Things played out differently in the United States. For one thing, American artists wanted to escape the influence of Europe and carve out some territory of their own. Unlike the Europeans’, a lot of their work was figurative, celebrating youth and idealizing the human body. New sexual freedoms led to frank, sensuous works like George Wesley Bellows’ Two Women and photographs of nudes by Edward Weston and Imogen Cunningham. Men’s bodies were celebrated too, and for the first time, there were sympathetic portrayals of African-Americans by artists like Winold Reiss, a German painter who came to the States to escape the rising militarism at home.
     In landscape painting, the story is more complicated. Artists on both sides of the Atlantic were reacting to urbanization and industrialization, but American painters like George Copeland Ault rendered industrial landscapes with precise definition, and the American mania for skyscrapers comes across in paintings like Georgia O’Keefe’s The Shelton with Sunspots and Charles Sheeler’s Church Street El. Photographers, too, found ways of incorporating American subject matter into a Modernist aesthetic, from Paul Strand’s minimalist photographs of porches and picket fences to Ansel Adams’ clean-cut depictions of the American landscape.