Awards

• "Winner of A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title ""Top 25"" Selection, 2016."
• Winner of A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Top 25 Selection, 2016.
• Winner of A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title ""Top 25"" Selection, 2016.

Overview

A vivid, engaging account of the artists and artworks that sought to make sense of America's first total war, Grand Illusions takes readers on a compelling journey through the major historical events leading up to and beyond US involvement in WWI to discover the vast and pervasive influence of the conflict on American visual culture. David M. Lubin presents a highly original examination of the era's fine arts and entertainment to show how they ranged from patriotic idealism to profound disillusionment. In stylishly written chapters, Lubin assesses the war's impact on two dozen painters, designers, photographers, and filmmakers from 1914 to 1933. He considers well-known figures such as Marcel Duchamp, John Singer Sargent, D. W. Griffith, and the African American outsider artist Horace Pippin while resurrecting forgotten artists such as the mask-maker Anna Coleman Ladd, the sculptor Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, and the combat artist Claggett Wilson. The book is liberally furnished with illustrations from epoch-defining posters, paintings, photographs, and films. Armed with rich cultural-historical details and an interdisciplinary narrative approach, David Lubin creatively upends traditional understandings of the Great War's effects on the visual arts in America.

Full Product Details

9780190218614

Table of Contents

Reviews

What Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory did for literature, David Lubin's Grand Illusions does for the painting, photography, sculpture, and architecture inspired by the First World War. Astutely guiding his readers through the treacherous landscape where stubborn romantic myths befog the ghastly realities of modern warfare, Lubin powerfully demonstrates the Great War's lasting legacy in all the visual arts. --David M. Kennedy, author of Over Here: The First World War and American Society A fascinating, richly illustrated examination of how this supposedly 'forgotten' war figured in the American imagination. --David Reynolds, author of The Long Shadow: The Legacies of the Great War in the Twentieth Century

The most thoughtful and imaginative book ever written about the art of the First World War. * Alexander Nemerov, author of Wartime Kiss: Visions of the Moment in the 1940s * The deep shadow the First World War cast on American painting, film, and letters is the subject of David M. Lubin's impressive book. Demolishing the outmoded idea that the war of 1914-18 vanished from the American scene after 1918, the author offers us a wide-ranging study of both the visible and the underground traces war leaves in its wake. * Jay Winter, author of Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History * Grand Illusions is a remarkable work of scholarship and cultural criticism. The huge amount of material Lubin has gathered makes absolutely clear the widespread and profound effect World War I had on those who created masses of art about it. Considered as a whole, Grand Illusions may come close to being the definitive study of America's myriad 'Illusions' about the Great War. Many others have addressed the topic, but no one does it better than Lubin in this fine volume. * Townsend Ludington, author of Marsden Hartley: The Biography of an American Artist * A fascinating, richly illustrated examination of how this supposedly 'forgotten' war figured in the American imagination. * David Reynolds, author of The Long Shadow: The Legacies of the Great War in the Twentieth Century * What Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory did for literature, David Lubin's Grand Illusions does for the painting, photography, sculpture, and film inspired by the First World War. Astutely guiding his readers through the treacherous landscape where stubborn romantic myths befog the ghastly realities of modern warfare, Lubin powerfully demonstrates the Great Wars lasting legacy in all the visual arts. * David M. Kennedy, author of Over Here: The First World War and American Society *

Author Information

David M. Lubin is the Charlotte C. Weber Professor of Art at Wake Forest University. A former critic for Rolling Stone, he is the author of several books including Picturing a Nation: Art and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century America (Yale UP, 1996), and Shooting Kennedy: JFK and the Culture of Images (University of California Press, 2003).

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