North American Realism

 

Ashcan School

The Ashcan school is a revolutionary group of young American artists who at the beginning of the 20th century in New York City, rebel against academic art with their individualism and defiantly urban art. Conservative in style, the Ashcan paintings were revolutionary in content. The Ashcan group sought to capture the feel of turn-of-the-century New York City, through realistic and unglamorized portraits of real life in gritty cities crowded with immigrants and the struggling poor. With such unpleasing titles as The Wrestlers, The Shoppers, and Hairdressers' Window, Sixth Avenue, their paintings captured spontaneous moments in everyday events.
The Ashcan group was known as the New York Realists, called by critics as the "revolutionary black gang" and the "apostles of ugliness." A critic, referring to their depictions also conferred them the pejorative label Ashcan School which became the standard term for this first important American art movement of the 20th century.
The main members of the movement included ; Robert Henri, Arthur B. Davies, Maurice Prendergast, Ernest Lawson, William Glackens, Everett Shinn, John Sloan, and George Luks. They were a diverse group of painters but opposed to academic art. Another central figure who joned the movement later was George Bellows.

 

American Scene Painting

American Scene Painting depicts scenes of typical American life and landscape painted in a naturalistic, descriptive vein during the Great Depression in the United States. It is an umbrella term for the rural American Regionalism and the urban and politically-oriented Social Realism, but its specific boundaries remain ambiguous.
An antimodernist style and reaction against the modern European style, American Scene Painting was seen as an attempt to define a uniquely American style of art. The term does not signify an organized movement, but rather an aspect of a broad tendency for American artists to move away from abstraction and the avant-garde in the period between the two world wars.
Benton, Curry and Wood were the three major representatives of Regionalism. They had all studied art in Paris but they declared their goal to create an art form that would be truly American. These artists insisted that the real solution to the many and growing problems of urban American life, made clear by the Great Depression, was for the United States to return to its agrarian roots.
The Regionalist's argument received unintentional support from the so-called Urban Realists (Social Realists), who focused their attention on the city.
The art produced by the American Scene artists was ambiguous and cultivated, and it drew from diverse cultures. The choice of subjects might have attested to a quest for identity.

 

Mural Painting

The Mexican Mural movement represents one of the most powerful and significant achievements in public art during the 20th century. After a prolonged civil war and people's revolution, Mexican Mural movement was born. The three most prominent artists of the movement are José Orozco, Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros.
In the early 20s new revolutionary government invited artists to help forge a new national cultural consciousness. A program of commissions for a large number of murals was introduced. The idea was that art ought to be accessible to all, and each artist must contribute to glorifying the people's strengths and building a more egalitarian future. The painter Siqueiros wrote, "We condemn so-called easel painting and all the art produced by ultra-intellectual circles on the grounds that it is aristocratic, and we glorify the expression of monumental Art because it is publics property".
Social Realism in the Mexico produced original and creative works of mural art. Each artist found ways both to comply with the demands of the educational and political program of mural painting, and to give free rein to his own research and work. The unity of the political tone went hand in glove with the diverse range of styles and techniques. By mixing classical and modernist influences with their own pre-Columbian heritage, Mexican muralists produced works whose influence stretched well beyond borders and gained international reputation in particular from United States.

 

The Harlem Renaissance

During the Great Migration of 1914-1918, many rural Americans from South headed to the industrial North for employment opportunities. Among the many new mass congregations in American industrial cities, was a Harlem, New York City, a convergence of African-Americans from all over the country.
The Harlem Renaissance was an expression of African-American social thought and culture which took a place in newly-formed Black community in neighborhood of Harlem. The Harlem Renaissance flourished from early 1920 to1940 and was expressed through every cultural medium-visual art, dance, music, theatre, literature, poetry, history, politics and the consequent "white flight" of Harlem.
Instead of using direct political means, African-American artists, writers, and musicians employed culture to work for goals of civil rights and equality. Its lasting legacy is that for the first time (and across racial lines), African-American paintings, writings, and jazz became absorbed into mainstream culture. At the time, it was known as the "New Negro Movement", named after an anthology, entitled The New Negro, of notable African-American works, published by philosopher Alain Locke in 1925.
It is certainly an era that African-Americans can be proud of and a time when a once severely oppressed people, began to expect more from life. They became more vocal and expressive about the state of their affairs. They took charge of adding flair and joviality to their lifestyle.
Harlem Renaissance is presented with the art of William H. Johnson, Lois Mailou Jones and Sargent Claude Johnson. Aaron Douglas is considered to be a "father of Afro-American Art".Other prominent artists associated with the Harlem Renaissance are Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, Archibald Motley and later influenced by the movement artists: Charles Sebree, John Biggers, Hale Woodruff, Beauford Delaney and Ernie Barnes.

 

Group of 7

Early in the 1910's casual group of Canadian painters began to paint Canadian wilderness landscape as they saw it. They journeyed all over the country to paint the waste with bold colors and a broad, decorative style. They socialized together around the group's sponsor and mentor Tom Thomson at the Arts and Letters Club in Toronto. It was a common meeting place for the artists.
During the spring of 1917, tragedy struck the group as Tom Thomson drowned in Algonquin Park's Canoe Lake under suspicious circumstances. This tragedy shocked the Group.
They formerly didn't call themselves the Group of Seven until their first exhibit in 1920. At the time they were seven: J.E.H. MacDonald, Arthur Lismer, Frederick Varley, Frank Johnston and Franklin Carmichael, A. Y. Jackson and Lawren S. Harris. They were not limited to the seven founding members, and they eventually changed their name to the Canadian Group of Painters.
Group of Seven artists were both strongly influenced by Post-Impressionism in France and Scandinavian art of North. They were creating bold, vividly-colored canvases, and instilling elements of the landscape with symbolic meaning.

 

Hyper-Realism

Hyper-realism started around the late sixties and early seventies.

The word hyper-realism is used in the art world to depict paintings that looked like photographs. The movement was most popular in the United States.