06
Sep
2005
The Great American Thing is, in some ways, a victim of its own success.
The exhibit, the first major show at the new Figge Art Museum, opens on September 17 and focuses on modern American art from 1915 to 1935, the "modernist" period roughly coinciding with the interval between the two world wars.
The exhibit makes the argument that this period produced art that asked and answered important questions about national identity, ones we still raise today: What does it mean to be American? What is American?
That artwork from the early 20th Century is urban, sophisticated, modern, and clearly of the New World. It's not anti-European, but separate from Europe. It is the first truly American art, and it laid the groundwork for all who followed, from regionalists such as Grant Wood to the postmodernists. Abstract expressionism - the post-World War II art movement identified with Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko that made New York the center of the art world - couldn't have existed without the modernists.
But in collecting more than 120 works for The Great American Thing, the exhibit's organizers ran into a problem: The Great American Thing, the book.
"The material had suddenly become very desirable," said Wanda M. Corn, author of the 1999 book and co-curator of the exhibit. And that was a function of the success of Corn's volume, which turned the tables on conventional art-history thinking that was dismissive of the modernists. "My book has hit a chord of response," Corn said in a phone interview last week.
American modernism had previously been discounted by art historians, Corn said. Even though some of the artists of the period were important - such as Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O'Keeffe, Stuart Davis, and Arthur Dove - the movement as a whole was not. Critics generally said, "This is very provincial stuff," Corn said.
But Corn's book put American modernism in its proper cultural context. The Boston Book Review called The Great American Thing "an important addition to modernist scholarship," while the New York Times Book Review said it was a "boldly argued study of American modernism." Choice explained: "What emerges from this exhaustive analysis ... is an unsuspected coherence to a period heretofore thought of as diverse and culturally schizophrenic."
The renewed importance of modernism has meant that works from the period have become scarce in terms of their availability for exhibits, Corn said.
"A whole host of museums are re-hanging their American collections," said Corn, the Robert & Ruth Halperin Professor of Art History at Stanford. Furthermore, dozens of museums have put moratoria on their lending programs.
So museums that never put an emphasis on collecting American modernism - such as the Museum of Modern Art - aren't equipped to give proper credit to the movement. At the Museum of Modern Art, Corn said, "you do not see the story I'm telling."
All those things made mounting an exhibit based on Corn's book something of a challenge. "We borrowed a lot from private collections," the author said. "We've got our show together."
"Ours" and "Theirs"
Corn said The Great American Thing was a project that spanned two decades. When she started thinking about the issue of American identity in art, she had a hypothesis more than a thesis: that American artists of the early 20th Century were creating a distinctly American art - one unburdened by history but also far more sophisticated than 19th Century attempts focusing on the wide-open American landscape.
As Corn dove into the topic, she found a wealth of under-appreciated works and artists. "I had hit a mother lode of evidence," Corn said. "There was a story here that hadn't been told."
Before the modernists was a "desire for American art" but mostly a void, Corn said. American artists of the time didn't carry the baggage of Europe, she said, and consequently weren't "overwhelmed by history." American artists "had no frame of reference before themselves," she added.
The modernists in America - working from roughly 1915 to 1935 - were consistently being marginalized in art histories as "a secondary subgenre of European modernism," Corn said. "I knew something was going on there that had nothing to do with Europe." She felt these artists made a critical contribution to a uniquely American art.
As the epilogue to her book summarizes: "Postwar calls for a 'new spirit' arose in both Paris and New York, and diverse artists became newly concerned with place, home, roots, traditions, continuities, and what was 'ours' and what was 'theirs.' In this inward-looking climate, artists on both sides of the Atlantic typecast America as an extremely modern country without a history and defined themselves as for or against the life it represented. They produced a variety of modern works evoking American things and places."
Just as crucially, the book notes, is the role this art played in future movements: "In ways rarely studied or commented on, post-World War I culture initiated patterns of behavior and artistic paradigms that persisted for at least the next two generations. Some of this legacy endures today." The regionalists and abstract expressionists borrowed as much from the vocabulary, attitude, and community of the modernists as their style, using "the same Americanizing language, always arguing for their own primacy of position in the art world of their day," Corn writes.
"You couldn't have art deco" without the modernists, Corn said. "You couldn't have had the regionalists."
Yet the modernists were also important in creating a tone for American art. Previous attempts at cultural nationalism, such as the Hudson River School, were literal, and naïve, representations of expansive landscapes and wilderness. "This group of artists made it interesting to be an artist," Corn said. "It created a stage. I think that's terribly important."
Setting the Stage for Grant Wood
Before The Great American Thing was a book, it was an idea, and as an idea it could have traveled down several different paths. "At the beginning, I thought the book could be an exhibition," Corn said.
