AMERICA'S COOL MODERNISM - O'KEEFFE TO HOPPER

As some American artists began to eliminate people and remove extraneous details from their compositions, they often
employed neat, orderly brushwork or close-up, unemotional photography. Artists as diverse as Patrick Henry Bruce, John
Covert, Georgia O'Keeffe, Paul Strand and Arthur Dove navigated European and American avant-garde circles, picking and
choosing new ideas and methods. Inspiration ranged from cubism and machine parts to new technologies, and they found
ways to bring order to the modern world through extreme simplification. For them, abstraction involved absence and presence -
the evacuation of human beings but also the desire to depict something that would not otherwise be visible or to render visible
unseen natural processes like the passage of time, sound waves, or weather patterns. Their artworks provide a new context for
the precisionist works in the subsequent sections and point to modern ideas about what art could be. How does a crisp painting
technique relate to an aesthetic of absence?