American Painting: the 20th Century
Description:... "The Armory Show is the single most important even in the history of American art: held in New York in 1913, it closed one epoch and opened another, confronting American artists with the challenge of European modernism. The protracted conflict between indigenous illustrational and story-telling realism and the "alien" or imported style of the European modernists set off by the Armory Show continued throughout the twenties and thirties. What was left for American artists to learn from Europeans was assimilated during World War II, when many of Europe's leading painters and sculptors fled the Nazis for the safety of America. Their presence in the United States shifted center of world art from Paris to New York and allowed the total assimilation of the aesthetics of the School of Paris by the artists of the New York School. Young American painters like Jackson Pollock were able to reject the provincialism of American Scene painting in which they were schooled in favor of Cubism and Surrealism. Although no one could have predicted such a bizarre melange, the mixture of American Scene painting, Cubism, and Surrealism gave rise to the greatest style in the second half of the twentieth century: Abstract Expressionism. The synthesis of native American attitudes with Cubist and Surrealist elements that created Abstract Expressionism endured throughout the forties and fifties, the two decades that mark the highest achievement of American art. The sixties have seen the break-down of Abstract Expressionism and the emergence of a series of heterogeneous styles: pop, op, minimal, and color abstraction"--
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