Wanda Corn
The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915–1935
Berkeley:
University of California Press,
1999.
470 pp.; 140 color ills.; 181 b/w ills.
Cloth
$50.00
(0520210492)
critical reviews of books, exhibitions, and projects in all areas and periods of art history and visual studies
published by the College Art Association
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July 14, 2000
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In a 1905 history, Samuel Isham argued that American art was “in no way native to America but is European painting imported, or rather transplanted, to America . . . . There is no local tradition or influence.” (Corn, 318) Countering this Eurocentric view (one still occasionally heard among those who dismiss American art before Abstract Expressionism), is an equally persistent belief in cultural exceptionalism. From the beginnings of cultural nationalism in the early nineteenth...