In 1913 the Armory Show in New York brought European modern art, from Impressionism to Cubism, before large crowds in New York, Chicago and Boston, many of them shocked. But American artists were already building a modern art of their own, encouraged by the photographer and gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz (see Photography as Modern Art), and over the next decades they found distinctly American subjects.
Georgia O'Keeffe (1887 to 1986) painted flowers so close up and so large that they fill the canvas and become almost abstract, as in Black Iris (1926, The Metropolitan Museum of Art), and later the bones, hills and skies of New Mexico. Edward Hopper (1882 to 1967) painted American cities and towns in strong, flat light: empty streets, gas stations, offices and diners. In Nighthawks (1942, The Art Institute of Chicago) three customers and a counterman sit inside a brightly lit corner diner at night, seen through a huge curved window; no door to the street is visible, and the people do not look at each other. Both paintings are still in copyright and are not shown here.
Key idea
Looking closely: American Gothic
Describe. A stern farmer holding a pitchfork stands beside a woman in front of a white wooden farmhouse with a pointed Gothic window in its gable. Analyze. Everything is painted with crisp, smooth precision. The vertical lines repeat: the pitchfork's tines echo in the stitching of the man's overalls, the window's arch and the long faces. The figures are close to us, frontal and still. Interpret. Grant Wood (1891 to 1942) saw the house in Eldon, Iowa, and posed his sister Nan and his dentist for the figures. Wood and his sister described them as a farmer and his daughter, though many viewers have taken them for a married couple. Critics have argued since 1930 whether it gently satirizes small-town Midwesterners or honors them; Wood said he meant it as a tribute. It is part of Regionalism, a movement of the 1930s that painted rural America.
Common mistake
The Harlem Renaissance
In the 1920s and 1930s Harlem, in New York, was the center of a flowering of Black American writing, music and art. The painter Aaron Douglas (1899 to 1979) illustrated books and magazines and painted murals in a style of flat, layered silhouettes, with rings of light and rhythms borrowed from jazz and from African art; his 1934 murals for the New York Public Library, now at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, trace history from Africa to Harlem. The sculptor Augusta Savage taught many young artists. One of them, Jacob Lawrence (1917 to 2000), painted The Migration Series (1940 to 1941): 60 small panels in flat, bright colors telling the story of the Great Migration of more than a million Black Americans from the rural South to northern cities. The Museum of Modern Art owns the odd-numbered panels and The Phillips Collection the even-numbered ones. These works are in copyright and are described here.
Why it works
Worked example: Father or husband?
- Grant Wood and his sister, who posed for the woman, described them as a farmer and his daughter.
- Many viewers have read them as a married couple.
- A careful description reports the artist's statement and notes that viewers differ.
Answer: Give Wood's description (father and daughter) and note that many viewers see a married couple.