![]() The rise of an American Cubist “culture of camouflage” is then examined for the ways in which American artists, critics, and a larger public ultimately justified Cubism’s apparent excesses according to a long naturalist and empirical tradition. Gallatin and the so-called “Park Avenue Cubists,” whose reception of modernist currents from Paris was highly informed by recent developments in a new transatlantic science of “physiological aesthetics.” This history is further discussed in relation to the ultimate rejection of Cubism by Thomas Hart Benton and its antithetical embrace by Stuart Davis, the latter case complemented by a new reading of Davis’s watershed, “proto-Cubist” artist’s journal of 1920–1922. Subsequent chapters revisit the “empathic” theories of modernist perception informing the American Cubism of Albert E. Departing from standard monographic or sociological approaches to its subject, this dissertation begins with the 1934–35 lecture tour of the United States by the expatriate poet, Gertrude Stein, offering a new interpretation of her signature lecture, Pictures (1934), while reviewing Stein’s historic, yet largely forgotten aesthetic collision with Duncan Phillips, of the Phillips Memorial Collection, where she spoke on her way to the White House. In making its way from Paris to New York, French Cubism is thus understood as leading to various conceptual and stylistic consequences, entering a new “field of cultural production” comprising variously competing, yet conjoining histories-from nineteenth-century aestheticism to international Constructivism. Borrowing loosely from the French social historian, Pierre Bourdieu, this dissertation challenges the common interpretation of Cubism’s entry into the United States as a story of one-way influence and appropriation, substituting for that causative narrative several disjunct, yet mutually informing case studies. ![]() According to this study, American Cubism is no unified stylistic or aesthetic object rather, it constitutes a variable, ever-shifting complex of cultural concepts acted out among a social system. ABSTRACT This dissertation examines the advent of American Cubism during the interwar period.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |