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White to Blue
| American Art as Reflection of Social Class in the 20th Century
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Following the First World War, America entered a period of isolationism, politically and culturally. At the conclusion of the World War in 1918, Americans had been fighting for two years, but the experience was enough to encourage a return to a policy of isolationism. At peace talks following World War I, Woodrow Wilson proposed the concept of the League of Nations to the international community as an organization to oversee world affairs and prevent future wars. Despite the fact that the League of Nations was Woodrow Wilson's idea, Congress refused to ratify the concept, sticking instead to George Washington's advice to "avoid entangling alliances." In 1920, Warren Harding was elected President of the United States on a campaign promise "to return to normalcy." And so, for the most part, the country did. Americans became increasingly concerned with America and things American, focusing attention within the country instead of turning outside its borders.
In 1919, with the passage of the 18th Amendment, the production and sale of alcohol was prohibited in the United States. The 18th Amendment, together with the 19th Amendment guaranteeing women's suffrage, was among the last successes of the Progressive Era. Rather than restricting the influences of alcohol, Prohibition did the opposite. Speak-easies cropped up throughout the United States as the production and sale of alcohol went underground. Speak-easies, jazz music, and flappers became synonymous with the Roaring Twenties as a period of excess.
The 1920s also witnessed a rise in African American identity. The immigration of African Americans to urban areas put the new immigrants in close contact with other African Americans and with new ideas. As soldiers in World War I, African Americans had seen significantly less racism in Europe and returned to the United States eager for an end to the institutional discrimination present throughout America. Prejudice and discrimination was as real in the North as it was in the South, and African Americans continued to struggle for equal opportunities. Despite the lack of opportunities for study, patronage, critical recognition, and exhibition or publishing, African American artists and writers continued to create. A centering of creative African Americans in the Harlem borough of New York City during the 1920s and the cultural revitalization they brought to the community became known as the Harlem Renaissance. Artists, authors, and poets produced creative works about African Americans in America's past and about the reality of life for African Americans in the 1920s. The Harlem Renaissance marked a "coming of age" for African American culture, much like American culture sought to create a separate identity from Europe in the 19th century. The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural renewal and would provide inspiration for artists throughout the 20th century.
Lester Johnson (b. 1937) was one of many artists influenced by the Harlem Renaissance. Johnson's Man's Head, 1960, is a powerful image of the head and face of an African American man. Johnson's drawing generalizes the specific features of the individual, so this is not a portrait of an individual. Using orange conte crayon, Johnson takes away the issue of skin color, allowing this head to belong to any man. The generalized features stress the commonalties rather than the differences between men.
Maurice Prendergast, American, 1858-1924, Salem Harbor, Maine, 1922, watercolor on paper, Gift of Mr. And Mrs. Charles Prendergast, 1945.003
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During the 1920s, American artists were also interested in the lives of American people beyond the city. A movement called regionalism developed as artists in the Midwest and Southwest used the people and places around them as subjects. Partially in response to the rapid urbanization and industrialization of the East Coast, regionalists turned to the rural countryside of the interior of the nation in a hope to document a part of America that seemed to be rapidly disappearing. Using a realist approach, regionalists found inspiration in the people and places around them. For example, Frederick Monhoff worked predominately in southwestern America during the 1920s and '30s. His prints depict a wide range of people, including fairly affluent white Americans in Fordissimus, native Mexicans in Market of Tlaquepaque, Mexico, and the rural poor in Appalachia.
Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975) was another well-known American regionalist, although he would not have chosen the word to describe himself. Rather, Benton believed that he depicted images of common American experiences, ideas and values that any American could relate to regardless of his or her hometown. Benton's Music Lesson, 1943, depicts a young girl intently watching a man play the guitar. From Benton's writings, it is known that the man was a fisherman and he was teaching his daughter the songs of whalers and fishermen on Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts. In the early decades of the 20th century before television, making music and singing in the evenings was a familiar scene to Americans across the country. Whether the man was a fisherman or a farmer and the songs about whaling or early pioneers, a man singing to his daughter conveyed American values of family, hard work, and simple pleasures.
In contrast to American artists working in the realist tradition, many American artists were also experimenting with new ideas of modernism and abstraction in art early in the 20th century. Modernism had its official start in America in 1913 with the Armory Show in New York City. The Armory Show was planned as an opportunity to introduce modern art, especially Post-Impressionism and Cubism, to the general public. A third of the artists represented were European; the rest were Americans, including many members of "The Eight." Americans were shocked at the abstraction of the Armory Show. Americans were not accustomed to the new ideas of conveying reality through simplified forms and abstract shapes. Despite the shock and criticism it generated, the Armory Show awakened American artists and audiences to European ideas of art and encouraged them to re-examine American assumptions about art, aesthetics and meaning.
Again taking the lead from European artists, American artists in the 1920s and 1930s began visually deconstructing their environment in their creative works. Cubism, a movement often associated with Pablo Picasso, broke up natural objects into their geometric shapes and planes, and produced a subjective painting rather than an objective response to the world. John Marin (1870-1953) incorporated some Cubist elements in his watercolors beginning in the 1920s. Marin's New Mexico Landscape, 1930, shows these Cubist elements with mountains reduced to a triangle in the distance, a road leading to the mountains as a strip of color, and the landscape on either side of the road appear as brushstrokes without definite shape.
The contrast between the new modernism and American realism can be seen in two images of New York City by Fiske Boyd and Richard Lakey. Lakey's Downtown New York is a realistic representation of the city's skyscrapers. With strong lines, each building takes a distinct form, separate from the buildings around it. Lakey's overall image is somewhat dark, conveying the dirt and grime associated with cities today. Boyd's New York Harbor, 1923, on the other hand, takes a similar bird's eye view of the New York City skyline and jumbles it. Perhaps beginning to deconstruct the scene in front of him, Boyd's image of New York City does not contain distinct and separate buildings; rather one building seems to blend into the next. In this image it is possible to sense the chaos and activity present in the city. Interestingly, in Boyd's New York Harbor a very small Statue of Liberty is visible in the harbor in the background of the image.
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