U.S. Culture

U.S. Culture

photographers and painters. They also published a magazine called Camera

Work to increase awareness about photographic art. In the United States,

photographic art had to compete with the widely available commercial

photography in news and fashion magazines. By the 1950s the tradition of

photojournalism, which presented news stories primarily with photographs,

had produced many outstanding works. In 1955 Steichen, who was director of

photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, called attention to

this work in an exhibition called The Family of Man.

Throughout the 20th century, most professional photographers earned their

living as portraitists or photojournalists, not as artists. One of the

most important exceptions was Ansel Adams, who took majestic photographs

of the Western American landscape. Adams used his art to stimulate social

awareness and to support the conservation cause of the Sierra Club. He

helped found the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art in

1940, and six years later helped establish the photography department at

the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco (now the San Francisco

Art Institute). He also held annual photography workshops at Yosemite

National Park from 1955 to 1981 and wrote a series of influential books on

photographic technique.

Adams's elegant landscape photography was only one small stream in a

growing current of interest in photography as an art form. Early in the

20th century, teacher-turned-photographer Lewis Hine established a

documentary tradition in photography by capturing actual people, places,

and events. Hine photographed urban conditions and workers, including

child laborers. Along with their artistic value, the photographs often

implicitly called for social reform. In the 1930s and 1940s, photographers

joined with other depression-era artists supported by the federal

government to create a photographic record of rural America. Walker Evans,

Dorothea Lange, and Arthur Rothstein, among others, produced memorable and

widely reproduced portraits of rural poverty and American distress during

the Great Depression and during the dust storms of the period.

In 1959, after touring the United States for two years, Swiss-born

photographer Robert Frank published The Americans, one of the landmarks of

documentary photography. His photographs of everyday life in America

introduced viewers to a depressing, and often depressed, America that

existed in the midst of prosperity and world power.

Photographers continued to search for new photographic viewpoints. This

search was perhaps most disturbingly embodied in the work of Diane Arbus.

Her photos of mental patients and her surreal depictions of Americans

altered the viewer’s relationship to the photograph. Arbus emphasized

artistic alienation and forced viewers to stare at images that often made

them uncomfortable, thus changing the meaning of the ordinary reality that

photographs are meant to capture.

American photography continues to flourish. The many variants of art

photography and socially conscious documentary photography are widely

available in galleries, books, and magazines.

A host of other visual arts thrive, although they are far less connected

to traditional fine arts than photography. Decorative arts include, but

are not limited to, art glass, furniture, jewelry, pottery, metalwork, and

quilts. Often exhibited in craft galleries and studios, these decorative

arts rely on ideals of beauty in shape and color as well as an

appreciation of well-executed crafts. Some of these forms are also

developed commercially. The decorative arts provide a wide range of

opportunity for creative expression and have become a means for Americans

to actively participate in art and to purchase art for their homes that is

more affordable than works produced by many contemporary fine artists.

Literature

American literature since World War II is much more diverse in its voices

than ever before. It has also expanded its view of the past as people

rediscovered important sources from non-European traditions, such as

Native American folktales and slave narratives. Rediscovering these

traditions expanded the range of American literary history.

American Jewish writing from the 1940s to the 1960s was the first serious

outpouring of an American literature that contained many voices. Some

Jewish writers had begun to be heard as literary critics and novelists

before World War II, part of a general broadening of American literature

during the first half of the 20th century. After the war, talented Jewish

writers appeared in such numbers and became so influential that they stood

out as a special phenomenon. They represented at once a subgroup within

literature and the new voice of American literature.

Several Jewish American novelists, including Herman Wouk and Norman

Mailer, wrote important books about the war without any special ethnic

resonance. But writers such as novelists Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and

Philip Roth, and storytellers Grace Paley and Cynthia Ozick wrote most

memorably from within the Jewish tradition. Using their Jewish identity

and history as background, these authors asked how moral behavior was

possible in modern America and how the individual could survive in the

contemporary world. Saul Bellow most conspicuously posed these questions,

framing them even before the war was over in his earliest novel, Dangling

Man (1944). He continued to ask them in various ways through a series of

novels paralleling the life cycle, including The Adventures of Augie March

(1953), Herzog (1964), and Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970). One novel in the

series earned a Pulitzer Prize (Humboldt's Gift, 1975). Bellow was awarded

the Nobel Prize for literature in 1976. Like Bellow, Philip Roth and

Bernard Malamud struggled with identity and selfhood as well as with

morality and fate. However, Roth often resisted being categorized as a

Jewish writer. Playwright Arthur Miller rarely invoked his Jewish

heritage, but his plays contained similar existential themes.

