that are essential, and when these are composed har-
moniously, the painting is effectively finished. In the art of Meissonier and the

DICKINSON : Villa la Mouette,

1938. Oil on canvas, 23% x 28%
inches. George A. Hearn Fund,
38.100
 EDWIN DICKINSON 171

DICKINSON: Ruin at Daphne, 1943-1953. Oil on canvas, 4 8 x 6 0 % inches. Edward Joseph

Gallagher III Memorial Collection,.53.13.1

Salon painters of the nineteenth century there were highly formalized, preconceived
ideas about finish, as there have been at most times in the history of art. It was the
impressionists, with the apparently more informal air of their work, who began to
change this. There was less of an objective standard from which the completed
impressionist painting could be judged. This, in fact, was one of the reasons for the
criticism that impressionism received. In forcing the viewer to rethink the nature of
painting, the artist threw an unaccustomed burden of decision and creativity on
the viewer. When the cubists laid bare the structure of the painting and the human
figure, when they presented the armature of experience without fleshing it out,
they carried the problem of the finished painting an additional step. Picasso once
said that an artist has to be two people, one who knows how to paint, the other
when to stop.
172 M I LT ON AVERY

MILTON AVERY, one of whose lifelong artistic concerns was the human fig-
ure, has produced work that is greatly admired by artists as apparently different
from him as Mark Rothko, Hans Hofmann, and Adolph Gottlieb. These painters
all admit to having learned from Avery's abstracting tendencies as well as from his
color. In turn, although Avery's painting can surely never be confused with that of
Matisse or Marquet, he learned from their simplifications. The critic Clement
Greenberg has pointed out that it was partly through Avery that American painters
remained aware of Matisse's lessons in color composition. Thus, even in a period
in which Matisse was not an influence on the school of Paris, he helped to liberate
American painting.
But regardless of influences in Avery's work there is a starkness of presentation,
a force and clarity of image, that makes the painting of his European predecessors
seem soft and overly concerned with the traditional esthetic. In his Swimmers and
Bathers, painted in New York City in 1945 from sketches made the previous spring-
in the art colony of Woodstock, New York, Avery anticipated the simplifications
of the New York school by some five years. The bold way in which he breaks the
parallels with his awkwardly articulated figures is typical. The figures are deper-

AVERY : Swimmers and Sunbathers, 1945. Oil on canvas, 28 x 48% inches. Gift of Mr. and Mrs.
Roy R. Neuberger, 51.97
 M I LT ON AVERY

AVERY : Green Sea, 1 954. Oil on canvas, 42 x 60 inches. Arthur H. Hearn Fund, 54.111

sonalized in feature but achieve personality through the shapes and masses of their
bodies, shapes and masses that, while they are geometrically analyzed, build into
convincing and memorable wholes. Avery confronts us with the familiar in terms
so stark, yet lovely, that we are forced to look freshly on stale scenes.
There is an advance toward complete abstraction in Green Sea, painted in 1954
from a water color done at Pemaquid Point, Maine, in 1945. The subject is still
recognizable landscape, but the jagged shapes, the clean schematization of the
composition, and the deliberate avoidance of a horizon line all combine to play
with the possibilities of naturalistic abstraction. There is play, too, between the
two-dimensional forms, all of which lie on the surface, and their respective roles
within the traditional three-dimensional orientation of the classical landscape.
Thus the distant dune shape can be read either as part of the overall surface pattern
or as the distant element it would be in nature. Avery's directness in color and his
simplicity of form do not in any way reduce the complexity or variety of his work.
It is this, as much as anything in his painting, that has served as a lesson to the
younger abstractionists.
RIVERS: The Sitter, 1956. Oil on canvas, 51 % x 47 inches. Gift of Hugo Kastor, 56.187

L A R R Y R I V E R S , while personally and historically aligned with the abstract

expressionists, has persevered in his concern with the identifiable. At the same
time he has continued to learn and change with the abstract art about him. His
extraordinary ability to draw has sometimes been subordinated to the necessiti ties of
compellingly abstracted compositions, but he has never wholly abandoned the
structured drawing, no matter how fragmented it has become in certain periods of
his career. During the years when the strength and purpose of the abstract artists
dominated in New York, Rivers was one of the few painters respected by the
abstractionists who continued to deal with recognizable subject matter.
 LARRY RIVERS 175

The Sitter shows both Rivers' talent for draftsmanship and his ability to organize
a picture convincingly. The way in which the painting is put together, a fully sug-
gested form separated from another by a lightly brushed area, is reminiscent of
Cezanne's later water-color technique and of his oils that translate the lightness and
transparency of water color to the heavier medium. The darker, more fully devel-
oped figure at the top center might be Cezanne's compelling Mont Sainte Victoire.
The way in which the table falls off sharply suggests, too, the foreground in a
Cézanne landscape. While we look head on at the repeated figure (a favorite sitter),
we look down at the table and its fully round plates. Rivers' most obvious relation-
ship to the abstract expressionists is in his leaving bare the process, the various stages
of completion, so that the making of his pictures becomes their true subject. There
is something in The Sitter of the French postimpressionist Bonnard in the way the
color is kept light and closely valued, and in the way the human figure is placed in a
homely yet disturbingly vague context. Rivers has said of his interest in the master
painting of the past, " I n relation to my own meanderings, disregarding what others
do, feel, or think, my work at moments seems an attempt to solidify my identity
with the 'great' painters. I can only hope to be original with what has been given
me."

A N D R E W WYETH, perhaps the most celebrated of today's American painters,

is respected as a traditionalist even by those who disapprove of the current tradition
of realism. Of the painters who have worked with directness and accuracy to
describe aspects of the visible world through the medium of their own sensibilities,
Wyeth particularly admires Eakins, Homer, and Hopper. His own technical facility
is great, so great, in fact, that we see through it to the scene he represents. It is in
this that he surpasses his academic contemporaries. In most of their work the reliance
on a specific master of the past is so strongly evident that it is this influence we see
rather than the subject or the personality of the painter. Wyeth has been aware of
this problem for a long time. He avoids it by painting with sensitivity and origi-
nality rather than merely by following others. " M y aim," he wrote in 1942, "is to
escape from the medium with which I work. To leave no residue of technical man-
nerisms to stand between my expression and the observer. . . . Not to exhibit craft,
but rather to submerge it, and make it the rightful handmaiden of beauty, power
and emotional content."
In Wyeth's A Crow Flew By the dry technique and the spareness of form and color
emphasize the quiet dignity of the subject, a man named Ben Loper. Wyeth did
preliminary sketches for a month and spent eleven weeks on the painting. His effort
went toward capturing the mood of his first impression in more permanent form.
176 ANDREW WYETH

WYETH : A Crow Flew By, 1 949-1950. Tempera on wood, 17% x 27 inches. Arthur H. Hearn Fund,
50.46.2

This could be done only by rearranging the way in which the scene actually looked,
eliminating certain details and emphasizing others until the painting conveyed the
sense rather than the photographic look of the scene. "It's not what you put in but
what you leave out that counts," Wyeth has stated. The sitter leans forward, his
face half in light, half in shade. Behind him the tattered garments of his life hang
with pathetic dignity upon a featureless wall. Avoiding the pitfalls of oversenti-
mentality and of superfluous detail, Wyeth has given us a moving picture.

Since the early fifties there have been a number of attempts to find new and vital
approaches to subject matter and figurative paintings. Several California painters
have worked their figuration out of abstraction, incorporating the freedom of the
brush and the accidental effects of the dominant mode of painting in their large
figurative canvases. In another approach, the pop artists—the painters of the
popular, commercial image—have taken up the startling aspects of mass-produced
Americana as both their subject and technique. All of these, and other contemporary
figurative painters, owe something of the ability and possibility of their art to the
fact that such artists as Dickinson, Avery, Rivers, and Wyeth, with their strongly
individual approaches, stayed with the subject.
Chapter Twelve

The New Abstraction

In the years following the Second World War the center of creative originality and
intensity in painting shifted for the first time from Europe to America, more specific-
ally from Paris to New York. It was in Europe that the possibility ofa nonrealistic,
nonfigurative art was invented and developed in the early decades of the century.
It is in America that the vital continuity of this art has proceeded in recent decades.
In an age of instant communication nationalism in art is no longer as meaningful
as it once was. The international art magazines and the increase in travel of painters
and paintings have made for transatlantic and transpacific influence and counter-
influence, and the release of energy that this interchange has made possible is
responsible for both the richness and complexity of contemporary art.
The sources of postwar American painting are almost as many and as individual
as the artists who produced it. We can generalize about the influence of surrealist
automatism, about the Federal Government's sponsorship of art during the Depres-
sion years through the WPA and the sense of community this gave the artists, and
about the influx of deeply influential European artists during the war years and
how this helped American painters to absorb completely the styles and attitudes of
advanced European painting. When we have touched on these matters we have
described only some of the elements that went into the heightening of American
art that has come to be known as abstract expressionism or as the New York school.
The term abstract expressionism was first employed in English by Alfred Barr in
1929 to place the paintings of Wassily Kandinsky of the decade 1910-1920—paint-
ings that are traditionally held to be the first complete abstractions. The expres-
sionist element in this work is the objectified emotion, the heave and swell of land-
scape forms to a point just beyond definite recognizability, the rhythmic distortion
of things seen and remembered by the greater strength of things felt. But as we saw
earlier, the landscape references in these first abstractions of Kandinsky, the similar
references in the contemporary art of Arthur Dove, and the references to light and
to the sun in the disks of Kupka and Delaunay mean that none of this work was fully-
abstract. As a term, abstract expressionism is more useful in characterizing the fully
abstract paintings of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Franz Kline.

177
178 THE NEW ABSTRACTION

Of course it cannot be denied that the rhythms of urban life and an awareness of
the city's structure are to some degree elements in the art of Kline, or that the size
and gesture of the outdoor painted sign are present as a remembered remnant in
the abstract works of de Kooning. With art as free and open as this the latitude for
association is wide, and because we bring the entire history of our looking to these
pictures, they often put us in mind of something. The associations we make may
derive from the residue of an image in the artist's mind or hand, or they may be a
superimposition by our mind on the presented forms, a personal selection and group-
ing of shape and color from the total complexity of the painting. There is a natural
tendency for the mind to reject complexity in favor of the simple pattern, the familiar
image. It requires effort to perceive complexity and to allow it to remain complex.
Abstract expressionism, then, describes an art that makes no natural references
except tangentially, and that records the objectified image of the artist's personal
state of feeling. While the term is adequate to describe the turmoil of much of the
painting of the late nineteen-forties and fifties, one may ask if it has much relevance
to the work of Robert Motherwell, Bradley Walker Tomlin, Mark Rothko, Barnett
Newman, or Clyfford Still. These painters, too, have objectified their images, have
made their personal visions and vocabularies generally available, but without the
extroverted energy we associate with expressionism—a term that evokes El Greco,
van Gogh, Soutine. The excitement and explosive energy, even violence (or what
was once read as violence) of Pollock, de Kooning, and Kline was only one of the
startling developments in postwar American painting. It was surely the most
dramatic, the most newsworthy, and thus it captured the public imagination, but
at the same time a quieter and more monumental style was developing. The difficult
paintings of Newman and Still have often been classed under the rubric of abstract
expressionism, probably to make it easier to avoid thinking about them with serious-
ness. To categorize them with art that has more patent drama gives the impression
that they are being dealt with.
Here something must be said about those who speak professionally about art:
the journalists, critics, and college art professors, the interpreters to the public of
the recondite and shocking. Once the label abstract expressionism was established
it gave a basis for their discourse outside the paintings themselves. Most of those
who have written of contemporary art have dealt more easily and persuasively
with words than with paintings. Of all the writers on the art of the forties and fifties
only one, Clement Greenberg, has really put us deeply in his debt. Looking at the
paintings themselves and describing and analyzing what he saw, avoiding any in-
volvement in the stance and rhetoric of the artists, Greenberg has produced a body
of essays that stands as the most important achievement in the history of American
art criticism.
 THE NEW A B S T R A C T I O N 179

Along with the paintings of Rothko and the somewhat younger Ad Reinhardt,
the pictures of Newman and Still are antiexpressionist, nongeometric, and they
make no natural or literary references. They are abstract, but they are not involved
with richness of visual incident, variations in brushwork, the insistence on the
fascination of personality as it can be expressed and controlled inch by inch across
the canvas by a hard-core abstract expressionist. These paintings also fall outside
the characterization of action painting, a term used by Harold Rosenberg in 1952
in connection with Jackson Pollock's art. As a vivid image of the process by which
Pollock worked—his reliance on the moment of involvement in the painting for
making crucial decisions—the term works well, although Pollock's relationship to
cubist space, to Thomas Hart Benton's expressionism, and to surrealism's emphasis
on the mythic are all left out. The term could also be extended to certain aspects of
Hans Hofmann's work, but an attempt to characterize all advanced American
painting as action painting would be futile.
The designation New York school is at least more inclusive, even if it does not
evoke any stylistic expectations. New York, as our largest and most cosmopolitan
city, the one most closely in touch with Europe through both proximity and rela-
tively recent immigration, has always attracted artists. The reasons have been the
buoyancy and excitement of the metropolis and the presence of its art schools and
museums. Eventually, of course, the very presence of an artistic community at-
tracted further waves of younger artists. But just as the school of Paris painters
came from almost anywhere but Paris, so most of the New York school painters
came to New York. Pollock: born in Wyoming. Gorky: born in Armenia. Rothko:
born in Russia, brought up in Oregon. Motherwell : state of Washington. Hofmann :
Germany. De Kooning: Holland. Kline: Pennsylvania. New York school painting-
is simply the logical continuation—logical after the fact, of course, because nothing
in good painting is predictable—of advanced European painting. Thus the term
names the place where a large and varied group of paintings of international sig-
nificance was executed; it characterizes little about them.
Perhaps the rather uncommitted phrase The New American Painting (under
which, during 1958-1959, the Museum of Modern Art circulated fine examples of
the work of Pollock, Gorky, Rothko, Gottlieb, Motherwell, de Kooning, Kline,
Tomlin, Newman, Still, and other New York painters through Europe) might
make a better label; at least it offers the advantage of leaving us free to examine
the paintings with no preconceived notions of what we are to see or how we are
to feel.
The great early movements of the twentieth century were fauvism, cubism (with
its offshoots futurism, suprematism, and neoplasticism), German expressionism,
dada, and surrealism. All of this activity, this wrenching of art out of its accustomed
180 THE NEW ABSTRACTION

paths, occurred with intensity in the remarkably short period from 1905 to 1925.
Following this, between 1925 and the mid-forties, major artists in Europe and
America worked out in varying personal manners the hints and implications of the
leaders: Picasso, Matisse, Duchamp, Mondrian. In the late forties, out of their
awareness of the innovational developments in Europe, the Americans created ab-
stract expressionism, the first new mode or stylistic possibility to be invented in
world art in two decades, and the first ever invented in the United States. In the
years since it came to maturity it has become the most influential style everywhere,
and New York has become the center of world art, with younger European and
Asian painters in ever larger number choosing it as the place to study and paint
instead of Paris. For some time now it has no longer been necessary to look to Europe
for examples that would be only partially understood. The culture is now local, the
context American and understandable.

A R S H I L E GORKY, who came to the United States in 1920, was at the center
of the transition of visual culture from Europe to America. In New York, about
1929, he became friendly with Stuart Davis, probably the most accomplished
abstract artist in America at the time, and in 1933 he met de Kooning, an artist he
was to influence and with whom he was to grow. During these years Gorky was
painting pictures frankly derivative of Picasso : still lifes with landscape overtones
and sometimes with suggestions of interiors—pictures with thick, viscous paint,
but looser and more swinging in rhythm than their Picasso prototypes. In the same
period he also executed a series of remarkable portraits—self-portraits, portraits of
his sister, portraits of himself with his mother—paintings that are strikingly true to
life yet lie flat and controlled on the surface of the canvas, with the shapes and their
positioning as tense and alert as the more abstract forms of the still lifes of the same
years. De Kooning was to carry the investigation of the portrait further than Gorky,
but only, as he readily admits, because Gorky pointed the way.
Gorky struggled all his mature life to become himself, to paint not like Cézanne
or Ingres or Picasso but like Gorky. We now see that his paintings of the twenties
and thirties, criticized at the time for being derivative, had the stamp of his person-
ality and style all the time. Especially as he approached the end of a period of
influence, the forms would free themselves of their derivation and become his :
flatter, more biomorphic, more tensile, able to transmit force within the picture
more easily and flowingly. It was the surrealists' automatism that ultimately in-
dicated to Gorky the way to the freedom of his last seven years. The cubist grid (or
prison in Gorky's case) was loosened and dissolved in the free flow and interchange
of his work of the forties, of which Water of the Flowery Mill h an important example.
 ARSHILE GORKY 181

The technique of drawing or painting automatically, letting the pencil or brush

follow its path with as little intellectual control by the artist as possible, released
Gorky's imagination, as did the example of the Chilean painter Matta, in whose
surrealist fantasies of the late thirties we can see the prototype for Gorky's work of
the forties. The Mattas seem hard and literal, specific and pinned down; Gorky
was to charge the forms with ambiguity and energy.
Water of the Flowery Mill is in effect a landscape occupied by biomorphic forms.
These are drawn softly at their edges, brushed loosely and lushly, yet with thin paint,
close to water color, especially in the lower right corner. The forms and paint seem
to slide gently across the surface, and we see a moment of process, not a finished
picture in any traditional sense. The ambiguity is so total and so controlled that we

GORKY: Water of the Flowery Mill, 1944. Oil on canvas, 42% x 48% inches. George A. Hearn Fund,
56.205.1
182 ARSHILE GORKY

can read each form in several contexts, relating it in shape and space and color to
one or another possibility on the canvas, thus further enriching the painting. The
forms seem to be held in space by invisible wires, while at the same time the paint
is allowed to drip down the canvas. Water of the Flowery Mill suggests, as William
Seitz has written in his essay on Gorky, "water, light, clouds, or other volatile
natural phenomena." The artist has brought into harmony the rich brushwork of
the upper right corner, the water-color looseness of the lower right, the drip tech-
nique that allows the paint to find its own course, and the biomorphic shapes of Arp
and Miró, and in so doing has given us a work that is more abstract and free than
anything in European expressionist painting.
By his courage as a painter Gorky helped to free his fellow painters. After his
suicide in 1948 a touching tribute was paid him in the magazine Art News by his
friend de Kooning: " I n a piece on Arshile Gorky's memorial show—and it was a
very little piece indeed—it is mentioned that I was one of his influences. Now that is
plain silly. When, about fifteen years ago, I walked into Arshile's studio for the first
time, the atmosphere was so beautiful that I got a little dizzy and when I came to, I
was bright enough to take the hint immediately. If the bookkeepers think it neces-
sary continuously to make sure of where things and people come from, well then, I
come from 36 Union Square [Gorky's studio]. It is incredible to me that other
people live there now. I am glad that it is almost impossible to get away from his
powerful influence. As long as I keep it with myself I'll be doing all right. Sweet
Arshile, bless your dear heart."

