Why go
The Hudson River School, Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol offer markedly different ways of seeing American art. Knowing their place in a longer history helps make sense of a collection’s changing subjects and styles. Literature adds another perspective through writers such as Mark Twain, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson.
The full story
In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, American writers and artists drew heavily on European models. By the mid-nineteenth century, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe and Henry David Thoreau were developing distinctive literary voices. Mark Twain and Walt Whitman followed, while Emily Dickinson’s importance became more widely recognized after her lifetime. Painting also changed direction. The Hudson River School worked within a tradition of landscape naturalism. New York’s 1913 Armory Show introduced European modernist work to a startled public, helping transform the American art scene. Georgia O’Keeffe and Marsden Hartley pursued individual approaches rather than a single national style. Later, abstract expressionists including Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning made abstraction a major presence. Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein developed pop art. Beyond painting, Isadora Duncan and Martha Graham helped establish modern dance, while photographers such as Alfred Stieglitz and Ansel Adams expanded the country’s visual culture.