Artistic creativity in the colonial period and the early decades of the new nation generally found expression in the production of useful, everyday implements such as simple, elegant furniture or colorful patchwork quilts. For the busy, practical-minded Americans
, portraits were the only kind of "fine" art that seemed necessary. Most American artists of the time were self-taught. Their work had the primitive charm of folk art-first-hand observation, a sense of character and instinct for color, line and pattern. Today the hundreds of early portraits that still exist are highly valued by collectors.
In the years before the United States revolution, some of America's most noted artists traveled to Europe. Some thrived there. Benjamin West (1738— 1820) became court painter to Britain's King George III and served as president of the Royal Academy for 28 years. But the work of others, such as John Singleton Copley (1738—1815), perhaps colonial America's leading portrait painter, seemed to lose its power away from the shores of North America.
America's first well-known "school" of landscape painting — the Hudson River School — appeared in the 1820s. Westward expansion had brought a realization of the vast scale and unspoiled beauty of the continent. Led by Thomas Cole (1801—1848), the Hudson River painters combined great technical skill with romantic American scenery. Their paintings were visual explorations of light and natural wonder. This tradition of directness, simplicity of vision, and clarity developed in the late 19th century into something new — naturalistic portrayal of the broad range of American life. Rural America — the seas, the mountains, and the men and women who lived there — was the subject of Winslow Homer (1836-1910).
The middle-class city life of the period found its poet in Thomas Etkins (1844-1916) an uncompromising realist whose gaunt honest portrayals provided redirection away from the romantic sentimentalism favored by the "polite" society at that time.
Controversy became a way of life for Americans. In fact, much of American painting and sculpture since 1900 has been a series of revolts against tradition. "To hell with the artistic values", announced Robert Henri (1865-1929), Henri was leader of what critics dubbed the "ash-can" school because of the group's realistic portrayal of the squalid aspects of city life. Just a few years later the "ash-can" artists were pushed aside by the arrival of modernist movements from Europe, such as cubism and abstraction, promoted by the great photographer Alfred Stieglitz at his "Gallery 291" in New York City. But by the 1920s a renewed sense of nationalism encouraged artists to rediscover and explore Americana. Regionalists such as Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975) and Grant Wood (1891-1942) celebrated the rural Midwest. At the same time artists such as Edward Hopper (1882-1967) pictured cities and small towns with new realism.
The Depression of the 1930s and growing world tensions sparked an increase in romantic social protest and in movements stylistically similar to those of artists in the U.S.S.R. and muralists in Mexico. Artists everywhere mounted extraordinary pictorial attacks on social systems in scores of paintings and public murals.
In the years following World War II, a group of young New York artists emerged with a fierce drive to remake the goals and methods of art. Their movement, known as Abstract Expressionism, became the first American art movement to exert major influence on foreign artists. By the early 1950s, New York City was a center of the art world.
The Abstract Expressionists went further than earlier European artists had in their revolt against traditional graphic styles. Among the movement's leaders were Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) and Willem de Kooning (1904-1988), these young artists abandoned formal composition. Instead, they stressed space and movement, and they relied on their instinct and the physical action of painting.
The Abstract Expressionists' radical innovations in the 1940s and 1950s were matched by American sculptors. The heroic models of the past were discarded in favor of open, fluid forms. New materials were adopted and color was used. Alexander Calder (1898—1976) developed the mobile. David Smith (1906—1965), the first sculptor to work with welded metals, developed a monumental abstract style that was a major influence on other artists.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, young artists reacted against Abstract Expressionism to produce works of "mixed" media. These artists — among them Robert Rauschenberg (1925) and Jasper Johns (1930) used photos, newsprint, and discarded objects in their paintings. The early 1960s saw the rise of "Pop" art. Artists such as Andy Warhol (1930-1987), Larry Rivers (1923), and Roy Lichtenstein (I923) reproduced, with satiric care, everyday objects and images of American popular cultures — Coca-Cola bottles, soup cans, cigarette packages and comic strips. "Pop" was followed by "Op"— art based on the principles of optical illusion and perception.
The 1970s and 1980s have seen an explosion of forms, styles and techniques. Artists are no longer confined to their studios, or even to the creation of objects. An artist's work might be an empty gallery, or a huge drawing cut into the western desert. It could be a videotaped event or a written manifesto. These different kinds of art bear a variety of names: earth art, conceptual art, performance art.
Stilt, the rapid rise in the 1980s of a new group of young artists has shown that painted figures on canvas remain popular with the art-viewing public. This new group, which includes David Salle and Susan Rothenberg, are the newest stars of the art world.