The idea for PART 9: American Modernism originated several years ago, when PART: The Online Journal of Art History was a new publication that had only recently converted to an exclusively online format. This was when the internet was so new that many people still had to ask what the "e" in e-mail meant. The thematic nature of each installment of Part offers exciting possibilities for focused scholarly events. It lends itself to an issue dedicated to what remains the most incompletely understood and under-appreciated aspect of American art up to World War II, that is the era bracketed on one side by the American Impressionists and on the other by the Abstract Expressionists. The advent of modernism in American painting and sculpture is a complex event, as anyone who has taught American art has experienced when trying to explain its sudden rise to an audience of non-major undergraduates. The limited venues for publishing articles, the increased difficulties with publishing due to printing costs and copyright issues, and the increased competition for publishing opportunities, made it highly desirable to publish an issue of PART that would be all about early-twentieth century American art.

The reasons for producing an issue of PART focused on early-modernist American art are numerous. This is an area full of undiscovered, ignored, and dismissed artists and artworks just ready to be reconsidered and further studied. The early years of modern art in America have been eclipsed by the interest of scholars and collectors in American art of the nineteenth century and the era after World War II. The Hudson River School, Mary Cassatt, John Singer Sargent, James W. M. Whistler, Georgia O'Keeffe, Pop Art, Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollock are relatively familiar. Synchromism, the Transcendental Painting Group, Arthur Dove, Stanton Macdonald-Wright, Stuart Davis, and Agnes Pelton are not nearly as well-known, and are even obscure by comparison. In many cases, these artists have clearly not been given their due. Arthur Dove started creating abstract paintings right around the time Kandinsky made the leap to total abstraction; he made an equivalent transformation only months later and, depending on how strictly you define "pure" or "total" abstraction, that period of time may be a little longer or even shorter. Yet Dove is marginalized in surveys of abstract art because of geographic dislocation. He was not only an American; he was working in America at the time that abstraction was born. Consequently, his reputation has suffered. Although survey books of modern art will group abstract artists from France to the Soviet Union in one chapter, they will usually relegate Dove, Marsden Hartley, Macdonald-Wright, Joseph Stella, O'Keeffe, and Stuart Davis to a separate chapter on American modern art. Similarly, the significance of Synchromism, perhaps the first movement in modern art started by American artists, has also been marginalized. Its connections to Orphism, particularly the light-color abstraction of Robert Delaunay, have been debated often yet remain confused and misunderstood. This seems even stranger than the situation with Dove because Macdonald-Wright, Morgan Russell, and Patrick Henry Bruce spent much of their early careers in Paris, and were in Paris when cubism and abstraction were the latest developments in French avant-garde art.

The articles and reviews in PART 9: American Modernism reflect the vitality of this field in recent years. Most of the articles bring long overdue attention to deserving modernists who came from or lived in America for most or all of their careers, but have received little scholarly attention until the past ten or fifteen years. The rest of the articles offer new and different perspectives on artists who are better known. Ruth Pasquine's article on Emil Bisttram and Nancy Sheley's article on Agnes Pelton are groundbreaking studies of two neglected modernists who spent most of their lives outside of the Northeast, where modern art dominated in galleries, museums, and social circles, but where, it turns out, it did not flourish exclusively. Their rich, articulate studies demonstrate the continuously evolving ways that abstract art, whatever its national or regional origin, may be analyzed and interpreted. Their scholarship also reveals that the sources, influences, intentions, and expressive possibilities of abstract art are more diverse, complex, and nuanced than has traditionally been thought. Dr. Pasquine's article on Bisttram reveals how mathematical logic and precision could be applied to abstract painting and drawing, and it is the most current and thorough study of how the aesthetic theory of Dynamic Symmetry, as espoused by Jay Hambidge in the 1920s, could be put to supremely effective use. Dr. Sheley's article on Pelton explores the intersection of biography and alternative spirituality in the early-twentieth century. We often hear of the impact of Theosophy and its founders Helena Blavatsky and Rudolph Steiner, and their significance is indisputable, but they are part of a huge matrix of alternatives to centuries-old belief systems that evolved in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries and gave rise to abstraction. Dr. Vrachopoulos' article on Jean Xceron expands our understanding of the stylistic sources and influences that shaped one of the relatively better-known abstractionists in America during the Great Depression and World War II. "Better-known" is very relative in this case, and must be stressed. Xceron spent most of his career in New York and socialized with many of the leading artists of the era, be they Americans or European expatriates who fled Nazi rampage and censorship during World War II. His abstract art was very much a product of this milieu, but as Dr. Vrachopoulos demonstrates so meticulously in her article, his work was still a very fresh, vital, and personal creation. My article on Stuart Davis is not intended to "resurrect" an overlooked artist, because of all the American artists featured in Part 9: American Modernism, he is the best known. Instead, my article is an attempt to broaden the perspective through which Davis has usually been understood. Although formalist studies of Davis are numerous and thorough, the social, political, and cultural context of Davis' Cubist-influenced exploration of mass-media imagery and the look of everyday commodities has not been adequately studied. My article is an attempt to correct this situation. The book reviews in this issue of Part represent the proliferation of scholarly studies in the field over the past few years. They indicate that more varied methodologies and theories are being applied to this still young and developing area in American art history. Brian Hack's review of two recent survey books on American art is thought-provoking commentary on the problems with teaching introductory survey courses and writing books for them.