Isaac Bashevis Singer was also part of this postwar group of American

Jewish writers. His novels conjure up his lost roots and life in prewar

Poland and the ghostly, religiously inspired fantasies of Jewish existence

in Eastern Europe before World War II. Written in Yiddish and much less

overtly American, Singer’s writings were always about his own specific

past and that of his people. Singer's re-creation of an earlier world as

well as his stories of adjusting to the United States won him a Nobel

Prize in literature in 1978.

Since at least the time of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, American

writers of African descent, such as Richard Wright, sought to express the

separate experiences of their people while demanding to be recognized as

fully American. The difficulty of that pursuit was most completely and

brilliantly realized in the haunting novel Invisible Man (1952) by Ralph

Ellison. African American writers since then have contended with the same

challenge of giving voice to their experiences as a marginalized and often

despised part of America.

Several African American novelists in recent decades have struggled to

represent the wounded manner in which African Americans have participated

in American life. In the 1950s and 1960s, James Baldwin discovered how

much he was part of the United States after a period of self-imposed exile

in Paris, and he wrote about his dark and hurt world in vigorous and

accusatory prose. The subject has also been at the heart of an

extraordinary rediscovery of the African American past in the plays of

Lorraine Hansberry and the fiction of Alice Walker, Charles Johnson, and

Toni Morrison. Probably more than any American writer before her, Morrison

has grappled with the legacy that slavery inflicted upon African Americans

and with what it means to live with a separate consciousness within

American culture. In 1993 Morrison became the first African American

writer to be awarded a Nobel Prize in literature.

Writers from other groups, including Mexican Americans, Native Americans,

Chinese Americans, Korean Americans, and Filipino Americans, also grappled

with their separate experiences within American culture. Among them, N.

Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Louise Erdrich have dealt with

issues of poverty, life on reservations, and mixed ancestry among Native

Americans. Rudolfo Anaya and Sandra Cisneros have dealt with the

experiences of Mexican Americans, and Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston

have explored Chinese American family life.

Even before World War II, writers from the American South reflected on

what it meant to have a separate identity within American culture. The

legacy of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction left the South with a

sense of a lost civilization, embodied in popular literature such as Gone

With the Wind (1936) by Margaret Mitchell, and with questions about how a

Southern experience could frame a literary legacy. Southern literature in

the 20th century draws deeply on distinct speech rhythms, undercurrents of

sin, and painful reflections on evil as part of a distinctly Southern

tradition. William Faulkner most fully expressed these issues in a series

of brilliant and difficult novels set in a fictional Mississippi county.

These novels, most of them published in the 1930s, include The Sound and

the Fury (1929), Light in August (1932), and Absalom, Absalom (1936). For

his contribution, Faulkner received the Nobel Prize in literature in 1949.

More recent Southern writers, such as Carson McCullers, Flannery O'Connor,

Walker Percy, James Dickey, and playwright Tennessee Williams, have

continued this tradition of Southern literature.

In addition to expressing the minority consciousness of Southern

regionalism, Faulkner's novels also reflected the artistic modernism of

20th-century literature, in which reality gave way to frequent

interruptions of fantasy and the writing is characterized by streams of

consciousness rather than by precise sequences in time. Other American

writers, such as Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and E. L. Doctorow

also experimented with different novel forms and tried to make their

writing styles reflect the peculiarities of consciousness in the chaos of

the modern world. Doctorow, for example, in his novel Ragtime juxtaposed

real historical events and people with those he made up. Pynchon

questioned the very existence of reality in The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)

and Gravity’s Rainbow (1973).

Aside from Faulkner, perhaps the greatest modernist novelist writing in

the United States was йmigrй Vladimir Nabokov. Nabokov first wrote in his

native Russian, and then in French, before settling in the United States

and writing in English. Nabokov saw no limits to the possibilities of

artistic imagination, and he believed the artist's ability to manipulate

language could be expressed through any subject. In a series of novels

written in the United States, Nabokov demonstrated that he could develop

any situation, even the most alien and forbidden, to that end. This was

demonstrated in Lolita (1955), a novel about sexual obsession that caused

a sensation and was first banned as obscene.

