American Art and its Publics 1880-1939

This study day is available as both an in person and a recording only event. The recording will be made available to ALL attendees on the Monday following the event and will be available for 4 weeks.

This study day traces the development of American art during a period of dynamic change – from the optimism and glamour of late 19th century to the anxiety and hardship of the Great Depression. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries America was at the height of its ‘gilded age’. Cities like Boston, Philadelphia and New York were emerging as vibrant and sophisticated art centres. They were also home to some of the wealthiest art patrons in the world. Their purchasing power would form the basis for outstanding collections of American and European art – including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Frick in New York, the Barnes Collection in Philadelphia and the Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum in Boston. In this vibrant, confident environment new avant-garde groups emerged, starting with the Ashcan School in the early years of the 20th century, which challenged traditional ideals in favour of the gritty realities of urban life. By the 1920s private buyers and museum curators were trying to incorporate the most innovative European trends in their collections, provoking heated debates between advocates of abstraction and realism. The Wall Street Crash of 1929 was a trauma felt across politics society. It impact, during the years of the Great Depression, can be traced in the work of Regionalist artists and in Roosevelt’s Federal Art Project.

Lecture 1
Art of the Gilded Age

Lecture 2
The Realities of Life – The Ashcan School

Lecture 3
New Directions in American Art – Abstraction and its Antagonists

Lecture 4
Painting the American Condition, 1930-1939