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nova americana in english

The Place of Europe in American History:Twentieth-Century Perspectives

edited by M.Vaudagna

Tiziano Bonazzi, Daria Frezza, Claudio Zambianchi, Giuliana Muscio, Giuliana

Gemelli and Antonella Cardellicchio, Jörn Leonhard, Raffaella Baritono, Marco Mariano, Mario

Del Pero, Jennifer Klein, Elisabetta Vezzosi, Maurizio Vaudagna, Manuel Plana, Alessandra Lorini, Simone Cinotto

Books in the “Nova Americana” and “Nova Americana in English” series also appear in electronic format and can be found at the website www.otto.to.it.

For the last thirty years the place of Europe in twentieth-century American history has been marginalized. While the impact of the United States on European life has been frequently dealt with, the American history writing prevalent in the United States has debunked the traditional portrait of the American experience as “invented” by Europeans and their heirs in the “New World.” The so-called “new historians” have dismantled the old Eurocentric “victory tale,” which they have interpreted as the historical legitimization of the white, male and Anglo-Saxon elites. As a result, not only has Europe’s pretentious claim of being the main original source of the American experience been appropriately denied, but all “Atlantic crossings” have been overlooked. With the beginnings of the 1990s, however, the trend toward cultural globalism made some of the leading protagonists of the Americanist historical profession in the United States keenly aware of the need to reformulate American history from a transnational perspective. If in new terms, the interest in the place of Europe in U.S. history has begun to revive. Yet, when it comes to the twentieth century, there has not emerged to this day a significant variety of studies on the many ways in which Europe has been present, whether constructively or dramatically, in the American historical process. This book is an effort to try and fill the void. It takes into account four important areas of transatlantic exchanges: international relations, cultural borrowings, emigration, and comparative welfare states. The implication is that, while distant from the old Eurocentric rationale, the history of transatlantic relations is relevant to understand both Europe and the United States.

ISBN 88-95285-03-4ISBN 978-88-95285-03-0

nova americana in english

THE PLACE OF EUROPE IN AMERICAN HISTORY: TWENTIETHCENTURY PERSPECTIVES

edited by M. Vaudagna

The Place of Europe in American History: Twentieth-Century PerspectivesEdited by M. Vaudagna

Collana Nova Americana in English

Comitato scientifico: Marco Bellingeri, Marcello Carmagnani, Maurizio Vaudagna

Prima edizione gennaio 2007

©2007, OTTO editore – Torino

mail@otto.to.ithttp://www.otto.to.it

ISBN 88-95285-03-4ISBN 978-88-95285-03-0

è vietata la riproduzione, anche parziale, con qualsiasi mezzo effettuato, compresa la fotocopia, anche ad uso interno o didattico, non autorizzato.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction 1

intellectual exchanges

Tiziano BonazziConstructing and Reconstructing Europe: Torture of an American Prometheus or

Punishment of a New World Sisyphus? 11

Daria FrezzaTh e Language of Race: Th e Discourse of American Social Scientists from the Progressive

Era to World War Two from a Transatlantic Perspective 27

Claudio Zambianchi“We Need a Closer Contact with Paris:” Th e Presence of Europe in American Art

from the Ashcan School to Abstract Expressionism 49

Giuliana MuscioEuropean Actors in Classical Hollywood Cinema: From the Extras to the Stars 65

Giuliana Gemelli and Antonella CardellicchioTh e Making of the New Encyclopaedia Britannica and the “Golden Age” of

European Culture in the U.S. (1940’s-1960’s) 91

political perspectives

Jörn LeonhardProgressive Politics and the Dilemma of Reform: German and American Liberalism in

Comparison, 1880-1920 115

Raff aella BaritonoTh e British Labour Model in the American Political and Intellectual Debate of the 1920s 133

Marco MarianoTh e U.S. Discovers Europe. Life Magazine and the Invention of the

“Atlantic Community” in the 1940s 161

Mario Del Pero“Europeanizing” U.S. Foreign Policy: Henry Kissinger and the Domestic Challenge

to Détente 187

the place of europe in american history

interactions in social policy

Jennifer KleinWelfare and Security in the Aftermath of World War Two: How Europe Infl uenced

America’s Divided Welfare State 215

Elisabetta VezzosiWhy Is Th ere No Maternity Leave in the United States? European Models for

a Law Th at Was Never Passed 243

Maurizio VaudagnaConservative Critics of the New Deal in the 1930s:

Towards Authoritarian Europeanization? 267

multidirectional emigrations

Manuel PlanaExiles and Refugees During the Mexican Revolution 325

Alessandra LoriniAtlantic Crossings: Race, Nation and Late Nineteenth-Century Cuba LibreBetween Italy and the United States 341

Simone Cinotto“I Won’t Be Satisfi ed Until I’ve Travelled the Entire World:” Th e Transnational

Imagination of an Italian Immigrant in the United States, 1905-1942 371

49

“WE NEED A CLOSER CONTACT WITH PARIS:”

THE PRESENCE OF EUROPE IN AMERICAN ART FROM

THE ASHCAN SCHOOL TO ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM*

claudio zambianchi

“If only America would realize that the art of Europe is fi nished – dead – and that

America is the country of the art of the future, instead of trying to base everything she

does on European Tradition!”1 So said Marcel Duchamp to an interviewer in 1915, less

than three months after he fi rst arrived to New York. Duchamp may have been too hard

on Europe, but he was right about American art. Up until the beginning of the 1940s,

art in the United States was deeply imbued with European infl uences, and one of the

major paradoxes of American art of the fi rst four decades of the twentieth century is that,

in their quest for a national style, Americans stumbled over European sources again and

again. Until at least the end of the thirties, it was Europe that provided the models and

the modern language with which to interpret American subject matters.

