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The title of Charles Demuth's abstract townscape, Backdrop of East Lynne (1919) was long disregarded as either a specific place name or a Dada-inspired play on words of little significance. This article proposes that it actually references the nineteenth-century novel and popular play East Lynne (1861) by Ellen Wood. East Lynne remained well known in Demuth's day through theatrical revivals and silent film adaptations. Though it still appealed to traditional taste, it became notorious for displaying a Victorian sentimentality many considered out of touch with the complexities of modern life. Understood in this context, Demuth's title draws an analogy between outmoded theatrical traditions and the American landscape conventions his modernist painting sought to revitalize. Moreover, it provides important insight into how his involvement with avant-garde theater as a founding member of the Provincetown Players shaped his practice as a visual artist and points to the deeper impact of nineteenth-century culture on the foundations of American modernism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'On America' is a short essay by one of the original contributors to Performance Research's ‘On America’ edition (Vol. 3 No. 1), back in 1998. The piece thinks elliptically about the art, character and landscape of the United States, particularly in the first half of the 20th Century, in the era of 'the historical avant-garde'. It asks, in particular, what 'avant-garde' might mean in the context of the American Midwest, with its endlessly flat landscape and sometimes isolated human populations. The words of John Cage, Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson and Susan Glaspell are employed to think about landscape theatre, theatre in the landscape, and whether or not some landscapes are 'almost too interesting'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates how modernist artists in the postwar United States navigated the intersection of sculpture and skilled labor. The sculpture of Northern California artist J. B. Blunk evinces a formal debt to Isamu Noguchi, his friend and mentor. Both artists made biomorphic sculptures in wood, many of which were interactive. From the late 1930s through the 1960s, Noguchi was a prolific set designer, creating a wide variety of stage sets for Martha Graham and other New York City choreographers. Blunk’s signature format is the public seating sculpture. Sited primarily in and around the San Francisco Bay Area, these communal benches sculpted from reclaimed wood are among his most visible and acclaimed works. Though related in visual terms, the functional woodworks of Blunk and Noguchi have been read in very different ways and occupy disparate niches in American visual culture. The article examines these artworks within the framework of labor, and demonstrates that this gulf is due, in part, to their differing stances toward the skill sets of the building, manufacturing, and design professions on which their practices relied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The American painter and artist of ephemeral, mythical environments, Paul Thek (1933–1988), commented on his position as an American artist in his home country by realizing some key works after having left the New York art scene for Europe at the end of the 1960s:Dwarf Parade Table(1969–1973),Fishman(1969) andShrine(1968–1972). These works are strikingly connected by their genealogy, a similar use of Polaroids and other photographs that document different stages of their creation process, and striking commonalities in their iconography. The essay highlights not only these interconnections, but also puts them into a relationship with a set of unpublished writings found after his early death in 1988. These writings of a »silent revolt« give further insight into the artist's critical and so far ignored attitude towards the art world of the United States during the late 1970s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay focuses on Alvin Coburn’s The Octopus, a photograph of Madison Square taken from atop the Met Life Tower in 1912. Working against the conventional interpretation of the image as a study in form, it approaches the work in relation to a public debate surrounding urbanization in Manhattan at the turn of the century. Read in this context, the image not only chronicles the anxieties of the skyscraper and its perceived threats to health, sociality, and class mobility but also discloses new modes of urban experience that strike a balance between competing forces within this dialogue. In this regard, the image is instructive for contemporary photography as it attempts to engage with the postindustrial city as subject. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A biography of the Mexican American sculptor and artist Octavio Medellín is presented. He was born in Matehuala of San Luis Potosí, Mexico in 1907 and studied at the San Antonio School of Art in San Antonio, Texas. He acquired U.S. citizenship in 1942 and taught at the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts (DMFA). Medellín's art was influenced by modernist primitivism and the direct carving approach to sculpture.

The article focuses on the American film magazine "Experimental Cinema" and its contribution to American modernism during the period of Great Depression. It investigates the magazine's discursive thinking of a dialectical cinema, engaging political radicalism and formal experimentation, that might compete with the Soviet montage epics. It says that the magazine was able to capture the tensions and complexities within American modernism.

