The independent "giants" Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, Albert Pinkham Ryder, and John Singer Sargent lived and continued working well into the twentieth century -- as did the principal American impressionists: Childe Hassam (link), John H. Twatchman (link), Robert Reid, and others of "The Ten." But their styles were firmly rooted in the previous century. The early 1900s were "stand-pat" years for American art. John I. H. Baur notes: "Perhaps at no time has our art been more truly provincial or more intolerant of stylistic deviations." Painter Everett Shinn (link) described the situation in more graphic and moribund terms. American art "had inherited a preceding drowsiness, and that virus of ease and artificiality produced in the non-resistant body a lowering of vitality and a state of staggering decrepitude." "Art galleries," he continued, "were more like funeral parlors wherein the cadavers were displayed in their sumptuous coffins."

It was a kind of doldrums, out of which American art took three courses of development. Many artists -- indeed the largest number-including such technically competent figures as Kenyon Cox, Charles Hawthorne, Frank Vincent Dumond, and William McGregor Paxton, perpetuated or only slightly updated the status quo. Under the pervasive sway of the National Academy of Design, nineteenth-century academic modes -- generally realistic in style and genteel in subject matter -- were formally sanctioned. Lloyd Goodrich describes the gravity of the situation for artists:

Almost the only way to get one's work before the public was in regular exhibitions of museums or artists' societies, dominated by conservative juries who excluded anything unorthodox, and awarded to their own kind the prizes so dear to the academic mind. Getting into one of these big shows was a major event in a young man's career; it meant the difference between artistic survival or failure.

For a 1907 N.A.D. show, the judges had rejected as too coarse, too unrefined, work by several artists who would soon after represent a second direction, a revolt against fashionable academic idealism. The following year these men exhibited together as The Eight at New York's Macbeth Gallery. Five of the group -- Robert Henri (link), George Luks, William Glackens (link), Everett Shinn (link), and John Sloan -- came to be identified as the Ash Can School. In reviving the vigorous brushwork and dramatic lighting of the earlier Munich manner, they were not innovative stylistically. But they jarred the prevailing sensibilities of their day with unconventional, often seamy views of urban life. Except for Henri, the Ash Can artists had formerly been newspaper illustrators. It is not surprising that "progressive painting should be in the hands of a group of newspaper-trained artist-journalists," Sam Hunter observes, noting further the thematic similarity of the artworks to the writings of such contemporaries as Steven Crane, Theodore Dreiser, Lincoln Steffens, Frank Harris, Jack London, and Upton Sinclair.

At about the same time, photographer Alfred Stieglitz had begun exhibiting European modern artists -- cubists, fauves, expressionists -- at his New York gallery, informally known as "291" (for 291 Fifth Avenue). He also provided show opportunities to numerous Americans who shared the creative spirit of the European avant-garde and would represent the third course, including Marsden Hartly, Arthur Dove, Alfred Maurer, and John Mann. American art was, as Goodrich says, "at a starting point for free creation, in which color, line, and design became a direct physical language." Cut off from "establishment" support, the new moderns organized their own autonomous exhibitions, the most notable of which were the Society of Independent Artists show in 1910 and the watershed event held in 1913 at New York's 69th Regiment Armory -- the "scandal on 26th Street," the Armory Show. A large section of the latter exhibit introduced the principal French modern artists to a widespread, but mainly bewildered and shocked American public. Though conservative critic Royal Cortissoz denounced the French work as "a gospel of studied license and self assertion" fit only for "the rubbish heap," American art was profoundly infected. "When the anger and astonishment subsided," George Heard Hamilton explains, "a new situation had been created for the American artist. Whether or not the Armory Show made America safe for modernism, it showed him that he could venture as far as the Europeans had gone, and it eventually made possible a more sympathetic audience." Goodrich declares flatly: "No single event, before or since, has had such an influence on American art."

Conservatism held prevalent in the late teens and 1920s; still in the spirit of cultural and political internationalism that followed World War I, non-literal expression also flourished with artists like Max Weber, Patrick Henry Bruce, Joseph Stella, and Stuart Davis. Interestingly, a number of artists of the period devised a kind of hybrid style in which elements of abstract design and composition were bred with traditional American realism. The resulting effect -- figurative, yet subject to non-representational design principles -- is seen in the work of Charles Sheeler, Charles Demuth, Georgia O'Keeffe, Niles Spencer, Edward Hopper (link), and numerous others.

