As the country prepared to enter the 20th century, the idealized legacy of the beginning of the nineteenth century continued to shape its main political and cultural attitudes. Despite the efforts of its true geniuses, America still desperately desired to retract the lost values of the pre-Civil War era, and used all its wealth and power for that purpose. Why inflict the anxieties of European modernism, when so many Americans saw it as yet another proof of the irreversible decline of the Old World?
America remained a great romantic nation, launched into a great romantic quest. Those who were able to face the future realized that this attitude was doomed to change. A great change took place in Chicago in the 1880s. First because of commercial pressures, and then under the influence of the protomodernist aesthetic doctrine promulgated by Louis Sullivan, the architecture of the city adopted, in the form of high buildings, a bold, innovative party, which announced the curtain walls and the general, smooth appearance of modern towers - even though Sullivan remained faithful to the ornamentation, of which he was one of the undisputed masters, and if he sometimes departed, for reasons of external effect, from his own doctrine, But had Sullivan scarcely triumphed in Chicago, Saint-Louis and Buffalo, that already his approach was rejected by his profession in favor of classicism of style "Beaux-Arts."
Among the great American architects, only a few endeavoured to continue in their work the spirit advocated by Sullivan; Frank Lloyd Wright, the most talented of them, had been his pupil. Since the architecture of the skyscrapers had yielded to the demands of façade ornamentation and revival styles formulated by the proponents of the "Beaux-Arts" tradition, Wright felt that only the design of private houses would enable him to implement his ideas. His achievements in this area were essential. His Prairie-style houses, designed to closely match the uneven profile of the Midwest, attracted the attention of the European architectural forefront and resolutely projected American architecture into the 20th century. Today installed in the American wing of the Metropolitan Museum, a room in one of these mansions perfectly illustrates the uninterrupted circulation of space, the opening of the interior to the exterior and the insistence on total design, including furniture, wall trim and stained glass, so characteristic of Wright.
Wright's belief that art had to meet modern needs was shared by a group of painters, the "Eight," later known as the sobriquet of Ash Can School, although the latter's solutions, in the long run, proved less radically original than those of the architect. While many of the painters at Ash Can School had been taught by teachers of "American Impressionism," they felt that the Impressionism practiced in their home had little to do with the life of the country. They therefore concentrated on the world around them and discovered in the humble existence, especially that of the man of the city, an intense and stimulating vitality. Because they were not afraid to deal with low subjects, a hostile critic affubla them with the name of Ash Can School that has remained with them since. In order to reflect the energy and vitality of the subjects they dealt with, the painters of this movement adopted a technique based on a rapid, very pictorial execution; unfortunately, it ended up recalling both that of the old masters, that ultimately the Ash Can School seemed less progressive than had been American Impressionism.
