Debating American Modernism: Stieglitz, Duchamp, and the New York Avant-Garde - Hardcover

Balken, Debra Bricker; Bochner, Jay; Covert, John; Crotti, Jean; Davis, Stuart; De Zayas, Marius; Demuth, Charles; Dove, Arthur; Schamberg, Morton; Sheeler, Charles; Stella, Joseph; Stettheimer, Florine; Storrs, John; Weber, Max; Wood, Beatrice

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1891024493 ISBN 13: 9781891024498

Publisher: D.A.P./American Federation of Arts, 2003

Synopsis

When Duchamp moved from Paris to New York in 1915, he was disappointed by the predominantly nature-based abstraction he observed, publicly proclaiming that American artists were too dependent on outmoded European traditions and had overlooked their greatest subjects--the skyscraper and the machine. Meanwhile, the artists associated with Alfred Stieglitz and his "291" gallery remained loyal to their belief in nature as a source of ongoing renewal for visual culture, and emphasized the crucial role that intuition and spirituality played in their creation of art. The crossfire between Duchamp and Stieglitz and their respective circles defined a critical moment in early twentieth-century American art. Debating Modernism includes reproductions of work by artists from both camps, from Charles Demuth, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Paul Strand to Man Ray, Francis Picabia, and Marsden Hartley. An essay by curator Debra Bricker Balken traces the threads of the debate through the 1910s and 20s, and also addresses the appearance of sexualized imagery in nearly all of these artists' works, a phenomenon that ironically unifies the two seemingly opposed camps. Jay Bochner's essay focuses on the artists' respective violations of American expectations about art.

About this title

About the Author

Debra Bricker Balken is an independent curator and writer who works on aspects of modern and contemporary art. In addition to Debating Modernism, she has also curated the exhibitions Arthur Dove: A Retrospective and Alfredo Jaar: Lament of the Images. Her publications include Modernism: Challenges and Perspectives, Architecture and Cubism, and Philip Guston's Poor Richard.

Reviews

This handsome, complexly imagined catalogue for a traveling art exhibition of the same name proffers a new, organizing schism to early-century avant-garde artmaking: namely, a division between French arch-conceptualist Marcel Duchamp and red-blooded American photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who foresaw radically different aesthetic futures for American modernism, and whose personalities set the tone of the New York art world at the time. In two well-considered essays, with rich reproductions by luminaries such as Georgia O'Keefe, Arthur Dove, and Marsden Hartley (on the Stieglitz side), and Man Ray, Francis Picabia, and Jean Crotti (on Duchamp's side), the authors trace divergent responses to artistic polarities of the day-masculine/feminine, Nature/machine-and find in both camps a similar recourse to the wellsprings of eroticism. Through sparring publicity and convivial debate, the respective circles of Duchamp and Stieglitz ultimately reformulated the New York art scene's expectations about what art was and could be, in ways that appear both strange and persistently relevant for artists today. For those interested in modern art and its foundations, this catalogue presents an original and well-executed argument, which may alter received conceptions of American intellectual history in general. 86 color and b&w illustrations.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: D.A.P./American Federation of Arts
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1891024493
• ISBN 13: 9781891024498
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 172