Sun by Arthur Dove

Skyscrapers quickly became symbols of modernism in America. Philadelphia's City Hall was the country’s tallest building until the second decade of the 20th century, when the Woolworth Building and other tall buildings were built in New York City. America's early modernist artists tilted and merged these tall buildings in their work to suggest urban dynamism and convey something of the dizzying sensation pedestrians experience while walking by a skyscraper. Abstraction Stuart Davis created a distinctly American art, often including in his compositions signs and words that were recognizable images from American culture. His works were influenced by jazz, among other things, and are considered to be precursors of the later pop art movement. Abstraction was painted in 1937.

Abstraction by Stuart Davis

Although Europe had been the acknowledged center of modern art in the first half of the 20th century, most critics now agree that after World War II (1939-1945), the center tended to shift to the United States. In the 1930s some American artists staged a strong rebellion against European influences in American art. Grant Wood's American Gothic was typical of a movement called regionalism, whose agenda was to celebrate what was typically American, and to do it in a style that avoided any references to European modernism. But for other American artists the regionalists’ embrace of nationalism could only hinder the arts.

The pop art movement of the 1960s took inspiration from the use of everyday objects by Johns and Rauschenberg. The pop artists—including Americans Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, and Tom Wesselmann—established a stronger connection than ever before between high art and popular culture. In Whaam! (1963, Tate Gallery, London) Lichtenstein created art from something that had never before been associated with high art: the comic book. Lichtenstein reproduced comic strips almost exactly, down to the mechanical dots created by the printing process. But what was most original about Lichtenstein's image was that once separated from the other panels of the comic strip, it no longer told a story. Taken out of context, the image had its own abstract power. Moreover, the machine-printed dots gained a distinctive new quality when Lichtenstein painted them by hand.

Andy Warhol preferred another strategy. Like Judd, he frequently relegated the execution of his pieces to assistants. In his Atomic Bomb (1965, Saatchi Collection, London), and in similar pieces showing car crashes and electric chairs, Warhol took a shocking image from a newspaper and repeated it again and again. These works demonstrated how repetition—made possible by mechanical reproduction techniques—can sometimes desensitize an audience to an image’s content.