U.S. Culture

influenced by a variety of intermediaries—critics, the schools,

foundations that offer grants, the National Endowment for the Arts,

gallery owners, publishers, and theater producers. In some areas, such as

the performing arts, popular audiences may ultimately define success. In

other arts, such as painting and sculpture, success is far more dependent

on critics and a few, often wealthy, art collectors. Writers depend on

publishers and on the public for their success.

Unlike their predecessors, who relied on formal criteria and appealed to

aesthetic judgments, critics at the end of the 20th century leaned more

toward popular tastes, taking into account groups previously ignored and

valuing the merger of popular and elite forms. These critics often relied

less on aesthetic judgments than on social measures and were eager to

place artistic productions in the context of the time and social

conditions in which they were created. Whereas earlier critics attempted

to create an American tradition of high art, later critics used art as a

means to give power and approval to nonelite groups who were previously

not considered worthy of including in the nation’s artistic heritage.

Not so long ago, culture and the arts were assumed to be an unalterable

inheritance—the accumulated wisdom and highest forms of achievement that

were established in the past. In the 20th century generally, and certainly

since World War II, artists have been boldly destroying older traditions

in sculpture, painting, dance, music, and literature. The arts have

changed rapidly, with one movement replacing another in quick succession.

Visual Arts

The visual arts have traditionally included forms of expression that

appeal to the eyes through painted surfaces, and to the sense of space

through carved or molded materials. In the 19th century, photographs were

added to the paintings, drawings, and sculpture that make up the visual

arts. The visual arts were further augmented in the 20th century by the

addition of other materials, such as found objects. These changes were

accompanied by a profound alteration in tastes, as earlier emphasis on

realistic representation of people, objects, and landscapes made way for a

greater range of imaginative forms.

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, American art was considered

inferior to European art. Despite noted American painters such as Thomas

Eakins, Winslow Homer, Mary Cassatt, and John Marin, American visual arts

barely had an international presence.

American art began to flourish during the Great Depression of the 1930s as

New Deal government programs provided support to artists along with other

sectors of the population. Artists connected with each other and developed

a sense of common purpose through programs of the Public Works

Administration, such as the Federal Art Project, as well as programs

sponsored by the Treasury Department. Most of the art of the period,

including painting, photography, and mural work, focused on the plight of

the American people during the depression, and most artists painted real

people in difficult circumstances. Artists such as Thomas Hart Benton and

Ben Shahn expressed the suffering of ordinary people through their

representations of struggling farmers and workers. While artists such as

Benton and Grant Wood focused on rural life, many painters of the 1930s

and 1940s depicted the multicultural life of the American city. Jacob

Lawrence, for example, re-created the history and lives of African

Americans. Other artists, such as Andrew Wyeth and Edward Hopper, tried to

use human figures to describe emotional states such as loneliness and

despair.

Abstract Expressionism

Shortly after World War II, American art began to garner worldwide

attention and admiration. This change was due to the innovative fervor of

abstract expressionism in the 1950s and to subsequent modern art movements

and artists. The abstract expressionists of the mid-20th century broke

from the realist and figurative tradition set in the 1930s. They

emphasized their connection to international artistic visions rather than

the particularities of people and place, and most abstract expressionists

did not paint human figures (although artist Willem de Kooning did

portrayals of women). Color, shape, and movement dominated the canvases of

abstract expressionists. Some artists broke with the Western art tradition

by adopting innovative painting styles—during the 1950s Jackson Pollock

"painted" by dripping paint on canvases without the use of brushes, while

the paintings of Mark Rothko often consisted of large patches of color

that seem to vibrate.

Abstract expressionists felt alienated from their surrounding culture and

used art to challenge society’s conventions. The work of each artist was

quite individual and distinctive, but all the artists identified with the

radicalism of artistic creativity. The artists were eager to challenge

conventions and limits on expression in order to redefine the nature of

art. Their radicalism came from liberating themselves from the confining

artistic traditions of the past.

The most notable activity took place in New York City, which became one of

the world’s most important art centers during the second half of the 20th

century. The radical fervor and inventiveness of the abstract

expressionists, their frequent association with each other in New York

City’s Greenwich Village, and the support of a group of gallery owners and

dealers turned them into an artistic movement. Also known as the New York

School, the participants included Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell, Franz

Kline, and Arshile Gorky, in addition to Rothko and Pollock.

The members of the New York School came from diverse backgrounds such as

the American Midwest and Northwest, Armenia, and Russia, bringing an

international flavor to the group and its artistic visions. They hoped to

appeal to art audiences everywhere, regardless of culture, and they felt

connected to the radical innovations introduced earlier in the 20th

century by European artists such as Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp. Some

of the artists—Hans Hofmann, Gorky, Rothko, and de Kooning—were not born

in the United States, but all the artists saw themselves as part of an

international creative movement and an aesthetic rebellion.

