Art History

Lead: While the works therein displayed stunned the audiences and shifted American art, not everyone was thrilled with the contents of the Armory Show.

Intro.: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts.

Content: The International Exhibition of Modern Art opened on February 17, 1913 in New York. Its theme? The New Spirit. American modernist poet William Carlos Williams joined in with the ninety thousand who attended saying, “I went to it and gasped with all the rest.” In New York the press was generally sympathetic to the display of Cezanne, Picasso, Gauguin, Matisse, Van Gogh, yet others were not so sanguine.

Intro.: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts.

Content: They were known as the The Eight. Realistic painters, former newspaper artists from Philadelphia, yet they were strongly influenced by and drawn to the revolutionary transformation of European art particularly by the Impressionists. Their work demonstrated that while most American artists drew their inspiration from the salon style of universities and art academies, this approach was not universal.

Intro.: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts.

Content: American art in the 19^th century was quite traditional, a form of realism that was almost descriptive, often termed narrative art. Images were recognizable, designed to inspire, not necessarily to challenge the viewer. The typical American artist produced works, whether in portraiture or landscape, that were recognizable and comfortable, especially to the uninitiated.

Intro.: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts.

Content: In April 1862 Union General George McClellan finally began to the Army of the Potomac. His plan was to march his army up the Virginia Peninsula and capture Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy. Anticipating a great decisive battle, leading illustrators as Alfred and William Waud, Thomas Nast, and Winslow Homer traveled with the army, hoping to record the drama of a major military engagement. McClellan had not changed, however. Nearly always erring on the side of caution, he brought a whole new meaning to the word prudence. He overestimated the strength of the Confederate forces and moved very slowly. As McClellan spent a wasted month besieging tiny Yorktown, Winslow Homer, got busy. He began to send a stream of brilliant war illustrations back to Harper’s Weekly in New York. He did sketches and drawings of camp life, skirmishes, and sharpshooters at work.

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Intro.: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts.

Content: Winslow Homer, considered one of the finest American artists of the nineteenth century, is most well known for his objective paintings of rural American life, the tropics, and the life and struggles of fishermen at sea. Homer was born in Boston in 1836. Unlike most of his contemporaries such as John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt, and James McNeill Whistler, he was not academically trained in Europe and painted a majority of his works in the United States. He was mostly self-taught; apprenticed to a lithographic firm at age 19, in 1858 he began his professional career in New York as a free-lance illustrator for Harper’s Weekly. Homer’s reputation was built responding to a new relish by the reading public for visual material to accompany printed text. He specialized in wood engravings, designs etched onto wood blocks which were then printed. Newly established weeklies as Ballou’s Pictorial, Leslie’s Weekly, and the most popular of all – Harper’s, created an unprecedented demand for illustrators. Simplified forms, crisp outlines and objectivity characterized Homer’s work and set him apart from other artists.

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