What is the “Great American Thing?” Wanda Corn identifies it as the distinctly American brand of modern art that painters and sculptors were striving to create during the early twentieth century. A new way of life was emerging in the United States at the time. Commercialism, industrialization, and prosperity became the defining aspects of American culture, and artists on both sides of the Atlantic were struggling to come to terms with the change. The skyscraper, the new emblem of American ambition and success, replaced the cowboy who had once symbolized the country and its endless frontier.

The art world itself was also changing during these decades. The one-way tide of American artists traveling abroad to study and soak up culture had begun to give way to a more equal cross-cultural exchange. European artists, both fascinated and repelled by the changing face of the United States, were eager to cross the Atlantic in order to see for themselves New York and its modern marvels, the skyscrapers, the bridges, the unabashed commercialism. Alfred Stieglitz’s galleries and the 1913 Armory Show had served to establish New York as the country’s center of modern art and the avant-garde, setting the stage for later artistic rivalries between Paris and New York. No longer were European artists ignoring America; after World War I artistic traffic began to travel both ways.

In her book The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915-1935, Corn looks at various attempts by artists during this period to visually redefine the United States by creating a new style of art that was both American and modern. The study is divided into four sections. In the Introduction, Corn uses Paul Rosenfeld’s book Port of New York (1924) to outline the issues that form the basis of her investigation. Parts I and II are composed of seven “case studies,” individual paintings by seven different artists that serve “to uncover the roots” of what she describes as an “exceptionalist discourse in American arts and letters” (p. xiv). Part I focuses on the “transatlantics,” those artists, both European and American, who traveled across the ocean in search of inspiration and a first-hand look at American culture. Examining specific works by Marcel Duchamp, Gerald Murphy, and Joseph Stella, the author attempts to achieve a better understanding of cross-cultural exchange. In Part II, Corn looks at one painting each by Charles Demuth, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Charles Sheeler, modern artists working in local or “rooted” traditions. In the epilogue, Corn “points to the ways these tensions [between the lure of Europe and the desire to make New York the new center of the art world] and bold claims for national art persisted in later American art movements” (p. xix).

In the introduction, Corn formulates the scholarly method that she will follow throughout her study, namely considering the works of painters, sculptors, photographers, and writers in light of contemporary social, political, and economic factors. For example, she credits international politics with engendering artistic exchange between Paris and New York in the years immediately following the first World War. “Such encouragement from France characterized the wartime Franco-American alliance, which depended on imagery that constructed the relationship between the two countries as one of parent to child. Europe . . . was the old, worn-out parent culture, America the enviable young and innocent child that had not yet exercised its muscles in the arts. This new international partnership . . . fueled the budding nationalism of New York intellectuals and artists like Paul Rosenfeld and deeply influenced creative work done in New York over the next two decades” (p. 11). Corn’s interdisciplinary and in-depth cultural readings of works by modern artists working both at home and abroad reveal that, despite differences in style, these artists had a common goal: to reflect the America of the twentieth century in a modern way that was worthy of its subject. By organizing each chapter around a specific work of art, first examining it formally and iconographically, then drawing out the connections between it and its context, Corn renders more manageable the challenge of understanding this dense period of American cultural development.

Indeed, paring down complex issues in order to arrive at central conclusions about her topic is a strategy that Corn uses throughout the study, sometimes to her detriment. In the introduction, for example, she states that she will use a commonly understood vocabulary, and asks that “terms such as ‘modernism,’ ‘avant-garde,’ and ‘America’ . . . be taken in their most commonly used and accepted meanings” (p. xvii). While this strategy enables the author to make her points succinctly, without the need for numerous qualifying statements and explanations, it also ignores many of the recent questions that emerged in art history since the 1970s. Revisionist historians who have thrown out the traditional definition of “America” in favor of new definitions that acknowledge the multiplicity of American experiences will, I expect, find themselves perplexed when confronted with Corn’s claims for the essential “Americanness of American culture.”
Likewise, traditional definitions of “modernism” and the “avant-garde” have been dissected by recent generations of historians, including Michael Leja, who concludes that the term avant-garde “has been subjected to considerable abuse” (Reframing Abstract Expressionism, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993, p. 21). In her introduction, Corn discusses Stieglitz and the role that he played in introducing the American public to modern European art, referring to him and his circle of artists as undeniably avant-garde. While Corn’s analysis of Stieglitz’s role in promoting the artists in his circles, particularly her distinction between the two different circles that surrounded him during the period, certainly contributes to our understanding of the emergence of the “Great American Thing,” she fails to address the larger question that Leja raised in 1993– namely, was the Stieglitz Circle truly avant-garde? Leja defined avant-gardism as “really an alternative form of academicism, one demanding novelty and experimentation” (Reframing Abstract Expressionism, p. 22). Both he and Meyer Schapiro before him stated that the United States offered no strong academic tradition against which an avant-garde could define itself, thereby problematizing the entire notion of an American avant-garde. Does the fact that Stieglitz exhibited and published the works of the European avant-garde make his own circle avant-garde? Corn chooses not to enter into this debate.

Race is another issue that Corn chooses not to investigate in this volume. Of the book’s seven modernist “case studies,” she does not include any non-white artists, amounting to a virtual disavowal of the importance of the Harlem Renaissance and the New Negro Movement in shaping American visual culture. Why does Corn choose Gerald Murphy’s Razor, one of only sixteen identified paintings by an artist whose career is known for its brevity, as one of her “transatlantic” case studies? Why not look instead at Palmer Hayden’s Nous Quatre à Paris (1935), a painting in the modern style by a prolific African-American artist that documents the Negro Colony of artists in Paris during the twenties and thirties? Recent publications including Sharon Patton’s African-American Art (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press,1998) serve as important surveys of the rich history of African-American visual culture. Until these artists are accepted and integrated into the larger history of American art, however, their most significant contributions will continue to be overlooked.

Overall, Corn’s book provides a useful addition to the literature on early twentieth-century American art. It is thoroughly researched, well written, and richly illustrated. By working from a small group of case studies, and building her argument outward using contemporary literature, politics, economics, and social factors to illuminate their significance, Corn has written a volume that will be of interest not only to art historians, but to all scholars of twentieth-century American cultural history.

Author's Bio>>