As artists felt released from the boundaries and conventions of the past

and free to emphasize expressiveness and innovation, the abstract

expressionists gave way to other innovative styles in American art.

Beginning in the 1930s Joseph Cornell created hundreds of boxed

assemblages, usually from found objects, with each based on a single theme

to create a mood of contemplation and sometimes of reverence. Cornell's

boxes exemplify the modern fascination with individual vision, art that

breaks down boundaries between forms such as painting and sculpture, and

the use of everyday objects toward a new end. Other artists, such as

Robert Rauschenberg, combined disparate objects to create large, collage-

like sculptures known as combines in the 1950s. Jasper Johns, a painter,

sculptor, and printmaker, recreated countless familiar objects, most

memorably the American flag.

The most prominent American artistic style to follow abstract

expressionism was the pop art movement that began in the 1950s. Pop art

attempted to connect traditional art and popular culture by using images

from mass culture. To shake viewers out of their preconceived notions

about art, sculptor Claes Oldenburg used everyday objects such as pillows

and beds to create witty, soft sculptures. Roy Lichtenstein took this a

step further by elevating the techniques of commercial art, notably

cartooning, into fine art worthy of galleries and museums. Lichtenstein's

large, blown-up cartoons fill the surface of his canvases with grainy

black dots and question the existence of a distinct realm of high art.

These artists tried to make their audiences see ordinary objects in a

refreshing new way, thereby breaking down the conventions that formerly

defined what was worthy of artistic representation.

Probably the best-known pop artist, and a leader in the movement, was Andy

Warhol, whose images of a Campbell’s soup can and of the actress Marilyn

Monroe explicitly eroded the boundaries between the art world and mass

culture. Warhol also cultivated his status as a celebrity. He worked in

film as a director and producer to break down the boundaries between

traditional and popular art. Unlike the abstract expressionists, whose

conceptual works were often difficult to understand, Andy Warhol's

pictures, and his own face, were instantly recognizable.

Conceptual art, as it came to be known in the 1960s, like its

predecessors, sought to break free of traditional artistic associations.

In conceptual art, as practiced by Sol LeWitt and Joseph Kosuth, concept

takes precedent over actual object, by stimulating thought rather than

following an art tradition based on conventional standards of beauty and

artisanship.

Modern artists changed the meaning of traditional visual arts and brought

a new imaginative dimension to ordinary experience. Art was no longer

viewed as separate and distinct, housed in museums as part of a historical

inheritance, but as a continuous creative process. This emphasis on

constant change, as well as on the ordinary and mundane, reflected a

distinctly American democratizing perspective. Viewing art in this way

removed the emphasis from technique and polished performance, and many

modern artworks and experiences became more about expressing ideas than

about perfecting finished products.

Photography

Photography is probably the most democratic modern art form because it can

be, and is, practiced by most Americans. Since 1888, when George Eastman

developed the Kodak camera that allowed anyone to take pictures,

photography has struggled to be recognized as a fine art form. In the

early part of the 20th century, photographer, editor, and artistic

impresario Alfred Stieglitz established 291, a gallery in New York City,

with fellow photographer Edward Steichen, to showcase the works of

photographers and painters. They also published a magazine called Camera

Work to increase awareness about photographic art. In the United States,

photographic art had to compete with the widely available commercial

photography in news and fashion magazines. By the 1950s the tradition of

photojournalism, which presented news stories primarily with photographs,

had produced many outstanding works. In 1955 Steichen, who was director of

photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, called attention to

this work in an exhibition called The Family of Man.

Throughout the 20th century, most professional photographers earned their

living as portraitists or photojournalists, not as artists. One of the

most important exceptions was Ansel Adams, who took majestic photographs

of the Western American landscape. Adams used his art to stimulate social

awareness and to support the conservation cause of the Sierra Club. He

helped found the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art in

1940, and six years later helped establish the photography department at

the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco (now the San Francisco

Art Institute). He also held annual photography workshops at Yosemite

National Park from 1955 to 1981 and wrote a series of influential books on

photographic technique.

Adams's elegant landscape photography was only one small stream in a

growing current of interest in photography as an art form. Early in the

20th century, teacher-turned-photographer Lewis Hine established a

documentary tradition in photography by capturing actual people, places,

and events. Hine photographed urban conditions and workers, including

child laborers. Along with their artistic value, the photographs often

implicitly called for social reform. In the 1930s and 1940s, photographers

joined with other depression-era artists supported by the federal

government to create a photographic record of rural America. Walker Evans,

Dorothea Lange, and Arthur Rothstein, among others, produced memorable and

widely reproduced portraits of rural poverty and American distress during

the Great Depression and during the dust storms of the period.

In 1959, after touring the United States for two years, Swiss-born

photographer Robert Frank published The Americans, one of the landmarks of

documentary photography. His photographs of everyday life in America

introduced viewers to a depressing, and often depressed, America that

existed in the midst of prosperity and world power.

