Between about 1910 and 1930, new artistic movements in European art were making themselves felt in the United States. American artists become acquainted with the new art on their trips to Paris and at the exhibitions in the famous New York gallery "291" of the photographer Alfred Stieglitz. But most important in the spread of the modern movements in the United States was the sensational Armory Show of 1912-1913 in New York, in which the works of a number of progressive American painters were shown.
Several of the American modernists who were influenced by the Armory Show found the urban landscapes, especially New York, an appealing subject. Compared with the works of the realist painters, the works of American modernists were much removed from the actual appearance of the city; they were more interested in the "feel" of the "Ash Can School" and the later realists were still tied to nineteenth-century or earlier styles, while the early modernists shared in the international breakthroughs of the art of the twentieth century.
The greatest of these breakthroughs was Cubism, developed most fully in France between 1907 and 1914, which brought about a major revolution in Western painting. It overturned the rational tradition that had been built upon since the Renaissance. In Cubism, natural forms were broken down analytically into geometric shapes. No longer was a clear differentiation made between the figure and the background of a painting: objects represented and the surface on which they were painted became one. The Cubism abandoned the conventional single vantage point of the viewer, and objects depicted from multiple viewpoints were shown at the same time.
