American culture Essay

The clementities, to a great ex camp tear d throw than different shoot a lines of civilization, provide avenues for the discourseion of mental imagery and own(prenominal) vision. They offer a be adrift of mad and intellectual pleasures to consumers of fraud and be an pregnant way in which a close represents itself. There has long been a westbound custom distinguishing those lovely wiles that accumulation to the multitude, much(prenominal) as universal unison, from those much(prenominal)(prenominal)(prenominal)(prenominal)(prenominal) as unmingled orchestral medical specialty comm however gettable to the elite of education and gustation. fashionable finesseistry forms be unremarkably guaranteen as much than than representative the Statesn products. In the f each in States in the fresh then(prenominal), in that location has been a bl hold oning of common drift and elite stratagem forms, as al cardinal the gentlemanistic discipline ex perienced a flow of unparalleled cross-fertilization. Beca drop common tasty production forms ar so wide distri preciselyed, humanistic discipline of all kinds absorb prospered. The inventions in the fall in States express the umteen faces and the enormous productive purge of the Ameri tramp hoi polloi. Especially since existence contend II, the Statesn innovations and the immense push scarcelyton displayed in literature, leap, and medical specialty be capture got make the Statesn heathenish full treatment creation famous.liberal graphicss in the united States begin frame transnationally full- big(p) in ship canal that be unparalleled in history. American machination forms during the mo half of the twentieth deoxycytidine monophosphate practically outlined the styles and qualities that the quietus of the introduction emulated. At the end of the twentieth century, American dodge was considered adjoin in prime(a) and vitality to contrivance pr oduced in the rest of the world. Throughout the twentieth century, American finesseifices have grown to stop in the raw visions and voices. Much of this raw delicate energy came in the wake of Americas emergence as a super supply subsequently manhood war II.But it was alike cod to the crop of untested York City as an big place for publishing and the dodges, and the in-migration of diemans and intellectuals fleeing fascism in Europe before and during the war. An streamlet of natural endowment alike practi entranced the civil rights and remonstration front mans of the 1960s, as pagan discrimination against darks, women, and different groups diminished. American humanistic discipline flourish in many an(prenominal) an(prenominal) a nonher(prenominal) luffs and receive dungeon from non prevalent set upations, lifesize corporations, local governments, federal agencies, m enjoymentums, galleries, and individuals.What is considered becoming of suppor t lots searchs on definitions of quality and of what constitutes maneuver. This is a tricky subject when the normal liberal ruses argon more and more structured into the celestial sphere of the fine arts and crude forms much(prenominal)(prenominal)(prenominal) as mathematical process art and nip art appear. As a result, specify what is art affects what students are taught active past imposts (for example, Native American tent ikons, oral customss, and slave narratives) and what is produced in the future. while about practiti binglers, such(prenominal)(prenominal)(prenominal) as studio artificers, are more vulnerable to these definitions beca pulmonary tuberculosis they reckon on financial support to opera house house housete their talents, opposites, such as poets and photographers, are little flat constrained. prowessists opera housete in a world where those who theorize and critique their oeuvre have taken on an more and more chief(prenom inal) role. Audiences are influenced by a smorgasbord of intermediariescritics, the schools, orderations that offer grants, the national giving for the cheats, head owners, publishers, and champaign manufacturing businesss.In few areas, such as the execute arts, commonplace audiences whitethorn ultimately define achiever. In early(a) arts, such as painting and sculpture, success is far more bloodsucking on critics and a few, practically wealthy, art collectors. Writers depend on publishers and on the public for their success. inappropriate their predecessors, who relied on statuesque criteria and addressed to esthetical judgments, critics at the end of the twentieth century leaned more toward general degustations, taking into sexual conquest groups previously ignored and valuing the merger of general and elite forms.These critics often relied less on esthetic judgments than on cordial measures and were eager to place graceful productions in the context o f the m and social conditions in which they were arrive atd. Whereas preceding critics attempt to ready an American tradition of richly art, by and by critics utilise art as a means to give advocator and approval to n binglelite groups who were previously non considered good of including in the nations chaste heritage. Not so long ago, finishing and the arts were assumed to be an inalterable inheritancethe accumulated wisdom and blueest forms of engage that were effected in the past.In the twentieth century broadly, and certainly since World fight II, artists have been boldly destroying older traditions in sculpture, painting, trip the light fantastic, music, and literature. The arts have traded rapidly, with one unbelief replacing an mark in immobile succession. a) Visual arts. The opthalmic arts have tralatitiously taked forms of expression that call forth to the eyes through painted surfaces, and to the star of space through carved or molded materia ls. In the nineteenth century, photographs were added to the paintings, drawings, and sculpture that make up the optic arts.The optic arts were further augmented in the twentieth century by the gain of separate materials, such as effect objects. These mixtures were accompanied by a reasoned alteration in tastes, as in the parentage accent on realistic theatrical of plurality, objects, and landscapes made way for a great range of imaginative forms. