Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

had been carefully removed in luminist pictures). However, the Americanimpressionists were more reluctant than their French counterparts to fracturesolid objects into a web of individually “broken” brush strokes. Solidly basedin the absolute of “God’s blueprint” in nature, American culture was not yetready to decompose the appearance of reality under the broken impressionistbrush stroke. American painters adopted mainly the painterly technique ofimpressionism (broken brushwork, brighter color, a lively surface), whileforms generally maintained their volume, structure, and contoured shapesunder the “quieter” American version of impressionism. A few of the leadingAmerican impressionist painters were Mary Cassatt, John Singer Sargeant,William Merritt Chase, Theodore Robinson, Childe Hassam, John HenryTwachtman, and Thomas Dewing.Although a large segment of the American art community continuedfor many decades to resist the early twentieth-century modernist stylesof abstraction (such as cubism, futurism, and constructivism), these wereintroduced to American shores by the famous New York Armory Show of1913 and by a series of exhibitions beginning in 1908 at 291, the New YorkCity gallery of pioneer modern photographer Alfred Stieglitz. In additionto synchronism (to be discussed later) and some flashes of commercial labelimagery that appeared in the colorful works of Gerald Murphy, StuartDavis, and Charles Demuth (prefiguring the pop art of the 1960s), I wouldlike to point to three early modernist American artists who introduced anindependent expression of line and color as well as elements of abstractedform in order to express something more originally American in relationto the experience of nature: Arthur Dove, Georgia O’Keeffe, and CharlesBurchfield. Their abstractions ranged from the cellular, musical, and evenspiritual, on the one hand, to the inventively formal and aesthetic on theother—but always primarily conveying their experience of the qualities of aparticular natural reality or a spirit of place. Although having a few formalqualities in common with these early modernists, the precisionist movementof the 1920s and 1930s in painting and photography was perhaps the oppositemanifestation. Precisionism admired and tried to express the formalqualities of modern technology and industrialized society in a somewhatrevamped luminist language (e.g., clean lines, sharp edges, anonymoussurfaces, geometric planar shapes, flat colors).Both Dove and O’Keeffe were part of the Stieglitz circle of artists, andother artists from this group, such as Max Weber, John Marin, and AbrahamWalkowitz, used stylized and abstracted elements more to express the exciting,bustling qualities of New York City than the being of nature. Arthur Dove(1880–1946) invented a highly personal style of painting, informed on the one119