From Native Americans to George Bellows
No, the history of art in New York doesn't begin with Andy Warhol's 1962 Campbell's soup can! Without going all the way back to the Algonquins - the Indian tribe that long populated the island of Manhattan, known for their basketry and beadwork - we have to go back to the second half of the 19th century, when James Whistler, forerunner of American Impressionism, painted vast pictorial symphonies. Then there's portrait painter John Singer Sargent and Mary Cassatt, now considered America's first female painter, born in 1844 in Pennsylvania.
It wasn't until the beginning of the following century that a truly American school of painting emerged, moving beyond traditional portraiture and the gentle romantic landscapes of theHudson River School. Boxing matches, working-class scenes, the underprivileged... The Eight and theAsh Can School( ) took over in a fiercely realistic style, illustrating urban violence and everyday life in the slums. Robert Henri (1865-1929), the champion of American realism, was the keystone of this style, around whom painters and illustrators such as John French Sloan, George Luks, William Glackens, Everett Shinn, Maurice Prendergast and George Bellows (1882-1925) gravitated as one of its most incisive exponents.
The Armory show of 1913
But if we had to choose just one date to sum up New York, the epicenter of American art, it would be 1913, the year of the famous modern art exhibition known as "The Armory Show"(The International Exhibition of Modern Art). That year, from February 17 to March 15, history was turned upside down. Thanks to a few major donors, as only America can produce - from Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney to Alfred Stieglitz, the photographer and famous art dealer - the exhibition offered the New York public over 1,200 paintings and sculptures from the European and American avant-garde. The most daring trends of the time were on display, including Fauvism and Cubism, and Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a StaircaseNo. 2 caused a scandal. It was all it took for modern art to take up permanent residence in the United States.
A cubo-realism tinged with futurism
A few years later, from 1920 onwards, he was to play a decisive role in the spread of a singular movement known as Precisionism. Precisionism is a kind of cubo-realism tinged with futurism, inspired by industrial landscapes and the urban world of New York. We come across paintings by Charles Demuth, Elsie Driggs and Charles Sheeler. Grain silos, port areas, factory chimneys... Led by Preston Dickinson, the pioneers of the Precisionist movement suddenly sublimated the American economic epic.
Farther removed from working-class subjects, the painter Edward Hopper was one of the major figures of this new scene. Fascinated by the great motifs of theAmerican way of life, Hopper portrayed the infinite despair of the middle classes, a certain melancholy, even downright depression. Charmless motels, deserted streets simply streaked with neon advertising... Under Edward Hopper's brush, the awakening after the crash of 1929 leaves a bitter taste. To sum up the mood, we refer to the artist's best-known painting, Nighthawks, from 1942, which now hangs on the walls of the Art Institute of Chicago. Nighthawks are the night birds that haunt bars in the late evening, the lonely patrons stranded at the counters of American diners. And yet, in 1933, Hopper was consecrated with the first retrospective of his work at the Museum of Modern Art, and today some of his works can be admired at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
From American Scene Painting to the New York School
The 1930s saw the emergence of a broad pictorial movement, American Scene Painting, to which Edward Hopper belonged, along with Jack Levine and Grant Wood. The latter is the author of an emblematic work signed in 1930, whose title, American Gothic, leaves little doubt as to its regionalist and social roots: a couple poses in front of a farmhouse, the man holding a pitchfork. An ultra-realist icon of rural America, typical of the Midwest, the painting became a symbol of the American heartland. Despite its popularity, the American Scene, which had been created in reaction to the Expressionist vein of the European avant-garde (with artists such as Arshile Gorky and Max Weber), was swept aside in the mid-1940s by the proponents of Abstract Expressionism.
The Big Apple emerged as the brightest spot in the world's creativity. As radical as it was informal, this movement was quickly dubbed the "New York School" and enjoyed unprecedented fame until the 1970s. Figuration was discarded, and the canvases were often very large, sometimes using the all-over technique, in which the paint covers the entire surface of the painting. Two currents can be distinguished... Action painting focuses on gesturality and energy, in a practice that could be described as "impulsive". This style is exemplified by the work of Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock - who used to paint on the ground, with his canvases laid flat and a stick dripping paint (the famous dripping technique). Color Field painting, brilliantly theorized by art critic Clement Greenberg, is much more meditative. Here, color becomes the very subject of the painting, and the planes are vast, deployed in wide chromatic expanses. Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still and Robert Motherwell are among the undisputed masters of this "color field" pictoriality.