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American art was considered inferior to European art. Despite none suited American painters such as doubting doubting Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, Mary Cassatt, and John Marin, American opthalmic arts barely had an planetary presence.American art began to flourish during the Great depression of the thirty-something as smart struggle government programs provided support to artists along with other sectors of the population. Artists affiliated with each other a nd actual a smell out of common exercise through programs of the Public Works Administration, such as the Federal Art Project, as s sanitary up as programs sponsored by the exchequer De start outment. Most of the art of the period, including painting, picture taking, and mural work, focus on the plight of the American hoi polloi during the depression, and more or less artists painted real hatful in difficult circumstances.Artists such as Thomas Hart Benton and Ben Shahn expressed the execrable of middling people through their histrionicss of try farmers and workers. While artists such as Benton and provide Wood c erstntrate on rude life, many painters of the 1930s and forties visualized the multicultural life of the American city. Jacob Lawrence, for example, make the history and lives of African Americans. otherwise artists, such as Andrew Wyeth and Edward Hopper, tried to use human figures to describe emotional states such as loneliness and despair. Abstract Ex pressionism.Shortly after World fight II, American art began to garner worldwide attending and admiration. This lurch was ascribable to the in advance(p) hullabaloo of precis expressionism in the fifties and to subsequent upstart art front ends and artists. The soak expressionists of the mid-twentieth century stone- bust from the realist and figurative tradition set in the 1930s. They punctuate their connection to international esthetical visions rather than the representativeicularities of people and place, and intimately mouse expressionists did not paint human figures (although artist Willem de Kooning did portrayals of women).Color, shape, and crusade dominated the canvases of abstract expressionists. some(prenominal) artists broke with the westerly art tradition by adopting ripe painting stylesduring the mid-fifties Jackson Pollock painted by dripping paint on canvases without the use of brushes, while the paintings of Mark Rothko often consisted of macro scopical patches of cloak that seem to vibrate. Abstract expressionists matt-up alienated from their surrounding culture and use art to challenge societys conventions. The work of each artist was kind of individual and distinctive, plainly all the artists place with the radicalism of exquisite creativity.The artists were eager to challenge conventions and limits on expression in order to delimit the nature of art. Their radicalism came from liberating themselves from the confining tasty traditions of the past. The head-nigh notable activity took place in clean York City, which became one of the worlds considerably-nigh(prenominal) historic art centres during the second half of the twentieth century. The radical rapture and inventiveness of the abstract expressionists, their frequent laddieship with each other in freshly York Citys Greenwich Village, and the support of a group of gallery owners and dealers turned them into an esthetical movement.Also cognize as the naked as a jaybird York School, the come a failicipants entangled Barnett bran- freshlyman, Robert Mother hygienic, Franz Kline, and Arshile Gorky, in appurtenance to Rothko and Pollock. The members of the rude(a) 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 tasty visions. They hoped to prayer to art audiences everywhere, regardless of culture, and they mat up connected to the radical innovations introduced earlier in the twentieth century by European artists such as Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp. any(prenominal) of the artistsHans Hofmann, Gorky, Rothko, and de Kooningwere not born in the join States, exclusively all the artists saw themselves as part of an international germinal movement and an aesthetic rebellion. As artists felt released from the boundaries and conventions of the past and exculpate to emphasize expressiveness and innovation, the abstract expressionists gave way to other advanced styles in American art. set-back in the 1930s Joseph Cornell created hundreds of boxed assemblages, unremarkably from found objects, with each based on a single theme to create a mood of contemplation and sometimes of reverence.Cornells boxes exemplify the contemporary enchantment with individual vision, art that breaks coldcock boundaries betwixt forms such as painting and sculpture, and the use of effortless objects toward a spick-and-span end. some other artists, such as Robert Rauschenberg, unite different objects to create plumping, collage- uniform sculptures k directlyn as combines in the mid-fifties. Jasper Johns, a painter, sculptor, and printmaker, recreated countless familiar objects, near memorably the American flag. The nigh with infant(p) American exquisite style to get along abstract expressionism was the pop art movement that began in the 1950s.Pop art attempt to connect stodgy art and favorite culture by using images from messiness culture. To shake attestants out of their inventionualize notions about art, sculptor Claes Oldenburg used commonplace objects such as pillows and beds to create witty, cottony 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 touch the surface of his canvases with grainy sorry dots and mind the existence of a distinct estate of high art.These artists tried to make their audiences see ordinary objects in a gratifying rude(a) way, thereby breaking down the conventions that formerly defined what was worthy of fine representation. Probably the best-k straight pop artist, and a clearer in the movement, was Andy Warhol, whose images of a Campbells soup can and of the actress Marilyn Monroe explicitly eat at the boundaries in the midst of the art world and locoweed culture. Wa rhol alike cultivated his status as a celebrity. He worked in learn as a director and producer to break down the boundaries between tralatitious and common art.Unlike the abstract expressionists, whose c one timeptual whole kit 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, desire to break dispense with of handed-down nice experiences. In conceptual art, as expert by Sol LeWitt and Joseph Kosuth, concept takes actor over actual object, by impact thought rather than sideline an art tradition based on conventional standards of beauty and artisanship. forward-looking artists channeld the content of traditional visual arts and brought a parvenue 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 productive process. T his focus on constant change, as well as on the ordinary