| American Art
Celebrate America's rich artistic heritage with framed prints from ARTinaClick.com. Beautifully framed prints feature over two centuries of artists and major art movements which influenced the history of art throughout the world, from the Hudson River School of landscape painting through American Impressionism, Illustration and the decorative arts, American Folk Art, Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. Thomas Cole was the founder of the Hudson River School which, in Thomas Cole's work, River in the Catskills, adopted the English landscape painter's emphasis on nature and infused it with local American color. In addition to Thomas Cole, members of the Hudson River School movement include Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Church. Albert Bierstadte enjoyed success early in his career depicting the rugged American West. In such monumental canvases as "Sunrise in the Yosemite Valley", Albert Bierstadt captures, with detailed staccato brushwork, the vitality of nature. Frederic Church was a dominant figure in the second generation of the Hudson River School. In framed prints such as "Niagra Falls" and "Scene on Catskill Creek", Frederic Church evokes the spirituality of natural forces; a major concern of Romanticism. The American Impressionists, which include, among others, Childe Hassam, Mary Cassatt and William Merritt Chase, were inspired by nature and light as were the French Impressionists, Claude Monet and Auguste Renoir. William Merritt Chase, an American painter and influential teacher, inspired generations of artists such as Georgia O'Keeffe. Louis Comfort Tiffany created an empire in the decorative arts with his famous studio that produced stained glass lamps, vases and windows in techniques that cannot be imitated. In the 1950's, a new generation of painters were giving birth to a new art, American Expressionism, which shifted the emphasis of the art world from Paris to New York.
A discussion of Abstract Expressionism begins with artist Jackson Pollock, as his drip paintings liberated future generations of artists and encouraged the viewer to have a purely emotional response to an image. Pop Art of the 1960's was a direct reaction to Abstract Expressionism. Artist involved with the Pop Art movement, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Jasper Johns, sought to create more concrete images and to respond to the social condition. Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Jasper Johns produced images that bridged the gap between low art and high art with their paintings of commercial images such as soup cans, comic strips, flags and targets.
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