It is thought that Matthew Baigell’s above-named article, published in Arts Magazine in 1987, was one of the first to broach the question of American identity created and interrogated through the entwined issues of European modernism and American nationalism in the 1920s.¹ It is important for both what is included and what is omitted. He believes that the quest for national identity, which he defines as self-discovery, was stifled (“closeted” in his term) by the 1930s. Working with a small sample of artists that includes members of the Stieglitz circle and Precisionists among others (Charles Sheeler, Thomas Hart Benton, Charles Demuth, Edward Hopper, Stuart Davis, Joseph Stella, Charles Burchfield, Louis Lozowick, John Marin and George Ault), Baigell makes the case that the 1920s was a decade of personal and national quest for the “self,” with introspective searches based on personal experience. His discussions of Burchfield and Hopper and their unsparing look at the dysfunctional side of America are especially adroit in this regard.

He notes that in the first decade of the 20th century, artists were encouraged to find their own way by escaping from European influences of writers and artists such as Mary Fanton Roberts (writing with the male nom-de-plume of Giles Edgerton) and Robert Henri, whose simple faith that an art of self-expression would express the spirit of the American people is still touching (whatever that was, Henri doesn’t define it). Baigell briefly surveys other idealistic alternatives linked to 19th century lyricism and the landscape, characterizing them as ranging from the “gentle to the genteel.” Other goads to re-thinking the American vision were World War I and the humiliating exposure to European modernism as presented in the Armory Show of 1913.²

What were artists to do? How could one be both American and modern? Europeans such as Francis Picabia assumed America would give up its traditional culture of the past and live in the present. Marius de Zayas believed “the real American life...remains to be discovered.” Writers echoed this type of thinking–Van Wyck Brooks “found spiritual values drowning in a sea of material ones,” and so on. Since the times were not great, it was argued, how could the art be? Digging through period journals such as The New Republic and The Nation, The Dial and The Seven Arts, Soil and Broom, Baigell notes that views were optimistic and pessimistic about the same thing–the lack of a genuine American culture–only with or without it could one find America. Baigell neatly demonstrates Sheeler’s critically acclaimed optimistic feeling for American efficiency and capitalism in the Ford Motor Car Company paintings, such as River Rouge Plant of 1932, calling his pared-down, chilly geometry a “rational organization of things.” Sheeler’s transcendent alchemy that transmutes God’s order into a Taylorized, dehumanized assembly-line version is nicely contrasted with a century-old landscape by Thomas Doughty, Gilpin’s Mill on the Brandywine (1826), where technology takes a back seat to the fuzzy glory of nature. Stuart Davis’s America inspired by jazz-playing African-American musicians, the local landscape and ordinary things such as cigarette packs also put him in Picabia’s modernist land of nostalgia-free presentism.

Baigell writes that by the 1930s, however, the xenophobic and anti-Semitic “nativist” views of Thomas Craven would come to dominate American art production, in particular that of the so-called American Scene. The celebrators of Regionalism emphasized rural subject matter in a descriptive and programmatic manner, avoiding the gloom and alienation one might detect in Burchfield or Hopper’s painting as symptomatic of what was wrong in contemporary American life. Above all, they hewed to the dogma that the proper “American heritage” was one cleansed of immigrants, for only those who grew from American soil like the heroic pioneer woman could really know America. It was also apparently and inconsistently void of Native Americans. Baigell chillingly cites the anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic views of Mary Austin who, writing in The Nation, scolded “Jewish” critics for thinking they could understand American life, and those of the conservative critic Royal Cortissoz who viewed Modernism as an immigrant plague endangering “the health of the body politic.” One is reminded of early criticisms of Cubism as well as the statements and actions of Adolf Hitler to quarantine and destroy the degenerate art of Modernists and Jews alike. Perhaps Rudolf Giuliani, the ex-mayor of New York, was channeling Cortissoz when he called African-British artist Chris Ofili’s lapidary painting of the Blessed Virgin Mary “sick art” and a danger to our institutions, threatening to close down the Brooklyn Museum as a way of sanitizing public health. Although he does not mention them, the climate of the Great Depression created by the stock market crash in 1929 and the newly restrictive immigration laws, as well as the direction of the WPA (which he does mention) were also contributing factors in the development of a more conservative definition of American art. Benton too, Baigell points out, would succumb to the disease of exclusionism and stereotyping by the 1930s. One recalls that Henry Luce’s Time magazine, a bastian of American values like xenophobia, featured a self-portrait of Benton on the cover of its 1934 Christmas issue and a portfolio of Regionalist work inside. Hopper and Davis remained clear-eyed. To Hopper, American scene painting was caricature and Davis later described the movement as “regional jingoism and racial chauvinism.” In his conclusion, Baigell admits that Social Realism may have been a responsive critical mode but that it too, like Regionalism, was agenda-driven and thus kept from the process of personal discovery.

