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Encyclopedia of American Immigration, 2nd Edition

Art

by David Peck

Significance: American art, like American music and literature, has been immeasurably enriched by the contributions of artists from every land coming to the United States to add their unique ideas and styles to the artistic tapestry.

Few art forms created in the United States have been completely free of foreign roots. American music, literature, and art have all been shaped from the beginning by artistic trends, figures, and movements from other countries, by artists immigrating to the United States, and by those moving back and forth between the United States and other countries. While scholars consider jazz to be the United States’ unique contribution to the world’s music, they agree that it would not be what it is without its African, Caribbean, and Latin elements. American folk music has its tangled roots in Irish, Scottish, and English ballads, and the American musical goes back to George Gershwin and Irving Berlin (himself an immigrant from Russia) to W. S. Gilbert and Arthur S. Sullivan in England, and back even further to a long tradition of the European music halls. Twentieth-century American literature is notable for the modernism of William Faulkner and other native-born writers, but modernism is European in origin and was fostered by Americans such as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein—members of the so-called lost generation—who emigrated to the Europe of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and others, as well as by Europeans bringing modernist voices to the United States, such as the German novelist Thomas Mann, who immigrated in 1938.

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Photo via iStock.com/isaxar. [Used under license.]

Photography, Architecture, and Sculpture

The history of the visual arts is a similar story of cross-fertilization and immigrant imagination, coming from every direction of the globe. American photography is hard to imagine without the studies of locomotion by Eadweard Muybridge, who was born and died in England but who did his most important photographic experiments as a resident in the United States; the social documentation of immigrant life by the Danish-born Jacob Riis ( How the Other Half Lives, 1890); or the studies of San Francisco’s Chinatown during the 1890s by the German-born Arnold Genthe. Also notable are the creative work of Luxembourgian-born Edward Steichen from the early twentieth century up to the 1955 exhibition The Family of Man that he curated at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the most popular photography exhibition ever mounted; the abstract experiments of Lászly Moholy-Nagy, who came to the United States from Hungary in 1937; and the work of Ben Shahn (Lithuania, 1906), Andreas Feininger (France, 1939), and Robert Frank (Switzerland, 1947).

From its beginnings, American architecture has been an eclectic mix of styles, but it emerged during the twentieth century as leader of the International Style thanks in large part to immigrant artists: Louis Kahn (Estonia) came to Philadelphia in 1905, Rudolf Schindler (Austria) to Chicago in 1914, and both Richard Neutra (Austria) and Eero Saarinen (Finland) to the United States in 1923. The biggest boost to American architecture, as to other American art forms, was the rise of Nazi Germany. With the closure of the influential Bauhaus school for architecture and design in Berlin in 1933, painter and art theoretician Josef Albers was hired at the newly opened Black Mountain College in North Carolina; Lászly Moholy-Nagy took his experimental design, sculpture, and photography to Chicago; and Walter Gropius became a professor of architecture at Harvard University and was later followed in that chair by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who had headed the Bauhaus after Gropius left. Ulrich Franzen (Germany) studied with Gropius at Harvard and then went to work for another immigrant artist, I. M. Pei, who had immigrated from China in 1935.

Sculpture in America tells a similar story. Possibly the best-known sculptor of the nineteenth century was Augustus Saint-Gaudens, born in Ireland of French descent and brought to the United States as an infant, who created public memorials such as the Diana statue at Madison Square Garden in New York (1891) and the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial in Boston Common (1884-97). Alexander Milne Calder, the grandfather of the twentieth-century American artist Alexander Calder, came from Scotland in 1868 to create public sculptures, such as the statue of William Penn atop Philadelphia’s city hall. Other sculptors from Europe included Arthur Lee (who emigrated from Norway to the United States in 1890), Louise Nevelson (Russia, 1905), Louise Bourgeois (France, 1938), Eva Hesse (Germany, 1939), Jacques Lipchitz (Lithuania, 1941), and Naum Gabo (Russia, 1946).

Painting

The history of American painting is studded with immigrant names. John James Audubon, the United States’ most famous wildlife painter, was born in Haiti of French parents and came to the United States in 1803. Thomas Cole, the ablest of early American landscape painters, came from England in 1818. Albert Bierstadt’s panoramic landscapes have defined the American West ever since he came to the United States from Germany in 1832. Still-life painter William Michael Harnett came to the United States from Ireland in 1849. One of the most enduring American images, the painting of Washington Crossing the Delaware, was painted by the German-born Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze in 1851.

The second major wave of European immigration, from approximately 1880 to 1920, included a number of painters who would gain fame in the United States. The 1913 Armory Show in New York first introduced the United States to modern European artists such as Paul Cézanne, Marc Chagall, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso. It also included a number of immigrant artists, such as the painters Oscar Bluemner (from Germany, 1892), Abraham Walkowitz (Russia, 1893), Joseph Stella (Italy, 1896), and Jules Pascin (Bulgaria, 1914), and the sculptors Gaston Lachaise (France, 1906), Elie Nadelman (Russia, 1914), and Alexander Archipenko (Russia, 1923). The most controversial work at that show was Nude Descending a Staircase (1912), a painting by Marcel Duchamp, who worked intermittently in the United States after 1915 and became a U.S. citizen in 1955.