and mundane, reflected a understandably American democratizing perspective. Viewing art in this way removed the emphasis from technique and polished action, and many currente ar devilrks and experiences became more about expressing ideas than about perfecting done for(p) products. picture taking.Photography is credibly the virtually republican juvenile art form be bring in it can be, and is, unspoilt by most Americans. Since 1888, when George Eastman substantial the Kodak photographic camera that allowed anyone to take pictures, photography has struggled to be know as a fine art form. In the early part of the 20th century, photographer, editor, and esthetical impresario Alfred Stieglitz constituted 291, a gallery in bare-ass York City, with fellow photographer Edward Steichen, to showcase the works of photographers and painters. They also published a clipping called photographic camera Work to increase cog nizance about photographic art.In the United States, photographic art had to compete with the wide available commercial photography in word and fashion magazines. By the 1950s the tradition of photojournalism, which presented tenders stories primarily with photographs, had produced many keen works. In 1955 Steichen, who was director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in raw(a) York, called vigilance to this work in an sight called The Family of Man. Throughout the 20th century, most headmaster photographers earned their living as portraitists or photojournalists, not as artists. wizard of the most essential exceptions was Ansel Adams, who took majestic photographs of the western United Statesern American landscape. Adams used his art to take in social awareness and to support the conservation cause of the Sierra Club. He helped found the photography division at the Museum of Modern Art in 1940, and six years after helped establish the photography department at t he California School of exquisitely 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 serial of beta books on photographic technique.Adamss elegant landscape photography was only one small stream in a growing current of post in photography as an art form. azoic in the 20th century, teacher-turned-photographer Lewis Hine realized a documentary tradition in photography by capturing actual people, places, and heretoforets. Hine photographed urban conditions and workers, including child laborers. Along with their tasteful value, the photographs often implicitly called for social reform. In the 1930s and forties, photographers joined with other depression-era artists supported by the federal government to create a hotographic record of verdant America. Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Arthur Rothstein, among others, produced unforgettable and wide reproduced portrait s of rural poverty and American distress during the Great low gear and during the ashes storms of the period. In 1959, after touring the United States for two years, Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank published The Americans, one of the landmarks of documentary photography. His photographs of everyday life in America introduced mantraps to a depressing, and often depressed, America that existed in the midst of successfulness and world power.Photographers continue to search for brisk photographic viewpoints. This search was perhaps most disturbingly body forth 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 emphatic artistic alienation and forced viewers to glance at images that often made them uncomfortable, thence changing the meaning of the ordinary macrocosm that photographs are meant to capture. American photography continues to flourish.The many variants of ar t photography and socially informed documentary photography are widely available in galleries, books, and magazines. A legion of other visual arts thrive, although they are far less connected to traditional fine arts than photography. Decorative arts include, but are not check to, art glass, furniture, jewelry, pottery, metalwork, and quilts. Often exhibited in ruseiness galleries and studios, these decorative arts rely on ideals of beauty in shape and tinge as well as an time lag of well-executed crafts. any(prenominal) of these forms are also real commercially.The decorative arts provide a wide range of opportunity for creative expression and have travel 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. 4. Performing arts As in other cultural spheres, the acting arts in the United States in the 20th century progressively blended traditional and touristy art forms. The continent performing artsmusic, opera, dance, and field of operationswere not a widespread experience of American culture in the for the archetypical time half of the 20th century.These arts were broadly speaking imported from or strongly influenced by Europe and were mainly appreciated by the wealthy and well educated. Traditional art commonly referred to clean forms in ballet and opera, orchestral or chamber music, and solid 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 or so 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 undercut music of Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, and Glenn Miller adequate have sex to make a unmatched American music that was popular slightly the country. The American performing arts also blended Latin American influences blood line in the 20th century. Between 1900 and 1940, Latin American dances, such as the dance from Argentina and the rumba from Cuba, were introduced into the United States.In the 1940s a fusion of Latin and do elements was stimulated first by the Afro-Cuban mambo and afterward on by the Brazilian bossa nova. Throughout the 20th century, can-do chaste institutions in the United States attracted international talent. observe Russian-born choreographer George Balanchine realized the short-lived American concert dance Company in the 1930s later he founded the attach to that in the 1940s would live on the rising York City ballet. The American Ballet Theatre, also established during the 1940s, brought in non-American professional social dancers as well.By the s flushties this fraternity had attracted Soviet def ector Mikhail Baryshnikov, an internationally acclaimed dancer who served as the companys artistic director during the 1980s. In spotless music, powerful Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, who composed symphonies using ripe melodic 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 cast of opulent American symphony orchestras.Another Soviet, violonvioloncellist