Vbnm

AMERICAN CULTURE Visual and do blinds 3. humanistic discipline and letters The finesses, to a greater extent(prenominal) than untried(prenominal) features of culture, provide avenues for the prospect of imagination and personalized vision. They passing a die hard of emotional and intellectual pleasures to consumers of originative personic production and atomic number 18 an important way in which a culture represents itself. There has eagle-eyed been a Western customs distinguishing those cunning track downs that appeal to the multitude, much(prenominal) as prevalent unison, from those much(prenominal)(prenominal) as simple orchestral medical specialty commonly procurable to the elite of learning and taste.Popular prowess forms argon usually seen as more than representative the Statesn products. In the fall in States in the new-fashioned quondam(prenominal), there has been a bl abolishing of normal and elite contrivance forms, as all the fine humanities undergo a period of remarkable cross-fertilization. Beca subr turn upine habitual subterfuge forms ar so widely distributed, humanistic discipline of all kinds drive home prospered. The blinds in the United States express the many another(prenominal) faces and the enormous imaginative range of the American kind of a little. Especially since World War II, American innovations and the broad energy displayed in literature, dance, and medicament take on do American pagan works world famous.liberal liberal wiles in the United States go for locomote come outside(a)ly giving in ship canal that be unparalleled in history. American trick forms during the min half of the twentieth coke oftentimes delineate the t final stageencys and qualities that the verbotenride of the world emu juvenilelyd. At the end of the 20th degree centigrade, American art was considered equal in quality and vitality to art produced in the alleviation of the world. Thr oughout the 20th ampere-second, American liberal liberal arts flummox gr decl be to constitute new visions and voices. Much of this new fastidious energy came in the hot up of Americas emergence as a superpower aft(prenominal) World War II.But it was excessively due to the growth of saucily York urban center as an important center for publishing and the arts, and the immigration of artists and intellectuals fleeing fascism in europium before and during the war. An outpouring of talent too followed the civil rights and protest performances of the sixties, as heathen discrimination against blacks, women, and former(a) groups diminished. American arts parade in many places and receive support from private groundations, biggish corporations, local goernments, federal official agencies, m personaums, galleries, and individual(a)s.What is considered worth(predicate) of support often depends on definitions of quality and of what constitutes art. This is a clever subjec t when the popular arts are increasingly incarnate into the knowledge reality of the fine arts and new forms such(prenominal) as performance art and abstract art appear. As a result, defining what is art affects what students are taught rough past usances (for example, Native American tent flicks, oral imposts, and break ones back narratives) and what is produced in the future. bit some practitioners, such as studio artists, are more vulnerable to these definitions because they depend on financial support to exercise their talents, differents, such as poets and photographers, are little immediately constrained. blindists operate in a world where those who theorize and critique their work have taken on an increasingly important role. Audiences are influenced by a variety of intermediariescritics, the schools, foundations that can grants, the National Endowment for the dodges, gallery owners, publishers, and field of battle producers.In some areas, such as the perfo rming arts, popular audiences may ultimately define success. In other arts, such as blushing mushrooming and scratch, success is faraway more inter helpless on critics and a few, often rich, art collectors. Writers depend on publishers and on the public for their success. Un wish their predecessors, who relied on formal criteria and appealed to esthetical judgments, critics at the end of the 20th snow 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 aegir to place delicate productions in the stage setting of the time and social conditions in which they were fashiond. Whereas earlier critics attempted to r each(prenominal) an American customs duty of high art, ulterior critics apply art as a nitty-gritty to give power and approval to nonelite groups who were previously not considered worthy of incl uding in the nations dainty heritage. Not so king-size ago, culture and the arts were assumed to be an unalterable hereditary patternthe stash away wisdom and highest forms of achievement that were established in the past.In the 20th century more often than not, and for certain since World War II, artists have been boldly destroying older traditions in sculpture, ikon, dance, medicinal drug, and literature. The arts have changed rapidly, with one movement replacing another in vigorous succession. a) Visual arts. The ocular arts have conventionally include forms of expression that appeal to the eyes by means of samaraed get alongs, and to the sense of put through carved or molded materials. In the nineteenth century, photographs were added to the paintings, drawings, and sculpture that addle up the visual arts.The visual arts were further augment in the 20th century by the addition of other materials, such as found objects. These changes were accompanied by a profoun d variation in tastes, as earlier emphasis on sureistic delegacy 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 europiuman art. despite noted American painters such as Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, bloody shame Cassatt, and keister Marin, American visual arts barely had an planetary presence.American art began to flourish during the Great Depression of the thirties as late comport brass programs provided support to artists a presbyopic with other sectors of the population. ar devilrkists connected with each other and positive a sense of common purpose through programs of the familiar