In 1936, for the cover of the Museum of Modern Art’s Cubism and Abstract Art exhibition catalogue, Alfred Barr famously created a flowchart of modernist movements fueling his two chosen strains of non-geometrical and geometrical abstraction. Barr’s recasting of history, which left out not only those modernist movements that did not fit his formalist history but also any mention of the contexts behind their success might be described as an example of what Van Wyck Brooks termed a “usable past.” In his 1918 essay appearing under that phrase, Brooks rejected the literary history of his day as the product of a “commercial philosophy” that offered little to the creative minds of the present (“On Creating a Usable Past,” The Dial [April 11, 1918]: 337–41). Recognizing that the past was a construct that “yields only what we are able to look for in it,” Brooks called for the discovery or invention of one more suited to contemporary writers’ goals. Barr’s internationalism would seem at odds with the politics of Brooks and other “Young Americans.” But a recent conference asserted that the period contemporaneous with his rise to power can profitably be seen as a laboratory for Brooks’s method. The term “usable...