The debate on the responsibility of the writer was, in France as in the USA, an attack against literary and artistic modernism. From Charles Maurras to Irving Babbit, the reaction against modernism presented itself as a defense of classicism and of tradition against romanticism. Far from being politically neutral, this attack identified romanticism with revolution and the destruction of the social order. The opposition between responsibility and freedom structured the debate from the end of the nineteenth century until World War II. The war entailed a loss of autonomy of the literary field which fostered, like during World War I, the imposition of national moralism. In both countries, a debate arose on the question of the responsibility of the writer, but it took a different form. Whereas the opposition between art for art’s sake and responsibility continued to structure it in the USA, the notion of responsibility was appropriated in France by the literary Resistance and redefined by Sartre at the Liberation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the operations of the the Penguin club, a group of modernist U.S. artists, and the role of painter Walt Kuhn in its formation. Kuhn's efforts in organizing the Armory Show, an early showcase for European modern art in the U.S., are explained by the author, as is Kuhn's divergence from the artistically conservative standpoint of the National Academy of Design (NAD). The author then goes on to describe various events sponsored by the Penguin, such as art exhibitions, auctions, and an annual costume ball.

Through discussion of a historical project to recreate Primitive Mysteries at Laban in London, the 1931 dance work is examined and placed in its context in Graham's career. Possible sources of inspiration derived from Catholic and New Mexican Pueblo culture are discussed, as is the relationship of the work to American modernism in art and dance. Through the use of a Labanotation score, films of the dance, the first-hand experience of Graham dancer Susan Sentler, and published sources, the work has been recreated for Laban dance students in its premiere outside the United States. The article uncovers the significance of the experience in deepening students' understanding of Graham's art and technique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a historical profile of the Design Laboratory, a modernist art school in existence in the U.S. from 1935 to 1939 as part of the Works Progress Administration's (WPA) Federal Art Project (FAP). Particular focus is paid to ways in which innovative art teaching methods and curriculum at the Design Laboratory transferred to other design schools following its closing and also how the school served as a place for artists, entrepreneurs, unionists, and journalists to develop relationships to initiate social change and promote modernist ideals. Other topics include the social aspects of education during the Great Depression and the role played by modern art advocate Holger Cahill in establishing the school.

This essay examines the effect of social change on artists and artworks in the 1960s in America. It focuses on the significance and meaning of Conceptual Art in the late 1960s, as artists reconsidered art theories and discourse in the context of the epoch-making events of 1968. Conceptual Art is not about forms or materials or styles, but about ideas and meanings. It is defined by the way it questions both the meaning of art and the inherent values of Modernist culture and society. The year 1968 represents the climax of the crisis of authority for which Conceptual Art is both symptom and diagnosis. As artists became acutely aware of the institutional and political context in which they showed their works, Conceptual Art revolutionized the way in which art was exhibited and conceptualized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the interwar debate over nationality and modernism by examining the writing and art of Walt Kuhn in the U.S. Recently, scholars of American art have aimed to dismantle the division of interwar modernists and realists, seeing it as a binary hangover from modern historians, and are more concerned with pointing to the many similarities between the two camps rather than their differences. Citing such commonalities as a fascination with folk culture and a quest for authenticity, scholars now acknowledge that most artists working in the United States during the war are competing for the American identity.

This article examines the journal USA: A Quarterly Magazine of the American Scene as a microcosm of the complexity of meanings and positioning of photographic modernism in interwar America. Established in the spring of 1930, USA would survive for only three issues. Yet despite that short run, this Philadelphia-based journal of the arts featured an impressive roster of work from across the arts including contributions by William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, Martha Graham, José Clemente Orozco, Isamu Noguchi and Richard Neutra. Within its pages, USA also prominently featured photographic representations by such canonical figures as Edward Weston, Walker Evans and Ralph Steiner as well as anonymous vernacular works. This article argues that USA's treatment of the photograph exemplifies photography's complex position during the interwar years as, on the one hand, an emergent medium of modernist art and, on the other, a favored form of commercial and popular expression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the effect of Cultural Cold War on modernism projects in the U.S. The project played a key role in redefining modernism as being characterized primarily by style, in directing modernism away from collectivist/Utopian origins and toward bourgeois individualism, and in constructing a coalition of elites. According to Intercultural Publication Inc. (IP) and its journal "Perspectives USA," headed by James Laughlin, the Cultural Cold War has significance in the domestication of literary and artistics modernism in the country.

