Bram Dijkstra’s book American Expressionism: Art and Social Change 1920–1950 convincingly constructs a new category of expressionism that he sets apart from early-twentieth-century German Expressionism and mid-twentieth-century Abstract Expressionism. “American Expressionism” combines modernism and realism to address compassionately a range of social issues. Dijkstra examines this art, created largely in the United States during the Great Depression, as a “venture into socialist cultural politics” (12). His thesis is that American Expressionist art was produced primarily...