She kept a three-ring notebook of works that could be part of an exhibition, but she was never able to get it into motion.
But Linda Downs, shortly after she became director of the Figge/Davenport Museum of Art three years ago, re-introduced the idea of an exhibit to Corn. "She was the one who put the bee in my bonnet," Corn said.
The first contact about the exhibit was about two years ago, Corn said. Typically, that's on the short end of the amount of time it takes to put an exhibit together, "but we had the book," Corn said.
The exhibit is not an attempt to replicate the book, but to tell its story well. The Great American Thing is not so much about specific works or art but the cultural context in which certain artists worked. "My book is not a survey book," she said. "It's about representative case studies."
So while the exhibit won't have some major works that were featured in the book, Corn doesn't sound disappointed. "The ideal exhibition would be to have all the [seven] major pictures in the book," Corn said. "We have things that can stand in. ... We have good substitutions."
The Figge exhibit - which will travel to the Tacoma Art Museum after its run here - has more sections than the book, adding an area on jazz and breaking up one chapter into two parts. That is to some degree a concession to the Figge space.
The show will take up the third and fourth floors of the Figge, and one of Corn's targets sounds modest, in part because modernist artists didn't work with massive canvases. "To fill it, period, is one goal," she said, "to get that space domesticated. We have our designers working very hard."
Asked whether she's satisfied with the exhibit, Corn deferred, saying that the fun part - actually arranging and hanging the show - still had to be done. "You can ask me in a week," she said.
Another issue is presenting the material in a way that it will be accessible to a general audience. "My own writing is very accessible," Corn said. "We always have a part of our audience that needs to be brought along."
Every element of the exhibit - from the wall labels to a symposium on September 17 - is designed to be understandable to the lay person without an art-history background, without being boring to people with an art-history background. "We don't want to play to the bottom," Corn said. "We have our work cut out for us."
This particular exhibit at this specific venue, Corn said, presents another challenge. She said she expects that an audience from the heartland - typically embracing regionalism as "the" American art - won't care about modernism's place in the art-history texts. "I don't think Iowans give a hoot about that kind of revisionism," she said.
But the audience will learn that its conception of American art - epitomized by the work of Grant Wood - wouldn't have been possible without the modernism shown in The Great American Thing. The search for "American" art preceded the regionalism that Midwesterners associate with Wood, and the regionalists were reacting to the modernists.
"People wonder where the regionalists are in this story," Corn said. "It sets the stage for them."
The exhibit makes the argument that this period produced art that asked and answered important questions about national identity, ones we still raise today: What does it mean to be American? What is American?
That artwork from the early 20th Century is urban, sophisticated, modern, and clearly of the New World. It's not anti-European, but separate from Europe. It is the first truly American art, and it laid the groundwork for all who followed, from regionalists such as Grant Wood to the postmodernists. Abstract expressionism - the post-World War II art movement identified with Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko that made New York the center of the art world - couldn't have existed without the modernists.
But in collecting more than 120 works for The Great American Thing, the exhibit's organizers ran into a problem: The Great American Thing, the book.
"The material had suddenly become very desirable," said Wanda M. Corn, author of the 1999 book and co-curator of the exhibit. And that was a function of the success of Corn's volume, which turned the tables on conventional art-history thinking that was dismissive of the modernists. "My book has hit a chord of response," Corn said in a phone interview last week.
American modernism had previously been discounted by art historians, Corn said. Even though some of the artists of the period were important - such as Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O'Keeffe, Stuart Davis, and Arthur Dove - the movement as a whole was not. Critics generally said, "This is very provincial stuff," Corn said.
But Corn's book put American modernism in its proper cultural context. The Boston Book Review called The Great American Thing "an important addition to modernist scholarship," while the New York Times Book Review said it was a "boldly argued study of American modernism." Choice explained: "What emerges from this exhaustive analysis ... is an unsuspected coherence to a period heretofore thought of as diverse and culturally schizophrenic."
The renewed importance of modernism has meant that works from the period have become scarce in terms of their availability for exhibits, Corn said.
"A whole host of museums are re-hanging their American collections," said Corn, the Robert & Ruth Halperin Professor of Art History at Stanford. Furthermore, dozens of museums have put moratoria on their lending programs.
So museums that never put an emphasis on collecting American modernism - such as the Museum of Modern Art - aren't equipped to give proper credit to the movement. At the Museum of Modern Art, Corn said, "you do not see the story I'm telling."
All those things made mounting an exhibit based on Corn's book something of a challenge. "We borrowed a lot from private collections," the author said. "We've got our show together."