Despite its obvious achievements, modernism in the United States had its

most profound effect on other forms of literature, especially in poetry

and in a new kind of personal journalism that gradually erased the sharp

distinctions between news reporting, personal reminiscence, and fiction

writing.

20th-Century Poetry

Modern themes and styles of poetry have been part of the American

repertoire since the early part of the 20th century, especially in the

work of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Their works were difficult,

emotionally restrained, full of non-American allusions, and often

inaccessible. After World War II, new poetic voices developed that were

more exuberant and much more American in inspiration and language. The

poets who wrote after the war often drew upon the work of William Carlos

Williams and returned to the legacy of Walt Whitman, which was democratic

in identification and free-form in style. These poets provided postwar

poetry with a uniquely American voice.

The Beatnik, or Beat, poets of the 1950s notoriously followed in Whitman’s

tradition. They adopted a radical ethic that included drugs, sex, art, and

the freedom of the road. Jack Kerouac captured this vision in On the Road

(1957), a quintessential book about Kerouac’s adventures wandering across

the United States. The most significant poet in the group was Allen

Ginsberg, whose sexually explicit poem Howl (1956) became the subject of a

court battle after it was initially banned as obscene. The Beat poets

spanned the country, but adopted San Francisco as their special outpost.

The city continued to serve as an important arena for poetry and

unconventional ideas, especially at the City Lights Bookstore co-owned by

writer and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Other modernist poets included

Gwendolyn Brooks, who retreated from the conventional forms of her early

poetry to write about anger and protest among African Americans, and

Adrienne Rich, who wrote poetry focused on women's rights, needs, and

desires.

Because it is open to expressive forms and innovative speech, modern

poetry is able to convey the deep personal anguish experienced by several

of the most prominent poets of the postwar period, among them Robert

Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Theodore Roethke, Anne Sexton, and John Berryman.

Sometimes called confessional poets, they used poetry to express

nightmarish images of self-destruction. As in painting, removing limits

and conventions on form permitted an almost infinite capacity for

conveying mood, feeling, pain, and inspiration. This personal poetry also

brought American poetry closer to the European modernist tradition of

emotional anguish and madness. Robert Frost, probably the most famous and

beloved of modern American poets, wrote evocative and deeply felt poetry

that conveyed some of these same qualities within a conventional pattern

of meter and rhyme.

Another tradition of modern poetry moved toward playful engagement with

language and the creative process. This tradition was most completely

embodied in the brilliant poetry of Wallace Stevens, whose work dealt with

the role of creative imagination. This tradition was later developed in

the seemingly simple and prosaic poetry of John Ashbery, who created

unconventional works that were sometimes records of their own creation.

Thus, poetry after World War II, like the visual arts, expanded the

possibilities of emotional expression and reflected an emphasis on the

creative process. The idea of exploration and pleasure through unexpected

associations and new ways of viewing reality connected poetry to the

modernism of the visual arts.

Journalism

Modernist sensibilities were also evident in the emergence of a new form

of journalism. Journalism traditionally tried to be factual and objective

in presentation. By the mid-1970s, however, some of America's most

creative writers were using contemporary events to create a new form of

personal reporting. This new approach stretched the boundaries of

journalism and brought it closer to fiction because the writers were

deeply engaged and sometimes personally involved in events. Writers such

as Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, and Joan Didion created a literary

journalism that infused real events with their own passion. In Armies of

the Night (1968), the record of his involvement in the peace movement,

Mailer helped to define this new kind of writing. Capote's In Cold Blood

(1966), the retelling of the senseless killing of a Kansas family, and

Mailer’s story of a murderer's fate in The Executioner's Song (1979)

brought this hyperrealism to chilling consummation. No less vivid were

Didion's series of essays on California culture in the late 1960s and her

reporting of the sensational trial of football star O. J. Simpson in 1995.

Performing Arts

As in other cultural spheres, the performing arts in the United States in

the 20th century increasingly blended traditional and popular art forms.

