Visual art of the United States or American art 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 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.
George Benjamin Luks was an American artist, identified with the aggressively realistic Ashcan School of American painting.
John French Sloan was an American painter and etcher. He is considered to be one of the founders of the Ashcan school of American art. He was also a member of the group known as The Eight. He is best known for his urban genre scenes and ability to capture the essence of neighborhood life in New York City, often observed through his Chelsea studio window. Sloan has been called the premier artist of the Ashcan School, and also a realist painter who embraced the principles of Socialism, though he himself disassociated his art from his politics.
Colleen Browning was an Anglo-American realist and magical realist painter.
Richard Estes is an American artist, best known for his photorealist paintings. The paintings generally consist of reflective, clean, and inanimate city and geometric landscapes. He is regarded as one of the founders of the international photo-realist movement of the late 1960s, with such painters as John Baeder, Chuck Close, Robert Cottingham, Audrey Flack, Ralph Goings, and Duane Hanson. Author Graham Thompson writes "One demonstration of the way photography became assimilated into the art world is the success of photorealist painting in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It is also called super-realism or hyper-realism and painters like Richard Estes, Denis Peterson, Audrey Flack, and Chuck Close often worked from photographic stills to create paintings that appeared to be photographs."
Peter Blume was an American painter and sculptor. His work contained elements of folk art, Precisionism, Parisian Purism, Cubism, and Surrealism.
Philip Martin Pearlstein was an American painter best known for Modernist Realist nudes. Cited by critics as the preeminent figure painter of the 1960s to 2000s, he led a revival in realist art.
Everett Shinn was an American painter and member of the urban realist Ashcan School.
Classical Realism is an artistic movement in the late-20th and early 21st century in which drawing and painting place a high value upon skill and beauty, combining elements of 19th-century neoclassicism and realism.
Janet Fish is a contemporary American realist artist. Through oil painting, lithography, and screenprinting, she explores the interaction of light with everyday objects in the still life genre. Many of her paintings include elements of transparency, reflected light, and multiple overlapping patterns depicted in bold, high color values. She has been credited with revitalizing the still life genre.
The contemporary realism movement is a worldwide style of painting which came into existence c. 1960s and early 1970s. Featuring a straightforward approach to representation practiced by artists such as Philip Pearlstein, Alex Katz, Jack Beal and Neil Welliver. The movement refers to figurative art works created in a natural yet highly objective style. Today the term Contemporary Realism encompasses all post-1970 sculptors and painters whose discipline is representational art, where the object is to portray the "real" and not the "ideal".
Mitchell Siporin (1910–1976) was a Social Realist American painter.
Lester Johnson was an American artist and educator. Johnson was a member of the Second Generation of the New York School during the late 1950s. The subject of much of his work is the human figure. His style is considered by critics and art historians to be in the figurative expressionist mode.
Harold Jacob Bruder is an American realist painter. In 1984, he was honored with a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. He is a former professor of art, working with the Kansas City Art Institute, Pratt Institute, National Academy of Design, Aspen Art Museum, and Queens College of the City University of New York (CUNY). He served as the Chairman of the Art Department at CUNY, where he taught painting and drawing for 30 years, retiring in 1995, as Professor Emeritus.
Miklos Suba was a Hungarian-born American artist. Trained as an architect, he devoted his time to both architecture and art until 1940 when he dedicated the remainder of his life to painting subject matter in Brooklyn, New York. He is classified as a member of the precisionism movement.
Ellen Lanyon was a painter and printmaker from Chicago, Illinois. She received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), her MFA from the University of Iowa School of Art and Art History and studied restoration at the Courtauld Institute of Art. She also received an honorary doctorate from SAIC. Her works are in the permanent collections of many major American museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Ulrich Museum.
Enella Benedict was an American realism and landscape painter. She taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was a founder and director for nearly 50 years for the Art School at the Hull House.
Edna Reindel was a subtle Surrealist and American Regionalist painter, printmaker, illustrator, sculptor, muralist, and teacher active from the 1920s to the 1960s. She is best known for her work in large-scale murals, New England landscapes, and later for her commissioned work of women workers in WWII shipyard and aircraft industries as published in Life magazine in 1944.
William Nichols is an American artist known for highly detailed, tactile landscape paintings that combine physical scale with intimacy. His work depicts unassuming gardens, forests, ponds, and streams rather than grand vistas, in dense, close-up screens of foliage, thicket or water that immerse viewers within the experience rather outside it. Nichols developed his mature style in the 1970s, combining painterly traditions going back to Impressionism with reemerging movements such as Realism and Photorealism; critic John Perreault called his approach, "Photo-Impressionism." He has exhibited throughout the United States and abroad, including at OK Harris Gallery in New York (1979–2013), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Milwaukee Museum of Art, Butler Institute of American Art, Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts (Taiwan), and Gulbenkian Museum (Lisbon); his work belongs to many private and public museum collections. In addition to reviews in national publications, Nichols's work appears in several art historical surveys of Realism and landscape painting, including The Artist and the American Landscape and Contemporary American Realism Since 1960, among others. Critic Mac McCloud observed that Nichols's "meticulous craft and precise observation of shape, edge, color and light" rendered his work "almost beyond reality […] alive with growth and transformation, teeming with insects and sweltering weather and yet, in the eternal aesthetic paradox it is motionless." Gallerist Ivan Karp wrote, "the vital pulse" of Nichols's paintings defies "the conviction that 400 years of depictions of the natural world nullify the ability of living artists to produce landscapes of high consequence."
