American Modernism: Precisionism and Regionalism

PRECISIONISM

Precisionism was the first indigenous modern art movement in the United States and an early American contribution to the rise of Modernism.

Precisionist paintings typically sought to capture this new industrial landscape in precise, simplified and sharply defined, geometrical forms. This general approach was influenced to an extent by the sharp focus and cropping techniques of 20th century American photographers. However, Precisionism remained a broad movement and embraced a wide spectrum of styles.

Charles Sheeler

Famous for both his photographs and paintings, Charles Sheeler was an influential American artist for most of the first half of the 20th century. Sheeler referred to them as his “separate eyes,” used to capture the function, abstraction, and the human element of the American industrial and urban age.

American Landscape

This image, a painting based on one of Sheeler's photographs of the Ford River Rouge Plant, Canal with Salvage Ship, best captures Sheeler's redefinition of the American Pastoral and the traditional subjects of landscape painting. The work captures humanity's almost god-like power to recreate the physical world in its own image, as the river reflects the design of the factory complex. The smoke rising out of the smokestacks seamlessly blends with the clouds, yet even today, it does not make the viewer think of industrial pollution, but rather how the things that humans create are as much a part of nature as the snow-capped mountains. The real landscape of America is now truly revealed through Sheeler’s work, and the industrial movement is a part of nature. Like traditional American landscape painting, Sheeler organized the painting around a body of water, yet even the water has been subject to human ingenuity and technological might, as it is contained in a canal. Likewise, a series of trains and train tracks lie alongside, representing how technology had developed a faster means of transportation than the old waterways of the 18th and early-19th century.

This image also depicts how well Sheeler maneuvered between commercial and fine art, just as he created a dialogue between the various media he used to create his artwork.

Water

In painting and photography, Charles Sheeler presented his interest in industry’s robust architecture. He viewed American factories and industrial plants as modern-day equivalents to the European Gothic cathedrals. He believed machinery and industrial innovations are as strong as any religious belief. Here, Sheeler adopted techniques from his photographic practice - cropping, sharply angled views - and applied them to painting, presenting the water plant’s massive system of pipes and buttressed towers as an imposing contemporary monument.

Charles Demuth

Charles Demuth was a principal member of the Precisionist movement that emphasized sharp lines and clear geometric shapes. Challenging the boundaries of race, class, sexuality, and artistic tradition, he digested the shifting social landscape around him.

My Egypt

This painting is one of seven in Demuth's final major series. It depicts a concrete and steel grain elevator in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The massive structure looms over the smaller, red buildings nearby - perhaps barns or family homes - almost shoving them out to the sides and corners of the canvas. Several intersecting beams of light illuminate the grain elevator like an actor on stage, reiterating its importance while adding a geometric fracturing reminiscent of Cubism to the composition.

The title suggests that industrialization is a pinnacle of American achievement equivalent to the great monuments of the ancient world, evoking the pyramids of Egypt and their symbolic association with life after death, which may have been a compelling idea to Demuth, who was bedridden by illness at numerous points throughout his life. At the same time, the painting may also allude to the slave labor that built the great monuments to the pharaohs. Thus serving as a critique of the dehumanizing effect of industry on American workers.

I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold

Painted in homage to his friend the poet William Carlos Williams, this painting has become one of Demuth's best-known works. It references Williams' poem The Great Figure, which describes a fire engine speeding through the streets on a rainy night. The intersecting lines, planes of color, and round forms of the streetlights and the fire engine's blaring siren infuse the painting with a vibrant, urban energy.

The painting's title is also a phrase from the poem. This is an iconic work of Precisionism - the geometric planes of light and color that overlap various elements of the composition suggest European Cubism and Futurism, yet their sense of scale and directness of expression are entirely American.

Georgia O'Keeffe

Georgia O'Keeffe played a pivotal role in the development of American modernism and its relationship to European avant garde movements of the early-20th century. Producing a substantial body of work over seven decades, she sought to capture the emotion and power of objects through abstracting the natural world.

Radiator Building - Night, New York

This painting illustrates O'Keeffe's skill in articulating architectural structures as well as her use of the highly realistic, yet simplified style of Precisionism. She uses the night backdrop to incorporate a play between structure and light, and between the straight lines of the architectural forms and the ethereal smoke, which is reminiscent of the folds of flowers. She depicts the building from a low vantage point to convey a sense of oppression with the building's towering presence over the viewer.

Black Place, Grey and Pink

O'Keeffe's landscape paintings are similar to her flower paintings in that they often capture the essence of nature as the artist saw it without focusing on the details. In works such as this one, O'Keeffe emphasizes the wide open spaces and emptiness of the landscape around her New Mexico ranch that she purchased in 1940 - vistas that are the opposite of her claustrophobic cityscapes. Her paintings of the area capture this sense of place and her attachment to it: "When I got to New Mexico that was mine. As soon as I saw it, that was my country. I'd never seen anything like it before, but it fitted to me exactly. It's something that's in the air, it's different. The sky is different, the wind is different." The often surprising reds and pinks of the land in these paintings are accurate renderings of the colorful desert scenery.

Black Mesa Landscape, New Mexico

The Back Mesa Landscape is in New Mexico, a place where Georgia O’Keeffe was motivated to paint many of her famous artworks. She was deeply moved by the New Mexico landscapes.