J A C K S O N POLLOCK came to the realization of his style and personality with

greater directness than Gorky, but like him went through an apprenticeship to
European art, specifically to the surrealists, before freeing himself. His earliest
pictures, done between 1930 and 1937, show the influence of his teacher, Thomas
Hart Benton, and of Ryder; they are thickly painted expressionist seascapes and
landscapes, small in scale, charged with an almost incoherent energy. Pollock used
to say that his work with Benton was "important as something against which to
react very strongly, later on ; in this, it was better to have worked with him than
with a less resistant personality who would have provided a much less strong op-
position." During these years Pollock was attracted to the work of the Mexican
muralists Orozco, Rivera, and Siqueiros. Frank O'Hara, in his book on Pollock,
has pointed out the possible connection between Pollock's enormous later paintings
and the statements Rivera was making in the thirties to the effect that art, express-
ing the new order of things and belonging to the populace, should appear on the
walls of public buildings.
 JACKSON POLLOCK 183

Like Gorky, de Kooning, Rothko, and a number of other painters who were to
become leaders in the forties and fifties, Pollock was employed on the Federal Art
Project during the thirties. Valuable to him in this experience, as well as to the
others, were friendships with like-minded painters that resulted in beneficial
influences and counterinfluences. A consuming interest with these New York-based
artists was the painting of Picasso, Mondrian, and the surrealists. Later, in the
forties, Pollock spoke thus of his debt to the Europeans: " I accept the fact that the
important painting of the last hundred years was done in France. American painters
have generally missed the point of modern painting from beginning to end. . . .
Thus the fact that good European moderns are now here is very important, for
they bring with them an understanding of the problems of modern painting. I am
particularly impressed with their concept of the source of art being the Unconscious.
This idea interests me more than these specific painters do, for the two artists I
admire most, Picasso and Miró, are still abroad."
The surrealists working in New York at the time Pollock said this were Duchamp,
Masson, Ernst, Dali, Chagall, Matta, Tanguy, and (as intellectual leader and
theoretician) the poet André Breton. Pollock's receptivity to their ideas was acute
and personal. Never a surrealist himself, he reinterpreted his expressionist back-
ground and training in the light of their ideas about the unconscious and the
autonomy of the hand. Then, having developed the courage to follow his instinct,
he abandoned the specific image, the recognizable peg on which to hang the picture,
and went on to produce the most original and influential paintings ever done by
an American.
In the years since his death, Pollock has become the mythic American painter.
The ridicule and scorn he once underwent in the press has become praise and pride
as the enduring quality of his work and its international acceptance and emulation
have become established facts. It was surely the reports of his technique of painting,
rather than the look of the finished pictures, that excited the derision of the public.
Long before, Whistler had been accused of "flinging paint" ; the charge was repeated
against Pollock. The error his critics made was in underestimating the control the
artist has in his hand and wrist. There is as much personal signature in the dripping
of fluid paint as there is in the wielding ofa brush. The work of the literal imitators,
those who have turned Pollock's open yet never arbitrary decisions into mere
contentless style, is proof of this.
A statement Pollock made in 1947 is revealing of his technique and of his mood:
" M y painting does not come from the easel . . . I prefer to tack the unstretched
canvas to the hard wall or the floor. I need the resistance ofa hard surface. On the
floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since this way I
can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting. This is
184 JACKSON POLLOCK

akin to the method of the Indian sand painters of the West. I continue to get further
away from the usual painter's tools. . . . I prefer sticks, trowels, knives and dripping-
fluid paint or a heavy impasto with sand, broken glass and other foreign matter

POLLOCK : Autumn Rhythm, 1950. Oil on canvas, 105 x 207 inches. Estate of Jackson Pollock,
George A. Hearn Fund, 57.92

Wj/M ••.-. • . VI'. ' J » 1

 JACKSON POLLOCK 185

added. When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It is only after
a sort of'get acquainted' period that I see what I have been about. I have no fears
about making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life
of its own. I try to let it come through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting
that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take,
and the painting comes out well."
186 JACKSON POLLOCK

Clearly this was the approach in one of Pollock's greatest works, Autumn Rhythm.
In the period since it was painted the picture has changed for many viewers from
the arbitrary to the inevitable, from seeming to be an angry diatribe against art to
an elegant statement. As in so many of Pollock's large paintings of the late forties
and fifties, there is a choreographic quality to the slow movement of the paint across
the surface. The picture is not continuous, infinite, cut off by the painter at a certain
size. An examination of the four corners and of the top and bottom will indicate that
it sits exactly within the area of the canvas, contained and self-referential, turning
in on itself.
One thread that runs through Pollock's work, although it is not explicit in Autumn
Rhythm, is his concern with the mythic. It can be seen in his paintings of the early
forties, among others She Wolf, Pasiphaë, Totem, and Guardians of the Secret. In his last
pictures it comes forward again as specific subject matter. Thus Pollock tapped for
himself and for us, in a newly meaningful way, the sources that have always been
the wellsprings of art.

BAZIOTES : Dragon, 1 950.

Oil on canvas, 47% x 39%
inches. Arthur H. Hearn
Fund, 50.27
STAMOS : Echo, 1 948. Oil on
masonite, 48 x 36 inches.
Arthur H. Hearn Fund, 50.37

W I L L I A M B A Z I O T E S and T H E O D O R O S S T A M O S have taken one

aspect of surrealism, not its automatism but its image-making power, and put it to
personal use. In Baziotes' Dragon the background offers little spatial indication, no
horizon line, and only slight atmospheric density. On it, occupying most of the pic-
ture's surface, floats the figure, flat, abstracted, its isolated parts reduced to a
schematic indication. There is wit rather than menace in the hugely open mouth,
and in the body that balances so exactly on the highest, sharpest point of the
"body." Baziotes' gently fantastic images, of which Dragon is typical, differ so
radically from the allover skeining of Pollock's Autumn Rhythm that at first it may
be difficult to credit that both paintings are indebted, to a degree, to surrealism.
Stamos, in his Echo, shows another treatment of the single image. As in Baziotes'
work, it appears against a nonspecific background, but the figure derives less from
the imagination and more from something seen, perhaps a close-up of an eye or a
view ofa table from above.
 MARK ROTHKO

ROTHKO: Number 2, 1962. Oil on canvas, 81 x 76 inches. Lent by Mrs. Albert D. Lasker

MARK ROTHKO, like other painters of the invented, repeated single image,
came to his mature style from surrealism. Along with Gorky, Pollock, and de
Kooning, he was a WPA painter during the late nineteen-thirties. With the sense
of shared artistic experience gained here, he went on, a decade later, to found a
school called "Subjects of the Artist." His associates in theventure were his fellow-
painters Baziotes, Motherwell, and Newman. Out of it grew the discussion group
called " T h e Club" that, continuing through the nineteen-fifties, provided an ex-
 MARK ROTHKO 189

citing forum for the ideas of New York's avant-garde. During these years Rothko
abstracted from his surrealist pictures a schema: floating horizontal rectangles
with blurred edges, the background color subtly and dramatically attuned to the
color of the rectangles. Such a painting is his Number 2. His pictures of the period
just preceding this were smaller and much more complex, made of many small
floating elements dovetailed in a kind of underwater fantasy. It is difficult now to
reconstruct exactly what happened in the years 1948-1951, the key period in the
development of the cool, clean, nonliterary, nongeometric art of Rothko and his
contemporaries Newman, Still, and Reinhardt. It is probable that Newman and
Still, in their work of 1949, helped crystallize ideas for Rothko that were already
hinted at in his own painting. The monolithic clarity and simplicity, the vertical
presence and directness of means of Newman's Concord, which was exhibited in 1949,
may have been the very elements that made it possible for others to think in these
terms. Whatever the explanation, Rothko's pictures are softer and more giving
than Newman's, Still's, or Rcinhardt's; they demand and receive easier acceptance
than the more austere, noninvolving paintings of the other men.
In 1949, as Rothko's work was moving toward the image and style of his Number 2,
he offered this statement of his ideas in the avant-garde magazine The Tiger's Eye:
" T h e progression ofa painter's work, as it travels in time from point to point, will
be toward clarity; toward the elimination of all obstacles between the painter and
the idea, and between the idea and the observer. As examples of such obstacles, I
give (among others) memory, history, or geometry, which are swamps of general-
ization from which one might pull out parodies of ideas (which are ghosts) but never
an idea itself. To achieve this clarity is, inevitably, to be understood."

A D O L P H G O T T L I E B , who once studied with Robert Henri and J o h n Sloan,

has been in the mainstream of exhibitions and discussions in the New York art
world since the mid-ninetccn-thirties. The progression his art is clearly seen in a
comparison of his Y of 1950 and his Thrust of 1959. The earlier painting is squared
off in a casual freehand manner and most of the squares are filled with symbols,
among others a circle, an eye with two pupils, an easel with a square-root sign on
an oddly shaped canvas, an S-curve, and the T from which the painting gets its
name. The picture is clearly if erratically structured; its ambiguity lies in the dis-
associated signs. The content is very nearly the structure, for the lines and signs are
all to be read as two-dimensional. No story element is hinted at; we are required
to take each sign at its face value. This painting is one of the final statements of
Gottlieb's interest in the pictographic or primitive symbolic, which had concerned
him since 1941. The period 1951-1957 saw him painting imagined landscapes,
190 ADOLPH GOTTLIEB

abstracted and lyrically explosive. In Thrust he has eliminated the linear structure
of the earlier painting and made two gigantesque signs and their relationship the
entire subject, content, and structure. Gottlieb began this series of "bursts," as he
calls them, in 1957, inventing an impressive personal symbology that is as forceful
and obsessive as the best work of his generation. Over the years his paintings have
become larger in format, the colors more dramatic, the number of elements fewer.
Thrust can be read as an exploding land mass beneath a contained and darkly
radiant sun, or as an active Hegelian dialogue between a freely painted expres-
sionist form, wild yet logical, and a soft-edged geometric form, both occupying
space on the same canvas in persuasive and powerful unity.

GOTTLIEB: T, 1950. Oil on canvas,

48 x 36 inches. David M. and Hope G.
Solinger Foundation, Inc., Gift Fund,
52.213

Opposite :
GOTTLIEB: Thrust, 1959.
Oil on canvas, 108 x 90
inches. George A. Hearn
Fund, 59.164
 ADOLPH G O T T L I EB 191

R O B E R T M O T H E R W E L L i s another painter who has developed a vocabulary

of symbols that he projects again and again on canvases of heroic size. His earliest
study of painting was with the Chilean surrealist Matta, the man who so influenced
Gorky. As a result of his work with Matta in Mexico in 1941, Motherwell adopted
the psychic automatism of the surrealists. On his return to New York he evinced an
192 ROBERT MOTHERWELL

MOTHERWELL: La Danse II, 1952. Oil on canvas, 6 0 x 7 6 inches. George A. Hearn Fund, 53.94

interest in the intellect of cubism and the joy of Matisse. He had his first one-man
show at Peggy Guggenheim's gallery, The Art of This Century, in 1944, and soon
became famous for his series know as Elegies to the Spanish Republic : horizontal
paintings in which black vertical elements, roughly oval, are alternately large and
small, the larger ones being the height of the canvas itself. La Danse His an atypical
Motherwell in that all its edges are clearly controlled. The forms floating darkly on
the strictly structured rectangle-within-a-rectangle have nothing of the spontaneity
or of the interest in how paint behaves that we see in other canvases by this artist.
In essence, however, La Danse II (which also exists in another version, one quarter
the size) is a hard-edged version of the Spanish Elegy series, an attempt to pull the
painting out of the contemporary concern with the action of paint and to strip it to
the basic, cleaned elements of which it is constructed. The black forms, reminiscent
of the cutout paper leaves that Matisse used in his last period, also remind us of the
abstracted and truncated references to the torso in the biomorphic work of Arp.
 ROBERT MOTHERWELL 193

One of the most thoughtful and articulate artists of his generation, Motherwell
has edited two influential books, The Dada Painters and Poets (1950) and, with Ad
Reinhardt, Modern Artists in America (1951), the latter offering the first sttempt to
describe the range and importance of the New York school.

TOMLIN: Burial, 1943. Oil on canvas, 3 0 x 4 4 inches. Arthur H. Hearn

Fund, 43.159.5

BRADLEY WALKER T O M L I N ' s style might be characterized as cubism

loosened by the illogic of surrealism. As in the case of Gottlieb we find the move-
ment from an earlier to a later painting enlightening. Tomlin's Burial is a fractured
cubist still life, the surface plane emphasized again and again by flat rectangles and
bars of color, while behind the controlling surface appears a classic head. In No. 11
the demands of the surface have taken over completely and the excuse of the
recognizable is no longer necessary. The entire large painting is made of dot and
dash elements, of tilting bars of color connected and unified with some thin and
freely painted curved lines. The painting is somewhat stiff and formal in the context
of its time, but the color (a cool yet sumptuous green and blue predominate)
elevates the work to a beautiful and resolved complexity. It is of interest to compare
the painting of Tomlin with that of Mark Tobey, since the styles of both men
evolved from the overlay of abstraction on recognizable subject matter. Disregard-
194 BRADLEY WALKER TOMLIN

TOMLIN : No. II, 1952-1953. Oil on canvas, 59 x 104 inches. Arthur H. Hearn Fund, 53.92

ing the difference in size—Tobey working small and Tomlin large—the framework
o f a Tobey is less rigid, less gridlike. But there is a suggestion throughout Tomlin's
work that, had he lived, his art would have continued developing toward the
freedom adumbrated in his late No. n.

H A N S H O F M A N N , whom we have already described as one of the great

teachers of this century, was active as a painter in Paris before the First World War.
There he knew Picasso and Matisse and was especially close to Delaunay. It is not
surprising, then, that it took him decades to work himself free of the conventions
they invented. (He once gave up painting entirely for fifteen years and limited him-
self to drawing, in order, as he has said, "to sweat cubism" out of his work.) With his
self-discipline and his belief in the deep seriousness of painting, Hofmann finally
came into his own in the nineteen-forties, thereafter producing work ever more
grandly conceived and freshly executed. "Simplicity should mean pureness, not
poorness," Hofmann has said. "This is what I stress in my teaching; no perspective
but plastic depth." Moving from The Window to Veluti in Speculum we can follow his
progression toward clarity, toward elimination of drawing, of reminiscent shape.
The Window is balanced, almost as if the forms had true weight. Here we are still
close to cubism and to allusions to the human figure. The sides and bottom of the
painting indicate the extent to which Hofmann was concerned, even as late as 1950,
 HANS HOFMANN 195

with pinning the picture down. He has given us an almost literal window through
which we see a pile-up of forms in a space not quite that of the edges of the picture.
In Veluti in Speculum all sense of drawing has been eliminated. We are presented
with rectangles of color that lie next to and slightly forward or back of one another.
This is a pure color structure but with no insistence on flatness and exactness of edge.
We see reminders of Hofmann's passion for juicyness of paint in the rich and satu-
rated color blocks, with the paths of the brush still very much in evidence. This
manner of working is only one of several used by Hofmann since the middle nineteen-
fifties. In another, invented concurrently with this one, he washes thin veils of paint
in freely moving shapes across the canvas, sometimes limiting them to a single color.
Clement Greenberg has called Hofmann's inventiveness "truly enormous, to the
point where he might be called a virtuoso of invention—as only Klee of the 1930's
was before him." Just as twenty years ago the public and critics were confused by
the diversity of Picasso's output, so are we now by Hofmann's. But what we perceive
as radically different manners today will undoubtedly fuse, with the perspective of
time, into a richlv varied but unified style.