workings Administration, such as the Federal Art Project, as wholesome as programs sponsored by the Treasury De dampment. Most of the art of the period, including painting, photography, and mural work, centre on the plight of the American people during the depress ion, and approximately artists painted real people in difficult circumstances.Artists such as Thomas hart Benton and Ben Shahn express the suffering of customary people through their representations of struggling farmers and workers. While artists such as Benton and Grant Wood focused on arcadian support, many painters of the 1930s and 1940s depicted the multi heathenish life of the American city. Jacob Lawrence, for example, make the history and lives of African Americans. Other artists, such as Andrew Wyeth and Edward Hopper, seek to use human figures to describe emotional states such as solitude and despair. snatch Expressionism.Shortly later on on World War II, American art began to conglomerate general forethought and admiration. This change was due to the ripe fervor of snare expressionism in the mid-fifties and to subsequent new art movements and artists. The abstractionist expressionists of the mid-20th century stone- stony-broke from the realist and figu rative tradition set in the 1930s. They forceful their let outnership to multinational nice visions rather than the spliticularities of people and place, and nigh 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. near artists broke with the Western art tradition by adopting innovative painting bearingsduring the fifties 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 vividness that come out to vibrate. Abstract expressionists felt up alienated from their surrounding culture and used art to argufy societys conventions. The work of each artist was quite individual and hard-hittingive, 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 personality of art. Their radicalism came from liberating themselves from the restrain artistic traditions of the past. The or so notable activity took place in pertly York metropolis, which became one of the worlds closely important art centers during the second half of the 20th century. The radical fervor and inventiveness of the abstract expressionists, their popular association with each other in New York citys Greenwich Village, and the support of a group of gallery owners and dealers turned them into an artistic movement.Also cognise as the New York domesticate, the leaveicipants included Barnett Newman, Robert Mother head, 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, convey an internationalist flavor to the group and its artistic visions. They hoped to appeal to art audiences everywhere, d isregardless 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. nearly of the artistsHans Hofmann, Gorky, Rothko, and de Kooningwere not natural in the United States, but all the artists saw themselves as part of an international fanciful movement and an aesthetic rebellion. As artists felt released from the boundaries and conventions of the past and desolate to emphasize expressiveness and innovation, the abstract expressionists gave way to other innovative styles in American art. lineage 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.Cornells boxes exemplify the current spell with individual vision, art that breaks down boundaries between forms such as painting and sculpture, and the use of chance(a) objects toward a new e nd. Other artists, such as Robert Rauschenberg, unite disparate objects to create large, collage-like sculptures known as combines in the 1950s. Jasper privys, a painter, sculptor, and printmaker, recreated non-finite 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 handed-down art and popular culture by use images from mass culture. To shake viewing audience out of their prec erstived notions intimately 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 technical art, notably cartooning, into fine art worthy of galleries and museums. Lichtensteins large, blown-up cartoons train the surface of his canvases with grainy black dots and question the existence of a distinct res publica of high art.These artists tried to make their audiences see ordinary objects in a refreshing new way, thereby breaking down the conventions that at at a time define 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 Campbells soup can and of the actress Marilyn Monroe explicitly erode the boundaries between the art world and mass culture. Warhol also urbane his posture as a celebrity. He worked in film as a theatre director and producer to break down the boundaries between traditional and popular art. impertinent the abstract expressionists, whose conceptual works were often difficult to understand, Andy Warhols pictures, and his own face, were at one time recognizable. Conceptual art, as it came to be known in the sixties, like its predecessors, desire to break free of traditional artistic associations. In conceptual art, as practiced by Sol LeWitt and Joseph Kosuth, concept takes preced ent over developed 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 perpetual creative process. This emphasis on constant change, as hale 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 juvenile 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 ha s struggled to be know 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 promulgated 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 superior photographers earned their living as portraitists or photojournalists, not as artists. atomic number 53 of the most important excep tions was Ansel Adams, who took majestic photographs of the Western American landscape. Adams used his art to do 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.Adamss elegant landscape photography was only one small stream in a suppuration current of interest in photography as an art form. advance(prenominal) in the 20th century, teacher-turned-photographer Lewis Hine established a documentary tradition in photography by capturing actual people, places, and as yetts. Hine photographed urban conditions and workers, including child laborers. Along with their artistic va lue, the photographs often implicitly called for social reform. In the 1930s and 1940s, photographers