From pop art to minimalism
The rest of this chronology is just like New York: oversized and iconic. In the title role, the man who would become the living legend of pop art, the darling of Manhattan chic. Andy Warhol, the eternal dandy from Pennsylvania limbo, grows white orchids and wears a platinum-colored wig. Born in Pittsburgh in 1928, he was also the man who set the New York art scene on fire in the 1960s. Halfway between art and consumerism, Warhol found his inspiration in American popular culture. The Brillo laundry detergent pack, the Coca-Cola bottle or the Campbell's soup can... It was from this shopping list that overwhelmed the Yankee market that the artist drew, in a compulsive art of recycling, mixing with the greatest naturalness effigies of Marilyn and portraits of Mao Zedong, images of electric chairs, flowers, a race riot, Mickey Mouse's smile.. At the same time, Jasper Johns painted American flags, Roy Lichtenstein tirelessly reproduced comic strips, Claes Oldenburg created giant hamburgers..
The trend is towards excess. As is often the case, the reaction was swift. It was called "Minimalism", with a credo reduced to the essential: formal simplicity. In practice, this gave rise to Sol LeWitt's Wall drawings (a series begun in 1968), Ad Reinhardt's black monochromes, Frank Stella's free-form Shaped Canvas... Minimal Art also covered the field of contemporary sculpture, with Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Richard Serra and Dan Flavin, the great master of the fluorescent tube. As the years went by, one style followed another, swinging from conceptual art to neo-expressionism. And then everything accelerated.
Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat
Once again, it was around Andy Warhol that the arty new wave crystallized, and more precisely in his studio, the Factory, then located at 33 Union Square West. It was here, in the early 1980s, that Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat met. At the time, New York was a volcano on the edge of which danced geniuses struck by lightning. Haring signed his first solo exhibition in 1982 at Tony Shafrazi's in SoHo, frequented Club 57 and created Radiant Baby, his most widely distributed pictogram. This was the golden age of New York graffiti, wild and abstract, hardcore and poetic..
The urban practice of tagging was gradually transformed. Kenny Scharf, Rammellzee, Crash and Dondi White, as well as Seen, are among today's legendary street artists. A special place must be given to Jean-Michel Basquiat, shooting star of the New York cultural scene. His story began in December 1960, in Brooklyn. Born to a Haitian father and a Puerto Rican mother, Basquiat began his career as a painter in the midst of underground culture. At first, he spray-painted graffiti on the streets and subway trains. At the time, the artist signed "Samo", a disillusioned shorthand for " SAMe Old shit ". Then, all of a sudden, his fame exploded. In 1982, Basquiat appeared on the walls of the Bischofberger gallery, then at Larry Gagosian, Mary Boone, Michael Werner... An incandescent comet of what came to be known as Bad Painting (painting that was falsely neglected, but truly subversive), Basquiat was definitively consecrated in February 1985, on the front page of the New York Times. He died of an overdose three years later, at the age of 27, leaving a body of work of over 800 paintings and 1,500 drawings, all painted in a neo-expressionist style of rare power.
Contemporary photography in New York
Vivian Maier (1926-2009), Robert Frank (1924-2019), Joel Meyerowitz (1938)... All have passionately photographed New York, each in their own style and following their own personal story. Of particular interest is Meyerowitz's post-apocalyptic New York after the September 11, 2001 attacks, where he captures the full scale of the drama he observes, traumatized. Then there's the incredible posthumous fame of street photographer Vivian Mayer, whose work is the subject of exhibitions the world over.
It's also impossible not to mention Helen Levitt (born in New York in 1913 and died in the same city in 2009), New York's Doisneau, who was the subject of Rencontres d'Arles' flagship exhibition in 2019. Self-taught, and influenced by photographers such as Walker Evans and Henri Cartier-Bresson, she began photographing New York's underprivileged neighborhoods (Harlem, Brooklyn, Lower East Side) in the 1930s. Her favorite theme was childhood, capturing every moment of it.
Finally, Cindy Sherman (1954) is arguably the most established artist in contemporary art and photography today. She lives and works in New York and has devoted her entire life to staging herself, first in black and white and then in color, and continues her relentless work around her own femininity. Ranging from the romantic to the grotesquely outrageous, she is one of those great New York photographers who have managed to situate their work at the frontiers of several arts, such as painting, cinema and fashion. Her photographs reinvent themselves over the years, never repeating themselves. His latest series refers to the 1920s, the interwar years of the Roaring Twenties and their transposition to the United States.