The classical performing arts—music, opera, dance, and theater—were not a

widespread feature of American culture in the first half of the 20th

century. These arts were generally imported from or strongly influenced by

Europe and were mainly appreciated by the wealthy and well educated.

Traditional art usually referred to classical forms in ballet and opera,

orchestral or chamber music, and serious drama. The distinctions between

traditional music and popular music were firmly drawn in most areas.

During the 20th century, the American performing arts began to incorporate

wider groups of people. The African American community produced great

musicians who became widely known around the country. Jazz and blues

singers such as Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Billie

Holiday spread their sounds to black and white audiences. In the 1930s and

1940s, the swing music of Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, and Glenn Miller

adapted jazz to make a unique American music that was popular around the

country. The American performing arts also blended Latin American

influences beginning in the 20th century. Between 1900 and 1940, Latin

American dances, such as the tango from Argentina and the rumba from Cuba,

were introduced into the United States. In the 1940s a fusion of Latin and

jazz elements was stimulated first by the Afro-Cuban mambo and later on by

the Brazilian bossa nova.

Throughout the 20th century, dynamic classical institutions in the United

States attracted international talent. Noted Russian-born choreographer

George Balanchine established the short-lived American Ballet Company in

the 1930s; later he founded the company that in the 1940s would become the

New York City Ballet. The American Ballet Theatre, also established during

the 1940s, brought in non-American dancers as well. By the 1970s this

company had attracted Soviet defector Mikhail Baryshnikov, an

internationally acclaimed dancer who served as the company’s artistic

director during the 1980s.

In classical music, influential Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, who

composed symphonies using innovative musical styles, moved to the United

States in 1939. German-born pianist, composer, and conductor Andrй Previn,

who started out as a jazz pianist in the 1940s, went on to conduct a

number of distinguished American symphony orchestras. Another Soviet,

cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, became conductor of the National Symphony

Orchestra in Washington, D.C., in 1977.

Some of the most innovative artists in the first half of the 20th century

successfully incorporated new forms into classical traditions. Composers

George Gershwin and Aaron Copland, and dancer Isadora Duncan were notable

examples. Gershwin combined jazz and spiritual music with classical in

popular works such as Rhapsody in Blue (1924) and the opera Porgy and Bess

(1935). Copland developed a unique style that was influenced by jazz and

American folk music. Early in the century, Duncan redefined dance along

more expressive and free-form lines.

Some artists in music and dance, such as composer John Cage and dancer and

choreographer Merce Cunningham, were even more experimental. During the

1930s Cage worked with electronically produced sounds and sounds made with

everyday objects such as pots and pans. He even invented a new kind of

piano. During the late 1930s, avant-garde choreographer Cunningham began

to collaborate with Cage on a number of projects.

Perhaps the greatest, and certainly the most popular, American innovation

was the Broadway musical, which also became a movie staple. Beginning in

the 1920s, the Broadway musical combined music, dance, and dramatic

performance in ways that surpassed the older vaudeville shows and musical

revues but without being as complex as European grand opera. By the 1960s,

this American musical tradition was well established and had produced

extraordinary works by important musicians and lyricists such as George

and Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, Lorenz

Hart, Jerome Kern, and Oscar Hammerstein II. These productions required an

immense effort to coordinate music, drama, and dance. Because of this, the

musical became the incubator of an American modern dance tradition that

produced some of America's greatest choreographers, among them Jerome

Robbins, Gene Kelly, and Bob Fosse.

In the 1940s and 1950s the American musical tradition was so dynamic that

it attracted outstanding classically trained musicians such as Leonard

Bernstein. Bernstein composed the music for West Side Story, an updated

version of Romeo and Juliet set in New York that became an instant classic

in 1957. The following year, Bernstein became the first American-born

conductor to lead a major American orchestra, the New York Philharmonic.

He was an international sensation who traveled the world as an ambassador

of the American style of conducting. He brought the art of classical music

to the public, especially through his "Young People's Concerts,"

television shows that were seen around the world. Bernstein used the many

facets of the musical tradition as a force for change in the music world

and as a way of bringing attention to American innovation.