As interesting as this seminal article is, and it is, especially in its reading of period documents, its exclusions are troubling. Where are the women artists, artists of color, artists of heterodox sexual orientation who grappled with their American identity and modernism? Why no discussion, or at least a mention of, say, Georgia O’Keeffe, Aaron Douglas, Marsden Hartley, surely part of the same American modernist pantheon? Why, Georgia O’Keeffe had just died the year before in 1986! How could she, subject of a series of retrospectives, the most recent at the Whitney in 1970, be forgotten and precious space given to George Ault? My America of the 1920s and that of many art historians and others was no longer monolithically white and heterosexually male in 1987. Why not peek behind the door? Baigell’s use of the word “closeted” was tantalizing but not fulfilling. It is difficult to believe that his use of the term was innocent of its gay nuance. His brief inclusion of Demuth concerned a critic’s perception that the watercolors were “morbid,” in line with the pessimistic view of Hopper and Burchfield, but a discussion on the obvious homoerotic aspects would have been more insightful. Thus he includes Demuth among artists seeking self-discovery, but shies away from discussing his sexual orientation and omits Marsden Hartley entirely. By the late eighties, had we not been sensitized and emboldened by the Pluralism of the Seventies as well as the social and political upheavals of the 1960s and 70s to be inclusionist, at least by regretting in print what could not be included for reasons of space? Well, thank goodness for Jonathan Weinberg.³

We can comfort ourselves that scholarship has advanced tremendously since 1987 on the topics of identity–national, ethnic, racial, gender, class– recording wide ranges of experience that make up modern identity in the Americas, but it is cold comfort.⁴ Baigell’s formation of a white male America as representative of national culture was already old-fashioned. Feminist scholarship was advanced at the time and had long since challenged such narrow views. Approximately fifteen years earlier in 1971, Linda Nochlin had published her seminal article, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” in Art News, unleashing some of the most important art history ever written. Women had sought self-discovery during the twenties too; after all, they had just received the vote, and like O’Keeffe, they wrestled with being American and modern. Baigell concerns himself with the skyscrapers of Louis Lozowick and the bridges of Joseph Stella as icons of modernity by immigrant Americans, but what about O’Keeffe’s architectural work during this period? She wasn’t an immigrant, ‘tis true, but exclusionary policies seem to apply to her too. Baigell writes that many artists turned to the landscape “to find a sense of national identity.” Although he discusses the localized landscapes of Davis (Gloucester, Mass); Marin (Stonington, Maine); and Sheeler’s Pennsylvania Bucks County barns as representative of America, one wonders where are Hartley’s Maine landscapes? Yes, he was in Europe during key years under discussion but so was Lozowick as Baigell admits. Most troubling, where are the rural and urban landscapes O’Keeffe painted in the twenties? Surely her Lake George pictures are just as abstractly specific of America as Sheeler’s barns, and her New York skyscrapers radiant in the night sky equal Stella’s evocations of the beauty of modern technology. It is counter-productive to omit her just because so much contemporary criticism focused in a deadening way on her femininity rather than the article’s theme. Baigell points out that Sheeler confessed a need to be in America to paint it, but he might have taken the long view, just briefly, to ponder why so many creative women–one thinks of Romaine Brooks and a few years later, Lois Mailou Jones, for example–left the country for Europe in order to make their journey of American self-discovery. At least O’Keeffe didn’t have to go farther than New Mexico.

And what of African-American artists in the U. S. in the 1920s? How is it possible to write about the 1920s and identity working with primarily East Coast art and not mention the Harlem Renaissance? The Studio Museum in Harlem had just published The Harlem Renaissance Art of Black America (1987) in connection with its exhibition. A brief discussion of Alain Locke’s crucial writing on self-discovery and identity construction through knowledge of African heritages and modern visual idioms in the March issue of Survey Graphic of 1925, “Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro” or his anthology of the same year, The New Negro: An Interpretation, would have made an indispensable addition. This seems a glaring omission, at least in hindsight. One need only think of Aaron Douglas’s crisp geometric murals and graphic designs or the Chicagoan Archibald Motley Jr’s portraits of women for evidence of modern, American art concerned with identity and self-discovery. Motley’s sitters form a new typology of strong, independent African-American women in opposition to persistent stereotypes of the mammy, etc., that are as important to the understanding of America’s identity especially in terms of race and class as the iconic pioneer woman. Transferred from Southern rural farms to the urban setting of Chicago, posed with gravity, they subtly argue for a larger America than Craven’s anemic vision. For Craven and other writers such as Maynard Walker the ideal was Grant Wood’s American Gothic (1930), but this staged scene is less authentic than Motley’s Mending Socks of 1924. Fortunately, historians like Richard Powell in his excellent book, Black Art and Culture in the 20th Century, go a long way setting the record straight.⁵ Or as Langston Hughes wrote in his essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” also published in The Nation in 1926, “We, artists of a new generation, we want to study our black personality without shame, nor fear...”

