Regionalism and Realism
As the Gilded Age waned around 1900, American cities were exploding with people and opportunities as never before in our history. Rebellious American artists were dismissive of their elders' "genteel" Eurocentric styles, both Impressionism and Academic Art. They claimed the right to define what was "American" in American art. Their aspirational guides were the celebrated realists, Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) and Winslow Homer (1836-1910).
Known as the Philadelphia Five, Robert Henri (1865-1929) and his four acolytes George Luks (1867-1933), Williams Glackens (1870-1938), John Sloan (1871-1951), and Everett Shinn (1876-1953) sympathized with the lower classes when portrayed in their art, revealing picturesque qualities in their humanity. Nonetheless, these artists were neither social critics nor reformers, avoiding scenes of civil unease, class tensions, and propaganda. The Henri coterie was in New York by 1904, associating with artists Ernest Lawson (1873-1939), Maurice Prendergast (1858-1924), and Arthur B. Davies (1862-1928), whose decorative, formalist styles aligned with the evolving realist artists' styles and subjects. Four years later, Henri and his feisty friends, forever identified as The Eight, challenged the conservative National Academy of Design by curating their own exhibit that was successful in introducing the independent artists to a larger public.
The much touted 1913 Armory Show, which introduced European modernism to America, is heralded mistakenly as ending the advancement of a distinct American modernism. World War I (1914-1918), the roaring 1920s, and the beginning of the Great Depression, 1929, gave rise to renewed nationalism, not only in the United States, but globally. In our country the belief that realism, expressed by the American scene painters with urban and rural subjects, represented a retreat from Modernism is an over simplification. Both the Regionalists and a decade later, the Social Realists, who were politically motivated, evidenced modernist tendencies.
