American Modern Art

Dictionary entry

1. Precisionism 1910s–1940s / Style

   Paints factories, silos, cities and machines reduced to clear contour, simple geometry and smooth planes.

2. Luminism 1850–1875 / Style

   An American landscape manner in which the brushmark is erased from a smooth surface and atmospheric light is graded in stages to the horizon. Figures are small, water lies still as a mirror, and light itself becomes the subject. A textbook of composition for anyone designing stillness.

3. Tonalism 1880–1915 / Style

   An American landscape manner that covers the whole picture in a single tone and dissolves contour into mist and dusk. A narrow range of greys, blue-greys and browns with softened edges produces the vagueness of a landscape held in memory. Feeling designed through a restricted palette.

4. American Regionalism 1930–1943 / Style

   A movement in Depression-era America that refused the European avant-garde and painted the farming and labour of the Midwest in realist terms. Rolling hills, stylised figures and legible narrative became national imagery by way of murals, magazines and postage stamps. The classic case of a region turned into a style.

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