The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915-1935

The story of how Alfred Stieglitz's shifting band of merry ex-pats and homegrown experimenters invented American modernism has been oft and well told, but never with Corn's combination of lucidity, subtlety and clear-eyed sympathy with the work--and the jingoistic America from which it emerged. Corn looks at the work of five American artists, dividing them into the ""Transatlantics"" and the ""Rooted."" Like Duchamp and Picabia (who paved the way with ""Am ricanisme""), two other ""transatlantics,"" Gerald Murphy and Joseph Stella, thought that America provided the perfect context for a machine-age art. For Corn, Stella's heroic stylizations of Manhattan's newly built skyscrapers are an attempt to paint through ""the European's highly reductive schema of New York,"" and get at its relentless modernity. The brash flatness of American billboards appears in Murphy's work in Paris, and in that of the ""rooted"" Demuth, who because of delicate health lived in Pennsylvania. Unlike Demuth, two other ""rooted"" artists, Corn argues, tried to recover a more historical understanding of what American art was--Georgia O'Keeffe looked to a Native American past in New Mexico, and Charles Sheeler incorporated vernacular elements like Shaker furniture into his canvases. Corn matches a terrific sensitivity to form with a winning curiosity about the artists' biographies and nods to period criticism. While a sense of broader social processes shaping artistic production (and the American public) doesn't really come through, Corn's nuanced descriptions of the individual artists, their lives and their materials mirror perfectly their search for ""American"" modes of expression. (Nov.)