HOFMANN : The Window, 1950. Oil

on canvas, 48 x 36% inches. Gift of
Mr. and Mrs. Roy R. Neuberger, 51.2
196 HANS HOFMANN

•.--

i*-M-r«r-'

H O F M A N N : Veluti in Speculum, 1962. Oil on canvas, 85% x 7 3 % inches. Mr. and Mrs. Richard
Rodgers and Francis Lathrop Fund, 63.225
 WILLEM DE K O O N I N G 197

WILLEM d e K O O N I N G has painted the most consistently alive and interest-

ing body of work in recent American art, a corpus that spans three decades with
restlessness and élan. His art has continued to change, although all of it has been
marked by a tensile strength and by a personal vocabulary of expanding and tilting
biomorphs. His more recent work has the calm and breadth, the expanse of a
Tiepolesque ceiling decoration. Like his friend Gorky, de Kooning had to paint
his way through great art (Ingres, Picasso, Miró, and some of Mondrian, Soutine,
and even Gorky) before he arrived at his own style. In 1948 at Charles Egan's
gallery he had his first one-man show, and his position as a leader of New York
painting, a fact known until then only by some painters, was immediately acknowl-
edged by the small audience that followed advanced art closely. The exhibition
was of his black-and-white paintings of the previous three years. Like Pollock, de
Kooning had for a time eliminated color from his palette, perhaps to concentrate
his attention on drawing and formal structure.
In his Easter Monday the entire surface is activated, but in a very different way
than in Pollock's Autumn Rhythm. In the Pollock skeins of paint float and flow above
and below each other creating a new, shallow space. In Easter Monday there is a
pervasive sense of drawing and brushing. The paint has been worked, in some areas
with a house painter's brush, wide and generalizing, in others with thinner, more
specifically energy-bearing strokes. The colors are characteristic de Kooning blues,
pinks, and yellows; they do much to calm the composition and, in their attractive-
ness, to balance the coarsely dragged and rubbed surface. (In a black-and-white
photograph the drawing and superstructure, without the softening effect of the
color, leap forward.) The painting was very much worked over. Because de Koo-
ning was impatient to continue but did not want to paint over wet areas, he applied
newspaper to absorb some of the oil. The paper's text and cuts, picked up by the
paint, were incorporated into the picture. While this was one legitimate way to
reintroduce recognizable imagery into painting so dedicated to spontaneity, de
Kooning proved, in his series of paintings depicting women, begun in 1952, that the
human figure could be used in advanced art. These women are created, dissolved,
exploded, eaten into by the same energetic brushwork we see in Easter Monday. Such
paintings as these spawned a number of younger "second generation" painters who
did good work in the dc Kooning style. Although it was Pollock's spirit that pervaded
the decade of the fifties, and it was his liberating influence that will be seen as the
major factor in the new vitality of American art, more paintings have been produced
with the de Kooning structure and brushwork behind them than paintings re-
sembling- Pollock's.
A statement of dc Kooning's in which he related himself to his universe and to
his art will suggest some of the qualities that have made him so potent an influence
198 WILLEM DE KOONING

DE KOONING : Easter Monday, 1 955-1956. Oil and newspaper transfer on canvas, 96 x 74 inches.
Rogers Fund, 56.205.2
 WILLEM DE K O O N I N G 199

on artists both of his generation and younger: "Spiritually I am wherever my spirit

allows me to be and that is not necessarily in the future. I have no nostalgia, how-
ever. . . . Some painters, including myself, do not care what chair they are sitting on.
It docs not even have to be a comfortable one. They are too nervous to find out
where they ought to sit. They do not want to 'sit in style.' Rather they have found
that painting—any kind of painting, any style of painting—to be painting at all, in
fact—is a way of living today, a style of living, so to speak. That is where the form
of it lies. It is exactly in its uselessness that it is free. Those artists do not conform.
They only want to be inspired. . . . The argument often used that science is really
abstract, and that painting could be like music, and, for this reason, that you can
paint a man leaning against a lamppost, is utterly ridiculous. That space of scientists
—the space of the physicists—I am truly bored with by now. Their lenses are so
thick that seen through them the space gets more and more melancholy. There
seems to be no end to the misery of scientists' space. All that it contains is billions of
hunks of matter, hot or cold, floating around in the darkness according to a great
design of aimlessness. The stars / think about if I could fly I could reach in a few
old-fashioned days. But physicists' stars I use as buttons, buttoning up curtains of
emptiness. If I stretch my fingers next to the rest of myself and wonder where my
fingers are—that is all the space I need as a painter."

F R A N Z KLINE was a painter whose relatively brief career as a mature artist

made him an heroic figure. With his first one-man show at Charles Egan's gallery,
his stark, startling black-and-white paintings led to his instant recognition as a
coherent and forceful artist. In the next dozen years he produced what were among
the most important works of his generation. Only rarely breaking into color, he
varied and reinvented what never became a formula: the large black-and-white
gesture, the painting that was a sign—and recognizably his sign—but was never
literally translatable into word equivalents. Of these pictures Kline said, "These
are painting experiences. I don't decide in advance that I'm going to paint a defi-
nite experience, but in the act of painting, it becomes a genuine experience for me.
It's not symbolism any more than it's calligraphy."
In the late nineteen-thirties Kline was painting deeply felt but rather traditional
pictures. His masterpiece of these years is a brilliantly colored portrait of the dancer
Nijinsky; the painting, done from a photograph, contains all the wistful humor,
pathos, and energy that went into Kline's love of the theater.
The change in scale and drama in Kline's work, his leap into an electrifying
personal style, seemed more sudden than it actually was. Because he had been
painting in England during most of the thirties, Kline had missed the contact,
200 FRANZ KLINE

KLINE: Black, White, Gray, 1959. Oil on canvas, 1 0 5 x 7 8 inches. George A. Hearn Fund, 59.165
 FRANZ KLINE 201

through the Federal Art Project, with his fellow artists in America. Yet when he
returned to New York and encountered the new area that had been staked out,
he understood it immediately. His drawings of this period were schematic, quickly
brushed studies in black ink. From these to the blowing up of the scale fifty or a
hundred times was not so big a step, given the size and scale of his contemporaries'
paintings, and the artistic climate of the late forties.
"People sometimes think I take a white canvas and paint a black sign on it," the
artist once said, "but this is not true. I paint the white as well as the black, and the
white is just as important." This is certainly the case in his Black, White, and Gray, a
softer, more muted painting than most of Kline's. Lacking the clarity and precision
they have in the painter's best-known work, the black forms melt through grays
into the white of the canvas. The paint was allowed to drip and to splatter, but the
effect is not one of accident. The major form balances between upward and down-
ward thrust, hovering and billowing with a presence and power of its own.
"If you're a painter, you're not alone," Kline said in 1958, explaining himself
and his work. "You think and you care and you're with all the people who care,
including the young people who don't know they do yet. Tomlin in his late paint-
ings knew this. Jackson always knew it; that if you meant it enough when you did
it, it would mean that much. . . . You don't paint the way someone, by observing
your life, thinks you have to paint, you paint the way you have to in order to give,
that's life itself, and someone will look and say it is the product of knowing, but it
has nothing to do with knowing, it has to do with giving."
Between them de Kooning and Kline did much to invent the verbal rhetoric of
abstract expressionism. In their statements, colloquial and pinpointed on the
ordinary, with casual allusions to the most abstract of ideas about inspiration and
creativity, they developed a style of talking about painting that influenced other
artists and the art magazines. As poetic imprecision, telling and touching when it
hits its mark, it can also become involuted and dense, private and noncommunica-
tive when used by those who only dimly understand it.

J A M E S B R O O K S ' S Ainlee and CON R A D M ARCA-RELLI s The Battle ave

abstract paintings of less explosive nature than Pollock's, de Kooning's, or Kline's.
They come after the moment of invention and belong to the order of paintings that
work out the problems stated more dynamically and in less finished form by the
innovators. Such pictures are almost always more beautiful, "easier to take," than
the rougher originals. Gertrude Stein, comparing Picasso's later paintings with his
work of 1907-1911, the period of the invention of cubism, said that these pictures
had "the serenity of perfect beauty" rather than "the beauty of realization." The
202

BROOKS: Ainlee, 1957. Oil

on canvas, 84% x 66% inches.
George A. Hearn Fund, 57.48

MARCA-RELLI : The Battle, 1956. Oilcloth, toned canvas, enamel, and oil paint on canvas,
70% x 130% inches. Arthur H. Hearn Fund, 56.203
 JAMES BROOKS, CONRAD MARCA-RELLI 203

latter, she said astutely, "is a beauty that always takes more time to show itself
than pure beauty does." In Brooks's and Marca-Rclli's cases the rules have been
made; the artists understand them perfectly and create lovely paintings. Brooks
uses flat, patterned strokes that move luxuriously and convincingly down and
around on the canvas. Marca-Relli has made his picture of cutout canvas, painted,
glued down, and painted over. His title refers to the heroic battle scenes of Paolo
Uccello. The opposing forces of this energetic canvas meet and jostle one another
at the center.

S A M F R A N C I S , in both Europe and J a p a n the best-known American painter

of his generation (he was born in 1923), has continued into the sixties the richness
and intelligent excitement of abstract expressionism. His Structure No. 2 is a char-
acteristic work in its openness, its concentrations of color, its dependence on spon-
taneity. The forms splatter across the surface with vitality and wit to make tenuous
contact somewhere through the middle. In spite of the seeming arbitrariness, the
artist is in control. His style is instantly recognizable and his accidents, if such they
are, look only like his own.

FRANCIS : Structure No. 2, 1957. Water color

on paper, 40 x 27 inches. Edward Joseph
Gallagher III Memorial Collection, 58.23
204 R O B E R T R A U S C H E N B E R G , JASPER JOHNS

During the period when abstract expressionism was dominating American art it
looked as if there might be no way out of it. Once the traditions of figure painting
had been denied, it was assumed that they could not be brought back without the
loss of conviction and energy attendant on revivals. However, two young artists
who began working in the middle fifties in directions that at first seemed merely
eccentric, have demonstrated that the recognizable can be a central and fecund
power in advanced art.

Opposite :
RAUSCHENBERG : Rebus, 1955. Mixed media, 96 x 144 inches. Lent
by the artist

R O B E R T R A U S C H E N BERG, in order to move forward, has returned to a

barely tapped twentieth-century technique, collage, rather than to any orthodox
application of oil paint to canvas. In a tradition that began, as we have seen, with
the cubists and continued in America with Arthur Dove (and from the nineteen-
thirties with the magical boxes ofJoseph Cornell), he gives us the thing itself rather
than the illusion of the thing. At the same time, instead of positing a window through
which we see space, he has continued in the abstract insistence on the two-dimen-
sionality of painting. In 1964 Rauschenberg became the third American (after
Whistler and Tobey) to win first prize at the Venice Biennale. His Rebus, one of his
works exhibited at the Venice show, is close to an anthology of the techniques of
contemporary painting: dripped paint, hard rectangles of primary colors, cloth,
torn posters, comic strips, children's drawings, graffiti, and the commercial re-
production of art. The ensemble is organized with an uncanny aptness of placement
into a composition that remains harmonious and spare despite its complexities.

Opposite :
JOHNS : White Flag, 1 955. Encaustic and fabric on canvas, 72 x 144
inches. Lent by the artist

J A S P E R J O H N S , also concerned with the réintroduction of recognizable subject

matter into two-dimensional painting, has chosen to remain with such familiar
visual elements as flags, targets, numbers, and maps—entities that we know from
experience are two-dimensional. By making the full rectangle ofa painting repre-
sent a flag, as he does in Large White Flag, he is free to allow the paint itself, with its
brushstrokes and alternations of values, to suggest the shallow visual space that we
known must be closely tied to the surface. This is a painting in which the structure
amounts to the content.
 ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG, JASPER JOHNS 205

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206 R O B E R T R A U S C H E N B E R G , JASPER JOHNS

Both Rauschenberg and Johns have become widely influential artists, not only
in America but in Europe and J a p a n . Their work, while following the abstract
expressionist scale and something of its gesture, has, in its use of the common,
familiar object, opened the way to the pop artists. Eliminating the painterly look
of the fifties, these younger men have concentrated on the large, cool, blown-up
single image of movie star, food package, or advertisement. It was Rauschenberg
and Johns who made this art possible.

The history of the most recent American painting cannot be adequately described
without our turning to the work of such artists as Phillip Guston, Barnett Newman,
Ad Reinhardt, and Clyfford Still in the older generation and Helen Frankenthaler,
Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and Frank Stella in the younger. And not even then
could the story be neatly finished. History continues, paintings lead to paintings,
and no collection of contemporary art or book about it can ever quite be definitive.
Only the art itself can be definitive, and this is its strength and fascination. While
much has happened since i960 in both abstract painting and pop art that cannot
yet be sorted out with any certainty, one fact is clear and encouraging. The fresh-
ness, alertness, and vitality that have given American painting its world importance
since World War II are continuing unabated.
B I O G R A P H I ES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

N D EX
Biographies of the Painters
JOSEF ALBERS
Born Bottrop, Germany, 1888. Attended
Royal Art School, Berlin, 1913-15; School
of Applied Art, Essen, 1916-19; Art Acad-
emy, Munich, 1919-20; Bauhaus, Weimar,
1920-23. T a u g h t at Bauhaus (Weimar,
Dessau, Berlin), 1923-33; Black M o u n t a i n
College, North Carolina, 1933-49. Became
American citizen, 1939. First New York
one-man show (Sidney Janis Gallery),
1949. Ada Garrett Prize, Art Institute of
Chicago, 1954. Chairman of Department
of Design, Yale University, 1950-60. Lives
in New Haven.
IVAN ALBRIGHT
Born North Harvey, Illinois, 1897. Studied
architecture at Northwestern University
and University of Illinois, 1915-17. Army
medical draftsman, 1918-19. Studied at
Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Nantes, 1919; Art
Institute of Chicago, 1919-23; Pennsylva-
nia Academy of the Fine Arts, 1923; Na-
tional Academy of Design, New York, 1924.
First one-man show (Waiden Book Shop,
Chicago), 1930. O n e - m a n exhibition, Art
Institute of Chicago, 1931. Painting The
Door won medal for best picture in Artists
for Victory Exhibition, Metropolitan Mu-
seum of Art, 1942. Major retrospective
exhibitions: Art Institute of Chicago, 1964;
Whitney Museum of American Art, New
York, 1965. Lives in Chicago. (Middle
name, Le Lorraine, has been dropped.)
M I L T O N CLARK AVERY
Born Altmar, New York, 1893. Formal art
training: one life class at Connecticut
League of Art Students, Hartford, Con-
necticut, 1911. First one-man show ( O p -
portunity Gallery, New York), 1928. Prizes:
Connecticut Academy of Fine Arts, 1930;
Art Institute of Chicago, 1932; Baltimore
Museum of Art, 1949. Retrospective ex-
hibition, Baltimore Museum of Art, in
association with Institute of Contemporary
Art, Boston, 1952. Ford Foundation award
and exhibition, Whitney Museum of Amer-
ican Art, New York, i960. First trip to
Europe, i960. Died New York, 1965.
WILLIAM BAZIOTES
Born Pittsburgh, 1912. Studied at National
Academy of Design, New York, 1933-36.
W P A painter and teacher, New York,
1936-41. First one-man show (Peggy Gug-
genheim's Art of This Century, New York),
1944. First prize, exhibition of Abstract and
Surrealist American Artists, Art Institute
of Chicago, 1947. Cofounder of school
"Subjects of the Artist," 1947. T a u g h t at
Brooklyn Museum Art School and at New
York University, 1949-52; Museum of
Modern Art, 1950-52; H u n t e r College,
beginning 1952. Died New York, 1963.
GEORGE WESLEY BELLOWS
Born Columbus, Ohio, 1882. Left Ohio
State University, 1904, and enrolled in New
209
210 BIOGRAPHIES
York School of Art (teacher, Robert Henri).
Also studied with Hardesty G. M a r a t t a ,
J a y Hambidge. First exhibited, 1906.
Second Hallgarten Prize, National Acad-
emy of Design, 1908. Associate of National
Academy of Design, 1909 ; National Acade-
mician, 1913. T a u g h t life class at Art Stu-
dents League, 1910-11, 1917. Helped to
organize, and exhibited in, Armory Show,
1913. T a u g h t at Art Institute of Chicago,
fall, 1919. Summered Woodstock, New
York, 1920-24. Died New York, 1925.
T H O M A S HART BENTON
Born Neosho, Missouri, 1889. Worked as
newspaper cartoonist, Joplin, 1905. Stud-
ied at Art Institute of Chicago, 1907. In
Paris, 1908-12; friendship with Stanton
Macdonald-Wright. I n New York, 1912-
18; worked with ceramics and book il-
lustration, taught night school, directed
small art galleries, designed sets for Fox
Film Company. In F o r u m Exhibition,
1916. Navy architectural draftsman, 1918-
19. Instructor, Art Students League, New
York, 1926-35. Director of painting,
Kansas City Art Institute, 1935-41. In
Europe, 1949, 1952-53, 1955. Retrospec-
tive exhibition, Joslyn Art Museum, O m a -
ha, Nebraska, 1951. M u r a l s : State Capitol,
Jefferson, Missouri; I n d i a n a State Univer-
sity; New School for Social Research, New
York; H a r r y S. T r u m a n Library, Inde-
pendence, Missouri. Lives in Kansas City.
EUGENE BERMAN
Born St. Petersburg, Russia, 1899. Lived in
Germany, Switzerland, and France, 1908-
13, then returned to Russia and began study
of painting and architecture. Left Russia,
1918. Entered Académie Ranson, Paris
(teachers, Maurice Denis, Edouard Vuil-
lard), 1919. Became American citizen,
1937. Guggenheim Fellowship, 1947, 1949-
Retrospective exhibitions : I nstitute of Mod-
ern Art, Boston, 1941 ; Museum of Modern
Art, New York, 1945. Has designed scen-
ery and costumes for Ballet Russe de Monte
Carlo; Sadler's Wells Ballet, L o n d o n ; Met-
ropolitan Opera, New York ; New York City
Center O p e r a . Lives in R o m e , Italy.
ISABEL BISHOP
Born Cincinnati, 1902. Attended New York
School of Design for Women, 1919-21, and
then Art Students League (teachers, Ken-
neth Hayes Miller, Reginald Marsh). First
one-man show (Midtown Gallery, New
York), 1930. Instructor, Art Students
League, 1936-37; Skowhegan School of
Painting a n d Sculpture, Maine, summer
1956. Lives in Riverdale, New York.
PETER BLUME
Born Russia, 1906. C a m e to United States,
1911. Attended drawing classes at Educa-
tional Alliance, New York, 1921-24; later
studied at Art Students League and Beaux
Arts Institute of Design. First one-man
show (Daniel Gallery, New York), 1930.
Guggenheim Fellowship for period of paint-
ing in Italy, 1932, 1936. R r s t prize,
Carnegie International, 1934. Grant, Na-
tional Institute of Arts and Letters, 1947.
Associate, National Academy of Design.
Lives in Sherman, Connecticut.
LOUIS BOUCHÉ
Born New York, 1896. Studied in Paris,
1910-15, with Jules Bernard, Gaston Des-
valliers, René Prinet, Bernard Naudin, and
at Académie Colarossi, La Grande Chau-
mière, Ecole des Beaux-Arts. I n New York,
studied at Art Students League (teacher,
Frank Vincent D u M o n d ) , 1915-16. Later
taught at Art Students League and Na-
tional Academy of Design. In Independ-
ents Exhibition, 1917. O n e - m a n shows:
Des Moines Art Center, 1952; T e m p l e

