ABSTRACT
The most straightforward way to survey twentieth-century American painting is to follow mainstream art history (and the terminology of the previous chapter) and talk of a struggle between realism or representationalism and modernism. After aesthetic skirmishes in New York City in the teens between The Eight (or Ash Can School realists) and the early modernists associated with Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 gallery, modernism registered some successes, particularly after the Armory Show of 1913. These were short-lived and American modernism came up against the revival of realism in the Depression of the 1930s, but then reemerged in the 1940s with the triumph of Abstract Express ionism. Post-modernism, in such forms as Pop Art and Conceptual Art, reacted against this dominant strain of American modernism, though its excesses are currently reactivating a call for realism and tradition.
