This catalogue looks at a current in interwar American art that is relatively unknown. The familiar story of America in the 'roaring Twenties' is that of 'The Great Gatsby', the Harlem Renaissance, and the Machine Age; while the 1930s are known as the Steinbeckian world marked by the Depression and the New Deal. This exhibition focuses on the artists who grappled with the experience of modern America with a cool, controlled detachment, almost completely eliminating people from their pictures. For some artists this treatment reflected an ambivalence and anxiety about the modern world. Factories without workers and streets without people. Factories without workers and streets without people could seem strange and empty places. George Ault (1891-1948) and Niles Spencer (1893-1952) painted eerie factories with darkened windows. Their precise, orderly painting style adds to the unsettling atmosphere of their work. In 'Manhattan Bridge Loop' (1928), Edward Hopper (1882-1967) captured the stilled, quiet mood of the city, including a solitary pedestrian. For others, this cool treatment of contemporary America was a positive more response - an expression of optimism and pride. Skyscrapers and bridges become studies in geometry; and cities are cleansed and ordered with no crowds and no chaos. Louis Lozowick's (1892-1973) prints capture the energy of the city in curving sprawls and buildings soaring into the sky; while Ralston Crawford (1906-78) and Charles Sheeler (1883-1965) depicted the architecture of industrial America - factories, grain elevators, water plants - as the country's new cathedrals, glorious in their scale and feats of engineering, yet oddly emptied of people. The detached, frozen appearance of the scenes creates an uncertain or ambiguous atmosphere.

The Museum of Modern Art is known for its prescient focus on the avant-garde art of Europe, but in the first half of the twentieth century it was also acquiring work by Stuart Davis, Georgia O’Keeffe, Charles Sheeler, Alfred Stieglitz, and other, less well-known American artists whose work sometimes fits awkwardly under the avant garde umbrella. American Modern presents a fresh look at MoMA’s holdings of American art from that period. The still lifes, portraits, and urban, rural, and industrial landscapes vary in style, approach, and medium: melancholy images by Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth bump against the eccentric landscapes of Charles Burchfield and the Jazz Age sculpture of Elie Nadelman. Yet a distinct sensibility emerges, revealing a side of the Museum that may surprise a good part of its audience and throwing light on the cultural preoccupations of the rapidly changing American society of the day.

America's global cultural impact is largely seen as one-sided, with critics claiming that it has undermined other countries' languages and traditions. But contrary to popular belief, the cultural relationship between the United States and the world has been reciprocal, says Richard Pells. The United States not only plays a large role in shaping international entertainment and tastes, it is also a consumer of foreign intellectual and artistic influences.Pells reveals how the American artists, novelists, composers, jazz musicians, and filmmakers who were part of the Modernist movement were greatly influenced by outside ideas and techniques. People across the globe found familiarities in American entertainment, resulting in a universal culture that has dominated the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and fulfilled the aim of the Modernist movement--to make the modern world seem more intelligible."Modernist America" brilliantly explains why George Gershwin's music, Cole Porter's lyrics, Jackson Pollock's paintings, Bob Fosse's choreography, Marlon Brando's acting, and Orson Welles's storytelling were so influential, and why these and other artists and entertainers simultaneously represent both an American and a modern global culture.

Original essays by twelve distinguished international scholars offer critical overviews of the major genres, literary culture, and social contexts that define the current state of scholarship. This Companion also features a chronology of key events and publication dates covering the first half of the twentieth century in the United States. The introductory reference guide concludes with a current bibliography of further reading organized by chapter topics.

