Overview

"Wanda M. Corn's ""The Great American Thing"" proposes a revisioning of the history of American modern art between the two world wars. Moving away from issues of style and abstraction, she bases her work on a broad examination of culture and on discourses of national identity. Corn argues that the key questions for interwar modernists in New York and Paris were whether or not it was possible to create an art that was both American and modern, and if it was, what such an art would look like. Both European and American artists debated these questions and made art that responded to them. Corn organizes each chapter around a careful reading of a work of art, probing first its peculiar poetry and style and then its connection to its artist and the cultural influences surrounding it. The result is an unfolding of the work's contingent relationships with history, literature, art criticism, music and popular culture. The works she examines - from those made by the Stieglitz circle to those by European Dadaists - were part of the quest for the ""great American thing"", a quest that was international in scope and that inspired a decade of vibrant cultural exchange between the art capitals of Europe and New York. With more than 300 illustrations - drawings, paintings, sculptures, advertisements, cartoons and documentary photographs - ""The Great American Thing"" aims to alter the way we think about the first decades of American modernism and the legacy it created."

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9780520231993

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Reviews

Now comes this remarkable book, parading as a coffee-table art book whereas it really is a wondrously provoking jaunt through the works and movements that made America see itself - and the future - through paintings, cartoons, advertisements: everything visual. - Michael Pakenham, Baltimore Sun Brilliantly conceived and executed.... One particularly admires Corn for the way in which she escorts us out of the museum, and connects American art with American life in the period of her study. - Arthur C. Danto, Times Literary Supplement A wide-ranging, accessible, and erudite discourse on both the international and homegrown origins of American modernism. - Russell T. Clement, Library Journal Never has the era, together with its diverse artistic movements, been understood so comprehensively and so insightfully.... What emerges from this exhaustive analysis of early American modernism is an unsuspected coherence to a period heretofore thought of as diverse and culturally schizophrenic. - Choice [A] boldly argued study....In looking for the roots of the American obsession to create an artistic tradition of its own - what Georgia O'Keeffe called 'the great American thing' - Corn zeroes in on such 'machine-age modernists' of the 20s as Demuth and Charles Sheeler. - Christopher Benfey, The New York Times Book Review The story of how Alfred Stieglitz's shifting band of merry ex-pats and homegrown experimenters invented American modernism has been oft and well told, but never with Corn's combination of lucidity, subtlety and cleareyed sympathy with the work - and the jingoistic America from which it emerged. - Publishers Weekly A provocative study and an important addition to modernist scholarship. - Jennifer A. Greenhill, Boston Book Review

Author Information

Wanda M. Corn is Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor in Art History at Stanford University, and author of The Color of Mood: American Tonalism, 1890-1915 (1972) and Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (1983).

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