As the influence of Social Realist art waned, diverse American artists began to incorporate the experiments of European Modernism into their vocabularies. Seminal to this transformation was the International Exhibition of Modern Art held at the New York Amory in 1913,... [more]

As the influence of Social Realist art waned, diverse American artists began to incorporate the experiments of European Modernism into their vocabularies. Seminal to this transformation was the International Exhibition of Modern Art held at the New York Amory in 1913, which brought the innovations of Impressionism, Cubism, and Fauvism to America by showing the works of artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Henri Matisse, Constantin Brancusi, and Pablo Picasso. Painter Stuart Davis asserted that the show was the single most important influence on his work. Adopting the flattened space and geometric structure of Cubism, Davis' paintings use the angular architecture and brightly colored billboard advertisements of the city both as stylistic influence and as subject matter. Davis' canvases reveal the influence of early Cubism and of the uniquely American urban landscape, which is filled with abstract rhythms akin to jazz music. For other artists, such as Ben Shahn, the social relations within the city represented a far more pressing subject. Amid the poverty that followed the stock market crash of 1929 and the subsequent New Deal reform efforts, many artists found work with the WPA -- Shahn, an immigrant from Lithuania, worked on mural projects under the WPA. He is perhaps best known for his painting - The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti - which depicts two Italian-Americans involved in the union struggles who were wrongfully executed for murder. Artists such as Arthur Dove and Georgia O'Keefe turned away from the subject matter of the bustling cities to retreat into the splendor of their natural surroundings. O'Keefe, also influenced by the 1913 Armory show, paired the abstraction of Modernism with the stark beauty of organic forms from the American desert. [show less]