American Art, painting and sculpture in colonial America and then the United States, from the late 16th century to the present. Until the early 19th century, painting in America was confined largely to portraiture, sculpture to utilitarian objects. But in that century American artists took up the full range of subjects in painting—still lifes, landscapes, history paintings, and scenes of everyday life. Sculptors began to produce large-scale works in marble. In painting landscape emerged as the dominant subject. The earliest landscape painters in America, the Hudson River School, conceived of the land as wild and intractable, reinforcing America’s view of itself as something new, a kind of Garden of Eden. At first most artists in America lived along the Eastern seaboard, but starting in the 1830s and 1840s some artists from the East pushed westward, a move reflected in paintings of Native Americans by George Catlin and paintings of animals and Native Americans of the Rocky Mountain region by Albert Bierstadt. These painters helped Americans envision the vast land to the west.
A core of realism, a reluctance to depart from the facts of existence, continued in painting until the end of the 1800s, even when painters conveyed a somewhat romanticized view of nature. We can see this adherence to realism in unidealized portraits by colonial painters such as John Singleton Copley and in mid-19th-century landscapes by the so-called luminist painters, who explored the effects of light. And when Childe Hassam and other American painters turned to European impressionism in the late 1800s, they kept the figures and objects in their paintings fairly intact, in contrast to the Europeans who dissolved objects into patches of color. Opposing this realist mainstream were a few imaginative approaches, such as the mystical landscapes by Albert Pinkham Ryder and Ralph Albert Blakelock. In sculpture, neoclassicism—a revival of ancient Greek and Roman styles that was popular in Europe—became deeply ingrained, persisting into the late 1800s.
The Essay on Latin American Influences on America
Latin America Latin America affects Florida, the Southwest and California in many ways. Three of the most obvious are food, holidays, and the people. These influences are mainly for the good though some can have negative influence as well. The food found in the Southwest is very similar to that of Latin America. Though some of the foods and restaurants aren't exactly the same or as good, they ...
Until World War II (1939-1945), Americans saw their art as provincial compared to the best that Europe had to offer. In the 1950s the United States—New York City in particular—took the lead with its own movement, abstract expressionism, and American art remained dominant into the 21st century. In the last decades of the 20th century, art in America and elsewhere embraced new materials, including industrial metals; vinyl, cloth, and other soft materials; fluorescent lights; and even the earth itself. No one could have dreamed of these developments when American art was young.
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