Photographers continued to search for new photographic viewpoints. This

search was perhaps most disturbingly embodied in the work of Diane Arbus.

Her photos of mental patients and her surreal depictions of Americans

altered the viewer’s relationship to the photograph. Arbus emphasized

artistic alienation and forced viewers to stare at images that often made

them uncomfortable, thus changing the meaning of the ordinary reality that

photographs are meant to capture.

American photography continues to flourish. The many variants of art

photography and socially conscious documentary photography are widely

available in galleries, books, and magazines.

A host of other visual arts thrive, although they are far less connected

to traditional fine arts than photography. Decorative arts include, but

are not limited to, art glass, furniture, jewelry, pottery, metalwork, and

quilts. Often exhibited in craft galleries and studios, these decorative

arts rely on ideals of beauty in shape and color as well as an

appreciation of well-executed crafts. Some of these forms are also

developed commercially. The decorative arts provide a wide range of

opportunity for creative expression and have become a means for Americans

to actively participate in art and to purchase art for their homes that is

more affordable than works produced by many contemporary fine artists.

Literature

American literature since World War II is much more diverse in its voices

than ever before. It has also expanded its view of the past as people

rediscovered important sources from non-European traditions, such as

Native American folktales and slave narratives. Rediscovering these

traditions expanded the range of American literary history.

American Jewish writing from the 1940s to the 1960s was the first serious

outpouring of an American literature that contained many voices. Some

Jewish writers had begun to be heard as literary critics and novelists

before World War II, part of a general broadening of American literature

during the first half of the 20th century. After the war, talented Jewish

writers appeared in such numbers and became so influential that they stood

out as a special phenomenon. They represented at once a subgroup within

literature and the new voice of American literature.

Several Jewish American novelists, including Herman Wouk and Norman

Mailer, wrote important books about the war without any special ethnic

resonance. But writers such as novelists Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and

Philip Roth, and storytellers Grace Paley and Cynthia Ozick wrote most

memorably from within the Jewish tradition. Using their Jewish identity

and history as background, these authors asked how moral behavior was

possible in modern America and how the individual could survive in the

contemporary world. Saul Bellow most conspicuously posed these questions,

framing them even before the war was over in his earliest novel, Dangling

Man (1944). He continued to ask them in various ways through a series of

novels paralleling the life cycle, including The Adventures of Augie March

(1953), Herzog (1964), and Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970). One novel in the

series earned a Pulitzer Prize (Humboldt's Gift, 1975). Bellow was awarded

the Nobel Prize for literature in 1976. Like Bellow, Philip Roth and

Bernard Malamud struggled with identity and selfhood as well as with

morality and fate. However, Roth often resisted being categorized as a

Jewish writer. Playwright Arthur Miller rarely invoked his Jewish

heritage, but his plays contained similar existential themes.

Isaac Bashevis Singer was also part of this postwar group of American

Jewish writers. His novels conjure up his lost roots and life in prewar

Poland and the ghostly, religiously inspired fantasies of Jewish existence

in Eastern Europe before World War II. Written in Yiddish and much less

overtly American, Singer’s writings were always about his own specific

past and that of his people. Singer's re-creation of an earlier world as

well as his stories of adjusting to the United States won him a Nobel

Prize in literature in 1978.

Since at least the time of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, American

writers of African descent, such as Richard Wright, sought to express the

separate experiences of their people while demanding to be recognized as

fully American. The difficulty of that pursuit was most completely and

brilliantly realized in the haunting novel Invisible Man (1952) by Ralph

Ellison. African American writers since then have contended with the same

challenge of giving voice to their experiences as a marginalized and often

despised part of America.

Several African American novelists in recent decades have struggled to

represent the wounded manner in which African Americans have participated

in American life. In the 1950s and 1960s, James Baldwin discovered how

much he was part of the United States after a period of self-imposed exile

in Paris, and he wrote about his dark and hurt world in vigorous and

accusatory prose. The subject has also been at the heart of an

extraordinary rediscovery of the African American past in the plays of

Lorraine Hansberry and the fiction of Alice Walker, Charles Johnson, and

Toni Morrison. Probably more than any American writer before her, Morrison

has grappled with the legacy that slavery inflicted upon African Americans

and with what it means to live with a separate consciousness within

American culture. In 1993 Morrison became the first African American

writer to be awarded a Nobel Prize in literature.

Writers from other groups, including Mexican Americans, Native Americans,

Chinese Americans, Korean Americans, and Filipino Americans, also grappled

with their separate experiences within American culture. Among them, N.

Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Louise Erdrich have dealt with

issues of poverty, life on reservations, and mixed ancestry among Native

Americans. Rudolfo Anaya and Sandra Cisneros have dealt with the

experiences of Mexican Americans, and Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston

have explored Chinese American family life.

Even before World War II, writers from the American South reflected on

what it meant to have a separate identity within American culture. The

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