American Landscapes

Through suffering, comes a new consciousness in man. America has been a haven for unity and freedom for decades. To achieve

this requires much loss and pain. The strive of the American culture for the attainment of such social luxuries is of great courage, will-power, faith and pride. During a time when the first World War had ended and the country was in a state of isolation, there were people within its borders that had an undying belief in what this country stood for. Though often overlooked and underappreciated in their time, artists had an advantage of using the suffering of the country and its industrial growth as a concentration for their bodies of work.

As the kinks of war were being worked out, and people were learning to move on with their lives, a woman by the name of Georgia O'Keefe , born in the rural countryside of Wisconsin was a teacher of art from 1907-1915 specializing in Charcoals. At this time in her life she was introduced to Stieglitz by a friend in New York. Steiglitz helped her set up shows by 1916 and gave her her own exhibition the following year. This much publicity at the time for a female artist was often criticised in the public eye. O'Keefe is most well known for her close-up images of flowers. While that had been flourishing, she began to paint the skyscrapers of New York which at the time, was in itself a model of America's productivity and inventiveness. In City Night, she depicts the city from a view on the street which makes them seem ominous and overbearing. O'Keefe's interpretation was that it was the city being too confining. New York being depicted as a prison of skyscrapers. This was an interesting interpretation of American growth at the time.

Another popular focal artist of this time was a man by the name of Charles Sheeler who was brilliant with using a heavy reliance on his talent to photograph industrial landscapes which he would sometimes later pain. Sheeler had the same fascination with the development

and forward movement of America as O'Keefe, but rather Sheeler was more observant towards the economical growth of the country such as factories and urban/industrial developments. Sheeler was hired by Ford to photograph the their plant; which he used as a backdrop for his painting of American Landscape which followed the ideaology that American industry would begin to take the modern day role of the church. This painting was done after the stock market crash and displays Steeler's undying faith in American Industry and its 'fundamental stability.'

The two perspectives these artists portray are exactly what the American people at the time were all about. There was doubt, criticism, faith, pride, everything you could ever want to make a political scramble of patriotism. Take O'Keefe; she was raised in the rural countryside of Sun Prairie, Wisconsin when she left to take classes in two of the larger cities of the country - Chicago and New York. during this time she was focused on rural landscapes, her roots. However after the surely overwhelming transition of Sun Prairie to Major cityscape of Chicago/New York she was discovered by the love of her life. Two years after marriage

she began her not-so-well known cityscape artistry. This transition must have fascinated her on such a deep level. being taken from a peaceful countryside to the hustle and tear of metropolitain NY. The ominous looming buildings in City Night are no doubt her interpretation of the fears and or fascinations with American industrial growth. such beauty in such darkness. While Charles Sheeler, born in Phliadelphia, Pennsylvania a more suburbian upbringing was known for his photography but had a knack for using it to create very industrial, non-organic paintings of what he saw. Almost as if growing up in the city had desensitized him to the beuty the world had to offer. Or perhaps even bored him. Charles Sheeler was the father of American Modernism; "Defining modernism is a difficult task. ... A historical definition would say that modernism is the artistic movement in which the artist's self-consciousness about questions of form and structure became uppermost. ... In brief, modernism asks us to consider what we normally understand by the center and the margins." - Heath Anthology, Vol. 2, 4th ed., 887-888.Charles Sheeler introduces the idea of American photography in realistic interpretations of American Industrial landscape which was merely a window for what was to come.

Grant Wood was an optimist and chose to approach America from