She spent 20 years using rocks and bones from the desert to arouse her abstract thoughts. Her American Modernism style captured the unique formations and colours of the Black Mesa Landscape. She said, “I found I could say things with colours and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way – things I had no words for.”

Mesa means tableland in Spanish and Portuguese. It is an area of land raised high above sea level that has a flat top with steep cliffs that surround the “geological wonder”, with the beautiful Black Mesa Landscape that Georgia O’Keeffe had been transfixed on, creating the dramatic effects with colours, textures and shapes for the paintings that are now revered.

REGIONALISM (THE AMERICAN SCENE)

American Regionalism is an American realist modern art movement that included paintings, murals, lithographs, and illustrations depicting realistic scenes of rural and small-town America primarily in the Midwest. It arose in the 1930s as a response to the Great Depression, and ended in the 1940s due to the end of World War II.

It was a rejection of many things that Americans blamed for the Depression, including the rapid urbanization and industrialization of the last several decades. Thus, Regionalism abandoned the cityscape and instead looked to rural America, particularly the Midwest. The resulting images were nostalgic and reassuring, celebrating American endurance and perseverance even in the bleakest of compositions. Regionalist styles tended to be straightforward and direct, reflecting the spirit of the Midwest.

Edward Hopper

No one captured the isolation of the individual within the modern city like Edward Hopper. His imagery of figures within urban settings go well beyond their role as modern cityscapes, exposing the underbelly of the human experience. So while his works officially fall within the rubric of Realism, it offers a far more evocative look at life between the World Wars.

Hotel Room

Hotel Room powerfully expresses Hopper's interest in solitude. In this painting, a masterful geometric simplicity achieves monumentality. The spare vertical and diagonal bands of color and sharp electric shadows present a concise and intense drama in the night. The tall, slender, pensive woman sits on a bed, her head cast downward as she considers a piece of yellow paper in her hand. Combining poignant subject matter with such a powerful formal arrangement, Hopper produced a composition of strength and refinement, yet layered with meaning for the sensitive observer. This was the first of several paintings Hopper set in hotel bedrooms and lobbies, all suggesting the disorienting experience of life away from home.

Nighthawks

Nighthawks depicts four figures in a sparsely furnished diner at night. A single light source illuminates the interior and spills outward toward the exterior. This work, with its simplicity of setting and dramatic lighting, excellently illustrates Hopper's interest in the themes of alienation, melancholy and ambiguous relationships. None of the four figures in this picture interact with one another and we are given to understand that this is the norm and that we are witnessing an unfolding narrative with limited emotional development. This painting is considered the embodiment existential art, capturing the alienation and loneliness indicative of modern urban life. The sense of the figures' isolation is heightened by the large window which creates an implicit barrier between the viewer and subjects. The viewers are outsiders, voyeurs, not privy to the real story, but, nevertheless, urged to draw our own conclusions regarding the drama depicted.

Thomas Hart Benton

Thomas Hart Benton was one of America's most popular and heavily patronized modern artists during the decades leading up to World War II, and his murals were especially acclaimed. Benton gained artistic fame as a Regionalist painter, depicting the people and culture of the American Midwest, in particular his native state of Missouri.

The Ballad of the Jealous Lover of Lone Green Valley

The work illustrates an old Ozark folk song of the same name in which a man stabs his wife on account of her supposed infidelity, only to find out later that his suspicion was unfounded. This work is typical of Benton's devotion to sound and music-making in his painting career. Elements of Synchromism - the musical characteristics of color - are evident such as the radiant layered halo connecting the man and wife in the background, which suggests music resonating. Early works by Pollock echo the undulating forms and use of space evident here in his teacher's painting, and in fact, Pollock who was close to Benton and his family, modeled for the harmonica player in the foreground.

Frankie and Johnny, from The Social History of Missouri Murals

Based upon a popular folk song, the tale of Frankie and Johnny might have in fact concerned an incident. Benton freezes the drama and its actors in mid-action as the gun at center fires a bullet. Benton's rhythmic composition is evident in the undulating line made up of the six figures. All the figures and action are heightened and exaggerated as if in a Baroque manner. The eye travels the length of the six characters in a curvilinear line typical of Thomas Benton's dynamic compositions and figures. The bright note of red at center brings attention to this pivotal figure that creates the tumultuous action within the canvas.

Grant Wood

American Gothic

American Gothic remains one of the most recognized American artworks of the 20th century. A youngish woman in conservative dress, eyes averted, stands next to an older man, who wears a dark suit jacket atop overalls and a collarless shirt. The bald-headed, bespectacled man grips a three-pronged pitchfork - an old-fashioned tool at the time - and gazes flatly at the viewer. Behind them is a modest white home, with a decorative gothic window - a common feature of the "Carpenter Gothic" style of the period. The curtains in the window echo the pattern of the woman's dress. A few potted plants are visible on the porch, just over the woman's shoulder. Tidy green trees, with a hint of perhaps a church steeple, along with a red barn, fill out the background. Grant Wood said this painting shows a daughter and a father, not a married couple as people assumed.

The reception of the work and its life since reflect the curious ambiguity of this seemingly straightforward image. It raises more questions than it answers. It's title declares itself American, but what, exactly, is emblematically American about it? If it is a paean to the simple folk of the Midwest, why has the artist posed the couple looking miserable? Is it meant to convey irony? Is it a commentary on American identity? Or does the title simply describe the revival-style architectural detail of the house? The debates of national identity that dominated the time of Wood's mature career play an important role in the interpretation of his work.