Smithsonian American Art Museum
America’s urban streets have long inspired documentary photographers. After World War II, populations shifted from the city to the suburbs and newly built highways cut through thriving neighborhoods, leaving isolated pockets within major urban centers.
Romaine Brooks (1874–1970) lived most of her life in Paris where she was a leading figure of an artistic counterculture of upper-class Europeans and American expatriates, many of whom were creative, bohemian, and homosexual.
In the 1950s and 1960s, pop art offered a stark contrast to abstract expressionism, then the dominant movement in American art.
Artists Respond: American Art and the Vietnam War, 1965–1975 explores artistic reactions to the Vietnam War created during the height of the US intervention in Southeast Asia. An unpopular and internally divisive conflict, America’s war in Vietnam had a pervasive cultural impact.
At the height of the Harlem Renaissance, Carl Van Vechten (1880–1964) picked up a camera and discovered the power the photographic portrait has over the photographer himself.