Visual art of the United States

As with music and literature, this development was delayed until artists perceived that the New World offered subjects unique to itself; in this case the westward expansion of settlement brought the transcendent beauty of frontier landscapes to painters' attention.

The Hudson River painters' directness and simplicity of vision influenced and inspired such later artists as John Kensett and the Luminists; as well as George Inness and the tonalists (which included Albert Pinkham Ryder and Ralph Blakelock among others), and Winslow Homer (1836–1910), who depicted the rural U.S.—the sea, the mountains, and the people who lived near them.

Paintings of the Great West, many of which emphasized the sheer size of the land and the cultures of the native people living on it, became a distinct genre as well.

George Caleb Bingham, and later Frederic Remington, Charles M. Russell, the photographer Edward S. Curtis, and others recorded the U.S. Western heritage and the Old American West through their art.

Middle-class city life found its painter in Thomas Eakins (1844–1916), an uncompromising realist whose unflinching honesty undercut the genteel preference for romantic sentimentalism.

[12] Several important painters who are considered American spent much of their lives in Europe, notably Mary Cassatt, James McNeill Whistler, and John Singer Sargent, all of whom were influenced by French Impressionism.

In the last decades of the century American Impressionism, as practiced by artists such as Childe Hassam and Frank W. Benson, became a popular style.

Soon the Ashcan school artists gave way to modernists arriving from Europe—the cubists and abstract painters promoted by Stieglitz at his 291 Gallery in New York City.

John Marin, Marsden Hartley, Alfred Henry Maurer, Arthur B. Carles, Arthur Dove, Henrietta Shore, Stuart Davis, Wilhelmina Weber, Stanton Macdonald-Wright, Morgan Russell, Patrick Henry Bruce, Andrew Dasburg, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Gerald Murphy were some important early American modernist painters.

After World War I many American artists rejected the modern trends emanating from the Armory Show and European influences such as those from the School of Paris.

Grant Wood, Reginald Marsh, Guy Pène du Bois, and Charles Sheeler exemplify the realist tendency in different ways.

Sheeler and the modernists Charles Demuth and Ralston Crawford were referred to as Precisionists for their sharply defined renderings of machines and architectural forms.

Edward Hopper, who studied under Henri, developed an individual style of realism by concentrating on light and form, and avoiding overt social content.

Following the first World War, the completion of the Santa Fe Railroad enabled American settlers to travel across the west, as far as the California coast.

Images of the Southwest became a popular form of advertising, used most significantly by the Santa Fe Railroad to entice settlers to come west and enjoy the "unsullied landscapes."

Walter Ufer, Bert Geer Phillips, E. Irving Couse, William Henry Jackson, Marsden Hartley, Andrew Dasburg, and Georgia O'Keeffe were some of the more prolific artists of the Southwest.

In the 1920s and 30s a new generation of educated and politically astute African-American men and women emerged who sponsored literary societies and art and industrial exhibitions to combat racist stereotypes.

Artists associated with the Harlem Renaissance include Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, Charles Alston, Augusta Savage, Archibald Motley, Lois Mailou Jones, Palmer Hayden and Sargent Johnson.

[17] The style of much of the public art commissioned by the WPA was influenced by the work of Diego Rivera and other artists of the contemporary Mexican muralism movement.

Several separate and related movements began and developed during the Great Depression including American scene painting, Regionalism, and Social Realism.

In the years after World War II, a group of New York artists formed the first American movement to exert major influence internationally: abstract expressionism.

The first generation of abstract expressionists included Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, Arshile Gorky, Robert Motherwell, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb, Phillip Guston, Ad Reinhardt, James Brooks, Richard Pousette-Dart, William Baziotes, Mark Tobey, Bradley Walker Tomlin, Theodoros Stamos, Jack Tworkov, Wilhelmina Weber Furlong, David Smith, and Hans Hofmann, among others.

Milton Avery, Lee Krasner, Louise Bourgeois, Alexander Calder, Tony Smith, Morris Graves and others were also related, important and influential artists during that period.

Abstract Expressionism can be characterized by two major elements: the large size of the canvases used (partially inspired by Mexican frescoes and the works they made for the WPA in the 1930s), and the strong and unusual use of brushstrokes and experimental paint application with a new understanding of process.

[27][28] During the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s painters as powerful and influential as Adolph Gottlieb, Phillip Guston, Lee Krasner, Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Richard Diebenkorn, Josef Albers, Elmer Bischoff, Agnes Martin, Al Held, Sam Francis, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Ellsworth Kelly, Morris Louis, Gene Davis, Frank Stella, Joan Mitchell, Friedel Dzubas, Paul Jenkins and younger artists like Brice Marden, Robert Mangold, Sam Gilliam, Sean Scully, Elizabeth Murray, Walter Darby Bannard, Larry Zox, Ronnie Landfield, Ronald Davis, Dan Christensen, Susan Rothenberg, Ross Bleckner, Richard Tuttle, Julian Schnabel, Peter Halley, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Eric Fischl and dozens of others produced vital and influential paintings.

Pop artists, such as Andy Warhol (1928–1987), Larry Rivers (1923–2002), and Roy Lichtenstein (1923–1997), reproduced, with satiric care, everyday objects and images of American popular culture—Coca-Cola bottles, soup cans, comic strips.

A few American artists of note include: Ansel Adams, John James Audubon, Milton Avery, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Thomas Hart Benton, Albert Bierstadt, Alexander Calder, Mary Cassatt, Frederic Edwin Church, Chuck Close, Thomas Cole, Robert Crumb, Edward S. Curtis, Richard Diebenkorn, Thomas Eakins, Jules Feiffer, Lyonel Feininger, Helen Frankenthaler, Arshile Gorky, Keith Haring, Marsden Hartley, Al Hirschfeld, Hans Hofmann, Winslow Homer, Edward Hopper, Jasper Johns, Georgia O'Keeffe, Jack Kirby, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Dorothea Lange, Roy Lichtenstein, Morris Louis, John Marin, Agnes Martin, Joan Mitchell, Grandma Moses, Robert Motherwell, Nampeyo, Kenneth Noland, Jackson Pollock, Man Ray, Robert Rauschenberg, Frederic Remington, Norman Rockwell, Mark Rothko, Albert Pinkham Ryder, John Singer Sargent, Cindy Sherman, David Smith, Frank Stella, Clyfford Still, Gilbert Stuart, Louis Comfort Tiffany, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol, Grant Wood, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Andrew Wyeth.