The first half of the nineteenth century in the United States is illustrated by very endearing landscape painters mainly who, like Cole, Church, Bingham in particular, give us back the wild grandeur or the incomparable richness of New World sites. Skilled and sensitive artists, Luminists have left us works that already remind us of the hyperrealists of today. In the same period of the nineteenth century, decorative arts and photography were also well represented in the United States. At the end of this century three artists of American origin imposed their names in Europe: the impressionists Mary Cassatt and Wüistler, the portraitist John Sargent. Their compatriot Tiffany gained world fame with his famous Art Nouveau objects. Of all the major arts of the time, it was the sculpture that took the longest - even the difference was only a few years - to adapt to the requirements of the new American “Golden Age” (Gilded Age), as Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner justly baptized the last decades of the nineteenth century. The first sculptor, no doubt, to adapt to the new age in the years immediately following the war, was John Quincy Adams Ward, who recognized the authority of classical ideals but remained by temperament an attentive observer of nature. Around 1880, however, this conception was overshadowed by the work of young artists who had studied in Paris, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Daniel Chester French or Frederick William MacMonnies; they introduced into America the highly decorative neo-baroque style that had become popular in France during the Second Empire and the reign of Napoleon II. Their works were in perfect harmony with the architecture of the great palace builders Richard Morris Hunt and the firm McKim, Mead & White, with whom they often collaborated. Saint-Gaudens, who never lost sight of the importance of sincere emotion, was undoubtedly the best artist in the group. Returning to painting, there is probably no more telling evidence of the dilemmas of life in America after the American Civil War than the decision by three of its most talented artists, James MeNeill Whistler, Mary Cassatt and John Singer Sargent, to pursue their career as volunteer exiles abroad. They found in London and Paris the refinement, tolerance and cultural maturity that America lacked, despite all its riches. In Europe, they also escaped the instability of American society, which was increasingly divided between capitalists and workers, American-born citizens and immigrants, rich and poor, black and white, a society further undermined by political corruption but which was growing, despite everything, uncontrollably. In the long run, this situation would be reflected in the work of courageous realists in the country, such as Eakins and Homer, in the form of disenchanted introspection.
Homer in particular was increasingly obsessed with death and disintegration. One may wonder if his success would have been the same if his pessimism had not been cleverly camouflaged by a dazzling, almost sensual technique. Certainly, the decorative and joyful images were those preferred by the typical American collector of this late nineteenth century. At least this seems to prove the enormous popularity of “American impressionism.” Almost completely forgotten until about twenty years ago, this movement has now been rehabilitated as one of the important stages in the history of American painting. Curiously enough, it did not develop from the example or teaching of Mary Cassatt, although she had been part of the French impressionist group. Rather, it arose from a series of “conversions” among young painters, most of whom had been trained in the realistic and conservative tradition of European academies. The majority of these conversions took place around 1890, well after French Impressionism was imposed on the attention of the public in Europe; they resulted from the admiration of these young artists for Claude Monet's work. The American Impressionists showed from the beginning a clear inclination for realism, the decorative and the non-disturbing, perhaps due to the fact that they were, basically, academic painters and not rebels of the avant-garde, perhaps also to the fact that the bias through which they had come to know Impressionism had not revealed its profound psychological appeal. From 1898, when they gathered for exhibition, until the beginning of the First World War, their style dominated American painting with remarkable tenacity.
This kind of tamed modernism illustrated by American impressionism is found in the few attempts to import the “Art Nouveau” across the Atlantic. Louis Comfort Tiffany, whose glass experiments earned him one of the few truly progressive American designers, stands out as the main figure of this movement which, for reasons still ill-defined, did not exert a profound influence on the American decorative arts as a whole.
For a country which, by 1890, was clearly on its way to becoming the world's main economic and military power, the United States remained surprisingly attached to cultural preferences which, in retrospect, seemed rather immature. The “frontier” with its cowboys, Indians and adventurers, once again became the touchstone of American manhood, to the virtues exalted by Theodore Roosevelt and Buffalo Bill Cody, the most famous Americans of their time. The war against Spain, precipitated in part by the violent demands of an expansionist national press, showed the whole world that the sleeping giant had recovered from his wounds and was leaving for new exploits. As in the 1840s, when Texas was annexed and the provinces of northern Mexico were conquered, the American nation abandoned itself to its own myth.