PART 9: American Modernism is dedicated to Professors Emeritae Marlene Park and Diane Kelder, two members of the faculty of the CUNY Graduate Center who recently retired: Prof. Park and Prof. Kelder have each participated in the Ph.D. Program in Art History for more than twenty years, having started their tenure in CUNY at two of its senior colleges, John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the College of Staten Island. When they joined the Ph.D. Program in Art History in 1980, they became part of a rapidly growing, thriving doctoral program that is now distinguished for its scholarship of American art.

Prof. Park trained as a Medievalist at Columbia University under the tutelage of Meyer Shapiro. Following a pattern similar to Prof. Shapiro, who began his scholarly career as a Medieval but is remembered today for his important work in modern art, she soon began groundbreaking scholarship of American art of the early-twentieth century. At the Graduate Center, she taught courses on American art of the 1930s, American modernism between the World Wars, American women sculptors, and public art in the United States. She will be remembered for her study of public art and government-sponsored art from the era of the Great Depression and the New Deal. She and John Jay College colleague Gerald Markowitz co-authored New Deal for Art: The Government Art Projects of the 1930s with Examples from New York City and State in 1977 and Democratic Vistas: Post Offices and Public Art of the New Deal in 1984. This research evolved in unison with her interest in photographing the public art she has researched. Prof. Park has always taken great pleasure in contributing to scholarly projects that originated with her doctoral students, which is testimony to her modesty as a scholar and the regard for her among her students. She has contributed to exhibitions and publications that were coordinated by Graduate Center alumni Ilene Fort, Will South, Diane Linden, and Alejandro Anreus, to name just a few. Her courses broadened the horizons of countless students. It was in her class on American art of the 1930s that my interest in Raymond Jonson was rekindled (I had briefly read about him a couple of years earlier), and that interest, which Prof. Park wholeheartedly encouraged, led to my dissertation on the New Mexico abstract painter. Prof. Park's enthusiastic introduction to lesser-known artists in her various courses was also important to Ruth Pasquine's study of Bisttram and the scholarship of countless graduate students. Prof. Park also authored an important study of depictions of lynching in American graphic arts of the 1930s, an updated version of which will soon be published. Prof. Park remains active as a scholar from her home in sunny California, to which she moved when she retired a few years ago. Her essay on Blanche Lazzell is due to be published next year. Prof. Kelder received her B.A. from Queens College, my alma mater I am proud to say, and went on to receive her doctorate at Bryn Mawr. Her scholarly interests are also highly eclectic, as is revealed by the variety of the courses she taught and the articles and books she has published. At the Graduate Center, she taught courses on history painting in France during the era of Jacques-Louis David and the history of printmaking during the modern era. Although her dissertation was on late-eighteenth century French history painting, she has published extensively on later European and American art. Her best-known books are probably the gorgeously illustrated The Great Book of Impressionism and The Great Book of Post-Impressionism. However, some of her most important work has been in early-twentieth century American art, particularly on Stuart Davis. Her anthology of Davis' writing is an important resource in the study of the artist; it was essential to my article on him in this issue of Part. She also contributed to the catalogue of the 1993 retrospective of Davis' work, which remains the most complete and authoritative study of the artist. She recently curated the exhibition Stuart Davis: Art and Theory, 1920-31 at the Pierpont Morgan Library and wrote the essay and entries for its catalogue. Prof. Kelder has remained very active at the Graduate Center since her retirement from teaching a few years ago. She has become the founding director of the Art Gallery of the CUNY Graduate Center. Under her guidance, the Graduate Center has established a genuine, dynamic, thriving exhibition space, and to date it has hosted numerous exhibits that are impressive in their diversity, scope, and quality. Considering her tireless activities for the new gallery, one might wonder if she ever really retired at all. This issue of Part was inspired by these scholars and teachers, by the research they have conducted, the courses they taught, the methodology they imparted to their students, the wisdom they have shared, and the guidance they have given so generously. For all they did and continue to do, we wholeheartedly thank them and present this issue to an interested and enthusiastic audience in their honor.