The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915-1935

The "bicontinentalism" that for a moment bonded American and European artists in the holiday 1920s had started to sour in the depressed and ideological 1930s. Intellectuals once diverted by American vitality and innocence now looked on the United States as a savage force and a "devouring civilization" (p. 133). A cheerful and mutually bracing interlude had ended. Even so, New York remained a focal point for all of the artists, European or American, who figure in Corn's forward- and backward-pointing narrative, and for none more so than one of her exemplary figures, Joseph Stella.

He had left Italy in 1896 at the age of eighteen. For the rest of his conflicted life, he was nostalgic for the Europe he kept revisiting and kept spellbound by the lights and mechanical motions of his adopted country. It took some years before Stella settled on what was to be his major subject, the modern city, which he most famously realized in The Voice of the City (now in the Newark Museum). Corn likens this futurist four-paneled "nocturne" of Manhattan to a Roman Catholic vision of heaven and hell, and she incorporates him into her company of painters, photographers, engineers, musicians, and writers who since 1900 had been turning New York into a "Cyclopean," "Electrical," and "Delirious" metropolis. Corn thinks Stella managed better than abstractionists like John Mann or Max Weber, or than most other painters of urban scenes, in capturing the city's "dizziness and cacophony," its personality and voice. By the 1930s, the great city signified modernity on both sides of the Atlantic. Its "soul" and "spiri t" took palpable form in Hart Crane's The Bridge and in Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand's film Manhatta (kindred works), and, according to Wanda Corn, most obsessively in Joseph Stella's visionary extravaganza.

New York to many artists may have been "America" quintessentialized, but there was no consensus on what constituted "Americanness" and even less on how to capture and distill it. All the same, the leading actors in The Great American Thing appear to have been hipped on this issue however widely they differed in their personal histories or psychological makeups.

Consider the painter Charles Demuth, the focus of one of Corn's most original chapters, who straddled two antagonistic conceptions of the American Thing. Split between his public and his private worlds, the "American avant-gardist" and closet homosexual slipped easily into the Paris of Duchamp and Murphy, but chronic diabetes, if not personal inclination, tied him perforce to New York and to his home base in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. In the grain elevators and industrial structures of Lancaster he found the "no-nonsense undecorated appearance" that appealed so strongly to French and German architects and engineers. The resolutely masculine Stieglitz circle with whom Demuth remained loosely affiliated treated him in a gingerly fashion, uncomfortable with what they euphemized as his "frailty" and "delicacy." At the same time, they much preferred his watercolors (mostly flowers and fruit) to his factories and billboards and "poster portraits." Corn reads the last as cryptic tributes to some of the very artists an d critics who had kept him in purdah and as coded messages or "valentines" to gay associates, but more significant to her are the clues they provide to his "own campaign for acceptance of who he was" (p. 197).