Progressive artists of the 1920s continued to produce into the '30s. But America's national mood changed in the wake of the stock market "crash" of 1929 and ensuing depression years. The country turned inward, economically, politically, socially, assuming an isolationist stance. During the long recovery, the government's Federal Art Project and Treasury Department programs sustained many artists through the leanest times. The chief object of the government's patronage was decorating post offices, court houses, and other civic buildings. Participating artists, therefore, were virtually obliged to consider themes of popular interest -- local history, industrial development, native landscape -- and to work in a representational style that the "average person" could understand and appreciate. Apart from government support, as Baur points out: "The suffering of those years turned increasing numbers of artists to the consideration of man as a social being and to specific problems of social relations which were not susceptible to abstract treatment." The '30s, then, saw the advance of socially meaningful art, under the heading "American scene," with an essentially nostalgic and rural wing represented by the "regionalists" -- Grant Wood (link), Thomas Hart Benton (link), and John Steuart Curry, for example -- and a political and urban wing with the "social realists" -- including Reginald Marsh, Ben Shahn, and Philip Evergood (link), and seen as well in the photography of Louis Hine and Dorothea Lange. Again, such authors as Sherwood Anderson, John Steinbeck, Sinclair Lewis, and William Faulkner reveal a comparable trend in literature.

Although American art of the 1920s and '30s was predominantly realistic, abstract and non-figurative styles were not without potent advocacy. From its founding in 1929, the Museum of Modern Art in New York was (and is still) a singularly formidable proponent. Joshua C. Taylor notes: "Through its exhibitions and publications, and eventually through its extraordinary permanent collection, it molded the concepts of the modern tradition into a convincing historical design." The New York group American Abstract Artists was organized in 1936, and in '37 the Chicago Bauhaus was founded by former members of the distinguished German design school who had fled the Hitler regime. All of this, and more, in effect set the stage for the great outburst of abstract and expressionist art that would dominate contemporary movements after World War II.

American sculpture in the first half of the twentieth century developed in a pattern similar to painting, only even more conservative and slow-changing. Members of the National Sculpture Society, an organization spiritually akin to the N.A.D., retained the Beaux-Arts styles of the previous era. To a small number of native-born sculptors like Jo Davidson, Paul Manship, John Storrs, and Hugo Robus, modern would mean simplified or streamlined figurative work. The chief practitioners of more abstracted design were immigrants from Europe who brought the latest trends with them: Gaston Lachaise, Elie Nadelman, Jacques Lipchitz, William Zorach, and Alexander Archipenko, to name the best known. Meanwhile, two particularly imaginative Americans began producing a remarkably innovative body of work: Joseph Cornell and his box sculptures, and the witty wire figures and mobiles of Alexander Calder.

In architecture, revivalist styles -- represented at the beginning of the century by the influential firm of McKim, Mead, and White -- gradually gave way to design based on the structural integrity of the edifice. During the long transitional phase, historical references were often veneered over technologically advanced building art, as in the notable examples of Cass Gilbert's Woolworth Building in New York, from 1913, and Hood and Howells' gothicized Chicago Tribune Building in 1923. Skeletal structural-steel systems made possible "curtain" rather than load-bearing walls, which in turn made possible the skyscraper. Upward-soaring office buildings demanded design characteristics that would articulate strength, verticality, efficiency, and newness, not to mention corporate pride or one-upsmanship. At the same time, Frank Lloyd Wright -- with his abhorance of the conventional box enclosure, his fondness for natural materials, colors, and textures, and his belief that structures should visually harmonize with their surroundings -- devised the "prairie house," and dominated progressive domestic architecture (though he also designed many commercial and institutional buildings). In the '30s, Walter Gropius and Ludwig Meis van der Rohe, recently arrived from Germany, introduced the smooth, functional Bauhaus aesthetic, the beginnings of the International Style that would markedly affect American business and industrial architecture for more than two decades after World War II.