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Part 4. Arts. How is America inspired?

Pre-reading task. Discussion club.

Get in pairs and discuss:

-) what form of art is America famous for

-) comment on your attitude to modern art

-) recall some names of American people of art and comment on their creations

PART 1.

1) Reading. Read the text carefully and retell it close to the original. Be ready to discuss it.

Art versus Science.

One can distinguish two branches of human work: the arts and the sciences. The sciences require knowledge, observation, identification, description, experimentation and theoretical explanation. The arts on the contrary require skill. That means the ability to work well with a part of the body. It is the combination of talent and technique. An artist is a man who can do something well with his own hands and tools. Some time ago everything that was made with tools was "artificial", not natural. The word "manufacture", for example, once meant "to make by hand".

Everything is a bit different nowadays. The word "art" has a special meaning. It means something beautiful. The paintings of skilled painters are appreciated and admired by millions of people today, by those who can see the beauty. Art comprises weaving rugs, tapestries, ceramic work and what not. So there are a lot of types of art. Nevertheless one can trace basic principles in art. All kinds of it require the same characteristics. The separate parts of a work of art should be arranged in pattern. The form itself, a pleasing shape and balance are extremely important.

Art inspires the human spirit. Painters, sculptors, musicians, writers, weavers - they all contribute to a better life for us.

Visual Art of the United States

American art encompasses the history of painting and visual art in the United States. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, artists primarily painted landscapes and portraits in a realistic style based mainly on Western painting and European arts. A parallel development taking shape in rural America was the American craft movement, which began as a reaction to the industrial revolution. Developments in modern art in Europe came to America from exhibitions in New York City such as the Armory Show in 1913. After World War II, New York replaced Paris as the center of the art world. Since then many American movements have shaped Modern and Postmodern art. Art in the United States today covers a huge range of styles. Let’s go chronologically…

XVIII century

After the Declaration of Independence in 1776, which marked the official beginning of the American national identity, the new nation needed a history, and part of that history would be expressed visually. Most of early American art (from the late 18th through the early 19th century) consists of history painting and especially portraits. As in Colonial America, many of the painters who specialized in portraits were essentially self-taught; notable among them are Joseph Badger, John Brewster, Jr., and William Jennys. The young nation's artists generally emulated the style of British art, which they knew through prints and the paintings of English-trained immigrants such as John Smibert and John Wollaston.



Robert Feke (1707-52), an untrained painter of the colonial period, achieved a sophisticated style based on Smibert's example. Charles Willson Peale, who gained much of his earliest art training by studying Smibert's copies of European paintings, painted portraits of many of the important figures of the American Revolution. Peale's younger brother James Peale and four of Peale's sons – Raphaelle Peale, Rembrandt Peale, Rubens Peale and Titian Peale – all with their telling names – were also artists. Painters such as Gilbert Stuart made portraits of the newly elected government officials, which became iconic after being reproduced on various U.S. Postage stamps of the 19th century and early 20th century, while John Singleton Copley painted emblematic portraits for the increasingly prosperous merchant class, including a portrait of Paul Revere. The original version of his most famous painting, Watson and the Shark, is in the collection of The National Gallery of Art while there is another version in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and a third version in the Detroit Institute of Arts. Benjamin West painted portraits as well as history paintings of the French and Indian War. West also worked in London where many American artists studied under him.

John Trumbull painted large battle scenes of the Revolutionary War. When landscape was painted it was most often done to show how much property a subject owned, or as a picturesque background for a portrait.

XIX century

Albert Bierstadt, The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak, 1863,

Metropolitan Museum of Art – an example of the Hudson River School

Mary Cassatt, The Bath 1891–1892, Art Institute of Chicago

James McNeill Whistler, Arrangement in Grey and Black: The Artist's Mother, 1871, popularly known as Whistler's Mother, Musée d'Orsay, Paris

America's first well-known school of painting – the Hudson River School – appeared in 1820. Thomas Cole pioneered the movement which included Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Edwin Church, Thomas Doughty and several others. As with music and literature, this development was delayed until artists perceived that the New World offered subjects unique to itself; in this case the westward expansion of settlement brought the transcendent beauty of frontier landscapes to painters' attention.

The Hudson River painters' directness and simplicity of vision influenced and inspired such later artists as John Kensett and the Luminists; as well as George Inness and the tonalists (which included Albert Pinkham Ryder and Ralph Blakelock among others), and Winslow Homer (1836-1910), who depicted rural America—the sea, the mountains, and the people who lived near them. The Hudson River School landscape painter Robert S. Duncanson was one of the first important African American painters. John James Audubon, an ornothologist whose paintings documented birds, was one of the most important naturalist artists in America. His major work, a set of colored prints entitled The Birds of America (1827–1839), is considered one of the finest ornithological works ever completed. Edward Hicks was an American folk painter and distinguished minister of the Society of Friends. He became a Quaker icon because of his paintings.

The most successful American sculptor of his era, Hiram Powers, left America in his early thirties to spend the rest of his life in Europe, where he adopted a conventional style for his idealized female nudes such as Eve Tempted. Several important painters who are considered American spent much of their lives in Europe, all of whom were influenced by French Impressionism. Theodore Robinson visited France in 1887, befriended Monet, and became one of the first American painters to adopt the new technique. In the last decades of the century American Impressionism, as practiced by artists such as Childe Hassam and Frank W. Benson, became a popular style.

Controversy soon became a way of life for American artists. 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). He was the leader of what critics called the Ashcan school of painting, after the group's portrayals of the squalid aspects of city life. American realism became the new direction for American visual artists at the turn of the 20th century. The Ashcan painters George Bellows, Everett Shinn, George Benjamin Luks, William Glackens, and John Sloan were among those who developed socially conscious imagery in their works.

The photographer Alfred Steiglitz (1864-1946) led the Photo-Secession movement, which created pathways for photography as an emerging art form. Soon the Ashcan school artists gave way to modernists arriving from Europe—the cubists and abstract painters promoted by Stieglitz at his gallery in New York City.

Marsden Hartley, Painting No. 48, 1913, Brooklyn Museum

Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance was another significant development in American art. In the 1920s and 30s a new generation of educated and politically astute African-American men and women emerged who sponsored literary societies and art and industrial exhibitions to combat racist stereotypes. The movement, which showcased the range of talents within African-American communities, included artists from across America, but was centered in Harlem. The work of the Harlem painter and graphic artist Aaron Douglas and the photographer James VanDerZee became emblematic of the movement.

New Deal Art

Thomas Hart Benton, People of Chilmark (Figure Composition), 1920, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.

When the Great Depression hit, president Roosevelt’s New Deal created several public arts programs. The purpose of the programs was to give work to artists and decorate public buildings, usually with a national theme. The first of these projects, the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), was created after successful lobbying by the unemployed artists of the Artists' Union. The PWAP lasted less than one year, and produced nearly 15,000 works of art. It was followed by the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration in 1935, which funded some of the most well-known American artists. The style of much of the public art was influenced by the work of Diego Rivera and other artists of the contemporary Mexican muralism movement. Several separate and related movements began and developed during the Great Depression including American scene painting, Regionalism, and Social Realism.


Date: 2015-12-11; view: 1181


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