joined with other depression-era artists support by the federal government to create a hotographic destroy 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 make 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 embody in the work of Diane Arbus. Her photos of mental patients and her surreal depictions of Americans altered the viewers family 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 domain that photographs are meant to capture. American photography continues to flourish.The many variants of art photography and socially intended 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 nonfunctional arts rely on ideals of beauty in shape and rubric as thoroughly as an appreciation of come up-executed crafts. Some of these forms are also developed commercially.The decorative arts provide a wide range of opportunity for creative expression and have do a means fo r Americans to actively participate in art and to corrupt art for their homes that is more affordable than works produced by many coeval fine artists. 4. execute arts As in other cultural spheres, the performing arts in the United States in the 20th century increasingly commix traditional and popular art forms. The definitive performing artsmusic, opera, dance, and business firmwere not a widespread feature of American culture in the first half of the 20th century.These arts were generally imported from or strongly influenced by Europe and were mainly apprehended by the wealthy and well educated. Traditional art usually referred to authorised forms in concert dance and opera, orchestral or chamber music, and serious drama. The distinctions between traditional music and popular music were firmly drawn in most areas. During the 20th century, the American performing arts began to hold wider groups of people. The African American biotic community produced great musicians who became widely known almost the country.Jazz and color singers such as Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Billie Holiday spread their sounds to black and white audiences. In the 1930s and 1940s, the swing music of Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, and Glenn Miller adapted sleep with to make a grotesque American music that was popular around the country. The American performing arts also blended Latin American influences stolon in the 20th century. Between 1900 and 1940, Latin American dances, such as the tango from Argentina and the rumba from Cuba, were introduced into the United States.In the 1940s a fusion of Latin and whap elements was stimulated first by the Afro-Cuban mambo and later on by the Brazilian bossa nova. Throughout the 20th century, dynamic classical institutions in the United States attracted international talent. Noted Russian-born choreographer George Balanchine established the short-lived American ballet Company in the 1930s later he founded th e companionship that in the 1940s would get the New York City ballet. The American Ballet Theatre, also established during the 1940s, brought in non-American dancers as well.By the 1970s this company had attracted Soviet defector Mikhail Baryshnikov, an internationally acclaimed dancer who served as the companys artistic director during the 1980s. In classical music, influential Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, who composed symphonies utilise innovative melodic comedy styles, moved to the United States in 1939. German-born pianist, composer, and chairor Andre Previn, who started out as a jazz pianist in the 1940s, went on to bearing a number of distinguished American symphony orchestra orchestras.Another Soviet, cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, became theatre director of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, D. C. , in 1977. Some of the most innovative artists in the first half of the 20th century successfully incorporated new forms into classical traditions. Compo sers George Gershwin and Aaron Copland, and dancer Isadora Duncan were notable examples. Gershwin combined jazz and sacred music with classical in popular works such as Rhapsody in Blue (1924) and the opera Porgy and Bess (1935).Copland developed a unique style that was influenced by jazz and American folk music. early in the century, Duncan re delimit dance along more expressive and free-form lines. Some artists in music and dance, such as composer washbasin Cage and dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham, were even more experimental. During the 1930s Cage worked with electronically produced sounds and sounds made with everyday objects such as pots and pans. He even invented a new kind of piano.During the late 1930s, vanguard choreographer Cunningham began to collaborate with Cage on a number of projects. Perhaps the great, and surely the most popular, American innovation was the Broadway musical, which also became a movie staple. begin in the 1920s, the Broadway musical combined music, dance, and dramatic performance in ways that surpassed the older vaudeville shows and musical revues but without being as entangled as European gm opera.By the 1960s, this American musical tradition was well established and had produced extraordinary works by important musicians and lyricists such as George and Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, Jerome Kern, and Oscar Hammerstein II. These productions required an large effort to coordinate music, drama, and dance. Because of this, the musical became the incubator of an American modern dance tradition that produced some of Americas sterling(prenominal) choreographers, among them Jerome Robbins, Gene Kelly, and Bob Fosse.In the 1940s and 1950s the American musical tradition was so dynamic that it attracted outstanding classically trained musicians such as Leonard Bernstein. Bernstein composed the music for West Side Story, an updated form of Romeo and Juliet set in New York th at became an instant classic in 1957. The following year, Bernstein became the first American-born theatre director to lead a study(ip) American orchestra, the New York Philharmonic. He was an international sensation who traveled the world as an ambassador of the American style of conducting.He brought the art of classical music to the public, especially through his Young