Visual art of American is visual art made in the United States or by U.S. artists. Before colonization there were many flourishing traditions of Native American art, and where the Spanish colonized Spanish Colonial architecture and the accompanying styles in other media were quickly in place. Early colonial art on the East Coast initially relied on artists from Europe, with John White (1540-c. 1593) the earliest example. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, artists primarily painted portraits, and some landscapes in a style based mainly on English painting. Furniture-makers imitating English styles and similar craftsmen were also established in the major cities, but in the English colonies, locally made pottery remained resolutely utilitarian until the 19th century, with fancy products imported.
But in the later 18th century two U.S. artists, Benjamin West and John Singleton Copley, became the most successful painters in London of history painting, then regarded as the highest form of art, giving the first sign of an emerging force in Western art. American artists who remained at home became increasingly skilled, although there was little awareness of them in Europe. In the early 19th century the infrastructure to train artists began to be established, and from 1820 the Hudson River School began to produce Romantic landscape painting that was original and matched the huge scale of U.S. landscapes. The American Revolution produced a demand for patriotic art, especially history painting, while other artists recorded the frontier country. A parallel development taking shape in rural U.S. was the American craft movement, which began as a reaction to the industrial revolution.
After 1850 Academic art in the European style flourished, and as richer Americans became very wealthy, the flow of European art, new and old, to the US began; this has continued ever since. Museums began to be opened to display much of this. Developments in modern art in Europe came to the U.S. from exhibitions in New York City such as the Armory Show in 1913. After World War II, New York replaced Paris as the center of the art world. Since then many U.S. movements have shaped Modern and Postmodern art. Art in the United States today covers a huge range of styles.
Beginnings
See also: Painting in the Americas before European colonization
One of the first painters to visit British America was John White (c. 1540 – c. 1606), who made important watercolor records of Native American life on the Eastern seaboard (now British Museum). White first visited America as the artist and map-maker for an expedition of exploration, and in the early years of the Colonial period most other artists trained in Western styles were officers in the army and navy, whose training included sketching landscapes. Eventually the English settlements grew large enough to support professional artists, mostly portrait-painters, often largely self-taught. Among the earliest was John Smybert(1688–1751), a trained artist from London who emigrated in 1728 intending to be a professor of fine art, but instead became a portrait painter and printseller in Boston. His friend Peter Pelham was a painter and printmaker. Both needed other sources of income and had shops. Meanwhile, the Spanish territories later to be American could see mostly religious art in the late Baroque style, mostly by native artists, and Native American cultures continued to produce art in their various traditions.
The American Southwest
Main articles: Art of the American Southwest and Visual arts by indigenous peoples of the Americas § Southwest
Following the first World War, the completion of the Santa Fe Railroad enabled American settlers to travel across the west, as far as the California coast. New artists' colonies started growing up around Santa Fe and Taos, the artists' primary subject matter being the native people and landscapes of the Southwest.
Images of the Southwest became a popular form of advertising, used most significantly by the Santa Fe Railroad to entice settlers to come west and enjoy the "unsullied landscapes." Walter Ufer, Bert Geer Phillips, E. Irving Couse, William Henry Jackson, Marsden Hartley, Andrew Dasburg, and Georgia O'Keeffe were some of the more prolific artists of the Southwest. Georgia O'Keeffe, who was born in the late 19th century, became known for her paintings featuring flowers, bones, and landscapes of New Mexico as seen in Ram's Head White Hollyhock and Little Hills. O'Keeffe visited the Southwest in 1929 and moved there permanently in 1949; she lived and painted there until she died in 1986 