New York Dadaist John Covert's (1882–1960) collage construction Time (1919) is a staple of American modernist art history. Recently discovered materials prompt our reconsideration of the work in terms of the connotations that time, broadly considered, came to embody in Covert's life and post-World War I America. Time addresses a reverence for the number four that we see in other works by the artist and that constituted part of a philosophy espoused by the pioneering psychiatrist Elmer Ernest Southard. Time represents a game or toy that, soon after its production, Covert would no longer have time to play. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the legacy of photographic modernism in the U.S. Charles Sheeler has made photography an integral part of his artistic practice since 1915. The inclusion of his 1939 work entitled Wheels in the 14th edition of the "Encyclopedia Britannica" published in 1941 is an evidence of his importance to the aesthetic development of the medium. His work accompanied Edward Weston's revised entry on the subject of Photographic Art for the publication. According to the article, photographic modernism in its purist sense started in the U.S. about 1915 to 1916 with the developing work of artists Sheeler, Strand and Morton Schamberg.

This article describes the evolution of puppet theatre in the U.S. as a form of modernism. The article especially focuses on a play by Gertrude Stein that was produced in 1936, Identity, or I Am I Because My Little Dog Knows Me. The play was done with puppets. In this article, the author attempts to show how the 1930s convergence of the Federal Theatre Project, Midwestern dreams of modern art, and an emerging U.S. sense of the possibilities of puppetry all led to a moment when puppet modernism publicly established itself as a national presence.

The article presents the author's artistic perspectives regarding the consideration of the American dream. Several perspectives and philosophies played an integral role in the formation of such idealism. The author assesses his various insights on the concept.

Presents an interview with American artist William T. Wiley. Personal and professional background of Wiley; Role of Wiley as a teacher at the University of California; Views of Wiley on abstract expressionism; Comment of Wiley on his association with the funk art movement on the West Coast; Influence of cartoonists on the life of Wiley,

This essaye analyzes the early poems of Yusef Komunyakaa. Komunyakaa's poems uncover multiple new tableaux of human presence and awareness which resonate with, and combine, dimensions of experience usually held apart. Attention to Komunyakaa's early work shows that his approach to the unusual door connects an American vernacular rooted in the blues, usually understood as an autobiographical or confessional mode to a modernist's obsession with images of interior processes, usually understood as dissociated from direct autobiographical meaning.

Television journalism and modern design share ideals of rationality, objectivity and utility. Both institutions embrace technology in pursuit of speed and machine vision. Both aspire to editorial and technical transparence. This essay examines the development of US television news design in relation to the modernist ethos, .focusing on choices to reveal, conceal and symbolize the production apparatus. I argue that the visual vocabulary of television news was established early and remains durable, constituting an 'International Style.' Since this style emerged largely outside design discourse, this article looks to accounts of decision makers, analysing intentions and the resulting forms, especially as they relate to modernist ideals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay seeks to explicate the historical development, when a specific type of authorial celebrity characteristic of modernism shifted from a literary to a musical dominant in the U.S. With the emergence of postmodernism, however, the significance of bohemia as a source of literary innovation receded, and therefore literary celebrity no longer commands the cultural authority it once did. The peculiar conflation of literary genius and pop phenomenon, however, did not disappear. Rather, it passed from the literary to the musical field in the figure of the singer-songwriter, whose emergence during the postmodern era is a crucial condition of possibility for the aesthetic consecration of a figure like Eminem. In this essay, the author hopes to establish why and how this shift occurred when it did.

This article focuses on the painting titled "Placa," where former graffiti writer Charles" Chaz" Bojorquez lists the names of people who have been significant in his life. He has described this work, made with fine art materials and donated to a museum, as his mantra painting, one that he created to acknowledge in a different realm the strength he had been given through the support of those he names. Through medium, format, technique, and placement, these acrylic letters also participate in the art-historical debates about the legacy of modernism in late-twentieth-century painting and about the influence of movements ranging from pop and abstract expressionism in the United States to informalism in Spain.

Discusses the emergence of the postwar art scene in Los Angeles, California. Emergence of "exciting" trends in contemporary American art in the 1960s; Role of elite art clubs such as the California Art Club and Artland; Influence of politics on art.

