American Painting - From its beginnings to the Armory Show

The Story of American painting begins in the Colonial period, in the seventeenth century. «The most obvious fact about early American painting,» writes Jules David Prown, «is that there was so little of it. When European colonists began to establish permanent settlements on the eastern flank of North America, they had other things on their minds than the painting of pictures. Faced with a pressing necessity to satisfy their primary life needs—food, shelter, clothing—they adopted a way of life and a view of the world that was necessarily pragmatic. For them the arts seemed dangerously irrelevant, a distraction from the serious tasks at hand. That pragmatic attitude has characterized American culture from its inception to the present day, and has profoundly affected the trajectory of American art.»