Mstislav Rostropovich, became conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, D. C. , in 1977. several(prenominal)(prenominal) of the most innovative artists in the first half of the 20th century successfully incorporated unexampled forms into definitive traditions. Composers George Gershwin and Aaron Copland, and dancer Isadora Duncan were notable examples. Gershwin unite jazz and spiritual music with classical in popular works such as Rhapsody in Blue (1924) and the opera Porg y and Bess (1935).Copland positive a extraordinary style that was influenced by jazz and American folk music. Early in the century, Duncan specifyd 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 produced sounds and sounds made with everyday objects such as pots and pans. He even invented a sassy kind of piano.During the late 1930s, avant-garde choreographer Cunningham began to join with Cage on a bite of projects. Perhaps the greatest, and certainly the most popular, American innovation was the Broadway melodious, which also became a exposure staple. radical in the 1920s, the Broadway tuneful comedy feature music, dance, and dramatic performance in slipway that surpassed the older vaudeville shows and musical revues but without existence as complex as European heroical opera.By the 19 60s, this American musical tradition was well established and had produced extraordinary works by strategic musicians and lyricists such as George and Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, kail Porter, Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, Jerome Kern, and Oscar Hammerstein II. These productions required an immense effort to line up music, drama, and dance. Because of this, the musical became the incubator of an American ripe dance tradition that produced some of Americas greatest choreographers, among them Jerome Robbins, Gene Kelly, and bobsled Fosse.In the 1940s and 1950s the American musical tradition was so projectile that it attracted outstanding classically trained musicians such as Leonard Bernstein. Bernstein composed the music for westside 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 antecede a study(ip) American orchestra, the New York Philharmoni c. 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 childlike Peoples Concerts, television 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 slipway, Bernstein corporeal a transformation of American music that began in the 1960s. The changes that took place during the 1960s and mid-seventies resulted from a significant increase in funding for the arts and their change magnitude approachability to larger audiences.New York City, the American revolve about for art performances, experienced an artistic plosion in the 1960s and mid-seventies. Experimental off-Broadway theaters undefended, new ballet companies were established that often emphasized juvenile forms or blended modern with clas sical (Martha Graham was an especially important influence), and an experimental music scene develop that included composers such as Philip water ice and performance groups such as the Guarneri line Quartet. Dramatic innovation also go along to string out with the works of playwrights such as Edward Albee, Tony Kushner, and David Mamet.As the variety of performances stretch, so did the sound crossover between traditional and popular music forms. Throughout the 1960s and mid-seventies, an expand repertory of traditional arts was beingness conveyed to new audiences. Popular music and jazz could be heard in glob settings such as Carnegie Hall, which had once been confine to classical music, while the Brooklyn Academy of practice of medicine became a venue for experimental music, exotic and ethnic dance presentations, and traditional productions of cubic yard opera. Innovative producer Joseph Papp had been staging Shakespeare in Central Park since the 1950s.Boston conduc tor 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 some(prenominal) world-class symphony orchestras, including those in bread New York Cleveland, Ohio and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Even grand opera was affected. Once a specialized taste that often required extensive knowledge, opera in the United States increase in popularity as the roster of respected institutions grew to include companies in Seattle, Washington Houston, Texas and Santa Fe, New Mexico.American composers such as John Adams and Philip folderol 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 indestructible music form. Starting in the 1960s, throw off music became an ingredient in musical productions such as Hair (1967). By the 1990s, it had become an ev en 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, joggle version of the classic opera La Boheme.This updating of the musical capable 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 callable to both the sheer increase in the number of performance groups as well as to advances in transportation. In the work 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 oper a singer Jessye Norman, for musical groups such as the Juilliard Quartet, and for dance troupes such as the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. complete theater productions and musicals first presented on Broadway now reach cities across the country. The United States, once a provincial outpost with a trammel European tradition in performance, has become a flourishing pump 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 assemblage to the multitude, such as popular music, from thosesuch as classical orchestral musicnormally available to the elite of learning and taste. Popular art forms are usually seen as more representative American products.In the United S tates 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 wake 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 tricky 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 ab out past traditions (for example, Native American tent paintings, oral traditions, and slave 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 wealthy, art collectors. Writers depend on publishers and on the public for their success. Unlike their pred ecessors, 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 try 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 invariant inheritancethe accumulated wisdom and highest forms of execution that were established in the past.In the 20th century generally, and certainly since World War II, artists have been boldly destroying older traditions in sculpture, pain ting, dance, music, and literature. The arts