American Portrait Artists 20th Century. In 20th century portrait art, the camera has come to supercede the paintbrush, leading to the emergence of a number of new and exceptionally talented portraitists, whose fine art photography in no way diminishes the genre. Early american paintings were primarily portraits, landscapes and depictions of historical events.
Some american modernists found new ways of depicting the spirit of their age. The first prominent art movement in the united states was realism , which depicted contemporary social realities and the lives of ordinary people. Artists who lived and worked in the 20th century produced some of the most significant pieces of art the world has ever known—and many of those artists are still walking among us today.
Here is a short selected list of the most important photographic portraitists.
Few details of his life are known. As of the first half of the 19th century, portrait painting got affected by a new artistic medium whose popularity was growing steadily and provided portrait artists and their models with the most “honest” and realistic image, one that paint on canvas could never obtain. 20th century art turned away from classical or formal portrait art and focused instead on new ways of presenting reality. Artists in the twentieth century chose two distinct ways to depict modernism and the excitement of progress—realism and abstraction.