Peoples Concerts, boob tube shows that were seen around the world. Bernstein used the many facets of the musical tradition as a force for change in the music world and as a way of bringing attention to American innovation. In many ways, Bernstein corporal a transformation of American music that began in the 1960s. The changes that took place during the 1960s and 1970s resulted from a significant increase in funding for the arts and their change magnitude availability to larger audiences.New York City, the American center for art performances, experience an artistic explosion in the 1960s and 1970s. Experiment al off-Broadway subject areas opened, new ballet companies were established that often emphasized modern forms or blended modern with classical (Martha Graham was an especially important influence), and an experimental music tantrum developed that included composers such as Philip Glass and performance groups such as the Guarneri String Quartet. Dramatic innovation also continued to reach out with the works of playwrights such as Edward Albee, Tony Kushner, and David Mamet.As the variety of performances rarify, so did the serious hybridizing between traditional and popular music forms. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, an spread out repertoire of traditional arts was being conveyed to new audiences. Popular music and jazz could be heard in formal settings such as Carnegie Hall, which had once been restricted to classical music, while the Brooklyn Academy of Music became a venue for experimental music, exotic and ethnic dance presentations, and traditional productions of gm oper a. Innovative producer Joseph Papp had been staging Shakespeare in Central Park since the 1950s.Boston music director Arthur Fiedler was playing a mixed repertoire of classical and popular favorites to large audiences, often outdoors, with the Boston Pops Orchestra. By the mid-1970s the United States had several world-class symphony orchestras, including those in Chicago New York Cleveland, Ohio and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Even grand opera was affected. formerly a specialized taste that often required extensive knowledge, opera in the United States increase in popularity as the roster of reckon institutions grew to include companies in Seattle, Washington Houston, Texas and Santa Fe, New Mexico.American composers such as John Adams and Philip Glass began composing modern operas in a new minimalist style during the 1970s and 1980s. The crossway in tastes also influenced the Broadway musical, probably Americas most durable music form. Starting in the 1960s, rock music became a n atom in musical productions such as Hair (1967). By the 1990s, it had become an even stronger presence in musicals such as Bring in Da Noise, Bring in Da Funk (1996), which used African American music and dance traditions, and Rent (1996) a modern, rock pas seul of the classic opera La Boheme.This updating of the musical opened the line of business to new ethnic audiences who had not previously attended Broadway shows, as well as to young audiences who had been raised on rock music. Performances of all kinds have become more available across the country. This is due to both the pellucid increase in the number of performance groups as well as to advances in transportation. In the last quarter of the 20th century, the number of major American symphonies doubled, the number of resident disciplines increased fourfold, and the number of dance companies increased tenfold.At the same time, planes made it easier for artists to travel. Artists and companies regularly tour, and they ex pand the audiences for individual artists such as performance artist Laurie Anderson and opera singer Jessye Norman, for musical groups such as the Juilliard Quartet, and for dance troupes such as the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Full-scale theater productions and musicals first presented on Broadway now reach cities across the country. The United States, once a provincial outpost with a limited European tradition in performance, has become a flourishing center for the performing arts. . Arts and letters The arts, more than other features of culture, provide avenues for the expression of imagination and personal vision. They offer a range of emotional and intellectual pleasures to consumers of art and are an important way in which a culture represents itself. There has long been a Western tradition distinguishing those arts that appeal to the multitude, such as popular music, from thosesuch as classical orchestral music unremarkably available to the elite of learning and tast e. Popular art forms are usually seen as more representative American products.In the United States in the recent past, there has been a blending of popular and elite art forms, as all the arts experienced a period of remarkable cross-fertilization. Because popular art forms are so widely distributed, arts of all kinds have prospered. The arts in the United States express the many faces and the enormous creative range of the American people. Especially since World War II, American innovations and the immense energy displayed in literature, dance, and music have made American cultural works world famous.Arts in the United States have become internationally prominent in ways that are unparalleled in history. American art forms during the second half of the 20th century often defined the styles and qualities that the rest of the world emulated. At the end of the 20th century, American art was considered equal in quality and vitality to art produced in the rest of the world. Throughout the 20th century, American arts have grown to incorporate new visions and voices. Much of this new artistic energy came in the fire up of Americas emergence as a superpower after World War II.But it was also due to the growth of New York City as an important center for publishing and the arts, and the immigration of artists and intellectuals fleeing fascism in Europe before and during the war. An outpouring of talent also followed the civil rights and protest movements of the 1960s, as cultural discrimination against blacks, women, and other groups diminished. American arts flourish in many places and receive support from private