In many ways, Bernstein embodied a transformation of American music that

began in the 1960s. The changes that took place during the 1960s and 1970s

resulted from a significant increase in funding for the arts and their

increased availability to larger audiences. New York City, the American

center for art performances, experienced an artistic explosion in the

1960s and 1970s. Experimental off-Broadway theaters opened, new ballet

companies were established that often emphasized modern forms or blended

modern with classical (Martha Graham was an especially important

influence), and an experimental music scene developed that included

composers such as Philip Glass and performance groups such as the Guarneri

String Quartet. Dramatic innovation also continued to expand with the

works of playwrights such as Edward Albee, Tony Kushner, and David Mamet.

As the variety of performances expanded, so did the serious crossover

between traditional and popular music forms. Throughout the 1960s and

1970s, an expanded repertoire of traditional arts was being conveyed to

new audiences. Popular music and jazz could be heard in formal settings

such as Carnegie Hall, which had once been restricted to classical music,

while the Brooklyn Academy of Music became a venue for experimental music,

exotic and ethnic dance presentations, and traditional productions of

grand opera. Innovative producer Joseph Papp had been staging Shakespeare

in Central Park since the 1950s. Boston conductor Arthur Fiedler was

playing a mixed repertoire of classical and popular favorites to large

audiences, often outdoors, with the Boston Pops Orchestra. By the mid-

1970s the United States had several world-class symphony orchestras,

including those in Chicago; New York; Cleveland, Ohio; and Philadelphia,

Pennsylvania. Even grand opera was affected. Once a specialized taste that

often required extensive knowledge, opera in the United States increased

in popularity as the roster of respected institutions grew to include

companies in Seattle, Washington; Houston, Texas; and Santa Fe, New

Mexico. American composers such as John Adams and Philip Glass began

composing modern operas in a new minimalist style during the 1970s and

1980s.

The crossover in tastes also influenced the Broadway musical, probably

America's most durable music form. Starting in the 1960s, rock music

became an ingredient in musical productions such as Hair (1967). By the

1990s, it had become an even stronger presence in musicals such as Bring

in Da Noise, Bring in Da Funk (1996), which used African American music

and dance traditions, and Rent (1996) a modern, rock version of the

classic opera La Bohиme. This updating of the musical opened the theater

to new ethnic audiences who had not previously attended Broadway shows, as

well as to young audiences who had been raised on rock music.

Performances of all kinds have become more available across the country.

This is due to both the sheer increase in the number of performance groups

as well as to advances in transportation. In the last quarter of the 20th

century, the number of major American symphonies doubled, the number of

resident theaters increased fourfold, and the number of dance companies

increased tenfold. At the same time, planes made it easier for artists to

travel. Artists and companies regularly tour, and they expand the

audiences for individual artists such as performance artist Laurie

Anderson and opera singer Jessye Norman, for musical groups such as the

Juilliard Quartet, and for dance troupes such as the Alvin Ailey American

Dance Theater. Full-scale theater productions and musicals first presented

on Broadway now reach cities across the country. The United States, once a

provincial outpost with a limited European tradition in performance, has

become a flourishing center for the performing arts.

Libraries and Museums

Libraries, museums, and other collections of historical artifacts have

been a primary means of organizing and preserving America’s legacy. In the

20th century, these institutions became an important vehicle for educating

the public about the past and for providing knowledge about the society of

which all Americans are a part.

Libraries

Private book collections go back to the early European settlement of the

New World, beginning with the founding of the Harvard University library

in 1638. Colleges and universities acquire books because they are a

necessary component of higher education. University libraries have many of

the most significant and extensive book collections. In addition to

Harvard’s library, the libraries at Yale University, Columbia University,

the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in Urbana, and the

University of California in Berkeley and Los Angeles are among the most

prominent, both in scope and in number of holdings. Many of these

libraries also contain important collections of journals, newspapers,

pamphlets, and government documents, as well as private papers, letters,

pictures, and photographs. These libraries are essential for preserving

America’s history and for maintaining the records of individuals,

families, institutions, and other groups.

Books in early America were scarce and expensive. Although some Americans

owned books, Benjamin Franklin made a much wider range of books and other

printed materials available to many more people when he created the first

generally recognized public library in 1731. Although Franklin’s Library

Company of Philadelphia loaned books only to paying subscribers, the

library became the first one in the nation to make books available to

people who did not own them. During the colonial period Franklin’s idea

was adopted by cities such as Boston, Massachusetts; Providence, Rhode

Island; and Charleston, South Carolina.