University, 1954; Albany Institute of
History and Art, 1963. M u r a l s : Depart-
ment of Justice, Washington, D . C ; R a d i o
City Music Hall, New York (large lounge) ;
Eisenhower Memorial, Abilene, Kansas.
Lives in New York.
JAMES BROOKS
Born St. Louis, 1906. Attended Southern
Methodist University, Texas, as art major,
1923-25. Studied at Dallas Art Institute
(teacher, M a r t h a Simkins), 1925-26; night
classes at Art Students League, New York
(teachers, K i m o n Nicolaides, Boardman
Robinson), 1927-30, working meantime as
commercial Ietterei'. Shared studio with
Bradley Walker Tomlin, Woodstock, New
York, 1931. W P A painter, 1936-42. In
Army, 1942-45, attaining rank of technical
artist. Studied with painter Wallace Harri-
son, New York, 1946-47. Instructor of
drawing, Columbia University, 1946-48.
Instructor in lettering, Pratt Institute,
Brooklyn, 1948-59. First one-man show
(Peridot Gallery, New York), 1950. Fifth
prize, Carnegie International, 1956. First
prize, Art Institute of Chicago, 1957.
Visiting critic, Yale University, 1955-60.
Artist in residence, American Academy in
R o m e , 1963. Lives in New York and
Springs, Long Island.
PATRICK HENRY BRUCE
Born Long Island, Virginia, 1881. Studied
in New York with Robert Henri, 1902-03,
then settled in France. Studied with Henri
Matisse, 1908. I n Armory Show, 1913.
Returned to United States a few months
before his death ; committed suicide, New
York, 1937.
CHARLES E P H R A I M BURCHFIELD
Born Ashtabula Harbor, Ohio, 1893. At-
tended Cleveland School of Art (teachers,
Henry G. Keller, Frank N . Wilcox, William
BIOGRAPHIES 211
J . Eastman), 1912—16. Awarded scholar-
ship to National Academy of Design, New
York, 1916, but left after one day in life
class. First one-man show (Cleveland
School of Art), 1916. Designer for wall-
paper company, Buffalo, New York, 1921-
29 ; thereafter devoted full time to painting.
Retrospective exhibitions: Carnegie Insti-
tute, Pittsburgh, 1938; Albright Art Gallery,
Buffalo, 1944; Cleveland Museum of Art,
1953; Whitney Museum of American Art,
New York, 1956. Chancellor's medal,
University of Buffalo, 1944; special prize,
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts,
1950. M e m b e r Board of Directors, Albright
Art Gallery, 1948-51 ; 1952-55. Lives near
Buffalo.
KENNETH CALLAHAN
Born Spokane, Washington, 1906. Studied
at University of Washington and in Lon-
don, Florence, Paris, Mexico. Worked as
seaman, Pacific coast, 1926-28. Assistant
director Seattle Art Museum, 1933-53.
Guggenheim Fellowship, 1954. Exhibited
internationally and nationally, 1946-61;
eight one-man shows, M a y n a r d Walker
Gallery, New York. Lives in Seattle.
ARTHUR B. C A R L E S
Born Philadelphia, 1882. Studied at Penn-
sylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (teacher,
Henry M c C a r t e r ) , 1900-07, with scholar-
ship trips to Europe, 1905, 1907. In France,
1910; Rome, 1911. Exhibited in "Younger
American Painters" (Stieglitz' 291), 1910.
First one-man show (Stieglitz' 291), 1912.
I n Armory Show, 1913. Stopped painting,
1941. Died Philadelphia, 1952.
J O H N STEUART CURRY
Born on farm near Dunavent, Kansas,
1897. First art lessons in Oskaloosa, Kansas
(teacher, Alice Worwick), 1909. Left high
school to study at Kansas City Art Institute,
212 BIOGRAPHIES
ig 16. At Art Institute of Chicago (teachers,
E d w a r d J . T i m m o n s , J o h n Norton), 1916-
18. T o New Jersey, 1919, and work as free-
lance illustrator; published in Boy's Life, St.
Nicholas, Country Gentleman, Saturday Evening
Post, 1921-26. Studied in Paris (studio of
academician Basil Schoukhaieff), 1926-27.
Exhibited at Corcoran Gallery of Art,
Washington, D . C , 1928. First one-man
show (Whitney Studio Club, New York),
1930. T a u g h t at Cooper Union, New York,
1932-34; Art Students League, 1932-36.
Worked on W P A Federal Art Project, 1934.
Appointed artist in residence, Agricultural
College, University of Wisconsin, 1936.
Murals: Department of Justice, Washing-
ton, D . C , 1936-37; Kansas State Capitol,
1938-40; University of Wisconsin, 1940-
42. Died Madison, Wisconsin, 1946.
ARTHUR BOWEN DAVIES
Born Utica, New York, 1862. First art
study in Utica (teacher, Dwight Williams),
1877. Moved to Chicago, 1878, studied
part time at Chicago Academy of Design
(teacher, Roy Robertson). In Mexico as
drafting civil engineer, 1880-82. S t u d i e d a t
Art Institute of Chicago (teacher, Charles
Corwin), 1882. T o New York, 1886;
magazine illustrator while studying at
G o t h a m Art School and Art Students
League. T r i p to Europe, 1893, financed by
Benjamin Altman. Exhibited with T h e
Eight, 1908. Chiefly responsible for, and
exhibited in, Armory Show, 1913. Died
Florence, Italy, 1928.
STUART DAVIS
Born Philadelphia, 1894. Left high school
to study in New York with Robert Henri at
Henri Art School, 1910-13. Drew for The
Masses, 1913. Exhibited in Armory Show,
1913. First one-man show (Sheridan Gal-
lery, New York), 1917. M a d e maps for
Army Intelligence, 1918. O n e - m a n exhibi-
tion, Newark Museum, 1925. T o Paris, 1928.
Began teaching at Art Students League,
1931. W P A painter, 1933-39. Began teach-
ing at New School for Social Research, 1940.
Prize, Carnegie International, 1944. Gug-
genheim Fellowship, 1952, 1953. Retro-
spective exhibitions: I n d i a n a University,
Cincinnati Modern Art Society, 1941;
Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1945;
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 1957.
Died New York, 1964.
WILLEM DE KOONING
Born R o t t e r d a m , Holland, 1904. Left
school, 1916, for apprenticeship to firm of
commercial artists and decorators. Studied
(night classes) at Academie voor Beeldende
Kunsten en Technische Wetenschappen,
1916-24. I n 1920 worked with artist Ber-
nard Romein. T o Belgium, 1924; art classes
in Brussels and Antwerp. Returned to
R o t t e r d a m and the Academie, 1925. T o
America, 1926; house painter, New Jersey.
Free-lance commercial artist, New York,
1927. Summer of 1928 in Woodstock, New
York. Shared studio with Arshile Gorky,
New York City, late 1930s. W P A painter,
1935; worked under Fernand Léger on
mural for French Line's pier, New York.
T a u g h t at Black M o u n t a i n College, North
Carolina, 1948. First one-man show (Egan
Gallery, New York), 1948. T a u g h t at Yale
University Art School, 1950-51. Retro-
spective exhibition, Boston Museum School,
1953. Exhibited in Museum of Modern
Art's European show, " T h e New American
Painting," 1958-59. Lives in New York.
CHARLES HENRY DEMUTH
Born Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 1883. At-
tended Franklin and Marshall Academy,
Lancaster, 1899-1901; Drexel Institute,
Philadelphia, 1901 - 0 5 ; Pennsylvania Acad-
emy of the Fine Arts (teachers, William

Merritt Chase, T h o m a s Anshutz), 1905.
T r i p to Europe, 1907. Again at Penn-
sylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1908.
I n Paris, 1912, studied at Academic
Colarossi, Académie Moderne, a n d Acadé-
mie Julien. First one-man show (Daniel
Gallery, New York), 1915. O n e - m a n shows
(Stieglitz' Intimate Gallery), 1926, 1929;
(Stieglitz' An American Place), 1931. Died
Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 1935.
E D W I N W. DICKINSON
Born Seneca Falls, New York, 1891. T o
New York City, 1910. Studied at Pratt
Institute, Brooklyn, Art Students League,
and with William Merritt Chase and
Charles Hawthorne. I n Navy, 1917-19. I n
Europe, 1919-20; 1937-38. First one-man
show (Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo), 1927.
W P A painter, 1934. T a u g h t at Art Students
League, 1922-23, 1945—; Cooper Union
Art School, New York, 1945—; Brooklyn
Museum Art School, 1949. Prizes, National
Academy of Design, 1929, 1949. Grant,
National Academy of Arts and Letters,
1954. Exhibited in "Fifteen Americans,"
Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1952.
O n e - m a n circulating exhibition sponsored
by Museum of Modern Art, 1961. Lives in
New York.
BURGOYNE DILLER
Born Battle Creek, Michigan, 1906. At-
tended Michigan State College, 1926-27,
Art Students League, New York, 1928-31.
First one-man show (Contemporary Arts
Gallery, New York), 1933. H e a d of M u r a l
Division, Federal A r t Project, New York
City, 1935-40; Assistant Technical Direc-
tor, W P A New York Art Project, 1940-41 ;
Director, W P A New York City W a r Service
Art Section, 1941-42. Professor, Design
Department, Brooklyn College, 1945—.
Retrospective exhibition, Galerie Chalette,
New York, 1961. Died New York, 1965.
BIOGRAPHIES 213
ARTHUR GARFIELD DOVE
Born Canandaigua, New York, 1880. At-
tended Hobart College and Cornell Uni-
versity; graduated from latter, 1903. At-
tended Art Students League, New York;
worked as commercial artist, 1903-07. In
France, 1907-09. Exhibited in "Younger
American Painters" (Stieglitz' 291), 1910.
First one-man show (Stieglitz' 291), 1912.
In Forum Exhibition, 1916. Lived at
various times in Connecticut, along H u d -
son River on a boat, and on Long Island.
Died New York, 1946.
GUY PÊNE DU BOIS
Born Brooklyn, New York, 1884. Studied
at New York School of Art (teachers,
Carrol Beckwith, William Merritt Chase,
Frank Vincent D u M o n d , R o b e r t Henri,
Kenneth Hayes Miller), 1899-1905. Stud-
ied with Alexandre Steinlen, Paris, 1905.
Beginning 1906, worked as reporter and/or
art critic for New York American, New York
Tribune, New York Evening Post ; then became
editor of Arts and Decoration magazine. Ex-
hibited in Armory Show, 1913. Second stay
in Europe, 1924-30. O n e - m a n show (Krau-
shaar Gallery, New York), 1944. T a u g h t at
Art Students League and conducted schools
in New York, and Stonington, Connecticut.
Died Boston, 1958.
LOUIS MICHEL EILSHEMIUS
Born Newark, New Jersey, 1864. Attended
school in Germany, 1875-81; at Cornell
University, New York, 1882-84. Studied
painting in New York with Robert L.
Minor and at Art Students League, 1884-
86. T o Paris, studied at Académie Julien,
1886-87. Traveled in Europe a n d North
Africa, 1892-94; South Seas, 1901; in
Europe again, 1902-03. I n Independents
Exhibition, 1917. One-man show (Société
Anonyme, New York), 1920. Stopped
painting in 1921. Died New York, 1941.
214 BIOGRAPHIES
PHILIP EVERGOOD
Original name Philip Evergood Blashki.
Born New York, 1901. T o England, 1909;
attended Eton, 1915—19; Trinity Hall Col-
lege, Cambridge University, 1919-21;
Slade Art School, London (teachers, Henry
Tonks, H a r v a r d Thomas), 1921-23. At-
tended Art Students League, New York
(teachers, G. William von Schlegell, George
Luks), 1923; sketched at night, Education-
al Alliance; studied etching (teachers,
Philip Reisman, H a r r y Sternberg). T o
Paris, 1924; attended Académie Julien
(teacher, J e a n Paul Laurens) a n d studied
with André Lhôte. Exhibited in Salon
d'Automne, Paris, 1925. First one-man
show (Dudensing Galleries, New York),
1927. In France, 1930, studied engraving
with Stanley William Hayter. I n New York
joined Public Works of Art Project, 1934,
and its successor, W P A Federal Art Project.
O n e - m a n exhibition, Denver Art Museum,
1936. T a u g h t at American Artists School,
New York, 1936-37. M a n a g i n g Supervisor,
Easel Division, New York W P A Federal
Art Project, 1938. Artist in residence,
Kalamazoo College, Michigan, 1940-42.
T a u g h t at Muhlenberg College, Allen-
town, Pennsylvania, and at Settlement
Music School, Philadelphia, 1942-43;
Contemporary School of Art, Brooklyn,
and Jefferson School, New York, 1946.
Retrospective exhibition, University of
Minnesota, 1955. Painting grant, American
Academy of Arts and Letters, 1958. Lives
in New York.
LYONEL CHARLES ADRIAN
FEININGER
Born New York, 1871. Went to G e r m a n y
to study music, 1887, turned to painting.
Studied at Kunstgewerbeschule, H a m b u r g ,
and Berlin Academy, 1887-91; Académie
Colarossi (Paris), 1892-93. Worked as
cartoonist and illustrator, Berlin, 1893-
1906. In Paris, 1906-07. O n e - m a n show
(Sturm, Berlin), 1917. T a u g h t at Bauhaus,
Weimar, 1919-24. With Wassily K a n d i n -
sky, Paul Klee, a n d Alexej von Jawlensky
formed the Blue Four group, 1924. Artist in
residence at Bauhaus, Dessau, 1925-32.
Retrospective exhibition, National Gal-
lery, Berlin, 1931. R e t u r n e d to United
States for the first time, 1936; taught art
(summer session) at Mills College, Cali-
fornia. Returned permanently to United
States, 1937. Again taught summer session
at Mills College, then settled in New York.
O n e - m a n shows (Curt Valentin Gallery,
New York), 1941, 1954- Retrospective ex-
hibitions: Museum of M o d e r n Art, New
York, 1944 (with Marsden H a r t l e y ) ;
Cleveland Museum of Art, 1951. Died New
York, 1956.
SAM FRANCIS
Born San Mateo, California, 1923. At-
tended University of California, Berkeley,
1941-43. In Army Air Corps, 1943-44.
Studied painting with David Park, San
Francisco M u s e u m of Art, 1946-47. First
exhibited, San Francisco Museum of Art,
1948. Received B.A. degree (1949) and
M . A . degree (1950) from University of
California. First one-man show (Galerie
Dausset, Paris), 1952. First one-man show
in United States ( M a r t h a Jackson Gallery,
New York), 1956. Prize, International Ex-
hibition, Tokyo, J a p a n , 1956. Exhibited in
Museum of Modern Art's European show,
" T h e New American Painting," 1958-59.
Lives in California.
WILLIAM JAMES GLACKENS
Born Philadelphia, 1870. Studied at Penn-
sylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, at same
time illustrating for Philadelphia Record,
Philadelphia Public Ledger, and Philadelphia
Press. T o Paris, 1895; worked independ-
ently. Settled in New York, 1896; illustrator