This article recalls the perceived combined practice of aesthetic experimentation and radical politics in Richard Foreman's play of "ontological depth, fragmented surfaces," of the U.S. modernist avant-garde. Foreman has created a body of theatrical works that oscillates "between chilly, forbidding surfaces, and its gestures toward worldly or subjective plenitude." The author contends that such oscillation is not only the mode but the subject of Foreman's recent plays, Paradise Hotel and Now That Communism Is Dead, My Life Feels Empty! The theoretico-aesthetic constants and transformations in the "Ontological-Hysteric" theater are analyzed by working on Foreman's essays and manifestoes.

Focuses on the history of modernism in the U.S. Background of author Wallace Stevens; Views of painters Robert Motherwell and Ad Reinhardt on the modern art; Description of the earliest poems of William Carlos Williams.

Focuses on Okwui Enwezor's art exhibition "The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945-1994," held at the Museum of Contemporary art in Chicago, Illinois in 2001. Reasons for the resistance to a self-consciously modern African art; Contrast between the Chicago event and the exhibit on the George Moore Wing at the British Museum; Characteristics of modernism.

Comments on trends in 20th century American art which gave rise to the modernism movement. Spirit of the modernist movement illustrated in the 1946 parody published by painter Ad Reinhardt; Role of forming early collections of modern art to validate and shape the historical perspective through which American modernism has been assessed.

Comments on the interpretations of the United States' mass cultural influence to other countries. Contribution of modernism in art to the growth of mass culture; Effects of mass culture globalization; Description of the US culture; Account on the cultural relationship between the United States and other countries.

Focuses on several art exhibitions on modernism in New York, New York as of February 2000. Includes `Still Life Is Still Alive' at the Jan Krugier Gallery; `Alfred Maurer: Aestheticism to Modernism' at the Hollis Taggart Gallery; `From Brugel to Rubens: Netherlandish and Flemish Drawings' at the Morgan Library.

Examines the tensions encoded in the Harlem Document, a compilation of photographs of Harlem and its residents taken by the white photographer Aaron Siskind. Treatment of American modernism on photography as a symbol and abstract of expression; Resistance from sensationalism of the poor; Embodiment of racial and political-aesthetic tensions into the images.

Analyzes the message of modernity imparted by the novel `Cogewea, The Half-Blood,' by Mourning Dove. Year the book was published; Discussion on how the book depicted the life of American Indian women; Characters in the novel.

Discusses obscene artistry in the United States. Nature of transgression; Art's forging of obscenity; French philosopher Michel Foucault's opinion of the pornography of Georges Bataille as expressed in his book `The History of Sexuality'; Setting of the aesthetic standard of legal obscenity through artist Djuna Barnes' `Nightwood.'

Explores the dynamics of mutual definition between art and its audiences at the moment of artistic modernism's early appearances in the United States in the late 19th-century and early 20th centuries. Art audiences's strong resistance to modernism in 19th century United States; Viewer responses to art exhibited at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.

Comments on the modernist art exhibited by the Museum of Modern Art. Key features; Range of themes and subject matter explored by the art works; Theoretical significance.

Compares modern and postmodern arts education in the United States. History of modernism; Background on the transition from modern to postmodern arts education; Description of postmodern arts education.

The article reports on the works of painter Maurice Brazil Prendergast. Prendergast focused his attention on New York City as a venue for planned spaces, where city dwellers could make use of their leisure time. Among his famous works are "Sunlight on the Piazetta," "Festival Day, Venice," "Procession, Venice" and "Central Park, 1901." Prendergast's paintings were compared with French modernist works and he experimented with color and composition, which set him apart from his American peers exhibiting in New York galleries.

The article offers information about Sheldon Cheney who dedicated his life in explaining the principles of modern art. Though he has not been analyzed by historians, his writings about modern art stayed continuously published. His writings are the link between the first set of analysis of modern art and later enhancement in modernist criticism. However, his interpretation of complex ideas into simpler language has led historians to neglect his real achievement as a synthesizer of avant-garde theory, but still, his writings greatly contributed in understanding the modern art in America.

The author reflects on the essay presented at a memorial conference for Irving Howe, and was then revised at the Locarno conference. He believes that it contrasted the glory days of Partisan Review, with the complacent passivity of the U.S. intellectuals. An overview of Howe's description of the cultural-political avant-garde for with the Partisan Review is offered. He argues that the art and literature of the twentieth century marked a major turning in the cultural history of the West.