These libraries set the precedent for the free public libraries that began

to spread through the United States in the 1830s. Public libraries were

seen as a way to encourage literacy among the citizens of the young

republic as well as a means to provide education in conjunction with the

public schools that were being set up at the same time. In 1848 Boston

founded the first major public library in the nation. By the late 19th

century, libraries were considered so essential to the nation's well-being

that industrialist Andrew Carnegie donated part of his enormous fortune to

the construction of library buildings. Because Carnegie believed that

libraries were a public obligation, he expected the books to be

contributed through public expenditure. Since the 19th century, locally

funded public libraries have become part of the American landscape, often

occupying some of the most imposing public buildings in cities such as New

York, Los Angeles, Detroit, and Philadelphia. The belief that the

knowledge and enjoyment that books provide should be accessible to all

Americans also resulted in bookmobiles that serve in inner cities and in

rural counties.

In addition to the numerous public libraries and university collections,

the United States boasts two major libraries with worldwide stature: the

Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and the New York Public Library.

In 1800 Congress passed legislation founding the Library of Congress,

which was initially established to serve the needs of the members of

Congress. Since then, this extraordinary collection has become one of the

world's great libraries and a depository for every work copyrighted in the

United States. Housed in three monumental buildings named after Presidents

John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, the library is open to

the public and maintains major collections of papers, photographs, films,

maps, and music in addition to more than 17 million books.

The New York Public Library was founded in 1895. The spectacular and

enormous building that today houses the library in the heart of the city

opened in 1911 with more than a million volumes. The library is guarded by

a famous set of lion statues, features a world-famous reading room, and

contains more than 40 million catalogued items. Although partly funded

through public dollars, the library also actively seeks funds from private

sources for its operations.

Institutions such as these libraries are fundamental to the work of

scholars, who rely on the great breadth of library collections. Scholars

also rely on many specialized library collections throughout the country.

These collections vary greatly in the nature of their holdings and their

affiliations. The Schmulowitz Collection of Wit and Humor at the San

Francisco Public Library contains more than 20,000 volumes in 35

languages. The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem,

part of the New York Public Library, specializes in the history of

Africans around the world. The Schlesinger Library on the History of Women

in America, located at Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in

Massachusetts, houses the papers of prominent American women such as Susan

B. Anthony and Amelia Earhart. The Bancroft Collection of Western

Americana and Latin Americana is connected with the University of

California at Berkeley. The Huntington Library in San Marino, California,

was established by American railroad executive Henry Huntington and

contains a collection of rare and ancient books and manuscripts. The

Newberry Library in Chicago, one of the most prestigious research

libraries in the nation, contains numerous collections of rare books,

maps, and manuscripts.

Scholars of American history and culture also use the vast repository of

the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, D.C., and

its local branches. As the repository and publisher of federal documents,

the National Archives contain an extraordinary array of printed material,

ranging from presidential papers and historical maps to original

government documents such as the Declaration of Independence, the

Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. It houses hundreds of millions of

books, journals, photos, and other government papers that document the

life of the American people and its government. The library system is

deeply entrenched in the cultural life of the American people, who have

from their earliest days insisted on the importance of literacy and

education, not just for the elite but for all Americans.

Museums

The variety of print resources available in libraries is enormously

augmented by the collections housed in museums. Although people often

think of museums as places to view art, in fact museums house a great

variety of collections, from rocks to baseball memorabilia. In the 20th

century, the number of museums exploded. And by the late 20th century, as

institutions became increasingly aware of their important role as

interpreters of culture, they attempted to bring their collections to the

general public. Major universities have historically also gathered various

kinds of collections in museums, sometimes as a result of gifts. The Yale

University Art Gallery, for example, contains an important collection of

American arts, including paintings, silver, and furniture, while the

Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology at the University of California at

Berkeley specializes in archaeological objects and Native American

artifacts.

The earliest museums in the United States grew out of private collections,

and throughout the 19th century they reflected the tastes and interests of

a small group. Often these groups included individuals who cultivated a

taste for the arts and for natural history, so that art museums and

natural history museums often grew up side by side. American artist

Charles Willson Peale established the first museum of this kind in

Philadelphia in the late 18th century.