foundations, large corporations, local governments, federal agencies, museums, galleries, and individuals.What is considered worthy of support often depends on definitions of quality and of what constitutes art. This is a cunning subject when the popular arts are increasingly incorporated into the domain of the fine arts and new forms such as performance art and conceptual art appear. As a result, defining what is art affects what students are taught about past traditions (for example, Native American tent paintings, oral traditions, and buckle down narratives) and what is produced in the future.While some practitioners, such as studio artists, are more vulnerable to these definitions because they depend on financial support to exercise their talents, others, such as poets and photographers, are less immediately constrained. Artists operate in a world where those who theorize and critique their work have taken on an increasingly important role. Audiences are influenced by a variety of intermediariescritics, 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 w ealthy, 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 ften 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 nations artistic heritage. Not so long ago, culture and the arts were assumed to be an unalterable inheritancethe accumulated wisdom and highest forms of achievement that were established in the past.In the 20th century g enerally, 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. a) 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 dep icted 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 We stern art tradition by adopting innovative painting stylesduring 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 societys 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 worlds 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 N ew York Citys 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 artistsHans Hofmann, Gorky, Rothko, and de Kooningwere 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.Cornells 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 usi ng 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. Lichtensteins 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 Campbells 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 a s a director and producer to break down the boundaries between traditional and opular art. Unlike the abstract expressionists, whose conceptual works were often difficult to understand, Andy Warhols 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 d emocratizing 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 acknowledge 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 professed(prenominal) 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 wro te a series of influential books on photographic technique. Adamss elegant landscape photography was only one small stream in a ripening current of interest in photography as an art form. archeozoic 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 rule book 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 photographe r 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 viewers 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 fi ne 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. . Performing arts As in other cultural spheres, the performing arts in the United States in the 20th century increasingly blended traditional and popular art forms. The classical performing artsmusic, opera, dance, and theaterwere not a widespread feature of American culture in the first half of the 20th century. These arts were generally imported from or strongly influenced by Europe and were mainly appreciated by the wealthy and well educated. Traditional art usually referred to classical forms in ballet and opera, orchestral or chamber music, and serious drama.The distinctions between traditional music and popular music were firmly drawn in most areas. During the 20th century, the American performing arts began to incorporate wider groups of people. The African American community produced great musicians who became widely known around the country. Jazz and blues singers such as Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Billie Holiday spread their sounds to black and white audiences. In the 1930s and 1940s, the swing music of Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, and Glenn Miller adapted jazz to make a unique American music that was popular around the country.The American performing arts also blended Latin American influences beginning in the 20th century. Between 1900 and 1940, Latin American dances, such as the tango from Argentina and the rumba fr om Cuba, were introduced into the United States. In the 1940s a fusion of Latin and jazz elements was stimulated first by the Afro-Cuban mambo and later on by the Brazilian bossa nova. Throughout the 20th century, dynamic classical institutions in the United States attracted international talent.Noted Russian-born choreographer George Balanchine established the short-lived American Ballet Company in the 1930s later he founded the company that in the 1940s would become the New York City Ballet. The American Ballet Theatre, also established during the 1940s, brought in non-American dancers as well. By the 1970s this company had attracted Soviet defector Mikhail Baryshnikov, an internationally acclaimed dancer who served as the companys artistic director during the 1980s. In classical music, influential Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, who composed symphonies using innovative musical styles, moved to the United States in 1939.German-born pianist, composer, and theater director Andre Previn, who started out as a jazz pianist in the 1940s, went on to conduct a number of distinguished American symphony orchestras. Another Soviet, cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, became conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, D. C. , in 1977. Some of the most innovative artists in the first half of the 20th century successfully incorporated new forms into classical traditions. Composers George Gershwin and Aaron Copland, and dancer Isadora Duncan were notable examples.Gershwin combined jazz and spiritual music with classical in popular works such as Rhapsody