There have always been interesting American artists, and at least two
19th-century painters,
Thomas Eakins
and Winslow Homer, influenced the
course of future art in the United States. During the 1920s and '30s,
Edward Hopper and
Georgia O'Keeffe
emerged as the inspirational new painters of distinctive American traditions.
Hopper's work was strongly realist, his still, precise images of desolation
and isolated individuals reflecting the social mood of the times.
O'Keeffe's art was more abstract, often based on enlarged plants and flowers,
and infused with a kind of
Surrealism
she referred to as ``magical realism''.
She may not have been a great painter, but her art was highly influential.