Between the Armory Show in 1913 and the end of World War II, American artists, critics, and cultural observers wrestled with various definitions of “American modernism.” Working toward a uniquely American aesthetic, artists as diverse as Reginald Marsh, Charles Sheeler, and John Marin also necessarily positioned themselves relative to modernism. What modern art meant for American art, and what America could in turn mean for modern art, proved productive issues for a generation of artists between the World Wars, spawning debate and experimentation, collaboration and dissent.

Celeste Connor, in her Democratic Visions: Art and Theory of the Stieglitz Circle, 1924-1934, conceives of the American modernism pursued by Alfred Stieglitz and the artists he exhibited as both an experiment in anti-academic and art-critical practice, and also significantly as an ethic committed to social betterment. The focus of Connor’s book, her first, is the post-WWI, post-291 phase of Stieglitz’s art production and promotion. Like Sarah Greenough and Wanda Corn, both of whom have treated this phase of Stieglitz’s influence in recent books of their own, Connor asserts a decisive shift lead to this latter era.¹ If prior to 1924 Stieglitz was involved primarily in bringing European modernism to a Manhattan audience, by 1925, as he confided in a letter to Sherwood Anderson, he felt modernism had become stagnant and conventional.² At the same time, he began to gather around him a group of artists and writers, many a generation younger than himself, who would join him in an effort to aggressively define and promote a specifically American breed of modernism. Critic Paul Rosenfeld’s 1924 book, Port of New York--discussed by Connor--ushered in this new phase with essays devoted to Stieglitz, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Georgia O’Keeffe and other artists who Rosenfeld argued were signs of a new spirit dawning in American life.³ This tight-knit circle also made their intentions known in the 1925 exhibit, “Seven Americans,” including Demuth alongside the six artists Rosenfeld extolled. The history of this post-1924 group--marked by its desire to tap the potential of America through authentic artistic leadership--comprises Connor’s text.

Convincingly arguing that attention to Stieglitz’s earlier involvement with European modernism has since obscured his participation in the fight to determine “Americanness” in modern art, Connor devotes this study to the years in which the Intimate Gallery (1925-29) and An American Place (1929-1946) were the hubs of Stieglitz’s aesthetic discourse. Connor closes her investigation in 1934, twelve years before Stieglitz’s death and the closing of An American Place. This end date was the year Thomas Craven published Modern Art: The Men, The Movements, The Meaning and the Stieglitz circle collectively authored America and Alfred Stieglitz, in part as a response to the charges levied against them in Craven’s text. 1934 thus marks Connor’s perceived shift toward the ascendance of a rather more chauvinistic nationalism in the 1930s. In this way, Connor positions her work as chronicling a moment between the dominance of European avant-garde modernism and the backlash of sentimental American regionalism. Further, she offers Democratic Visions as a corrective to what she considers a standard art historical mistake: the over-identification of Stieglitz with European modernism. She asserts that this misconception is the legacy of the likes of Craven, whose attempts to bolster the regionalist painters’ claim to Americanness served to contest and ultimately obscure Stieglitz’s own nativist efforts.

Connor argues that Stieglitz, along with the artists and critics in his post-1924 circle, grounded the direction of their work and artistic identity on a democratic ideal passed down from Walt Whitman, and updated in the contemporary criticism of Van Wyck Brooks. Rather than the Fordist vision of American specificity current during this period, the circle turned to democracy as a guiding principle constructing “Americanness.” Connor’s contribution to studies on Stieglitz and his allies is valuable for its reminder of the circle’s sometimes-nostalgic attachments to rural life and craft ideology. By tracing the group’s theoretical foundation to Whitman (and, at times, William Morris), Connor demonstrates at once the circle’s philosophical ambitions and their nineteenth-century habits. Instead of a backward looking liability, Connor promotes their attachment to Whitman--secured through artists’ letters and the writings of Rosenfeld and Frank--as a sign of the group’s commitment to democracy. With this as her unifying premise, Connor proceeds to treat a wide range of topics: the circle’s authors, Paul Rosenfeld and Waldo Frank; Stieglitz’s anti-commercial approach to selling artworks; the group’s turn to “New Realism” as a democratic modernist gesture; the group’s critical assessment of urban life; the group’s aesthetic and ideological attachment to rural existence; and Stieglitz’s prized artists themselves: Charles Demuth, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Paul Strand.