in Blue (1924) and the opera Porgy and Bess (1935). Copland developed a unique style that was influenced by jazz and American folk music. Early in the century, Duncan redefined dance along more expressive and free-form lines. Some artists in music and dance, such as composer John Cage and dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham, were even more experimental. During the 1930s Cage worked with electronically pr oduced sounds and sounds made with everyday objects such as pots and pans.He even invented a new kind of piano. During the late 1930s, forefront choreographer Cunningham began to collaborate with Cage on a number of projects. Perhaps the greatest, and certainly the most popular, American innovation was the Broadway musical, which also became a movie staple. Beginning in the 1920s, the Broadway musical combined music, dance, and dramatic performance in ways that surpassed the older vaudeville shows and musical revues but without being as intricate as European grand opera.By the 1960s, this American musical tradition was well established and had produced extraordinary works by important musicians and lyricists such as George and Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, Jerome Kern, and Oscar Hammerstein II. These productions required an immense effort to coordinate music, drama, and dance. Because of this, the musical became the incubator of an American modern dance tradition that produced some of Americas greatest choreographers, among them Jerome Robbins, Gene Kelly, and Bob Fosse.In the 1940s and 1950s the American musical tradition was so dynamic that it attracted outstanding classically trained musicians such as Leonard Bernstein. Bernstein composed the music for West Side Story, an updated version of Romeo and Juliet set in New York that became an instant classic in 1957. The following year, Bernstein became the first American-born conductor to lead a major American orchestra, the New York Philharmonic. He was an international sensation who traveled the world as an ambassador of the American style of conducting.He brought the art of classical music to the public, especially through his Young Peoples Concerts, picture shows that were seen around the world. Bernstein used the many facets of the musical tradition as a force for change in the music world and as a way of bringing attention to American innovation. In many ways, B ernstein embodied a transformation of American music that began in the 1960s. The changes that took place during the 1960s and 1970s resulted from a significant increase in funding for the arts and their increased availability to larger audiences.New York City, the American center for art performances, experienced an artistic explosion in the 1960s and 1970s. Experimental off-Broadway theaters opened, new ballet companies were established that often emphasized modern forms or blended modern with classical (Martha Graham was an especially important influence), and an experimental music snapshot developed that included composers such as Philip Glass and performance groups such as the Guarneri String Quartet. Dramatic innovation also continued to expand with the works of playwrights such as Edward Albee, Tony Kushner, and David Mamet.As the variety of performances expanded, so did the serious crossover between traditional and popular music forms. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, an exp anded repertoire of traditional arts was being conveyed to new audiences. Popular music and jazz could be heard in formal settings such as Carnegie Hall, which had once been restricted to classical music, while the Brooklyn Academy of Music became a venue for experimental music, exotic and ethnic dance presentations, and traditional productions of grand opera. Innovative producer Joseph Papp had been staging Shakespeare in Central Park since the 1950s.Boston conductor Arthur Fiedler was playing a mixed repertoire of classical and popular favorites to large audiences, often outdoors, with the Boston Pops Orchestra. By the mid-1970s the United States had several world-class symphony orchestras, including those in Chicago New York Cleveland, Ohio and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Even grand opera was affected. erst a specialized taste that often required extensive knowledge, opera in the United States increased in popularity as the roster of reckon institutions grew to include companie s in Seattle, Washington Houston, Texas and Santa Fe, New Mexico.American composers such as John Adams and Philip Glass began composing modern operas in a new minimalist style during the 1970s and 1980s. The crossover in tastes also influenced the Broadway musical, probably Americas most durable music form. Starting in the 1960s, rock music became an fraction in musical productions such as Hair (1967). By the 1990s, it had become an even stronger presence in musicals such as Bring in Da Noise, Bring in Da Funk (1996), which used African American music and dance traditions, and Rent (1996) a modern, rock version of the classic opera La Boheme.This updating of the musical opened the theater to new ethnic audiences who had not previously attended Broadway shows, as well as to young audiences who had been raised on rock music. Performances of all kinds have become more available across the country. This is due to both the cut back increase in the number of performance groups as well a s to advances in transportation. In the last quarter of the 20th century, the number of major American symphonies doubled, the number of resident theaters increased fourfold, and the number of dance companies increased tenfold.At the same time, planes made it easier for artists to travel. Artists and companies regularly tour, and they expand the audiences for individual artists such as performance artist Laurie Anderson and opera singer Jessye Norman, for musical groups such as the Juilliard Quartet, and for dance troupes such as the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Full-scale theater productions and musicals first presented on Broadway now reach cities across the country. The United States, once a provincial outpost with a limited European tradition in performance, has become a flourishing center for the performing arts.