for New York Herald, New York World, a n d
magazines. Artist-correspondent in C u b a
during Spanish-Anneri can War, 1898.
Visited St. Pierre and Miquelon, 1902;
Spain, 1906. Exhibited with T h e Eight,
1908; in first Independent Exhibition,
1910; Armory Show, 1913. T o Paris, 1912,
to buy paintings for Dr. Albert C. Barnes.
Second prize, Carnegie International,
1929. G r a n d prix at Paris Exposition of
1937 (highest award accorded an American
artist). Died Westport, Connecticut, 1938.
ARSHILE GORKY
Original name Vosdanig Manoog Adoian.
Born Armenia, 1904. C a m e to United
States, 1920. Attended night classes at
R h o d e Island School of Design, Providence,
then Technical High School and New
School of Design, Boston. Moved to New-
York ig25(?). Studied at, then taught at
G r a n d Central School of Art until 1931.
Formed friendship with Stuart Davis, 1929.
Formed friendship with Willem de Kooning
about 1933. W P A painter, 1936-38. Organ-
ized class in camouflage painting, G r a n d
Central School of Art, 1941. First of sum-
mer visits to Crooked R u n F a r m , Hamilton,
Virginia, 1943. M e t André Breton and sur-
realist artists, 1944. First major one-man
show (Julien Levy Gallery, New York),
1945. Twenty-seven of his paintings des-
troyed by fire in his studio at Sherman,
Connecticut, 1946. Serious illness, 1947,
followed by injury in automobile accident,
J u n e , 1948. Committed suicide, Sherman,
July, 1948.
ADOLPH GOTTLIEB
Born New York, 1903. Left high school,
1919, to study at Art Students League
(teachers, J o h n Sloan, R o b e r t Henri). T o
Europe, 1921; worked in sketch classes at
Académie de la G r a n d e Chaumière and in
other studios. R e t u r n e d to New York, 1923;
BIOGRAPHIES 215
finished high school and entered Parsons
School of Design. Concentrated on paint-
ing, meantime working as arts and crafts
teacher, sign painter, and retoucher of
photographs. First one-man show (Duden-
sing Galleries, New York), 1930. W P A
painter, 1936. T a u g h t at P r a t t Institute,
Brooklyn, and University of California at
Los Angeles, 1958. T h i r d prize, Carnegie
International, 1961. Retrospective exhibi-
tions: Bennington College, Bennington,
Vermont, 1954; Jewish Museum, New
York, 1957; Walker Art Center, Min-
neapolis, 1963. Lives in East H a m p t o n ,
Long Island, and New York.
MORRIS GRAVES
Born Fox Valley, Oregon, 1910. Trips to
Orient, 1928, 1930. W P A painter, Seattle,
1936-39. O n e - m a n show, Seattle Art M u -
seum, 1936. Associated with Seattle Art
Museum, 1940-42. Guggenheim Fellow-
ship for study in J a p a n , 1946; worked in-
stead in Honolulu. Retrospective exhibi-
tion, California Palace of the Legion of
Honor, San Francisco, 1948. I n Europe,
1948-49; Mexico, 1950; J a p a n , 1954. Now
lives in County Cork, Ireland.
GEORGE GROSZ
Born Berlin, 1893. Attended Royal Saxon
Academy of the Fine Arts, Dresden
(teachers, Richard Muller, Osmar Schind-
ler, R o b e r t Steri, R a p h a e l Wehle) 1909;
Royal Arts and Crafts School, Berlin
(teacher, Emil Orli), 1911. At Académie
Colarossi, Paris, 1913. I n G e r m a n army,
1 g 14-16, 1917-18. Joined G e r m a n d a d a
movement, Berlin, 1918. O n e - m a n show,
Weyhe Gallery, New York, i g 3 i . T o New
York, ig32. Conducted art school with
Maurice Sterne, 1933—37, a n d taught at
Art Students League, beginning 1933.
Guggenheim Fellowship, 1937, 1938. Be-
came American citizen, 1938. O n e - m a n
216 BIOGRAPHIES
exhibition, Museum of M o d e r n Art, New
York, 1941. T a u g h t at School of Fine Arts,
Columbia University, 1941-42. O n e - m a n
exhibition, Whitney M u s e u m of American
Art, New York, 1954. Died Berlin, 195g.
SAMUEL HALPERT
Born Russia, 1884. Came to United States
as a child. Studied at National Academy of
Design, i 8 g g - i g o 2 ; Ecole des Beaux-Arts,
Paris, ig02. Exhibited in Armory Show,
1913. T a u g h t at Master Institute of United
Arts, New York; art school of Detroit
Society of Arts and Crafts, 1927-30. Died
Detroit, 1930.
MARSDEN HARTLEY
Born Lewiston, Maine, 1877. Studied art in
Cleveland, O h i o (teachers, J o h n Semon,
Cullen Yates, Nina Waldeck, Caroline
Sowers), 1892. In New York, 1898-gg,
studying at New York School of Art
(teachers, William Merritt Chase, Frank
Vincent D u M o n d , F. Luis M o r a ) , and Na-
tional Academy of Design (teachers,
Frances C.Jones, Edgar M . W a r d , George
M a y n a r d , Edwin H . Blashfield, F. J . Dil-
m a n , F. Scott Hartley). First of annual
summer trips to Maine, i g o i . First one-
m a n show (Stieglitz' 2 g i ) , igog. Exhibited
in "Younger American Painters" (Stieg-
litz' 2 g i ) , i g i o . T o Paris, i g i 2 . Exhibited
in Armory Show, 1913. T o Berlin, 1914.
Exhibited in F o r u m Exhibition, 1916.
Further trips to Europe, 1921, ig22-23,
1928, 1933. T o Mexico on Guggenheim
Fellowship, 1932. Worked on W P A Federal
Art Project, New York, 1936. Died Ells-
worth, Maine, 1943.
CHARLES WEBSTER HAWTHORNE
Born Lodi, Illinois, 1872; brought u p in
Richmond, Maine. T o New York, 1890.
Worked in stained-glass factory, studied
art at night. Began at Art Students League ;
entered Frank Vincent D u M o n d ' s evening
classes, 1893 ; then returned to Art Students
League (teachers, George De Forest Brush,
H. Siddons Mowbray). Studied with Wil-
liam Merritt Chase at his Shinnecock
Summer School of Art, Long Island, 1896;
helped Chase to organize his New York
school and acted as his assistant, 1897. Ex-
hibited with County Sketch Club at Na-
tional Academy of Design, 1897. Founded
Cape Cod School of Art, Provincetown,
Massachusetts, 189g ; summers in Province-
town thereafter. To Italy, 1906. Winters in
Bermuda, 1910, i g i 1; Paris, 1912-15;
New York, beginning 1919. I n addition to
Cape Cod school, taught at Art Students
League, National Academy of Design, Art
Institute of Chicago. Third prize, Carnegie
International, ig25. Died Baltimore, ig30.
ROBERT HENRI
Original name Robert Henry Cozad. Born
Cincinnati, 1865. Studied at Pennsylvania
Academy of the Fine Arts (teachers,
Thomas Hovendon, Thomas Anshutz),
1886-88; Académie Julien and École des
Beaux-Arts, Paris, 1888-go. T a u g h t in
Philadelphia, i 8 g i - g 5 ; at Chase School,
New York, igo3~o8. O n e - m a n show,
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts,
igo7. Exhibited with T h e Eight, igo8.
Established Henri School of Art, New
York, igog. Sponsored first nonjury exhibi-
tion in America, Independent Exhibition,
1910. Exhibited in Armory Show, 1913.
Trips to Europe throughout career. Died
New York, 192g.
EUGENE H I G G I N S
Born Kansas City, Missouri, 1874. Studied
at St. Louis Art School, i8go. Attended
Académie Julien, Paris (teachers, J e a n
Paul Laurens, Benjamin Constant), i8g7;
later at Ecole des Beaux-Arts (teacher,
J e a n Léon Gérôme). Exhibited (American

Art Club, Paris), igoo. Returned to United
States, 1904. Exhibited in Armory Show,
i g i 3 . Carnegie Prize, National Academy
of Design, 1937. Died New York, 1958.
HANS HOFMANN
Born Weissenberg, Germany, 1880. Began
art study, Munich, 1898. In 1904 patronage
o f a Berlin collector (Philipp Freudenberg)
enabled him to work in Paris for ten years.
Returned to Germany at outbreak of
World W a r I. Founded art school, Munich,
1915. Took his students on summer trips:
Italy, 1924, 1925-27; France, 1928-29.
T a u g h t summer session, University of
California, Berkeley, 1930; Chouinard Art
Institute, Los Angeles, spring 1931; Uni-
versity of California, Berkeley, summer
i g 3 i ; Art Students League, New York,
1932-33; T h u r n School, Gloucester, Mas-
sachusetts, summers 1932-33. Founded
Hofmann School of Art, New York, 1933;
summer school, Provincetown, Massachu-
setts, 1934. Became American citizen, 1941.
First one-man show in United States
(California Palace of the Legion of Honor,
San Francisco), 1931. First New York one-
m a n show (Peggy Guggenheim's Art of
This Century), 1944. Retrospective exhibi-
tions : Addison Gallery of American Art,
Andover, Massachusetts, 1948; Bennington
College, Bennington, Vermont, 1955; Art
Alliance, Philadelphia, 1956; Whitney
Museum of American Art, New York, 1957.
Stopped teaching to devote full time to
painting, 1958. Lives in New York and
Provincetown.
EDWARD HOPPER
Born Nyack, New York, 1882. Studied il-
lustration and commercial art, New York
City, i 8 g g - i g o o ; continued to work as il-
lustrator until 1924. Studied at New York
School of Art (teachers, Robert Henri,
K e n n e t h Hayes Miller), 1900-06. In Paris,
BIOGRAPHIES 217
1906-07, 1909; France and Spain, 1910.
Exhibited in Armory Show, 1913. From
i g i 5 till 1924 did practically no oil paint-
ing. First one-man show (Whitney Studio
Club, New York), 1920. First William A.
Clark Prize and Corcoran Gold Medal,
Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington,
D . C , 1937. Huntington Hartford Founda-
tion Fellowship, 1956. Retrospective ex-
hibitions: Museum of Modern Art, New
York, 1933 ; Whitney Museum of American
Art, New York, 1950 ; University of Arizona
Art Gallery, 1962; Whitney Museum of
American Art, 1964. Winters in New York,
summers on Cape Cod.
JASPER JOHNS
Born Allendale, South Carolina, 1930.
Studied at University of South Carolina.
T o New York, 1952. First one-man show
(Leo Castelli Gallery, New York), 1958.
Prize, Carnegie International, 1958. First
European one-man shows (Galerie Rive
Droite, Paris; Galleria d'Arte del Naviglio,
Milan), 195g. Retrospective exhibitions:
Jewish Museum, New York, 1964; White-
chapel Gallery, London, 1964; Pasadena
Art Museum, California, 1965. Lives in
New York.
JOHN KANE
Born West Calder, Scotland, i860. Came
to United States, 1879. Worked at railroad
and mining jobs, Pennsylvania; as miner,
Alabama, Kentucky, Tennessee. To Pitts-
burgh, Pennsylvania, 1890; worked as
street paver. Began painting, 1897. Recog-
nition in 1927 when he exhibited in Carne-
gie International. First one-man show
(Junior League, Pittsburgh), 1931. First
show in New York (Contemporary Arts
Society), 1931. In group shows, Museum of
Modern Art, New York, 1930, 1934, 1938;
Whitney Museum of American Art, New
York, 1932, 1934. Died Pittsburgh, 1934.
218 BIOGRAPHIES
BERNARD KARFIOL
Born Hungary, 1886, of American parents.
Attended public school, Brooklyn, New
York, and Saturday art class at Pratt
Institute. Accepted at National Academy
of Design, 1900, but refused entrance to life
class because of his youth. T o Paris at age
fifteen; enrolled in Académie Julien (teach-
er, Jean Paul Laurens). T a u g h t at Gertrude
Vanderbilt Whitney's Eighth Street Studio,
New York, i g o 8 - i o ; exhibited in Armory
Show, 1913. Spent first of a n n u a l summers
in Ogunquit, Maine, 1914. First William
A. Clark Prize and Corcoran Gold Medal,
Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington,
D . C , 1925. Honorable mention, Carnegie
International, 1927. O n e - m a n exhibition,
Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, 193g. Died
Irvington-on-Hudson, New York, ig52.
ELLSWORTH KELLY
Born Newburgh, New York, ig23. Studied
at Boston Museum of Fine Arts Art School
(teacher, Karl Zerbe), 1945; at École des
Beaux-Arts, Paris, 1948. First one-man
show (Galerie A r n a u d , Paris), 1951. First
American one-man show (Betty Parsons
Gallery, New York), igs6. Exhibited in
"Sixteen Americans," Museum of Modern
Art, New York, 1959. O n e - m a n museum
shows : Washington Gallery of Modern Art,
Washington, D . C , 1963-64; Institute of
Contemporary Art, Boston, 1964. Fourth
prize, Carnegie International, 1961 ; paint-
ing prize, Carnegie International, 1964.
Lives in New York.
FRANZ KLINE
Born Wilkes B a n e , Pennsylvania, 1910.
Studied at Girard College, Philadelphia.
Art classes at Boston University, 1931-35;
Heatherly's Art School, London, 1937-38.
Settled in New York, 1938. First one-man
show (Egan Gallery, New York), 1950.
T a u g h t at Black M o u n t a i n College, North
Carolina, 1952; Pratt Institute, Brooklyn,
1953; Philadelphia Museum School of Art,
ig54- Exhibited in Museum of Modern
Art's European show, " T h e New American
Painting," ^ 5 8 - 5 9 . Died New York, 1962.
LEON KROLL
Born New York, 1884. Studied at Art
Students League (teacher, J o h n H. Twacht-
man) and National Academy of Design; at
Académie Julien, Paris (teacher J e a n Paul
Laurens). First one-man show (National
Academy of Design, New York), 1911.
Exhibited in Armory Show, 1913. First
Altman Prize, National Academy of De-
sign, 1922, 1932. Retrospective exhibition,
Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, 1935. First
prize, Carnegie International, 1936. M u -
rals: Department of Justice, Washington,
D.C. ; Worcester W a r Memorial, Worces-
ter, Massachusetts. Lives in New York.
WALT KUHN
Born Brooklyn, New York, 1877. Began
cartooning, 1899. Studied at Académie
Colarossi, Paris, a n d Royal Academy,
Munich (teacher, Heinrich von Zugel),
1901-03. Cartoonist for Life, Puck, Judge,
New York Sunday Sun, and New York World,
1905-14. T a u g h t at New York School of
Art, 1908. First one-man show (Madison
Galleries, New York), 1901. Executive
secretary of Armory Show, 1912-13; also
exhibited in show. T a u g h t at Art Students
League, 1927-28. Consulting architect for
Union Pacific Railroad, 1936-41. Died
White Plains, New York, 194g.
YASUO KUNIYOSHI
Born Okayama, Japan, 1893. Educated in
elementary and technical schools. Came to
United States, 1906 ( i g i 1, according to
National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo),
lived in Seattle and Los Angeles. Studied a t
National Academy of Design, New York,

1910, briefly at Henri school, at Independ-
ent School, 1 g 14-16, a n d at Art Students
League (teacher, K e n n e t h Hayes Miller)
1916-20. Trips to Europe, 1925, 1928
T a u g h t at Art Students League after 1933
New School for Social Research after 1936
Guggenheim Fellowship, 1935. First presi-
dent of Artists Equity Association. Died
Woodstock, New York, 1953.
ERNEST LAWSON
Born San Francisco, 1873. T o New York,
1890; studied at Art Students League,
(teachers, J o h n H . T w a c h t m a n , J. Alden
Weir). In Paris, studied at Académie J u l i e n
(teacher, Benjamin Constant). Exhibited
with T h e Eight, 1908; in Armory Show,
1913. First prize, Carnegie International,
1921. Died Miami Beach, Florida, 193g.
JACK LEVINE
Born Boston, 1915. First art lessons at a
Roxbury community center, then, begin-
ning ig29, drawing instruction at Boston
Museum of Fine Arts; later worked under
tutelage of D e n m a n Ross of Department of
Fine Arts, H a r v a r d University. W P A
painter, 1935. In Museum of Modern Art's
show of W P A work, New York, 1936. First
one-man show (Downtown Gallery, New-
York), 193g. Guggenheim Fellowship,
1945, 1946; Fulbright Fellowship, 1950.
Retrospective exhibitions: Institute of Con-
temporary Art, Boston, 1953; Whitney
Museum of American Art, New York, 1955;
Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City, i960.
Lives in New York.
JONAS LIE
Born Moss, Norway, 1880. I n Paris, 1892.
Came to United States, 1893. Attended
night school, National Academy of Design
and Art Students League. T r i p to P a n a m a ,
1910; paintings depicting construction of
the canal. Exhibited in Armory Show,
BIOGRAPHIES 219
1913. Carnegie Prize, National Academy
of Design, 1927. President of National
Academy, ig34~3g. Died New York, ig40.
GEORGE B E N J A M I N LUKS
Born Williamsport, Pennsylvania, 1867.
Studied at Pennsylvania Academy of the
Fine Arts; Düsseldorf Academy, G e r m a n y ;
also in London and Paris. Artist-correspond-
ent for Philadelphia Bulletin, i8go. Exhibited
with T h e Eight, i g o 8 ; in Armory Show,
1913. First William A. Clark Prize a n d
Corcoran Gold Medal, Corcoran Gallery
of Art, Washington, D . C , 1927. Died New
York, 1933.
STANTON MACDONALD-WRIGHT
Born Charlottesville, Virginia, 1890. Pri-
vate art instruction, 1895-1900. At Cali-
fornia Art Students League, 1907-07. T o
Paris, 1907; studied at École des Beaux-
Arts, Académie Julien, and other schools.
Exhibited in Salon d'Automne, 1910. With
M o r g a n Russell founded sy nchromist move-
m e n t ; synchromist exhibitions in Munich
(1913), Milan, Paris, London, Warsaw.
First exhibited in New York (Carrol Gal-
lery), 1913. In 1919 went to live in Cali-
fornia. Studied Chinese and Japanese
calligraphy and esthetics, ig33~35- Direc-
tor W P A Federal Art Project, Southern
California, ^ 3 5 - 3 7 , 1938-42. In J a p a n ,
1937-38. Professor of Oriental art and
esthetics, University of California at Los
Angeles, 1942-54. Fulbright exchange pro-
fessor, Japan, 1952-53. Retrospective ex-
hibition, Los Angeles Museum of Science,
History and Art, igs6. Divides time be-
tween California (Pacific Palisades) and
J a p a n (Kyoto).
H E N R Y LEE M c F E E
Born St. Louis, 1886. Studied at Stevenson
Art School, Pittsburgh, igo7. T o Wood-
stock, New York, igo8, where he entered
220 BIOGRAPHIES
Art Students League's summer classes
(teacher, Birge Harrison), igog. M a d e
Woodstock his home, i g i o . First exhibited
(McDowell Club, New York), i g n . In
F o r u m Exhibition, i g i 6 . Honorable men-
tion, Carnegie International, 1923. First
one-man show (Rehn Gallery, New York),
1927. Died Pasadena, California, 1953.
CONRAD MARCA-RELLI
Born Boston, 1913. Childhood spent partly
in Europe. T o New York, 1926. W P A
painter, late 1930s. I n Army, 1944-48.
First one-man show (Niveau Gallery, New
York), ig48. T r i p to Mexico, 1953; sub-
sequently several trips to Europe. First
prize, Art Institute of Chicago, 1954. Visit-
ing critic, Yale University, 1954-55;1959~
60. Associate professor, University of Cali-
fornia, Berkeley, 1958. Lives in New York.
JOHN MARIN
Born Rutherford, New Jersey, 1870. After
attending Stevens Institute, New Jersey,
worked in a n architect's office a n d as free-
lance architect. Studied at Pennsylvania
Academy of the Fine Arts (teachers,
T h o m a s Anshutz, H u g h Breckenridge),
1899-1901, and at Art Students League,
New York (teacher, Frank Vincent Du-
M o n d ) , 1904. Several trips to Europe,
igo5~io. First one-man show (Stieglitz'
291), 190g. Exhibited in "Younger Ameri-
can Painters" (Stieglitz' 291), 1910; Ar-
mory Show, 1913; F o r u m Exhibition, i g i 6 .
Spent first of m a n y summers in Maine,
i g i 4 - I n New Mexico, ^ 2 9 - 3 0 . Retrospec-
tive exhibitions : Museum of Modern Art,
New York, 1936; Institute of Modern Art,
Boston, 1947; Los Angeles County M u -
seum, 194g. Died Cape Split, Maine, 1953.
REGINALD M A R S H
Born France, i8g8, of American parents.
Attended Yale University, ig 16-20; grad-
uated with A.B. degree. First professional
art instruction, Yale and Art Students
League, New York, 1919. Free-lance il-
lustrator for New York Evening Post, New
York Herald, Vanity Fair, Harper's Bazaar,
ig20. Staff artist, New York Daily News,
ig22-25- Illustrator for The New Yorker,
1925-31 ; also free-lance for Esquire, Fortune,
Life. Studied at Art Students League
(teachers, J o h n Sloan, K e n n e t h Hayes
Miller, George Bridgman, George Luks),
1920-24, (teacher, K e n n e t h Hayes Miller),
1927-28. O n e - m a n show (Rehn Gallery,
New York), ig30. Studied dissection, Col-
lege of Physicians and Surgeons, New York,
1931, Cornell University Medical College,
1934. Studied fresco (teacher, Olle Nord-
mark), sculpture (teacher, M a h o n r i Young),
1935, copper engraving (teacher, Stanley
William Hay ter), 1940, painting (teacher,
Jacques Maroger), 1940-46. T a u g h t at Art
Students League, beginning 1935. W a r t i m e
artist-correspondent for Life, 1943. Retro-
spective exhibition, Berkshire Museum,
Pittsfield, Massachusetts, 1944. First Wil-
liam A. Clark Prize and Corcoran Gold
Medal, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Wash-
ington, D . C , 1945. Head of Department of
Painting, Moore Institute of Art, Science
and Industry, Philadelphia, 1953-54. Pub-
lished book, Anatomy for Artists, 1945. Art
Editor, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1954. Died
Dorset, Vermont, 1954.
ALFRED HENRY MAURER
Born New York, 1868. Left school to work
in family lithographic business, 1884.
Studied at National Academy of Design
(teacher, Edgar W a r d ) . T o Paris, 1897;
studied briefly at Académie Julien, there-
after worked alone. Won Carnegie Inter-
national prize, 1901. Second trip to Paris,
1902. Began friendship with Gertrude and
Leo Stein, 1904. First one-man show
(Stieglitz' 291), 190g. Exhibited in "Young-
 BIOGRAPHIES 221

