Hot Art

Column by Elise Gegauff


AMERICAN ART


Hello everybody, I'm back from Los Angeles!
It was a really exciting city, with great nightlife, sightings, shopping and culture.
But I'm not here to write a travelguide, I'm here to write about art.
And art in Los Angeles was also very interesting.

I went to the J. Paul Getty Museum to look at some photographic art with the Nude Body as topic:

http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/focus_nude/

One thing that I got very interested in as I was in America, and especially when I went on a road trip north and out of LA, was art with Native Americans as a topic.
As soon as you get out of the city a littlebit, you can find galleries specialized on Native Americans or Art of the West as a theme.

But what's interesting is that most of this art is quite new. The racism agains native Americans are still there today and that is also something you can discover in art.

Of course another racial issue concerning art is where the African American artists fit in American art history.

Actually, already in the slave communities, there were important African American artists. During the period between the 1600s and the early 1800s art took the form of small drums, quilts, wrought-iron figures and ceramic vessels. In the southern United States these artifacts have similarities with comparable crafts in West and Central Africa. In contrast, black artisans created art that was conceived in a thoroughly Western European fashion.

There were many skilled artist that arrived as slaves from Africa, and sometimes they learned to develop their skills as apprentices of other artists, both black and white. Some slaves were even allowed by their masters to earn money from their art, so that they could buy themselves and their families free later on. Usually these masters were people who didn't necesseraly agree too much with slavery.

During the 1920's there was a movement called "The Harlem Renaissance". It was the most important movement for African American artists up till then. This was a way for black artists to start celebrating black history in art, instead of copying the white traditions and ways of art. It was a way of challenging racism and take back their identity.

Most artists that are concidered american have studied or just travelled in Europe and met european artist from London and Paris, such as Mary Cassatt and Whistler. When the modernists came from Europe to America, controversy became a way of life for american artists, and they started to break the norm in art.

When the first World War was over, the Santa Fe Railroad was finished. More and more people travelled and settled across the West, and artist colonies started to grow around Santa Fe and Taos. The artists' main subject became native people and landscapes of the Southwest. All of this new art became a great way for the Santa Fe Railroad to advertise and get people to come to the Southwest.

After World War 2, Abstract Expressionism began to take shape. The artists started to move away from the formal view on real objects and composition. What was in focus now was shapes, colour and space.

In the 50's the Modernism moved into Ne Dada, Colour Field Painting, Post painterly Abstraction, Op Art, hard endge painting, minimal art, shaped canvas painting, Lyrical Abstraction and of course Abstract Expressionism continued. Other artstyles that started not long after this are still very popular in American art and the rest of the world today, such as; Conceptual Art, Postmminemalism, Earth Art, Video, Performance Art and Installation Art.

Closer to our time today is for example a lot of abstaction with mixed media. Photographs are more used than before, and you have paintings with objects on the canvas. Of course there are still quite many artists who concentrate on doing paintings the traditional and naturalistic way.
A lot of american art, especially older work, are very naturalistic and has images of everyday life. Most of it however, shows americans in battle for their new country. It was important for the americans to capture as much history as possible since they "had none" yet.

All in all, there's a lot of interesting american art. Some of the artist you should check out are: Albert Bierstadt, John Trumbull, Whistler, Mary Cassatt, Grant Wood, Walter Ufer, Bert Greer Phillips, E. Irving Couse, William Henry Jackson, Georgia O'Keefe, Aaron Douglas, James VanDerZee, Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Willem de kooning, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell, Jules Olitski, Kenneth Noland, Helen Frankenthaler, Thoman Eakins, Frank Stella, Cindy Sherman and James Thurber.

-Elise Gegauff