The gothic in American art looks back on a long tradition which is almost as old as the gothic novel itself. However, gothic art as a pronounced tendency that can be identified and labelled as such is a relatively recent phenomenon. This essay will survey the characteristics of the gothic in American art and trace its history from its earliest manifestations to a boom of the gothic in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century art. As a trend in art, the gothic is intrinsically linked not only to the phenomenon of goth subculture as it emerged in the 1980s but also to a wide variety of forms of expression in the popular arts, in particular film and music but also fashion, design and architecture. In this productive cross-pollination between art, literature and the more ephemeral manifestations of the gothic in popular culture, it is a typical product of the postmodern era. In recent decades it has become a potent and pervasive, almost ubiquitous signifier for dark moods in times of change and crisis as expressed in a contemporary mordant mindset, the liberal indulgence in horror, macabre images and flirting with disaster.

The gothic is traditionally circumscribed through various related aesthetic phenomena such as the sublime, the uncanny, the ugly, the grotesque, formlessness and, most recently, the abject. I will attempt to classify the gothic as an independent aesthetic category that integrates elements of the previous but also stands alone. In defining the gothic, one needs to balance literary and other cultural influences with trends and traditions specific to the visual arts. Images of horror existed before the gothic – such as the grotesque goblins of medieval cathedrals, Renaissance paintings of saintly martyrdom and the Baroque celebration of the body or Piranesi's fantastic architectures of horror. However, over the 250 years of its existence, the gothic has evolved as a unique combination of terror and fantasy that materializes dark atmospheric moods and challenges moral and social trends.