The largest and most varied collection in the United States is contained

in the separate branches of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington,

D.C. The Smithsonian, founded in 1846 as a research institution, developed

its first museums in the 1880s. It now encompasses 16 museums devoted to

various aspects of American history, as well as to artifacts of everyday

life and technology, aeronautics and space, gems and geology, and natural

history.

The serious public display of art began when the Metropolitan Museum of

Art in New York City, founded in 1870, moved to its present location in

Central Park in 1880. At its installation, the keynote speaker announced

that the museum’s goal was education, connecting the museum to other

institutions with a public mission. The civic leaders, industrialists, and

artists who supported the Metropolitan Museum, and their counterparts who

established the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Art Institute of Chicago,

and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, were also collectors of fine art.

Their collections featured mainly works by European masters, but also

Asian and American art. They often bequeathed their collections to these

museums, thus shaping the museum’s policies and holdings. Their taste in

art helped define and develop the great collections of art in major

metropolitan centers such as New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Boston.

In several museums, such as the Metropolitan and the National Gallery of

Art in Washington, D.C., collectors created institutions whose holdings

challenged the cultural treasures of the great museums of Europe.

Funding

Museums continued to be largely elite institutions through the first half

of the 20th century, supported by wealthy patrons eager to preserve

collections and to assert their own definitions of culture and taste.

Audiences for most art museums remained an educated minority of the

population through the end of the 19th century and into the 20th century.

By the second decade of the 20th century, the tastes of this elite became

more varied. In many cases, women within the families of the original art

patrons (such as Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller,

and Peggy Guggenheim) encouraged the more avant-garde artists of the

modern period. Women founded new institutions to showcase modern art, such

as the Museum of Modern Art (established by three women in 1929) and the

Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Although these museums still

catered to small, educated, cosmopolitan groups, they expanded the

definition of refined taste to include more nontraditional art. They also

encouraged others to become patrons for new artists, such as the abstract

expressionists in the mid-20th century, and helped establish the United

States as a significant place for art and innovation after World War II.

Although individual patronage remained the most significant source of

funding for the arts throughout the 20th century, private foundations

began to support various arts institutions by the middle of the century.

Among these, the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Rockefeller

Foundation were especially important in the 1920s and 1930s, and the Ford

Foundation in the 1960s. The federal government also became an active

sponsor of the arts during the 20th century. Its involvement had important

consequences for expanding museums and for creating a larger audience.

The federal government first began supporting the arts during the Great

Depression of the 1930s through New Deal agencies, which provided monetary

assistance to artists, musicians, photographers, actors, and directors.

The Work Projects Administration also helped museums to survive the

depression by providing jobs to restorers, cataloguers, clerical workers,

carpenters, and guards. At the same time, innovative arrangements between

wealthy individuals and the government created a new kind of joint

patronage for museums. In the most notable of these, American financier,

industrialist, and statesman Andrew W. Mellon donated his extensive art

collection and a gallery to the federal government in 1937 to serve as the

nucleus for the National Gallery of Art. The federal government provides

funds for the maintenance and operation of the National Gallery, while

private donations from foundations and corporations pay for additions to

the collection as well as for educational and research programs.

Government assistance during the Great Depression set a precedent for the

federal government to start funding the arts during the 1960s, when

Congress appropriated money for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA)

as part of the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities. The NEA

provides grants to individuals and nonprofit organizations for the

cultivation of the arts, although grants to institutions require private

matching funds. The need for matching funds increased private and state

support of all kinds, including large donations from newer arts patrons

such as the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund and the Pew Charitable

Trusts. Large corporations such as the DuPont Company, International

Business Machines Corporation (IBM), and the Exxon Corporation also

donated to the arts.

Expansion

The increased importance placed on art throughout the 20th century helped

fuel a major expansion in museums. By the late 1960s and 1970s, art

museums were becoming aware of their potential for popular education and

pleasure. Audiences for museums increased as museums received more funding

and became more willing to appeal to the public with blockbuster shows

that traveled across the country. One such show, The Treasures of

Tutankhamun, which featured ancient Egyptian artifacts, toured the country

from 1976 to 1979. Art museums increasingly sought attractions that would

appeal to a wider audience, while at the same time expanding the

definition of art. This effort resulted in museums exhibiting even

motorcycles as art, as did the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1998.