er American Painters" (Stieglitz' 291), Guggenheim's Art of This Century), ig44-

I g i o ; F o r u m Exhibition, 1 g 16. Committed T a u g h t at Black Mountain College, North
suicide, New York, 1932. Carolina, ig45, 1951. With William Ba-
ziotes, David Hare, Barnett Newman, a n d
KENNETH HAYES MILLER M a r k Rothko, conducted art school " S u b -
Born Oneida, New York, 1876. Attended jects of the Artist," 1947-48. Shared studio
Art Students League (teachers, H. Siddons with Bradley Walker Tomlin, 1948-49.
Mowbray, Kenyon Cox, F . Luis Mora, Edited anthology, The Dada Painters and
Frank Vincent D u M o n d ) ; New York Poets, 1950. Professor, Graduate School,
School of Art (teacher, William Merritt H u n t e r College, 1951-58. With Ad Rein-
Chase). T o Europe, 1900. Exhibited in hardt, edited Modern Artists in America, 1951.
Armory Show, 1913. T a u g h t at New York Guest artist, West German Republic, fall
School of Art, 1900-11; Art Students 1954. Exhibited in M u s e u m of M o d e r n
League, 1911-31, i93 2 ~35, 1944~5l- Goid Art's European show, " T h e New American
medal, National Academy of Design, 1943. Painting," i958-5g. Lives in New York.
O n e - m a n exhibition, Art Students League,
194g. Died New York, 1952. JEROME MYERS
Born Petersburg, Virginia, 1867. T o New
A N N A M A R Y ROBERTSON M O S E S York, 1886; studied at Cooper Union and
Born Greenwich, New York, i860. Lived in Art Students League (teacher, George De
Viginia, 1887-1905, then in Eagle Bridge, Forest Brush). T r i p to Paris, 1896. First
New York. Painted first picture, 1920. one-man show, igo8. Exhibited in Armory
Paintings discovered by Louis Caldor, Show, 1913. Died New York, 1940.
engineer and art collector, 1938. Exhibited
in "Contemporary American Painters," GEORGIA O'KEEFFE
Museum of Modern Art, New York, 193g. Born Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, 1887. Studied
First one-man show (Galerie St. Etienne, at Art Institute of Chicago, ^ 0 4 - 0 5 ; Art
New York), ig40. First prize, Syracuse Students League, New York, igo7~o8;
Museum of Fine Arts, 1941. Died Hoosick University of Virginia, summer i g i 2 ; with
Falls, New York, 1961. A r t h u r Wesley Dow, Teachers College,
Columbia University, ig 14—16. Free-lance
ROBERT MOTHERWELL commercial artist, Chicago, igog-10. Pub-
Born Aberdeen, Washington, 1915. Studied lic-school art supervisor, Amarillo, Texas,
painting at Otis Art Institute, Los Angeles, i g i 2 - i 4 . T a u g h t at Columbia College,
mid-1920s ; also at California School of Fine South Carolina, ig 15-16; University of
Arts, San Francisco. G r a d u a t e d from Stan- Virginia, summers 1913—16 ; West Texas
ford University, B.A. degree, 1937. Grad- State Normal School, Canyon, Texas,
uate School of Philosophy, H a r v a r d Uni- 1 g 16-17. First shown in group show
versity, 1937-38; University of Grenoble, (Stieglitz' 2 g i ) , 1 g 16. First one-man show
France, 1938-39. T a u g h t at University of (Stieglitz' 2g 1 ), 1 g 17. Moved to New York,
Oregon, ig3g~40. Studied at graduate i g i 8 . Married Alfred Stieglitz, ig24. First
School of Architecture and Art, Columbia of several trips to Europe, ig53- Major
University, 1940-41. I n Mexico with sur- retrospective exhibitions: Art Institute of
realist painter M a t t a , 1941. Settled in New Chicago, i g 4 3 ; Museum of Modern Art,
York, ig42. First one-man show (Peggy New York, 1946; Dallas Museum of Fine
222 BIOGRAPHIES
Arts, ig56; Worcester Museum of Art,
Massachusetts, i960. Lives in Abiquiu,
New Mexico.
JULES PASCIN
Original name Julius Pineas. Born Vidin,
Bulgaria, 1885. T o Munich as staff illus-
trator for magazine Simplicissimus; igoo. T o
Paris, 1905. Exhibited in Armory Show,
1913. T o United States, 1914; became
American citizen, 1915. I n Tunisia, Spain,
Portugal, ig24~28. Committed suicide,
Paris, ig3o.
HORACE PIPPIN
Born West Chester, Pennsylvania, 1888.
Worked in New York state as hotel porter,
warehouseman, iron molder, j u n k dealer.
Enlisted in A r m y ; wounded in action,
France, i g i 7. R e t u r n e d to West Chester to
live, ig2o. Paintings discovered by critic
Christian Brinton, 1 g37- Exhibited in
"Masters of Popular Painting," Museum
of Modern Art, New York, ig38. O n e - m a n
shows (Carlen Galleries, Philadelphia;
Pignon Gallery, New York), ig40. Died
West Chester, 1946.
JACKSON POLLOCK
Born Cody, Wyoming, 1912. Attended
M a n u a l Arts High School, Los Angeles,
i925-2g, studying sculpture and painting.
At Art Students League, New York (teach-
er, Thomas H a r t Benton), 1 g2g-31. Settled
in New York, ig35- W P A painter, ^ 3 8 - 4 2 .
First one-man show (Peggy Guggenheim's
Art of This Century), ig43- Moved to East-
h a m p t o n , Long Island, ig46. Died there,
I95 6 -
MAURICE BRAZIL PRENDERGAST
Born St. J o h n ' s , Newfoundland, 1859.
Family moved to Boston, 1861. O n second
trip abroad, 1891, studied at Académie
Julien (teachers, J e a n Paul Laurens a n d
Joseph-Paul Blanc) and Académie Cola-
rossi. R e t u r n e d to United States, i8g4.
Exhibited Chase Gallery, Boston, i8g7.
Third trip abroad, i8g8; chiefly Venice.
Exhibited with T h e Eight, igo8. In
Europe, igog-10, 1911, 1914. Exhibited in
Armory Show, 1913. Third William A.
Clark Prize and Corcoran Bronze Medal,
Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington,
D . C , 1923. Died New York, 1924.
C L A Y T O N S. P R I C E
Born Bedford, Iowa, 1874. Attended St.
Louis School of Fine Arts (Missouri), 1905-
06. I n Alberta, C a n a d a , 1908. Worked as
illustrator, Portland, Oregon, i g o g - i o .
In C a n a d a again, worked as cook, 1 g 10-14.
Lived Monterey, California, ig 18-27.
First one-man show (Beaux Arts Gallery,
San Francisco), ig25. W P A painter, Port-
land, ig35~40. Retrospective exhibition,
Portland Art Museum, ig42. Exhibited in
"Fourteen Americans," Museum of Modern
Art, New York, ig46. Died Portland, 1950.
ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG
Born Port Arthur, Texas, 1925. Studied at
Kansas City Art Institute ; Académie Julien,
Paris; Black M o u n t a i n College, North
Carolina (teacher, Josef Albers) ; Art
Students League, New York (teachers,
Vaclav Vytlacil, Morris K a n t o r ) . After
period in Italy and North Africa, 1952-53,
settled in New York. Since 1955 has de-
signed and executed sets and costumes for
Merce C u n n i n g h a m Dance Company.
Retrospective exhibitions : Jewish Museum,
New York, 1963; Whitechapel Gallery,
London, igÖ4- First prize, Venice Biennale,
ig64- Lives in New York.
MAN RAY
Born Philadelphia, i8go. Studied architec-
ture, engineering, and painting in New
York, the last at National Academy of De-

sign (igo8). Worked as advertising illustra-
tor. Formed friendship with Marcel Du-
c h a m p , 1915. In Forum Exhibition, i g i 6 .
Cofounder, Société Anonyme, ig20. M e m -
ber Paris d a d a group, 1 g21 ; surrealist
group, 1 g24. Active as photographer from
i g 2 i . In United States, 1940-51. Retro-
spective exhibition, Pasadena Art Institute,
California, 1944. Lives in Paris.
LARRY RIVERS
Born New York, 1923. In Army Air Corps,
ig42~43- Studied at Juilliard School of
Music, New York, 1944-45; thereafter
active for two years as jazz musician.
Studied painting with Hans Hofmann and
at New York University, ^ 4 7 - 4 8 . First
one-man show (Jane Street Gallery, New
York), ig4g. Traveled in England, France,
and Italy, 1950; several subsequent trips to
Europe with stays in Paris, London. Lives in
New York and Southampton, Long Island.
MARK ROTHKO
Born Dvinsk, Russia, 1903. Came to United
States, 1913. Public-school education,
Portland, Oregon. Attended Yale Univer-
sity, 1921-23. Studied briefly at Art
Students League, New York (teacher, M a x
Weber), 1926. W P A painter, 1936-37.
First one-man show (Peggy Guggenheim's
Art of This Century), 1948. Cofounder of
school "Subjects of the Artist," 1947.
T a u g h t at California School of Fine Arts,
San Francisco, 1947, 194g; Brooklyn Col-
lege, ^ 5 1 - 5 4 . International Award, Gug-
genheim Museum, 1958. Exhibited in M u -
seum of Modern Art's European show,
" T h e New American Painting," ig58~5g.
Lives in New York.
BEN SHAHN
Born Kovno, Lithuania, i8g8. C a m e to
United States, 1906. Attended night school,
Brooklyn, New York, 1913-17, working by
BIOGRAPHIES 223
day as lithographer's apprentice. Employed
on and off at lithography until 1930. At-
tended New York University and City
College, i g i g - 2 2 . Left to study at National
Academy of Design. Also studied at Art
Students League and in Paris. First one-
m a n show (Downtown Gallery, New York),
ig30. Gained prominence with Sacco-
Vanzetti paintings, ig32. Worked with
Diego Rivera on fresco at Rockefeller
Center, New York, 1933 (fresco destroyed).
Artist for F a r m Security Administration,
1935-38. Retrospective exhibition, M u -
seum of Modern Art, New York, 1947.
Charles Eliot Norton Professor, H a r v a r d
University, 1956-57; lectures published as
The Shape of Content. Lives in Roosevelt,
New Jersey.
CHARLES SHEELER
Born Philadelphia, 1883. Studied design at
School of Industrial Art, Philadelphia,
1900-03, painting- at Pennsylvania Acad-
emy of the Fine Arts (teacher, William
Merritt Chase), 1903-06. T o London a n d
Holland with Chase's class, 1904; to Spain
with Chase's class, 1095. T r i p to Italy and
Paris, 190g. Exhibited in Armory Show,
1913; F o r u m Exhibition, 1916 ; Independ-
ents, 1917. First one-man show (De Zayas
Gallery, New York), 1920. Fourth trip to
Europe, 192g. Staff photographer, Metro-
politan Museum of Art, 1942-45. Artist in
residence, Phillips Academy, Massachu-
setts, 1946. Major restrospective exhibi-
tions : Museum of Modern Art, New York,
193g ; University of California, Los Angeles,
ig54; Allentown Art Museum, Allentown,
Pennsylvania, 1961 ; University of Iowa,
igÖ3. Lives in Irvington-on-Hudson, New
York. ci.. I^C-íT
EVERETT SHINN
Born Woodstown, New Jersey, 1876. T o
Philadelphia, 1891, for mechanical training
224 BIOGRAPHIES
at Spring Garden Institute; transferred to
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts,
1893. Illustrator for Philadelphia Press,
1893-96. T o New York; illustrator for New
York World a n d New York Herald, i8g7~gg.
Magazine illustrator after i8gg. I n Paris
and London, igo3. Exhibited with T h e
Eight, igo8; in Armory Show, i g i 3 - M u r a l
decorations : Stuyvesant Theater (renamed
Belasco T h e a t e r ) , New York; City Hall,
Trenton, New Jersey. Died New York,
!953-
JOHN SLOAN
Born Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, 1871. Il-
lustrator for Philadelphia Inquirer, i8g2-g5-
Studied at Pennsylvania Academy of the
Fine Arts (teacher, Thomas Anshutz),
1892-93. Illustrator for Philadelphia Press,
1 8 9 5 - ^ 0 3 . Worked under Robert Henri,
18g7. Exhibited at Art Institute of Chicago,
Carnegie Institute, Pennsylvania Academy
Annual, igoo. Moved to New York, igo4,
began decade of illustrating for Collier's and
The Century. Instructor at Pittsburgh Art
Student's League, fall, igo7. Exhibited
with T h e Eight, igo8; in Independent Ex-
hibition, 1910; Armory Show, 1913. Edito r
of Socialist magazine, The Masses, 1912-15.
O n e - m a n exhibition, Whitney Studio Club,
1916. T a u g h t at Art Students League, New
York, 1915-32. Divided time between New
York and Santa Fe, New Mexico, i g i g - 4 5 .
T a u g h t at Alexander Archipenko's École
d'Art, New York, 1932-33; George Luks
School, 1934; again at Art Students
League, 1935-37- Died Hanover, New
Hampshire, 1951.
RAPHAEL SOYER
Born Tombov, Russia, i8gg. Came to
United States, i g i 2 . Studied at National
Academy of Design, Cooper Union, and
Art Students League (teacher, Guy Pène
du Bois). T a u g h t at Art Students League,
American Art School, New School for
Social Research. W P A painter, ig33- Lives
in New York.
EUGENE EDWARD SPEICHER
Born Buffalo, New York, 1883. Studied at
Buffalo Fine Arts Academy (teachers,
M a r y B. W. Coxe, Lucius Hitchcock,
U r q u h a r t Wilcox), 1901-06; Art Students
League, New York (teachers, Frank Vin-
cent D u M o n d , William Merritt Chase),
1907; Henri School (teacher, Robert
Henri), igo8. I n Europe, i g i o . First one-
m a n show (Montross Gallery, New York),
i g i 8 . T h i r d prize, Carnegie International,
1 g21. Second prize, Carnegie International,
ig23- O n e - m a n exhibition, Denver Art
Museum, 1948. Died New York, 1962.
NILES SPENCER
Born Pawtucket, R h o d e Island, 1893.
Studied at R h o d e Island School of Design,
1913-15; Ferrer School, New York (teach-
ers, George Bellows, Robert Henri), 1915.
Summers in Ogunquit, Maine, winters in
New York, 1917-21. In Europe, i g 2 i - 2 2 ,
ig28-2g. O n e - m a n shows: Daniel Gallery,
New York, 1925, ig28; Downtown Gallery,
New York, ig47- Died Dingman's Ferry,
Pennsylvania, ig52.
THEODOROS STAMOS
Born New York, ig22. Left high school to
study art, winning scholarship to American
Artists School, ig36; specialized in sculp-
ture (teachers, Simon Kennedy, Joseph
Konzal). Concentrated on painting after
ig3g. First one-man show (Betty Parsons
Gallery, New York), 1947. I n the West
(United States and Canada) and in
Europe, 1948-49. T a u g h t at Black M o u n -
tain College, North Carolina, 1950; Cum-
mington School of Art, Massachusetts,
1952, 1953; Art Students League, New
York, 1961. Tiffany Fellowship, 1951;

