United States

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Native nations made art on the continent for millennia: Pueblo pottery, Navajo weaving, carved Northwest Coast masks and the ledger drawings of Plains artists. Colonial and early republican painters such as John Singleton Copley specialised in portraits, and in the 19th century landscape painters celebrated the wilderness while Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins looked hard at American life.

In the 20th century, Georgia O'Keeffe enlarged flowers and painted New Mexico's desert, Edward Hopper painted lonely diners, as in Nighthawks (1942), and Jacob Lawrence narrated the Great Migration in sixty small panels. After 1945, Abstract Expressionists such as Willem de Kooning moved the centre of modern art to the United States. Jasper Johns's Flag (1954–55) and Robert Rauschenberg's combines opened the way for Pop, including Roy Lichtenstein's comic-book paintings, and Frank Stella and the Minimalists stripped painting back further.