The Most Important Independence Day Art Pieces

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13. The Fourth of July by Childe Hassam, 1916

Hassam was part of a breed of American artists that are often overlooked—American Impressionists. In a time when Monet, Renoir, and Degas were dominating the Impressionist movement in Europe, elements of this painting style trickled across the Atlantic. In this painting, Hassam paints American flags hanging on a city street, a common subject of his. The painting displays a windswept and celebratory version of the Fourth. 

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12. Fourth of July in Centre Square Philadelphia by John Lewis Krimmel, 1812

Krimmel repeatedly painted July Fourth celebrations, including the first work on this subject. By the time he produced this work, the day was mostly a white working-class holiday after a mob descended on black people during the 1805 celebrations. In this work, only one black figure, a young boy, appears in the scene. 

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11. Washington Crossing the Delaware by Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze, 1851

This history painting by German-American artist Leutze depicts George Washington's crossing the Delaware, a scene from a pivotal point during the Revolutionary War. The original, which was housed in Germany, was destroyed in a British air raid in 1942. Leutze brought the painting to Europe, hoping to inspire Germans with a revolutionary fervor.

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10. Declaration of Independence by John Trumbull, 1817

This painting depicts the Founding Fathers presenting the draft of the Declaration of Independence to Congress although it is often confused for a depiction of the actual signing of the Declaration. Trumbull painted many of the individuals in this work from life, and he visited Independence Hall to study the room's layout. The painter included 42 of the 56 signers, unable to find likenesses of the rest. This image appears on the back to the two-dollar bill.

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9. Barbecue by Eric Fischl, 1982

"Almost all of my early art dealt with the fallout from middle-class taboos, the messy, the ambivalent emotions couples felt, the inherent racism, the sexual tensions and the unhappiness roiling below the surface of our prim suburban lives. Meanwhile I was a suburban bad boy—cynical, sarcastic, contemptuous of all authority." Long Island-born painter Eric Fischl writes in his book Bad Boy: My Life On and Off the Canvas. Fischl's works are filled with nudity and tension. Here, the artist paints a boy playing with fire at a summer barbecue. The emotion, however does not come from the powerful flame, but the clammy fish at the forefront and the ambigous face of the man grilling to the side. Below this summer celebration exists a clammy discomfort. 

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8. America (Baseball) R. B. Kitaj, 1983–84

R. B. Kitaj is one of the American painters in the '80s and '90s proved that figurative painting still has value in an art market dominated by abstract work. His highly-emotional works buzz with a feverish energy, with his scenes of New York City coming to life on the canvas. This work is no different. In displaying America's national pastime, Kitaj fills a pool with baseball players. This surreal scene is an overwhelmingly dynamic image, showing us submerged in American ideology.

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7. The Old Dump Flag by Claes Oldenburg, 1960

Oldenburg spent the summer of 1960 collecting driftwood and ocean debris in Princeton, MA. True to his process of creating high art out of non-traditional materials, Oldenburg assembled a variety of beach combed flags. In these almost primitive works, Oldenburg gives us just enough visual cues to recognize the flag. It seems like he is stripping down the symbol it's essential structure.

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6. Flag by Howard Finster, 1991

A Baptist minister from Georgia, Finster believed that his artwork was a medium to spread God's word. His paintings can be described as folk art or outsider art, a term applied to artists with no formal trained in art who exist outside the art world. His works probably would have remained on the fringes except that he gained international fame by designing album covers for Talking Heads and R.E.M. This painting features George Washington with the lyrics to the "Star-Spangled Banner," typical American tropes along with rockets ind UFOs. Despite his Christian agenda, Finster's psychedelic seemed like an artsy acid trip, which is why it probably appealed to rock stars.

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5. Royal Fireworks by Helen Frankenthaler, 1957

Frankenthaler was an influential Abstract artist working in the mid-1950s who helped establish the movement. Like Jackson Pollock, she placed her canvases on the floor and poured paint over them. Her experiments with color and surface focused on the materiality of the paint. Even though this is not your typical firework painting by any means, you can feel the explosive energy and heat of the Frankenthaler's colors.

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4. The Presidential Suite. Johnson & Humphrey at L.B.J. Barbecue by Billy Apple, 196

New Zealand-born artist Apple worked in the vein of the New York Pop artists in the '60s. In this work, we see a direct reference to Warhol's silk-screens. Like Warhol, he pulls from newsprint source image, reproducing it as a mass-produced emblem of America in red, white, and blue. 

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3. Flag by Jasper Johns, 1954-55

Johns took a factory-made American flag, covered in in a wax called encaustic, and hoisted it on the wall. This gesture complicated the meaning of the sacred national symbol. In Johns' flag work, wax drips outside the precise stripes of the flag, evidencing the artist's hand. Johns juxtaposes his unique creation with the mass-produced product. He points to the paradox that the flag is considered sacred and almost mystical in its power, but in reality is just a reproducible object. In later works, Johns took this line of thought further, layering identical flags atop each other.

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2. Flag by Leo Villareal, 2008

Villareal is a New-York based light artist who programs LED lights to make glowing displays. Here he creates a dynamic flag, one of his various flag constructions. Taking an image already imbued with symbolism, Villareal casts it as a looming image. Like Johns' work, we ask if this is a commemoration of the symbol or a devaluation, cast in the same lights used for bar signs.

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1. The Hole Truth by Brian Kenny, 2012

One of the contemporary artist associated with Jasper Johns, Kenny also tackles the American flag as charged icon. As a gay artist and and an active participant in the Occupy movement, Kenny deconstructs flags to speak out for gay rights and against corruption and inequality. What may be seen as an anti-American gesture is in fact the opposite. It was the Founding Fathers who said, "when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government," after all. Kenny might be the most patriotic artist on this list. 

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