American modernism
American modernism is the United States' long engagement with modern art, from Alfred Stieglitz's gallery 291 and its circle - Georgia O'Keeffe, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley - through the shock of the 1913 Armory Show to mid-century dominance of the New York art world. Its artists absorbed European abstraction, Fauvism, and Cubism but bent them toward American subjects: the machine city, the desert, the barn, the jazz band. Charles Sheeler's precisionist factories and O'Keeffe's enlarged flowers and bones show the range, from hard-edged industrial clarity to personal, near-abstract natural form. Across painting, photography, and design, the movement's wager was that American experience could carry radical form - and by the 1940s and 1950s the wager had made New York the center of the art world.
Defining characteristics
- European modernist forms - abstraction, fragmentation, flat color - adapted to American subjects
- Machine-age imagery: skyscrapers, factories, and bridges rendered with clean, hard-edged clarity
- Bold simplification and enlargement of natural forms
- Experimental photography treated as a fine art alongside painting
- Tension between regional subject matter and radical technique
Key figures
- Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986) — Made enlarged flowers, bones, and desert forms icons of American modernism
- Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) — Photographer and impresario whose gallery 291 launched American modern art
- Charles Sheeler (1883-1965) — Precisionist of the machine age, in painting and photography
- Marsden Hartley (1877-1943) — Painted bold emblematic abstractions and heavy, heroic figures
- Arthur Dove (1880-1946) — Early experimenter with near-total abstraction from natural forces
Example works
- Portrait of a German Officer — Marsden Hartley (1914)
- American Landscape — Charles Sheeler (1930)
- Cow's Skull: Red, White, and Blue — Georgia O'Keeffe (1931)
Sources
- American modernism - Wikipedia encyclopedia