chapter IX. Cultural life

Read and translate the following words and word combinations:

to set the problem                                   to pull the leg

to degenerate                                           progenitor

to steer boats                                           gospel music

expatriate                                                romantic crooning

to defer (deferred)                                   at large

to enchant                                                spiritualism

ensuing                                                    unconventional

to be nourished                                        to shuttle back and forth

Although it is a generalization, it is useful to divide the US cultural history into three broad stages.

The first stage stretches from colonial times until about the Civil war. In this period, American art, architecture, music and literature were strongly influenced by European ideas and traditions. What was fashionable or popular in London, Paris, Rome or Vienna usually set the pattern for Boston, New Orleans, New York, and Philadelphia. Some of the colonial painters, like other craftsmen, came across the sea to try their luck. A few American painters of that time among them Benjamin West, Washington Allston, John Singleton Copley and Gilbert Stuart still considered themselves largely as part of European tradition.

Gradually America was becoming subject and substance of separate artistic creation. Through the Colonial period and for the first half century of the Republic, American painting was dominated by portraiture. Painting portraits was the way an artist could make at that time a living. Like the 17th century European portraitists, the American artists left rich information about their time. Portraits became documents detailing furniture, costumes, jewelry, and implements of their occupation. Unfortunately there were few history paintings of good quality recording the Revolution, except some made John Trumbull After the invention of camera in 1839 the proportion of portraits to dropped and. the Civil War was best recorded by its photographers except for the genre pieces of life done by Eastman Johnson and Winslow Homer.

The period after the Civil War saw two new genres in American painting, the creation of works, which described American landscapes and the everyday life of people, depicted mostly by a Russian artist Pavel Svirin. Scores of street scenes, gathering in village taverns, political rallies, poor women’s kitchens, factory workers, Black slaves were already on canvases.

If genre art was nourished by political and social forms, landscape paintings owed much to romantic poetry of William Cullen Bryant and books by James Fennimore Cooper. Landscape were merged with scenes of the migrants crossing the plains and mountains in their wagons, with Indians, buffalo and death often in the background. Among the American artists of that period one can mark Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins. .

A landmark in the history of American painting was made by the Armory Show of 1913 Sixteen hundred paintings by more than 300 Americans artists were shown there, representing some new genres like the Impressionists, Post-Impressionists and the Cubists. Later on with the Depression, many American artist of different sties depicted the strikers, the unemployed, the Blacks, all those whose lives were crushed by the economic desaster. R. Marsh was dealing with urban poor, Ch. Burchfield and E. Hopper with dreary working class identical houses.

Like scientists many of highly creative artists were driven to America by the Second World War. In the 1950-60s abstract expressionism, pop art, minimal art and photo-realism became quite common in the USA. Some of the artists associated with such movements are Close, Davis, de Kooning, Demuth, Dine, Estes, Hanson, Johns, Kline, Lichtenstein, Motherwell, Oldenburg, Pollock, Rauschenberg, Rosenquist, Rothko, Segal and Warhol..

By the 60-70s New York had become one of the art capitals of the world. Now in New York alone there are around 12000 artists and sculptors, around 400 art galleries and hundreds of exhibitions and shows each season. Among the great New York museums there are the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) which houses the most complete collection of modern art in the world, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheism, The Cloisters with its fine medieval collection, the Brooklyn Museum, the Frick Collection, the Nation Museum of Design, the Museum of American Indian, the American raft Museum and the Whitney Museum of Modern Art. Besides New York Chicago is often associated with art and modern architecture. Chicago is the city where several important artists live. Some of them, like Mies van der Rohe or Philip Johnson, did much to influence modern design. In Chicago there is also the museum of Louis Sullivan, called “the father of the skyscraper”.