Exploring their commitment to democracy, Connor argues that in all their pursuits, Stieglitz-circle artists sought to build a democratic community through an American art that would act as common ground. She further asserts, through recourse to the group’s discussion of Pueblo culture in New Mexico and their adherence to Whitman, that the artists held a pluralistic vision of community. As such, the circle sought to reconcile subjective expression with universal communicability. This is a particularly compelling point, especially as such a position would set the Stieglitz circle apart from the contemporaneous assimilationist view of Americanness, which Connor herself makes clear.⁴ Connor asserts that the circle’s interest in galvanizing a common culture came as a response to immigration. Whether they specifically had an immigrant audience in mind is not entirely clear from Connor’s history. Nonetheless, her text includes many key ingredients for further consideration of the tensions between pluralism and universality, including both the group’s discourse on the Southwest and their interest in folk art.

Connor’s supposition that the artists sought an aesthetic that would not merely register American democratic cohesiveness, but in fact produce it, self-consciously denies Craven’s depiction of the circle as “a group of elitist and socially disengaged artists.”⁵ Fiercely opposed to this characterization, Connor emphasizes Stieglitz’s sense that “the people would respond if given half a chance,” as he wrote to Anderson.⁶ However, Connor does not address the actual reception of the circle’s efforts, and in some ways this is her text’s biggest handicap. While she argues that these artists were “agents in the spread of a visual literacy that helped unify the American community in self-awareness,”⁷ she does not account for the group’s inability to command an audience comparable to that of the New Deal arts projects or regionalist painters. In fact, Wanda Corn reports meager attendance to the group’s inaugural 1925 show, and notes that only one work from the exhibit sold, and that was sold to O’Keeffe. While Connor does not directly address--or even admit to--this failure of the Stieglitz circle to construct the sort of cohesive American society it envisioned, she perhaps gives some clue as to the reasons for the group’s failure. Noting the artists’ dedication to the value of good craftsmanship, Connor argues that they presumed a producerist viewer for their works. That is, they took for granted that their audience would consist of individuals who themselves made things for a living, and so would appreciate the labor of the artist’s craft. In this way, Stieglitz-circle artists failed to adjust to what Connor argues was an increasingly consumerist American populace.

Connor’s tight focus on the group makes for a rich historical read. However, this is not a book to be read in isolation, but rather as part of a rather more complex debate over the terms of American modernism, both in the period and beyond it. Connor provides only a slight sense of the complexities and ambivalences that marked the field of art production, both within and without the Stieglitz circle. Connor’s constricted purview ironically treats the group as though it were alone in its quandaries and quests, thus furthering the very notion of the circle’s exclusivity against which Connor labors. Connor gives little voice to Stieglitz’s critics, except for her invocations of Craven and Thomas Hart Benton, whose protests are predictably punctuated by unfortunate slurs. This renders the only counter-discourse in the book an easily dismissed straw man. In fact, Benton’s caricature of East Coast artists in New Mexico may be distasteful for his inclusion of “priggish aesthetes. . . and fairies” among the highbrow tourists, but he otherwise raises important questions about the problems of cultural exchange and the status of democracy therein.⁸ While perhaps Connor is too quiet as to the ways in which the Stieglitz circle met defeat and criticism, it is precisely these philosophical contests over art and democracy that constitute the historical import of the era, and attest to the strength of the group’s democratic visions. Patriotism, Connor’s book reminds us, need not be either mindless or sentimental. The aesthetic debates and democratic philosophy that backed the artist practice of the Stieglitz circle indeed point to the mental labor required not just for artistic practice, but also for community building, and remind us also of the productive exchange possible between the two.

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