American art in the Twenties and Thirties was not largely influenced by the Modernist artists who worked in Europe. There are no hints of Picasso or Matisse or Chagall or Mondrian or Braque, no departures in the meaning or purposes of representation, whether that means Picasso’s distortions of what is visible and invisible about a figure, superimposing parts of bodies so that a number of moments can be appreciated as simultaneous, nor of Chagall’s fanciful use of legend with no great respect for what would have been considered what is appropriate to a single composition, nor Matisse’s use of color and alteration of perspective so as to create very psychologically intense pictures of spaces and viewpoints, nor the geometry of Mondrian and Braque replacing subject matter entirely. Rather, what the American artists of the Twenties and Thirties try to do, I think, is to counter or adapt to the other visual art that had intruded into the cultural spotlight, and that was photography. This thesis is an application of what I call “The Laocoon Principle”, in honor of Gottfried Lessing, the eighteenth century aesthetician who focussed on the way the nature of a medium impacts on what an artist presents. The American artists did not face up to Modernism because of their preoccupation with distinguishing themselves from or imitating or adapting to photography, an art form taking up ever more room, especially ever since photographs rather than engravings had become a main feature of Twenties newspapers, what with their visual coverage of the slum poor, perp walks and urban construction.
The easiest way to differentiate one’s art from the realism that is imposed by photography is simply to distort the picture and so supply something that photography could at least at that time not do. Thomas Hart Benton takes that path. His “Madison Square Park” (1920) simply distorts the place by making lines curvy, which is what he also does with his group portraits. That might seem fresh because the audience has not seen that place treated that way, but the gesture at artistry is only a gimmick because no emotional resonance has been added. “Madison Square Park” is not seen in a new way but only as a place that has been distorted for the purpose of making the painting seem artistic. Another way to differentiate art from the photography is to pick out a different subject for it. That happens with Georgia O’Keefe, very familiar with the art of photography because of her association with Alfred Steiglitz, who is most famous for his photos of the Flatiron Building, these achieving moods of their own even though his photographs are very realistic. Steiglitz shows what the building looks like at night or in snow, and so the photographs are somewhat magical in spite of their realism. O’Keefe, for her part, picks objects to paint which are not in the mainstream: flowers where the viewer is drawn into the complex arrangement of the petals, and so a study in botany or, as some wags would have it, of female biology, and, later on, in the painting of found objects like skulls, which also have line symmetry.
George Bellows, it seems to me, achieves his success as a painter by accepting photography as the model of art. He imitates and enhances a bit, through his use of color, the effects that could be achieved by the black and white photography of the time. Regarded as a “second generation” Ashcan School painter, Bellows’ 1907 painting, “42 Kids”, could have been a snapshot taken by any photographer who went close to the river where it was close to the slums, although probably not by Jacob Riis, who preferred to make his shots of appealing families going about their jobs of sewing clothing at home. Bellows catches boys with naked and a bit overly angular backsides, some of them undressing, but no frontal nudity, the pictures swathed in the distancing that makes the scene sentimental because it is a picture of how people should act out of the warmth of their natural humanity, and so is a forerunner of Norman Rockwell, an artist who was properly dismissed in his time not for any technical improficiency but rather for the content of his concept. His idealization of American life was so soppy that it would appeal to Americans unfamiliar or uncomfortable with the extent to which art can call forth complex emotions.
More successful, I think, is Bellows’ “Pennsylvania Station Excavation”, from 1909, because its colors do what photography coul;d not as yet do. The painting provides not only a sense of how gigantic is the excavation, how the surroundings are being ripped up, but does so in forceful dark shades that make the excavation seem ominous and slightly inhuman, a mark of how much anguish as well as ingenuity go into construction, how digging deeply and uprooting the landscape is diabolic as well as progressive. This is a combination of feelings that would be lost in the Thirties photographic impressions of the grandeur of dams.
Bellows is most well known for his “Dempsey and Firpo”, from 1924. Here he is his most photographic, most like a journalist covering the day’s sensational sports news. So why make a painting of it? It is because painting seems a grander art at the time photography is still not fully recognized in the popular imagination as an art. The older art gives the image more status as a piece of culture and so people are willing to pay to have the image gussied up, just as generations later they will pay to have Larry Neiman paintings of sports events that are far better rendered in photography. Bellows appeals to that middle brow market whatever may be his strengths as a painter. I don’t know why “Dempsey and Firpo” deserves to be exhibited in a museum as a work of great art.
Edward Hopper is perhaps the best artist of the period. He would also seem to be the least connected to the photographic because he uses traditional painterly resources to achieve his results. He uses contrasting colors and unusual angles of attack, sometimes up close or out a window, so as to create a mood, his people famous for their estrangement from social life and so a way of visually defining a notion of modern life as people inhabiting a lonely crowd. But Hopper also entices a viewer to concoct a story for the people who are sitting next to one another but do not make contact, emotional or otherwise, with one another. We want to know what is behind the faces of those people staring out into space. That is definitely a photographic accoutrement in that when people gather around family albums they explain to one another the circumstances under which the photos were taken and who are the people in the pictures who might be unfamiliar to the others looking at the album. Even more significant is that Hopper, like photographers, portrays characteristic artifacts of an era. He captures, in “Nighthawks” (1942) the large and long glass panel that is the front of the diner through which his coffee drinkers are seen. He also captures in “New York Movie” (1939), one of the gilded and velvet curtained entrance ways between the main lobby and the auditorium of one of those movie palaces constructed all over the country at the time. (The late date of these two pictures suggests that Hopper had outlasted Modernism entirely and resided in and so could be fully appreciated for his Existentialist impulse to show how people were suspended in a world that was unfamiliar and foreign, themselves unknowable, during the successor cultural period, that of the Age of Anxiety.)
Why the Modernist movement in art did not catch on in the United States even as it was so powerful all over continental Europe is very hard to say. Other imports from the Continent, such as psychoanalysis, certainly did catch on. The same problem exists for American literature, which had been as advanced as European through Dreiser, but then does not catch up with the Modernism of Joyce and Lawrence and Kafka until after the Second World War, instead opting for the realism of Hemingway (in his novels) and of F. Scott Fitzgerald, as well as by such lesser lights as Sinclair Lewis and Willa Cather. After the war, Americans moved on to the Existential drama of Bellow and Malamud to the more fantastic visions available in Europe.
But that might not be the right way to look at it. Modernism was there in the stream of consciousness of Hemingway’s stories and early sketches; it was there in the new music of Tin Pan Alley and Jazz; it was there in the early Faulkner who wrote what appeared to be drugstore novels until he was rediscovered in the 1940’s. And, after all, not all European authors were Modernists, only a selective few. Galsworthy pursued the traditional novel and was much honored for it. Artists and writers, as I say, do what they are inclined to do, and the theory of periods, however much it may be true, is imposed upon them so as to help understand the Leviathan known as culture.