Other noted immigrant artists from this period include Max Weber (who came from Russia in 1891), Louis Lozowick (Ukraine, 1906), Peter Blume (Russia, 1911), and Raphael Soyer (Russia, 1912). Artists continued to immigrate to America during the twentieth century, and especially after the rise of Nazi Germany. George Grosz came from Germany in 1932, Hans Richter in 1941, and Max Beckmann in 1947. The noted abstract painter Piet Mondrian electrified the American art scene when he arrived from the Netherlands in 1940, and the famed Mexican muralists of the 1920s and 1930s—Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros—were all residents of the United States at one time or another and worked on a number of mural projects in New York, Los Angeles, Detroit, and other cities. The legacy of these muralists’ powerful social realism has lasted since then, and one of Siqueiros’s students when he taught in New York City during the 1930s was Jackson Pollock, who would become one of the most famous abstract expressionist painters, dominating American art after World War II.

Many of the postwar painters were immigrants: Mark Rothko came from Russia in 1913, Jack Tworkov from Poland the same year, Arshile Gorky from Turkish Armenia in 1920, Willem de Kooning from the Netherlands in 1926, Hans Hoffman from Bavaria in 1932, and Saul Steinberg from Romania in 1941. American art since the 1950s has continued to see an influx of immigrant artists; the painter David Hockney (born in Bradford, England) settled in Los Angeles in 1976, and the sculptors Niki de Saint Phalle (France, 1930), Claes Oldenburg (Sweden, 1936), and Christo and Jeanne-Claude (Bulgaria and Morocco, 1964) along with the architect Paolo Soleri (Italy, 1947) have transformed the American land-scape with their work.

Latin American, Asian, and Middle Eastern Influences

American art has been enriched not only by Europeans but also increasingly by people from other continents. Since 1980, waves of immigrants have come from Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, and American art has experienced an infusion of styles and images from all these directions. The Mexican tin retablo tradition of altar paintings lives on in the early twenty-first century, as do Aztec and Aztlán images and myths that have infused the art of the Southwest for centuries and can be found in the multimedia assemblages of Guillermo Pulido, the prints of Enrique Chagoya, and the quilts of Maria Enriquez de Allen, all three of whom immigrated to the United States from Mexico. Other notable Latino artists include the painters Luis Cruz Azaceta, Juan González, and César Trasobares, from Cuba; the painter and sculptor Lito Cavalcante, from Brazil; the painter, sculptor, and woodcut artist Nayl Ojeda, from Uruguay; and the painter Jorge Tacia, from Chile.

The influx of Asian artists has also been significant. Chinese painters Han Hsiang-ning (H. N. Han) and Bing Lee, Korean video artist Nam June Paik, and Japanese painters Masami Teraoka, Henry Sugimoto, and Yuriko Yamaguchi all immigrated to the United States during the twentieth century, as did a number of artists from Southeast Asia. The contemporary Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei lived in the United States throughout much of his formative years (1981-93). Artists from the Middle East include the Iranian-born sculptor Siah Armajani, best known for designing the Olympic torch presiding over the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games, and the American sculptor and painter Zigi Ben-Haim, who was born in Iraq and later lived in Israel.

Art in the twenty-first century knows few national borders. Though some artists are unable to emigrate, images from their art as well as its forms and techniques can travel around the globe in nanoseconds through the Internet. The 1913 Armory Show in New York was the first time that most Americans were able to witness the modern European masters; less than a century later, art could be transmitted throughout the world instantly. In 1989, for example, David Hockney sent work for the Sáo Paulo Art Biennial via fax. Art can be viewed online, and Internet art has itself become an important artistic form. Technology and immigration are both sources of art inspiration and tradition in the twenty-first century.

Further Reading

1 

Danticat, Edwidge. Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work. New York: Vintage, 2011.

2 

Lippard, Lucy R. Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America. Pantheon Books, 1990.

3 

McCabe, Cynthia Jaffee. The Golden Door: Artist-Immigrants of America, 1876-1976. Smithsonian Institution Press, 1976.

4 

———, guest curator. The American Experience: Contemporary Immigrant Artists. Independent Curators/Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies, 1985.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Peck, David. "Art." Encyclopedia of American Immigration, 2nd Edition, edited by Michael Shally-Jensen, Salem Press, 2021. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=AmImm2e_0046.
APA 7th
Peck, D. (2021). Art. In M. Shally-Jensen (Ed.), Encyclopedia of American Immigration, 2nd Edition. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Peck, David. "Art." Edited by Michael Shally-Jensen. Encyclopedia of American Immigration, 2nd Edition. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2021. Accessed December 14, 2025. online.salempress.com.