Themes in American History

In Savannah and the Low country of Georgia, a legacy of decorative art among African Americans, including carvings, canes, quilts, baskets, furniture, and grave decorations, continued into the early twentieth century. During the 1930s and early 1940s, a period in which regional cultures were emphasized in literature, music, and the arts, the less conventional works of southern, self-taught artists, especially African Americans, were exposed to a wider audience and received greater appreciation. Trained artists in the Savannah area often collected the work of self-taught artists. (http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org)

Street Scene, Savannah

Margaret Augusta Murphy, the daughter of Savannah artists Lucile Desbouillons and Christopher P. H. Murphy, painted the watercolor Street Scene, Savannah between 1930 and 1940.

 By 1914 New York City had become the center of Modernist art. Characteristically, modernist art has a tendency to abstraction, is innovative, aesthetic, futuristic and self-referential. It includes visual art, literature, music, film, design, architecture as well as life style. It reacts against historicism, artistic conventions and institutionalization of art. In this period, art was not only to be dealt with in academies, theaters or concert halls, but to be included in everyday life and accessible for everybody.( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_modernism)

http://www.chicagomaroon.com/2008/5/30/new-york-changes-before-sloans-eyes

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A characterization of a dichotomy between an urban-industrial North and a rural-plantation South before civil war would exaggerate actual conditions. But the southern city like Savannah was neither nonurban nor antiurban, which resembled northern city, especially, New York City in their commercial functions and social complexity . Savannah businesspeople did, however, depend on northern cities, especially New York City’s capital and markets. (Chudacoff, pg78, 6th Ed)

Comparing with New York City, Savannah suffered more damage from the civil war. The union army’s blockade ports, the breakdown of transportation system as a result of military activity, and wartime inflation exacerbated patterns of urban hardship, especially food shortages. All of these slowed down the development of economic in Savannah. But New York City’s economic was rapid develop in the 1850s (Chudacoff, pg80, 6th Ed).

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