Modernism, referring to the period dating roughly from the late 19th century through 1970, is regarded as a crucial moment in the history of American art. Although Modernist artists adopted a wide range of styles, they were tied by a desire to interpret the rapidly changing nature of society, and to cast aside the conventions of representational art. Some, such as Stuart Davis and Joseph Stella, responded to consumerism, urbanism, and industrial technology, while others, such as Arthur Dove and Georgia O’Keeffe, found inspiration in nature and the traditional Native American culture of the Southwest. This magnificent new book presents the works of the Vilcek Collection, an unparalleled private collection of American Modernist art. Jan and Marica Vilcek acquired their first American Modernist work in 2001, and have since assembled an amazing collection of masterworks representative of a crucial moment in the history of American art. Art historian Lewis Kachur explores almost 100 rarely seen paintings, works on paper, and sculptures by more than 20 leading artists active during the first half of the last century, while William C. Agee contributes an authoritative introduction. Lavishly illustrated throughout, Masterpieces of American Modernism offers an outstanding overview of the radical shift in art that this movement represents.

"In this book Jill Pearlman argues that Gropius did not effect changes alone and, further, that the Harvard Graduate School of Design was not merely an offshoot of the Bauhaus. - She offers a crucial missing piece to the story - and to the history of modern architecture - by focusing on Joseph Hudnut, the school's dean and founder."--BOOK JACKET.

"This book uncovers a largely overlooked strand of American modernism in Cornell's work that engaged with current issues through the metaphysical aspects of vernacular objects and experiences"--

Presents an account of a key period in American graphic design as it manifested itself in various media, covering major historical influences and significant works.

Arguing that the contemporary commitment to the importance of cultural identity has renovated rather than replaced an earlier commitment to racial identity, Walter Benn Michaels asserts that the idea of culture, far from constituting a challenge to racism, is actually a form of racism. Our America offers both a provocative reinterpretation of the role of identity in modernism and a sustained critique of the role of identity in postmodernism. "We have a great desire to be supremely American," Calvin Coolidge wrote in 1924. That desire, Michaels tells us, is at the very heart of American modernism, giving form and substance to a cultural movement that would in turn redefine America's cultural and collective identity--ultimately along racial lines. A provocative reinterpretation of American modernism, Our America also offers a new way of understanding current debates over the meaning of race, identity, multiculturalism, and pluralism. Michaels contends that the aesthetic movement of modernism and the social movement of nativism came together in the 1920s in their commitment to resolve the meaning of identity--linguistic, national, cultural, and racial. Just as the Johnson Immigration Act of 1924, which excluded aliens, and the Indian Citizenship Act of the same year, which honored the truly native, reconceptualized national identity, so the major texts of American writers such as Cather, Faulkner, Hurston, and Williams reinvented identity as an object of pathos--something that can be lost or found, defended or betrayed. Our America is both a history and a critique of this invention, tracing its development from the white supremacism of the Progressive period through the cultural pluralism of the Twenties. Michaels's sustained rereading of the texts of the period--the canonical, the popular, and the less familiar--exposes recurring concerns such as the reconception of the image of the Indian as a symbol of racial purity and national origins, the relation between World War I and race, contradictory appeals to the family as a model for the nation, and anxieties about reproduction that subliminally tie whiteness and national identity to incest, sterility, and impotence.

The definitive biography of the fascinating William James, whose life and writing put an indelible stamp on psychology, philosophy, teaching, and religion—on modernism itself. Often cited as the “father of American psychology,” William James was an intellectual luminary who made significant contributions to at least five fields: psychology, philosophy, religious studies, teaching, and literature. A member of one of the most unusual and notable of American families, James struggled to achieve greatness amid the brilliance of his theologian father; his brother, the novelist Henry James; and his sister, Alice James. After studying medicine, he ultimately realized that his true interests lay in philosophy and psychology, a choice that guided his storied career at Harvard, where he taught some of America’s greatest minds. But it is James’s contributions to intellectual study that reveal the true complexity of man. In this biography that seeks to understand James’s life through his work—including Principles of Psychology, The Varieties of Religious Experience, and Pragmatism—Robert D. Richardson has crafted an exceptionally insightful work that explores the mind of a genius, resulting in “a gripping and often inspiring story of intellectual and spiritual adventure” (Publishers Weekly, starred review). “A magnificent biography.” —The Washington Post