fellowship grant, National Institute of Arts
and Letters, 1956. Lives in New York.
JOSEPH STELLA
Born M u r o Lucano, Italy, 1877. T o New
York, 1896. Attended Art Students League,
18g 7 ; New York School of Art, 18g8-1900,
1902 (teacher, William Merritt Chase).
Worked as magazine illustrator, igo5-o8.
I n Europe, 1909-12. First one-man show
(Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh), 1910.
Exhibited in Armory Show, 1913. Worked
as illustrator, 1918. In Europe frequently,
1922-38. Retrospective exhibition, Newark
Museum, New Jersey, 193g. Died Astoria,
New York, ig46.
FLORINE STETTHEIMER
Born Rochester, New York, 1871. Studied
at Art Students League, New York (teacher,
Kenyon Cox), mid-eighties. In Europe,
i g o 6 - i 2 . O n e - m a n exhibition (Knoedler
Gallery, New York), 1916. Exhibited with
Society of Independent Artists, 1917-26.
Designed sets and costumes for production
of Gertrude Stein's Four Saints in Three Acts,
1934. Died New York, 1944.
YVES TANGUY
Born Paris, 1900. Merchant seaman in
youth. T u r n e d to painting-, 1924; self-
taught. Joined surrealist group, 1926. Ex-
hibited in surrealist group show, Palais des
Beaux-Arts, Brussels, 1937. To United
States, 193g; became American citizen.
O n e - m a n shows (Pierre Matisse Gallery,
New York), ig3g, 1942, 1950. Died Wood-
bury, Connecticut, 1955.
PAVEL TCHELITCHEW
Born Moscow, 1898. Encouraged by
Alexandra Exter, a pupil of Fernand Léger,
studied at Academy of Kiev, i g i 8 - 2 0 . In
Constantinople and Sofia, i g 2 0 - 2 i ; Berlin,
i g 2 i - 2 3 ; Paris, ig23. First one-man show
BIOGRAPHIES 225
(Claridge Gallery, London), 1928. First
shown in United States, Museum of
Modern Art, New York, 1930. First one-
m a n show in United States (Julien Levy
Gallery, New York), 1934. Lived in United
States (Connecticut and New York), 1938-
48. Retrospective exhibitions : Museum of
Modern Art, 1942; Institute of Modern
Art, Buenos Aires, 194g. Became American
citizen, 1952. O n e - m a n show, Detroit Insti-
tute of Arts, 1952. Died Rome, Italy, 1957.
MARK TOBEY
Born Centerville, Wisconsin, 1890. In
Chicago, 1907, worked as commercial
artist and attended Saturday classes, Art
Institute. Commercial artist in New York
and Chicago, 1911-17; studied briefly
with Kenneth Hayes Miller in New York.
First one-man show (Knoedler's, New
York), 1917. T a u g h t at Cornish School,
Seattle, ig22-23. Introduced to Chinese
brushwork by Chinese student at Univer-
sity of Washington, ^ 2 3 - 2 4 . In France,
Greece, Near East, ig25-26. Instructor at
Free Creative Art School for Children,
Seattle, 1928. Artist in residence, Darting-
ton Hall, Devonshire, England, 1931-38.
In Mexico, 1931; studied Chinese callig-
raphy in Shanghai and brushwork in J a p a n ,
ig34- First one-man museum show, Seattle
Art Museum, 1935. W P A painter, Seattle,
193g. Purchase prize, Artists for Victory
Exhibition, Metropolitan Museum of Art,
ig42. Retrospective exhibition, Whitney
Museum of American Art, New York, 1951.
First prize at Venice Biennale, i g s 8 .
Retrospective exhibition, Musée des Arts
Décoratifs, Paris, i g 6 i . First prize, Carne-
gie International, 1961. Lives in Seattle.
BRADLEY WALKER TOMLIN
Born Syracuse, New York, 1899. Studied
modeling, studio of Hugo Gari Wagner,
1913. Entered College of Fine Arts, Syra-
226 BIOGRAPHIES
cuse University, i g i 7; graduated ig2i with
Bachelor of Painting degree. T o France,
i g 2 3 ; studied at Académie Colarossi and
a n d Académie de la Grande Chaumière.
First of m a n y summers in Woodstock, New
York, 1925. Trips to Europe, 1926, 1928.
Shared studio with J a m e s Brooks, Wood-
stock, New York, 1931. T a u g h t at Buckley
School, New York, 1932-33; Sarah Law-
rence College, 1933—41 ; P a r t time at
Dalton School, New York, 1933-34. Shared
studio with Robert Motherwell, New York,
1948-49. Died New York, 1953.
GEORGE TOOKER
Born Brooklyn, New York, ig20. Attended
Phillips Academy, Massachusetts, 1936-38,
H a r v a r d University, 1938-42. In Marine
Corps, 1942-43. Attended Art Students
League, New York (teachers, Reginald
Marsh, K e n n e t h Hayes Miller, H a r r y
Sternberg), 1943-45. Studied privately
with Paul Cadmus. First one-man show
(Hewitt Gallery, New York), 1955. Grant,
National Institute of Arts a n d Letters, 1960.
Lives in Hartland, Vermont.
GUY CARLETON WIGGINS
Born Brooklyn, New York, 1883. Studied
with his father and at National Academy of
Design. Prizes, Connecticut Academy of
Fine Arts, 1916, 1918, 1926, 1931, 1933;
Salmagundi Club, New York, 1916, i g i g .
Medal and prize, Art Institute of Chicago,
i g i 7; R h o d e Island School of Design, 1922.
Died St. Augustine, Florida, 1962.
GRANT WOOD
Born on farm near Anamosa, Iowa, 1892.
First art training a course in design running
serially in The Craftsman (teacher, Ernest
Batchelder). Attended Minneapolis School
of Design and Handicraft and Normal Art
(teacher, Ernest Batchelder), summers
1910-11, night art class at State University
of Iowa (teacher, G A. Cumming), 1 g 11 —
12. Attended classes at Art Institute of
Chicago for brief periods, 1 g 13— 15, trying
business ventures in between. T a u g h t high-
school art, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, i g i g . T o
Paris and Académie Julien, 1923. Later
European trips, 1926, ig28. Helped to
found Stone City Art Colony, Iowa, ig32.
In charge of W P A art project at University
of Iowa, ig34- University staff member,
1935. Died Iowa City, i g 4 i .
ANDREW W Y E T H
Born Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, 1917.
Received training from his father, the
painter and illustrator N . C. Wyeth. First
one-man show (Macbeth Gallery, New
York), 1937. Academician of National
Academy of Design, 1944. Retrospective
exhibitions: Albright-Knox Art Gallery,
Buffalo, New York, 1962; Arizona Uni-
versity Art Gallery, 1963. Summers in
Cushing, Maine, winters in Chadds Ford.
 Bibliography

A l o n g b i b l i o g r a p h y c o u l d b e e s t a b l i s h e d o n A m e r i c a n a r t of this c e n t u r y ,
b u t c o m p a r a t i v e l y few of t h e b o o k s w o u l d b e i n f o r m a t i v e e n o u g h t o r e c o m -
m e n d to t h e n o n s p e c i a l i s t . T o g i v e a n i d e a of w h a t is l a c k i n g , r e l i a b l e i n d i -
v i d u a l s t u d i e s h a v e n o t y e t b e e n p u b l i s h e d o n m o r e t h a n h a l f of t h e p a i n t e r s
d e a l t w i t h i n this b o o k . T h e f o l l o w i n g p u b l i c a t i o n s , a g r o u p of g e n e r a l n a -
t u r e a n d a g r o u p d e v o t e d t o p a r t i c u l a r a r t i s t s , a r e t h o s e t h a t h a v e b e e n of
t h e g r e a t e s t i n t e r e s t a n d h e l p to m e — a n d a r e t h o s e , I feel, t h a t w o u l d p r o v e
m o s t r e w a r d i n g to a n y o n e w i s h i n g t o g o f u r t h e r i n t o t h e s t u d y of m o d e r n
A m e r i c a n a r t . N e a r l y h a l f t h e titles, it will b e s e e n , a r e e x h i b i t i o n c a t a l o g u e s .
I n s o m e cases t h e s e a n d t h e o t h e r b o o k s offer h a r d l y m o r e t h a n a c o l l e c t i o n
of p h o t o g r a p h s of t h e a r t i s t ' s w o r k , b u t s i n c e little w r i t i n g in this field c a n
b e c a l l e d d e f i n i t i v e , t h e p h o t o g r a p h s often tell t h e s t o r y as well as it h a s y e t
b e e n told.

GENERAL INFORMATION

Brown, Milton W. American Painting from the H u n t e r , Sam. Modern American Painting and
Armory Show to the Depression. Princeton, Prince- Sculpture. New York, Dell Publishing Com-
ton University Press, 1955. pany, 1959.

Craven, T h o m a s . Modern Art; the Men, the Move-
ments, the Meaning. New York, Simon and
Schuster, 1934.
Frank, W a l d o ; Mumford, Lewis; N o r m a n ,
D o r o t h y ; Rosenfeld, P a u l ; Rugg, Harold
(editors). America and Alfred Stieglitz; A Col-
lective Portrait. New York, Doubleday, Doran
and C o m p a n y , 1934.
Goodrich, Lloyd, and Baur, J o h n I. H . American
Art of Our Century. New York, T h e Whitney
M u s e u m of American Art—Frederick A.
Praeger, 1961.
Greenberg, Clement. Art and Culture; Critical
Essays. Boston, Beacon Press, 1961.
Hess, T h o m a s B. Abstract Painting; Background
and American Phase. New York, T h e Viking
Press, 1951.
Janis, Sidney. Abstract and Surrealist Art In Amer-
ica. New York, Reynal and Hitchcock, 1944.
Janis, Sidney. They Taught Themselves ; American
Primitive Painters of the soth Century. New York,
T h e Dial Press, 1942.
Kootz, Samuel M . JVew Frontiers in American
Painting. New York, Hastings House, 1943.
Kuh, K a t h a r i n e . The Artist's Voice; Talks with
Seventeen Artists. New York, H a r p e r and Row,
i960.
Miller, Dorothy C , and Barr, Alfred H., J r .
(editors). American Realists and Magic Realists.
New York, T h e M u s e u m of Modern Art,
1943. (Exhibition catalogue.)
Soby, J a m e s Thrall, and Miller, Dorothy C.
Romantic Painting in America. New York, T h e
M u s e u m of M o d e r n Art, 1943. (Exhibition
catalogue.)

227
228 BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDIVIDUAL STUDIES
ALBERS:
H a m i l t o n , George H e a r d . Josef Albers: Paint-
ings, Prints, Projects. New H a v e n , Yale U n i -
versity Art Gallery, 1956. (Exhibition cata-
logue.)
BELLOWS:
George Bellows: Paintings, Drawings and Prints.
Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago, 1946.
(Exhibition catalogue.)
BURCHFIELD:
Baur, J o h n I. H . Charles Burchfield. New York,
T h e Whitney M u s e u m of American Art—
T h e Macmillan C o m p a n y , 1956.
DAVIES:
Cortissoz, Royal. Arthur B. Davies. New York,
T h e Whitney Museum of American Art, 1931.
DAVIS:
Blesh, R u d i . Stuart Davis. New York, Grove
Press, i960.
Goossen, E. C. Stuart Davis. New York, George
Braziller, 1959.
DE K O O N I N G :
Hess, T h o m a s B. Willem de Kooning. New York,
George Braziller, 195g.
DEMUTH:
Ritchie, Andrew Carnduff. Charles Demuth, New
York, T h e M u s e u m of M o d e r n Art, 1950.
(Exhibition catalogue.)
DOVE:
Wight, Frederick S. Arthur G. Dove. Berkeley,
University of California Press, 1958. (Exhibi-
tion catalogue.)
EVERGOOD:
Baur, J o h n I. H . Philip Evergood. New York, T h e
Whitney M u s e u m of American Art—Freder-
ick A. Praeger, i960. (Exhibition catalogue.)
GORKY:
Rosenberg, H a r o l d . Arshile Gorky: The Man,
The Time, The Idea. New York, Horizon Press,
1962.
Schwabachcr, Ethel K. Arshile Gorky. New York,
T h e Whitney M u s e u m of American Art—
T h e Macmillan C o m p a n y , 1957.
Seitz, William C. Arshile Gorky: Paintings, Draw-
ings, Studies. New York, T h e M u s e u m of
M o d e r n Art, 1962. (Exhibition catalogue.)
GOTTLIEB:
Friedman, Martin. Adolph Gottlieb. Minneapolis,
Walker Art Center—Colwell Press, 1963.
(Exhibition catalogue.)
GRAVES:
Wight, Frederick S. ; Baur, J o h n I. H . ; a n d
Phillips, Duncan. Morris Graves. Berkeley,
University of California Press, 1956.
GROSZ:
Grosz, George. A Little Yes and A Big Xo; The
Autobiography of George Grosz. New York, T h e
Dial Press, 1946.
HARTLEY:
McCausland, Elizabeth. Marsden Hartley. M i n -
neapolis, University of Minnesota Press. 1952.
HENRI:
Henri, Robert. The Art Spirit (compiled by
Margery Ryerson). Philadelphia, J . B. L i p -
pincott C o m p a n y , 1923.
HOFMANN:
H u n t e r , Sam. Hans Hofmann. New York, H a r r y
N . Abrams, 1963.
Wight, Frederick S. Hans Hofmann. Berkeley,
University of California Press, 1957. (Exhibi-
tion catalogue.)
HOPPER:
Goodrich, Lloyd. Edward Hopper. N e w York,
T h e Whitney M u s e u m of American Art,
1964. (Exhibition catalogue.)

JOHNS:
Jasper Johns. New York, T h e Jewish Museum,
1964. (Exhibition catalogue; essays by Alan
R. Solomon and J o h n Cage.)
Steinberg, Leo. Jasper Johns. New York, George
Wittenborn, 1963.
KUNIYOSHI:
Yasuo Kuniyoshi: Retrospective Exhibition. New
York, T h e Whitney M u s e u m of American
Art, 1948. (Exhibition catalogue; essay by
Lloyd Goodrich.)
MARIN:
N o r m a n , Dorothy (editor). The Selected Writings
of John Marin. New York, Pellegrini and
C u d a h y , 1949.
MARSH:
Goodrich, Lloyd. Reginald Marsh. New York,
T h e Whitney Museum of American Art,
1955. (Exhibition catalogue.)
MAURER:
McCausland, Elizabeth. A. H. Maurer. Minne-
apolis, Walker Art Center; New York, A. A.
Wyn, 1951. (Exhibition catalogue.)
O'KEEFFE:
Rich, Daniel Catton. Georgia O'Keeffe. Chicago,
T h e Art Institute of Chicago, 1943. (Exhibi-
tion catalogue.)
POLLOCK:
O ' H a r a , Frank. Jackson Pollock. New York,
George Braziller, 1959.
Robertson, Bryan. Jackson Pollock. New York,
H a r r y N. Abrams, i960.
PRENDERGAST:
Rhys, H . H . Maurice Prendergast i8^g-ig24.
Boston, M u s e u m of Fine Arts—Cambridge,
H a r v a r d University Press, i960. (Exhibition
catalogue.)
BIBLIOGRAPHY 229
RAUSCHENBERG:
Robert Rauschenberg; Paintings, Drawings and Com-
bines, ig^g-igßj.. London, Whitechapel Gal-
lery, 1964. (Exhibition catalogue; essays by
H e n r y Geldzahler, J o h n Cage, M a x Kozloff.)
Solomon, Alan R. Robert Rauschenberg. N e w
York, T h e Jewish Museum, 1963. (Exhibition
catalogue.)
RAY:
R a y , M a n . Self Portrait. Boston, Little, Brown
and C o m p a n y . 1963.
ROTHKO:
Selz, Peter. Mark Rothko. New York, T h e M u -
seum of M o d e r n Art, 1961. (Exhibition cata-
logue.)
SHAHN:
Shahn, Ben. The Shape of Content. Cambridge,
H a r v a r d University Press. 1957.
Soby, J a m e s Thrall. Ben Shahn; His Graphic Art.
New York, George Braziller, 1957.
SHEELER:
Charles Sheeler. New York, T h e Museum of M o d -
ern Art, 1939. (Exhibition catalogue; intro-
duction by William Carlos Williams.)
The Quest of Charles Sheeler. Iowa. State Univer-
sity of Iowa, 1963. (Exhibition catalogue; text
by Lilian Dochterman.)
Rourke, Constance. Charles Sheeler. Artist in the
American Tradition. New York, H a r c o u r t ,
Brace and Company, 1938.
SLOAN:
Brooks, V a n Wyck. John Sloan; A Painter's Life.
New York, E. P. Dutton and C o m p a n y , 1938.
Goodrich, Lloyd. John Sloan. New York, T h e
Whitney M u s e u m of American A r t — T h e
Macmillan C o m p a n y , 1952.
STELLA:
Baur, J o h n I. H . Joseph Stella. New York, T h e
Whitney M u s e u m of American Art—Shore-
wood Pulishing C o m p a n y . 1963. (Exhibition
catalogue.)
230 BIBLIOGRAPHY

STETTHEIMER: TCHELITCHEW:
McBride, Henry. Fiorine Stettheimer. New York, Pavel Tchelitchew. New York, T h e Foundation
T h e M u s e u m of Modern Art, 1946. (Exhibi- for M o d e r n Art, 1964. (Exhibition catalogue;
tion catalogue.) essay by Lincoln Kirstein.)