Museums also began to expand the kinds of art and cultural traditions they

exhibited. By the 1990s, more and more museums displayed natural and

cultural artifacts and historical objects from non-European societies.

These included objects ranging from jade carvings, baskets, and ceramics

to calligraphy, masks, and furniture. Egyptian artifacts had been

conspicuous in the holdings of New York's Metropolitan Museum and the

Brooklyn Museum since the early 20th century. The opening in 1989 of two

Smithsonian museums in Washington, D.C., the National Museum of African

Art and the National Museum of the American Indian, indicated an awareness

of a much broader definition of the American cultural heritage. The Asian

Art Museum of San Francisco and the Freer Gallery at the Smithsonian in

Washington, D.C., maintain collections of Asian art and cultural objects.

The 1987 opening of the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, a new Smithsonian

museum dedicated to Asian and Near Eastern arts, confirmed the importance

of this tradition.

Collectors and museums did not neglect the long-venerated Western

tradition, as was clear from the personal collection of ancient Roman and

Greek art owned by American oil executive and financier J. Paul Getty.

Opened to the public in 1953, the museum named after him was located in

Malibu, California, but grew so large that in 1997 the J. Paul Getty

Museum expanded into a new Getty Center, a complex of six buildings in Los

Angeles. By the end of the 20th century, Western art was but one among an

array of brilliant cultural legacies that together celebrate the human

experience and the creativity of the American past.

Memorials and Monuments

The need to memorialize the past has a long tradition and is often

associated with wars, heroes, and battles. In the United States, monuments

exist throughout the country, from the Revolutionary site of Bunker Hill

to the many Civil War battlefields. The nation’s capital features a large

number of monuments to generals, war heroes, and leaders. Probably the

greatest of all these is Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, where

there are thousands of graves of veterans of American wars, including the

Tomb of the Unknowns and the gravesite of President John F. Kennedy. In

addition to these traditional monuments to history, millions of people are

drawn to the polished black wall that is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial,

located on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. The memorial is a stark

reminder of the losses suffered in a war in which more than 58,000

Americans died and of a time of turmoil in the nation.

No less important than monuments to war heroes are memorials to other

victims of war. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which opened

in 1993 in Washington, D.C., is dedicated to documenting the extermination

of millions of Jews and others by the Nazis during World War II. It

contains photographs, films, oral histories, and artifacts as well as a

research institute, and has become an enormous tourist attraction. It is

one example of a new public consciousness about museums as important

sources of information and places in which to come to terms with important

and painful historical events. Less elaborate Holocaust memorials have

been established in cities across the country, including New York, San

Francisco, and Los Angeles.

Monuments to national heroes are an important part of American culture.

These range from the memorials to Presidents George Washington, Thomas

Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.,

to the larger-than-life faces of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and

Theodore Roosevelt carved into Mount Rushmore in South Dakota. Some

national memorials also include monuments to ordinary citizens, such as

the laborers, farmers, women, and African Americans who are part of the

new Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, D.C.

Americans also commemorate popular culture with museums and monuments such

as the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland, Ohio, and the

Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York. These

collections of popular culture are as much a part of American heritage as

are fine arts museums and statues of national heroes. As a result of this

wide variety of institutions and monuments, more people know about the

breadth of America’s past and its many cultural influences. This new

awareness has even influenced the presentation of artifacts in natural

history museums. Where these once emphasized the differences among human

beings and their customs by presenting them as discrete and unrelated

cultures, today’s museums and monuments emphasize the flow of culture

among people.

The expansion in types of museums and the increased attention to audience

is due in part to new groups participating in the arts and in discussions

about culture. In the early 20th century, many museums were supported by

wealthy elites. Today’s museums seek to attract a wider range of people

including students from inner cities, families from the suburbs, and

Americans of all backgrounds. The diverse American population is eager to

have its many pasts and talents enshrined. The funding now available

through foundations and federal and state governments provides assistance.

This development has not been without resistance. In the 1980s and 1990s

people challenged the role of the federal government in sponsoring certain

controversial art and culture forms, posing threats to the existence of

the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the

Humanities. Nevertheless, even these controversies have made clearer how

much art and cultural institutions express who we are as a people.

Americans possess many different views and pasts, and they constantly

change what they create, how they communicate, and what they appreciate

about their past.

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