In the 21st century, however, we should perhaps rethink the America identity thing and let go of intra-national boundaries for extra-national shared issues of the Americas, north, central and south. Why be border warriors when borders are so meaninglessly porous and dangerous anyway? Why not pursue interests by affinity–the environment, surely we have something to say in concert with Brazil and Canada here; uses of technology; globalism; political identity and cultural memory (is the U.S. listening to Argentina and Cuba?) ; class, gender, ethnicity; religion (is anybody listening and talking to each other?). It is good that Baigell peeked through the keyhole and saw what he did. Perhaps Sharyn Udall has the right concept in linking three artists of disparate geographies by gender–Carr, O’Keeffe and Kahlo. Perhaps not. But it is a start in seeing new relationships.⁶

One further thought that this rich and source-filled article generated for me, possibly gratuitous or just my hobby-horse, but perhaps timely, is: how can we citizens of the U. S. possess the entire Western Hemisphere by the use of the term American to describe our cultural identity? As the U. S. increasingly comes to be a member of a global community rather than its master (despite its continued self-destructive attempts otherwise), we must rediscover our place and identity in the world at large and find ways to describe ourselves that are less tactlessly confrontational to our neighbors to the north and south within the hemisphere as well as in the larger global community. The Whitney Museum of American Art’s two-part exhibition The American Century (1999) and accompanying catalogues would have been just as engrossing with a less tendentious title that recalls the imperial outlook of Henry Luce, as would have been Robert Hughes’s book, American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America (1997). Recently, a traveling exhibition organized in France explored the American identity phenomenon (or should we say problem?) but called the exhibition and catalogue, Made in USA: l’art américain, 1908-1947.⁷ The essays on the American love of the machine and black identity are especially interesting, coming from a self-conscious European perspective. One just has to think of this year’s Documenta to have a sense of the complexity of today’s worldly, trans-national relationships. Latin Americans have long been vocal about their position in defining the Americas and their place in it. In the mid-eighties Alfredo Jaar, for instance, designed a sequence of maps of the Americas for a public art project presented on the Spectracolor board in Times Square entitled “This is not America’s flag,” which alternated combinations of the North and South American continents with the U. S. flag.

The 1920s throughout our hemisphere was a particularly lively period in terms of quests for national and self discovery. Perversely, travel abroad to Europe, as well as the grim but thrilling new awareness that followed World War I, was part of it. One thinks of the sophisticated image-obsessed couple Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo globe-trotting variously in Mexico, Europe and the U. S., something like Madonna and Guy Ritchie. Inspired by ideas of indigenismo, Mexico’s education minister, José Vasconcelos, invited the three great muralists of Mexico–Rivera, Orozco and Siqueiros--to create the vast narratives in the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria. Their influence on their American compañeros–Benton, Pollock--is well-known. Kahlo’s personal journey continues to fascinate and perhaps the best, recent accolade to her originality and narcissism are the wild appropriations by the cultural brigand, Masumasa Morimura, who lives in Japan. The Brazilian Tarsila do Amiral with her fellow anthropophagists combined modernism and nationalism, gobbling up Euro-culture to create a new idiom rooted to place; her painting Abaporú (1928), of a fleshy giant squatting in a brilliant landscape might be most emblematic of the movement’s ideas. As well, Brazilian artists asserted their cultural nationalism in the events of the Semana de Arte Moderna in São Paulo in 1922. The Russian-Lithuanian immigrant painter Lasar Segall settled in Brazil in the 1920s, sensitively recording Afro-Brazilian life as an outsider, life not much attended to before his arrival. Modernism and national identity are also explored in Argentina during this decade–the avant-garde journal Martín Fierro, named for a fictional gaucho, is founded in 1924; Borges’s friend Xul Solar creates pictographic works that owe something to Paul Klee and his notions of criollismo; and the down-home La Boca school of Buenos Aires is led by Benito Quinquela Martín (son of Italian immigrants, his energetic paintings of port side scenes have a kinship with Stella’s bridges). In the north, we could try and cite Native Americans responding to similar impulses during this decade, but it is difficult; perhaps the Kiowa Five? Last but not least in a most incomplete list of American artists actively defining “self” in terms of nation and personhood in the 1920s comes the Canadian landscapist and portraitist Emily Carr, who did indeed cross borders from Canada’s Pacific North West where she exhibited with the Group of Seven beginning in 1927. In 1930 she met Georgia O’Keeffe in New York.

In an interview in this summer’s Art Journal, Okwui Enwezor, the organizer of Documenta 11, made a comment that can be applied to the condition and definition of American art : “It’s no longer possible to talk about English literature in the present; English literature is the past. We talk about literature written in English because of the multiple inflections that have been brought to bear on this very question of language, the renovation of language.” ⁸ Someone may say to me in a condescending or placating way, but you make too much of it, the word America is only nomenclature! Yes, perhaps, but words have meaning and naming confers power.

Notes>>

Author's Bio>>