(2 of 2)
This emphasis on the masculine reacted to what many Americans from the 1880s on saw as a crisis in their culture. America's business environment was abundant, booming and young. But to Realist artists and writers, its art and literature looked pious, neurasthenic and "feminized." Younger artists such as Robert Henri, John Sloan and George Luks sought vitality in what had once been called the "lower depths" of New York City. They were nicknamed the Ashcan School, and the most bravura performer among them, for a time, was George Bellows (1882-1925). Bellows' most memorable images were his fiercely macho boxing scenes, which for brutal energy outstripped anything else in American art in the 1900s.
Edward Hopper (1882-1967) was the quintessential Realist painter of 20th century America, and although not all his work was based on the city--some of the most beautiful Hoppers are of rural and coastal scenes--he "got" a particular city mood as no other painter has. He liked painting seediness and abandonment. He saw it as a peculiarly American condition, the downside of excessive hope. More abstract than the Ashcan painters, he made his apartments, lobbies and cafes into space frames: abstraction was a sign for not belonging. Probably the most dystopian American images of modernity, though, were painted by a man who meant no criticism of it: Charles Sheeler (1883-1965), with his "Precisionist" industrial scenes. Culture, for Sheeler, had colonized all the space in the imagination that nature once claimed. The world of Thomas Cole was finally concreted over.
Apart from Hopper, the outstanding American painter of urban experience in the 1930s and '40s was a journalist's son and (like Hopper) a pupil of Robert Henri's: Stuart Davis (1894-1964). He defined the role of the artist as "a cool Spectator-Reporter at an Arena of Hot Events." Davis found visual equivalents to that greatest of American musical forms--which was also the greatest of African-American cultural achievements--jazz. Another artist who achieved such a synthesis was Romare Bearden (1912-88), who did it from within and delineated a kind of city-within-a-city, Harlem. Bearden tried to "establish a world through art in which the validity of my Negro experience could live and make its own logic." He was no cultural separatist--African masks and Matisse odalisques were of equal value to him--and his collages have the same direct beauty and inventive toughness as the writings of Ralph Ellison, in their common task of figuring and narrating the black experience of the American city.