"Ours" and "Theirs"
Corn said The Great American Thing was a project that spanned two decades. When she started thinking about the issue of American identity in art, she had a hypothesis more than a thesis: that American artists of the early 20th Century were creating a distinctly American art - one unburdened by history but also far more sophisticated than 19th Century attempts focusing on the wide-open American landscape.
As Corn dove into the topic, she found a wealth of under-appreciated works and artists. "I had hit a mother lode of evidence," Corn said. "There was a story here that hadn't been told."
Before the modernists was a "desire for American art" but mostly a void, Corn said. American artists of the time didn't carry the baggage of Europe, she said, and consequently weren't "overwhelmed by history." American artists "had no frame of reference before themselves," she added.
The modernists in America - working from roughly 1915 to 1935 - were consistently being marginalized in art histories as "a secondary subgenre of European modernism," Corn said. "I knew something was going on there that had nothing to do with Europe." She felt these artists made a critical contribution to a uniquely American art.
As the epilogue to her book summarizes: "Postwar calls for a 'new spirit' arose in both Paris and New York, and diverse artists became newly concerned with place, home, roots, traditions, continuities, and what was 'ours' and what was 'theirs.' In this inward-looking climate, artists on both sides of the Atlantic typecast America as an extremely modern country without a history and defined themselves as for or against the life it represented. They produced a variety of modern works evoking American things and places."
Just as crucially, the book notes, is the role this art played in future movements: "In ways rarely studied or commented on, post-World War I culture initiated patterns of behavior and artistic paradigms that persisted for at least the next two generations. Some of this legacy endures today." The regionalists and abstract expressionists borrowed as much from the vocabulary, attitude, and community of the modernists as their style, using "the same Americanizing language, always arguing for their own primacy of position in the art world of their day," Corn writes.
"You couldn't have art deco" without the modernists, Corn said. "You couldn't have had the regionalists."
Yet the modernists were also important in creating a tone for American art. Previous attempts at cultural nationalism, such as the Hudson River School, were literal, and naïve, representations of expansive landscapes and wilderness. "This group of artists made it interesting to be an artist," Corn said. "It created a stage. I think that's terribly important."
Setting the Stage for Grant Wood
Before The Great American Thing was a book, it was an idea, and as an idea it could have traveled down several different paths. "At the beginning, I thought the book could be an exhibition," Corn said.
She kept a three-ring notebook of works that could be part of an exhibition, but she was never able to get it into motion.
But Linda Downs, shortly after she became director of the Figge/Davenport Museum of Art three years ago, re-introduced the idea of an exhibit to Corn. "She was the one who put the bee in my bonnet," Corn said.
The first contact about the exhibit was about two years ago, Corn said. Typically, that's on the short end of the amount of time it takes to put an exhibit together, "but we had the book," Corn said.
The exhibit is not an attempt to replicate the book, but to tell its story well. The Great American Thing is not so much about specific works or art but the cultural context in which certain artists worked. "My book is not a survey book," she said. "It's about representative case studies."
So while the exhibit won't have some major works that were featured in the book, Corn doesn't sound disappointed. "The ideal exhibition would be to have all the [seven] major pictures in the book," Corn said. "We have things that can stand in. ... We have good substitutions."
The Figge exhibit - which will travel to the Tacoma Art Museum after its run here - has more sections than the book, adding an area on jazz and breaking up one chapter into two parts. That is to some degree a concession to the Figge space.
The show will take up the third and fourth floors of the Figge, and one of Corn's targets sounds modest, in part because modernist artists didn't work with massive canvases. "To fill it, period, is one goal," she said, "to get that space domesticated. We have our designers working very hard."
Asked whether she's satisfied with the exhibit, Corn deferred, saying that the fun part - actually arranging and hanging the show - still had to be done. "You can ask me in a week," she said.
Another issue is presenting the material in a way that it will be accessible to a general audience. "My own writing is very accessible," Corn said. "We always have a part of our audience that needs to be brought along."
Every element of the exhibit - from the wall labels to a symposium on September 17 - is designed to be understandable to the lay person without an art-history background, without being boring to people with an art-history background. "We don't want to play to the bottom," Corn said. "We have our work cut out for us."
This particular exhibit at this specific venue, Corn said, presents another challenge. She said she expects that an audience from the heartland - typically embracing regionalism as "the" American art - won't care about modernism's place in the art-history texts. "I don't think Iowans give a hoot about that kind of revisionism," she said.
But the audience will learn that its conception of American art - epitomized by the work of Grant Wood - wouldn't have been possible without the modernism shown in The Great American Thing. The search for "American" art preceded the regionalism that Midwesterners associate with Wood, and the regionalists were reacting to the modernists.
"People wonder where the regionalists are in this story," Corn said. "It sets the stage for them."
