American Abstraction: Early 20th Century
Painters and sculptors do not always strive to depict persons and objects realistically. Rather than imitate their subject's natural appearance, some artists deliberately change it. They stretch or bend forms, break up shapes, and give objects unlikely textures or colors. Artists make these transformations in an effort to communicate something they cannot convey through realistic treatment. Works of art that reframe nature for expressive effect are called abstract. Art that derives from, but does not represent, a recognizable subject is called nonrepresentational or nonobjective abstraction.
The pivotal event that brought modernism to America was the International Exhibition of Modern Art of 1913, today better known as the Armory Show. The exhibition exposed American audiences to abstract art for the first time. Many ridiculed the fragmentation of cubism and rejected the charged colors of fauvism and expressionism. A few, however, embraced abstraction, and gradually the new styles were incorporated into the American visual vocabulary.
Energized by new artistic possibilities, American artists synthesized European innovations into a variety of forms. Lyonel Feininger's cubist constructions incorporate the color and movement typical of Italian futurism. Max Weber and John Marin fractured images and reassembled the faceted planes into dynamic compositions. The organic abstractions of Georgia O'Keeffe and Arthur Dove add a new dimension to familiar forms from the natural world.
Abstraction dominated American art beginning in the 1930s. Fleeing fascism, a wave of European artists and intellectuals immigrated to the United States, bringing with them avant-garde ideas and artistic approaches. Influenced by the émigrés, American artists became interested in Freudian and Jungian psychological theories that emphasized mythic archetypes, the unconscious and non-Western imagery. Surrealist art embraced these new theories and tried to illustrate the...
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