American Modernism

About

Around 1910 a few American artists who had seen Cubism and Fauvism in Europe brought those ideas home. The photographer Alfred Stieglitz championed several of them in New York, and the 1913 Armory Show confronted the public with Marcel Duchamp, Henri Matisse and the European avant-garde, and to American newcomers.

What followed was a search for a modern art that felt native. Arthur Dove made some of the first American abstractions. Marsden Hartley painted emblematic, flag-like compositions in Berlin, such as Portrait of a German Officer (1914). Georgia O'Keeffe enlarged flowers into near-abstract forms and later painted the bones and hills of New Mexico. Joseph Stella's Brooklyn Bridge (1919–20) turned cables and arches into a Futurist vision, while Charles Sheeler and the Precisionists gave factories and grain elevators crisp, hard-edged clarity. Stuart Davis fused Cubist structure with jazz and advertising. This generation prepared the ground for the New York School.