TANGUY:
Soby, J a m e s Thrall. Yves Tanguy. New York.
T h e M u s e u m of Modern Art, 1955. (Exhibi-
tion catalogue.)
TOBEY:
Mark Tobey. Paris, Musée des Arts Décoratifs,
1961. (Exhibition catalogue.)
Seitz, William C. Mark Tobey. New York, T h e
M u s e u m of M o d e r n Art — Doubleday a n d
C o m p a n y , 1962. (Exhibition catalogue.)
Index

T h e appearance of an artist's n a m e in small capitals indicates that d a t a on the

artist may be found in the biographical section; in such cases, too, if differentiation
is needed, the page numbers of the principal discussion are set in italics.

abstract expressionism, 48, 153, 169, 177-178, Bacon. Peggy, 102

179, 180
abstract expressionists, 128, 161, 174, 175
abstraction :
of Milton Avery, 173
of A r t h u r B. Carles, 74
of Charles D e m u t h , 138
of Burgoyne Diller, 148
of A r t h u r Dove, 52, 53, 57
of Marsden Hartley, 59-61
of S. Macdonald-Wright, 72
of J o h n Marin, 64
of Georgia O'Keeffe, 130, 133
of Charles Sheeler, 138
action painting, 179
ALBERS, JOSEF, 129, I48-I5O,
ALBRIGHT, IVAN, I 5 3 - I 5 5
Americana, use of, 126
see also pop art
Americanism :
of Arthur Dove, 56
of T h e Eight, 16
of Yasuo Kuniyoshi, 84
of Midwest regionalists, 90, 91, 98. 100
of J o h n Sloan, 30
Anshutz, T h o m a s , 16. 17
Arcimboldo, Giuseppe, 156
Armory Show, 18, 27-28, 32, 34, 51, 71, 74, 77,
81, go. 146
Barbizon painters, 49, 94
Barnes Foundation, 124
Barr, Alfred, 177
Bauhaus, the, 141, 143, 148, 150, 151, 153
BAZIOTES, WILLIAM, l8j, 188
BELLOWS, GEORGE, 17, 22, 23, 38-41, IOI, IO5,
140
his Padre and Speicher's Mountaineer, 84
BENTON, THOMAS HART, gO, QZ-O^, g6, I45, l o i ,
17g, 182
HERMAN, EUGENE, I55-I56, I 58
Bingham, George Caleb, 97
I5I biomorphism, 152, 180, 181, 182, 192, 197
BISHOP, ISABEL, IOI, IOJ-108, IO9
Black M o u n t a i n College, 149
Blake, William, 165
Blesh, R u d i , 145
Bloom, H y m a n , 1 13
Bluemner, Oscar, 51, 90
BLUME, PETER, I58-I59
Böcklin, Arnold, 32
Bonnard, Pierre, 35, 169, 175
BOUCHÉ, LOUIS, 71, go, iog
Brancusi. Constantin, 27, 51

Arp, J e a n , 152, 182, 192 Braque, Georges, 53, 74, 83

automatism, surrealist, 153, 177, 180-181, 183, Brecht, Bertolt, i 17

187. 191 Breton, André, 183
AVERY, MILTON. 1/2-iyj, lj6 Bridgman, George, 103

231
232 N DEX
Brinley, D . P u t n a m , 50
Brook, Alexander, i o i
BROOKS, JAMES, 2OI-2O3
Brown, Milton, i o i , 107
BRUCE, PATRICK HENRY, I 7, 143-144,
BURCHFIELD, CHARLES, go, gì, g8-I00,
Burne-Jones, Edward, 32
C a d m u s , Paul, 60
CALLAHAN, KENNETH, 165
calligraphy, Oriental, 161, 162
CARLES, ARTHUR B., 50, 5 I, J4
Cézanne, Paul, 27, 35, 37, 40, 50, 57, 63, 64, 73,
74. 77, 82, 83, 84, 144, 175, 180
Chagall, M a r c , 183
Chase, William Merritt, 15, 17, 149, 169
Chirico, Giorgio de, 141, 156
city, as subject matter, 16, 30, 4 3 - 4 4 , 46, 63, 64,
101, 102, 103, 140-141, 163
" C l u b , T h e , " 188
Coleman, Glenn, 17
collage, 54, 55, 71, 204
Constant, Benjamin, 44
Cornell, Joseph, 204
Cortissoz, Royal, 105
craftsmanship, concern with, 76, 84
Craven, T h o m a s , 9 0 - 9 1 , 145
cubism, 68, 69, 72, 73, 117, 138, 141, 143, 150,
i6g, 17g, 180, ig3, 194
cubists, 53, 54, 84, 156, 171
cubist-realism, 128
CURRY, JOHN STEUART, go, g ì , g4~g6, 161
d a d a movement, 71, 117, 179
Dali, Salvador, 97, 153, 183
Dasburg, Andrew, 84, 90, 122
Daumicr, Honoré, 15, 45, 105
DAVIES, ARTHUR B., I 5, 32-34, 5g, öl
DAVIS, STUART, I 7, 60, 97, I44-I4J, 180
Degas, Hilaire Germain Edgar, 30, 31, 32, 89,
109
146 DE KOONING, WILLEM, l 6 l , I 77, I 78, I 79, 180,
182, 183, 188, ig7-igg, 201
161
Delacroix, Eugene, 128
Delaunay, Robert, 53, 63, 68, 72, 74, 143, 177,
194
DEMUTH, CHARLES, 52, 64, 123, I 28, I2g, I33-I38
his Bermuda No. 2, the Schooner and Feininger's
Church at Gelmeroda, 143
Denis, Maurice, 35, 155
Derain, André, 73
DICKINSON, EDWIN, l6g-ljl, I 76
DILLER, BURGOYNE, 148
Disney, Walt, ioo
DOVE, ARTHUR, 48, 50, 5 1, 52-57. 64, 67, 73, I 77,
204
Dow, A r t h u r Wesley, 129
DU BOIS, GUY PÈNE, 24, IO5-IO/, 143
D u c h a m p , Marcel, 27, 71, 121, 133, 146, 180,
183
Duveneck, Frank, 15
Dynamic Symmetry, 40
Eakins, T h o m a s , 16, 17, 77, 109, 175
Egan, Charles, 197, igg
Eight, T h e , 15-16, 25, 30, 32, 38, 42, 43, 46
EILSHEMIUS, LOUIS, 11g-120, 122, I 25
Epstein, J a c o b , 93
Ernst, M a x , 183
EVERGOOD, PHILIP, I15-I16, I I 7 , I18
expressionism, 178, 182
American, 81, 94, 166, 179, 182
German, 57, 82, 143, 179
fauves, 53, 156
fauvism, 72, 73, 74, 82, 179

Federal Art Project, 183, 201
see also W P A
FEININGER, LYONEL, 64, I4I-I43
Fellows, Lawrence, 50
Forain. J e a n Louis, 105
F o r u m Exhibition, 18, 92
FRANCIS, SAM, 203
Frankenthaler, Helen, 206
Freud, Sigmund, 30, 153
futurism, 67, 69, 72, 134, 138, 143, 17g
Gainsborough, T h o m a s , 84
Gaudi, Antonio, 49
Gauguin, Paul, 27, 35, 49, 52
Gérôme, J e a n Léon, 44
Giotto, 86, 113
GLACKENS, WILLIAM, I5, l6, I7, ig, 24-26, 2g, 67
Gogh, Vincent van, 52, 178
Goodrich, Lloyd, 99
GORKY, ARSHILE, 152, I 79, 180-182,
191.197
GOTTLIEB, ADOLPH, 172, 179, i8g-igo,
Goya y Lucientes, Francisco José de, 15, 17, 88
G r a n d m a Moses, see Moses, A n n a M a r y
Robertson
GRAVES, MORRIS. 167-168
Greco, El, 113, 178
Greenberg, Clement, 172, 178, 195
Gropius, Walter, 143
GROSZ, GEORGE, 89, g2, II/-I18
Guggenheim, Peggy, 192
G u i m a r d , Hector, 49
Guston, Philip, 206
H
HALPERT, SAMUEL, 82-83, 9°
Hals, Frans, 15, 17, 21, 22, 23, 84, 129, 150
H a m b i d g e , J a y , 40
IN DEX 233
HARTLEY, MARSDEN, 48, 50, 52, 57-62, 67, 73,
I28, I37
comment on Alfred Stieglitz. 51
his Portrait of a German Officer and Davis'
Semé, 60, 146
HAWTHORNE, CHARLES W., 42-43, 169
HENRI, ROBERT, I5, l6-2I, 22, 25, 26, 27-28, 29,
32, 38, 41, 43. 44, 72, 76, 77, 84, 101, 103,
105, 128, 140, 143. 146, 149, 189
HIGGINS, EUGENE, 44-45
HOFMANN, HANS, 150, 172, 17g, ig4~ig6
comment on A r t h u r Carles, 74
as teacher, 17, 148, 14g
Holbein, Hans, 84
Homer, Winslow, 16, 17, 36, 61, 77, iog, 175
HOPPER, EDWARD, 23, 4 I , 77-80, IOI, I05, I07,
143, ' 7 5
comment on Robert Henri, 17-18
H o r t a , Victor, 4g
Hudson River school, 16
Huneker, J a m e s , 22
H u n t e r , Sam, 25
183, 188, I
ig3 impressionism, ig, 25, 37, 4g, 63, 73
impressionists:
American, 26, 37, 48, 1 ig
French, 15, 35, 77. 171
Independents exhibitions. 18, 121
Ingres, J e a n Auguste Dominique. 128, 180, ig7
isolationism, artistic, gì
Janis, Sidney, 123
JOHNS, JASPER, 60, 204-206
K
Kandinsky, Wassily, 27, 52, 53, 143, 177
KANE, JOHN, 122-123, 124
234 INDEX
K a n t o r , M o r r i s , 102
KARFIOL, BERNARD, 8 7 , 88, I 12
KELLY, ELLSWORTH, 9 7 . I 2g,
K e n t , R o c k w e l l , 17
K l e e , P a u l , 113, 143, i g 5
KLINE, FRANZ, l 6 l , I 7 7 , I 7 8 , 17g,
KROLL, LEON, 87, I I 2
KUHN, WALT, 81-82, go
KUNIYOSHI, YASUO, I 7, 84-86,
K u p k a , F r a n k , 5 3 , 6 8 , 7 2 , 177
L a c h a i s e , G a s t o n , g o , 121
L a n i n g , E d w a r d , 103
Laurens, J e a n Paul, 44
LAWSON, ERNEST, I 5, 37-38
L é g e r , F e r n a n d , 144
LEVINE, JACK, III, JI3-II5,
LIE, JONAS, 46
L i t t l e Galleries of t h e Photo-Secession,
see P h o t o - S e c e s s i o n
Louis, Morris, 206
LUKS, GEORGE, 15, I 6, I 7, i g , 21-23,
67, 103, " 5
M N a t i o n a l A c a d e m y o f D e s i g n , 17, 18, 3 8 , 109
M c B r i d e , H e n r y , 126
M c C a u s l a n d , Elizabeth, 5g
MACDONALD-WRIGHT, STANTON, 5 1 , 6 7 ,
MCFEE, HENRY LEE, 8 3 - 8 4
M a l e v i c h , K a s i m i r , 5 3 , 150
M a n e t , E d o u a r d , 15, 17, 2 1 , 2 5 , 5 0 , 7 7 , 8 8 , 150
MARCA-RELLI, CONRAD, 2 O I - 2 O 3
MARIN, JOHN, 4 8 , 5 0 , 5 2 , 6 l , 62-67,
M a r q u e t , A l b e r t , 8 2 , 172
MARSH, REGINALD, 2 g , I O I , IO3-IO5,
M a s s o n , A n d r é , 183
M a t i s s e , H e n r i , 2 7 , 4 g , 5 0 , 5 1 , 7 3 , 7 4 , 8 2 , 8 8 , 124,
143, 144, 150, 152, 172, 180, i g 2 , 194
M a t t a ( M a t t a E c h a u r r e n ) , 181, 183, i g i
MAURER, ALFRED, 5 0 , 73~74, 81
M e i s s o n i e r , J e a n L o u i s E r n e s t , 170
I51-152 Meredith, George, 33
M e t r o p o l i t a n M u s e u m , i g , 2 7 , 5 2 , g 6 , 1 0 3 , 109,
163
igg-201 M i c h e l a n g e l o B u o n a r r o t i , 105, 165
MILLER, KENNETH HAYES, 7 7 , 8 6 , IOI-IO3, IO5,
107, 108, 160
Millet, J e a n Francois, 45, 94
go, IOI, I I 3
M i r ó , J o a n , 152, 1 8 2 , 1 8 3 , 197
M o n d r i a n , P i e t , 5 3 , 144, 148, 150, 1 5 1 , 180, 1 8 3 ,
197
M o r e a u , G u s t a v e , 32
MOSES, ANNA MARY ROBERTSON, I 25
MOTHERWELL, ROBERT, I 7 8 , I 7 9 , 188, igi-ig3
M u n c h , E d v a r d , 4g
mural painting:
J o h n Steuart Curry and, g6
J a c k s o n P o l l o c k a n d , 182
Everett Shinn and, 30
I 17, I18 M u s e u m o f M o d e r n A r t , 126, 17g
MYERS, JEROME, 4 3 - 4 4
2
5> 2 9> 4 3 ; N
nabis, 35, 4 g
N a d e l m a n , E l i e , 51
n a t i o n a l i s m , a r t i s t i c , 91
n e o p l a s t i c i s m , 5 3 , 1 5 1 , 179
N e w A m e r i c a n P a i n t i n g , T h e , 1 79
72~73
N e w m a n , B a r n e t t , 178, 179, 1 8 8 , 189, 2 0 6
n e w o b j e c t i v i s t s , 91
N e w Y o r k s c h o o l , 177, 17g
Noland, Kenneth, 206
74> ' 3 8
I 0 7 , 160 O
O ' H a r a , F r a n k , 182
O ' K E E F F E , G E O R G I A , 5 1 , 52, 9 7 , 128, i2g-¡33,15E
O r i e n t , i n f l u e n c e s of, 1 6 1 , 6 7

Orozco, José Clemente, m , 182
orphism, 68, 72
Pach, Walter, 81
PASCIN, JULES, 87, 88-8g, 109
photography :
Georgia O'Keeffe and, 131
M a n R a y and, 71
Charles Sheeler and, 138-139
Alfred Stieglitz and, 49
Photo-Secession, 5 0 - 5 1 , 74
Picabia, Francis, 51, 71, 146
Picasso, Pablo, 27, 31, 50, 53, 73, 74, 83, 88, 132,
144, 150. 156. 171, 180. 183, 194, 195, 197,
201
Piero della Francesca, 40, 86, 139
PIPPIN, HORACE. 124
POLLOCK, JACKSON, l 6 l , I 77, I 78, I 79,
187, 188, I97, 201
pop art, 176, 206
see also Americana
Poussin, Nicolas, 40, 128
precisionists, 97, 128, 141, 158
PRENDERGAST, MAURICE, I 5,
Pre-Raphaelites, 49
PRICE, CLAYTON S., 165-166,
primitive art, i ig
R SHINN, EVERETT, I 5, I 6, I 7, 3O-32, 67
RAUSCHENBERG, ROBERT, 5 5 , 204,
RAY, MAN, 71
realism :
characteristic strain of, 76
of T h e Eight, 16, 25-26
of Andrew Wyeth, 175
Redon, Odilon, 34
regionalism :
Midwest, 90, 91, 93, 100, 145
Pacific Northwest. 161
INDEX 235
R e i n h a r d t , Ad, 179, 189, 193, 206
R e m b r a n d t , 45, 113
Renoir, Pierre Auguste, 25, 50, 83, 105
Rivera, Diego, 92, 111, 182
RIVERS, LARRY, 174-175, I 76
Rodin, Auguste, 49, 50
Rosenberg, Harold, 179
Rosenfeld, Paul, 61
Ross, D e n m a n , 113
Rossetti, D a n t e Gabriel, 32
Rosso, M e d a r d o , 49
ROTHKO, MARK, 172, 178, I 79, 183, l88-l8g
Rouault, Georges, 31, 113
Rousseau, Henri, 50, 73
Rubens, Peter Paul, 105, 107, 128
Russell, Morgan, 17, 72
Ryder, Albert Pinkham, 33, 102. 109, 182
182-186,
Salon painters, 170, 171
Sargent, J o h n Singer, 15, 36, 109, 128
Schamberg, Morton, 138
schools, delimitation of, 128, 158
35~37
Seitz, William, 182
Seurat, Georges, 31
167
Severini, Gino, 51
SHAHN, BEN, 112—II3, I I 5 , I I 7, I 1 8
SHEELER, CHARLES, 9 7 , I 2 3 , I 2 8 , I 2 9 , 137, 138-
140, 1 4 1 , 158
Shiele, Egon, 89
Siqueiros, David Alfaro, 182
2o6
SLOAN, JOHN, 15, 16, 17, 26-30, 4 3 , 44, 67, 103,
189
and Armory Show, 27
comment on Robert Henri, 19
social protest, 111-112, 118
Solitine, Chaim, 113, 178, 197
Soyer, Isaac, 101
Soyer, Moses, 101, iog
SOYER, RAPHAEL, I O I , IOg-IlO
236 N DEX

SPEICHER, EUGENE, 17, 84, I 12 TOMLIN, BRADLEY WALKER. 178, 179, ig3~ig4,
SPENCER, NILES, g 7 , I O I , 14O-141 201

STAMOS, THEODOROS, 187 TOOKER, GEORGE, I O I , 160

Steichen, E d w a r d , 50, 62 Toulouse-Lautrec, H e n r i de, 31, 50, 89

Stein, Gertrude, 50, 73, g2, 201 T w a c h t m a n , J o h n , 37

Stein, Leo, 50, 73

Steinberg, Saul, 113
Stella, Frank, 206
u
STELLA, JOSEPH, 67-70, 7 I , g o , 12 1 Uccello, Paolo, 203
STETTHEIMER, FLORINE, I 2 5 - I 2 7
Stieglitz, Alfred, 49-52, 59, 62, 63, 74, 90, 130,
13 1
V
Stijl, de, 53
Valloton, Félix. 35
Still, Clyfford. 178. 179, 189, 206
Velazquez. 15, 17, 84, 88, 150
styles, see schools
Vitruvius, 40
subject matter, question of suitable, 56, 155
Vuillard, J e a n Edouard, 155
"Subjects of the Artist," 188
suprematism, 53, 72, 150, 179
surrealism, 153. 156, 177, 17g, 180-181, 182, w
187, 188, i8g, 193
surrealists, 141, 183, 184, i g i Walkowitz, A b r a h a m , 51. go. 121
synchromism, 72, 73 Weber, M a x , 50, go
Weir, J . Alden, 37
Whistler, J a m e s A. McNeill. 15, 72, 161, 183,
204
WIGGINS, GUY, 4 6
TANGUY, YVES, 156-158, 183 Williams, William Carlos, 136-137
Taylor, Bert Leston. 54 WOOD, GRANT, go, g ì , 9 7 - 9 5 . 161
TCHELITCHEW, PAVEL, ƒ56", 158 W P A , 177, 188
T i t i a n , 17, 113 see also Federal Art Project
TOBEY, MARK, 161-164, 1 6 5 , 167, 1 9 3 - 1 9 4 , 2O4 WYETH, ANDREW, I 7 5 - 1 7 6
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