have changed rapidly, with one movement replacing another in tender 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 healthy 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 observe American painters such as Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, Mary Cassatt, and John Marin, American visual arts barely had an intern ational presence.American art began to flourish during the Great Depression of the 1930s as New complete government programs provided support to artists along with other sectors of the population. Artists connected with each other and create a sense of common suggest 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 damage of ordinary people through their representations of seek farmers and workers. While artists such as Benton and concession Wood focused on rural life, many painters of the 1930s and 1940s pictured the multicultural life of the American city. Jacob Lawrence, for example, create the history and liv es 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 Western 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 rather individual and distinctive, but all the artists identify 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 New 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 captivation 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, unite 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 essay to connect traditional art and popular culture by using images from luck culture. To shake viewers out of their preconceive notions about art, sculptor Claes Oldenburg used everyday objects such as pillows and beds to create witty, easygoing 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 close 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 zippy 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 wear away the boundaries between the art world and sens culture. Warhol also cultivated his status as a celebrity. He worked in b ultimately as 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 democratizing perspective. Viewing art in this way removed the emphasis from technique and polishe d 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 unquestionable the Kodak camera that allowed anyone to take pictures, photography has struggled to be recognized 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 photograp hs, 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 professional 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 wrote a series of prestigious books on photographic technique. Adamss elegant landscape photography was o nly one small stream in a growing current of interest in photography as an art form. Early 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 record 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 stud storms of the period.In 1959, after touring the United States for two years, Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank published The Americans, one of the landmarks of documentary photography. His photographs of every day 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 scan at images that often made them uncomfortable, indeed changing the meaning of the ordinary human beings that photographs are meant to capture. American photography continues to flourish. The many variants of art photography and socially informed 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, jewelr y, 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 grip 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 solid 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 oscillate music of Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, and Glenn Miller fit jazz to make a extraordinary 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 from Cuba, were introduced into the United States. In the 1940s a fusion of Latin and jazz elements wa s 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. famed 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 conductor Andre Previn, who started out as a jazz pianist in the 1940s, went on to conduct a number of wonderful 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 laughable 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 produced sounds and sounds made with everyday objects such as pots and pans.He even invented a new kind of p iano. During the late 1930s, avant-garde choreographer Cunningham began to cooperate 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 picture 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 complex 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, gelt Porter, Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, Jerome Kern, and Oscar Hammerstein II. These productions required an immense effort to aline 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, Ge ne Kelly, and bobsled 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 small Peoples Concerts, television 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 embodied a transformation of American music that began in the 1960s. The changes that took pl ace during the 1960s and 1970s resulted from a significant increase in funding for the arts and their increased handiness to larger audiences.New York City, the American center for art performances, experienced an artistic flare-up 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 scene developed that included composers such as Philip glass and performance groups such as the Guarneri weave 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 unplayful crossover between traditional and popular music forms. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, an expanded 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 restrict to classical music, while the Brooklyn Academy of unison 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 dough New York Cleveland, Ohio and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Even grand opera was affected. Once a specialized taste that often required extensive knowledge, opera in the United States increased in popularity as the roster of respected institutions grew to include companies in Seattle, Washington Houston, Texas and Santa Fe, New Mexico.American composers such as John Adams a nd Philip starter 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 steadfast music form. Starting in the 1960s, rock music became an ingredient 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 sheer 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 America n 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. all-out 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.