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

Demuth's oil painting The Figure 5 in Gold, the apotheosis of a Manhattan fire engine, illustrates his technique of covert communication. Corn's exegesis of this work starts with the poem of his friend William Carlos Williams that inspired it. She translates at length Demuth's obscure symbols and "double entendres" and demonstrates his skill in blending "the high principles of modernism with the lowbrow practices of street signage" (p. 209). In this sympathetic portrait, he steps forward as a fine painter and self-appointed cultural diplomat who did his best to reconcile clashing modernist factions, the transcendentalized organicists of the Sherwood Anderson, Waldo Frank, Arthur Dove, Paul Rosenfeld, Alfred Stieglitz persuasion, and the perky champions of Dadaist spontaneity, jazz, and Ford cars. To achieve "a great new national art" (p. 236), Corn concludes, Demuth was prepared to mix distinctive features of both groups, even if that required on his part a degree of self-mockery and dissimulation.

Demuth bequeathed his oil paintings to Georgia O'Keeffe, the wife of Alfred Stieglitz. She didn't like them much, although she seemed to have thought better of his flower paintings, an opinion she shared with the rest of the Stieglitz circle. They had made a great to-do over her, translating her into an icon of the Feminine Principle and explicating the "unfolding petals" and "eroticized stamens" in her flower paintings as abstract renderings of "women's sexual drives and experiences. After enduring, or perhaps encouraging, the "sensuous woman" and flower fancies of her male acolytes, and after having a brief fling with skyscrapers, O'Keeffe began the last leg of her physical and psychological journey. Her move to the Southwest, as Corn tells it, marked her final break with the Stieglitzian mystique and the transmogrifying of "woman painter" to "regional painter" (p. 242).

O'Keeffe's pilgrimage is only one episode in Corn's disquisition on the aesthetic impact of the American Southwest on artists and writers. For some, like Marsden Hartley, Mabel Dodge, and D. H. Lawrence (they walk in and out of Corn's chronicle), the experience could be quasireligious. Others (Edmund Wilson and Stuart Davis are cited) were moved but unravished by the desert landscape and drily skeptical of the epiphanies of "anglo-cosmopolites" (p. 254). If O'Keeffe had a few of her own, she kept them to herself. Her staged western hegira and unrapturous meditations on skulls and bones signaled a joint repudiation of the Manhattan "machine age" artists, the Stieglitz naturists, and the Midwest regionalists who exalted the local and hated anything smacking of New York City. Corn is snappish with high-culture mandarins, Clement Greenberg for one, who "deemed the triumph of abstract painting in New York a measure of American civilization," but even more so with the Thomas Hart Benton school, who plumped for a co mpletely "de-Europeanized" brand of "American" painting (p. 342).