Before providing a short overview of the European presence in American art in the

second part of this paper, I will give some specifi c examples of the interaction. When the

Ashcan School arose in New York during the fi rst decade of the twentieth century, one of

its main objectives was the creation of a truly American school. Th e core of the group was

formed by Robert Henri and some of his pupils from the Pennsylvania Academy of the

Fine Arts in the 1890s: William Glackens, George Luks, Everett Shinn, and John Sloan.

Th e latter four artists – who followed Henri to New York at the beginning of the new

century – all started their careers as newspaper illustrators and shifted to painting under

Henri’s impulse as soon as they reached New York. Henri and his followers were the fi rst

to claim an American art in the new century, but their style was greatly infl uenced by

French painting of modern life. Henri had been to France three times and he mainly

admired the work of Manet, though through his work he also came to appreciate the

painting of old masters like Frans Hals and Diego Velázquez. Henri’s followers Glackens

and Shinn, on the other hand, looked to the work of Edgar Degas. In general, the main

source for the painting of the Ashcan School was French art of the 1870s and 1880s.

Th ere is also a vernacular aspect to their realism, due to their former careers as newspaper

illustrators. Th e taste for the anecdotal and the narrative in Sloan’s Chinese Restaurant

(1909; University of Rochester, Memorial Art Gallery; www.otto.to.it), for example,

owes much to that experience. Nevertheless, the main infl uence on the Ashcan School’s

penchant for the depiction of urban modern life was the French Nouvelle Peinture. Such

a penchant casts a long shadow over the American art of the fi rst half of the twentieth

century. Th e social realism of the thirties, for example, practiced by painters such as

FIGURE 1FIGURE 1

50

“we need a closer contact with paris”

Reginald Marsh, Isabel Bishop, and the Soyer brothers during the Depression, is rooted

in the American Realism of the fi rst decade of the century. If we look to another moment

of twentieth-century American painting, specifi cally the work of Grant Wood, creator of

one of the most famous icons of American art – American Gothic (1930; Th e Art Institute

of Chicago; www.otto.to.it) – we fi nd a similar hiatus between the American subject mat-

ter and a style that was drawn from Europe. During the twenties Wood studied in Paris

and Germany, where a form of magic realism was developing. Th e lack of atmospheric

quality and hard edges in Wood’s Th e Midnight Ride of Paul Revere (1931; New York,

Th e Metropolitan Museum of Art; www.otto.to.it) recall the paintings of Franz Radziwill

and Georg Scholz, among others, and the sharp focus with which Wood depicted the

farmers’ faces in American Gothic is similar in style to the portraits of Christian Schad.2

In terms of subject matter, Wood’s painting is American to the point of being nation-

alistic, while in terms of style it depends heavily on European prototypes. Th e stress on

subject matter as a means to defi ne a specifi c American quality in painting is evident in

the words of the most vociferous of the Regionalists, Th omas Hart Benton. When he

looked in retrospect to the Regionalist art of the thirties in his book of memoirs, he saw

Regionalism as a reaction to Parisian models in order to draw inspiration from “American

life and American life as known and felt by ordinary Americans. We believed,” he added

“that only by our own participation in the reality of American life, and that defi nitely

included the folk patterns which sparked it and largely directed its assumptions, could

we come to forms in which Americans would fi nd the opportunity for genuine spectator

participation.”3 While it is clear that Benton contrasted an art that was based on the life

of the American people with the dehumanization of Modernist art, the question concern-

ing the defi nition of an authentic American art specifi cally in terms of style does not go

beyond a generic plea for realism and remains substantially unanswered.

If, paradoxically, the infl uence of Europe provided painters of the Ashcan School

and Regionalism with the means to address issues of national identity, the tradition

of modern European art guided Arshile Gorky on the diffi cult path towards personal

identity.4 Gorky was born in Turkish Armenia in 1904 and landed in the U.S. in 1920

with his sister, after their mother had died from the strain of fl eeing the Turkish army.

When he started painting, he relied heavily on European sources, to the point of almost

copying the works of Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, even Ingres, almost as though such a

pedigree could protect him from the sense of loss, deprivation, and rootlessness that he

experienced in the U.S. It was only in the mid-thirties that Gorky fi nally managed to

break away from a direct European infl uence and start producing original work.

Th e European infl uence on American art may also follow a more tortuous path,

as is shown in a case that will be considered in some detail. A Eurocentric attitude also

seems to characterize the outlook of African American intellectuals on the plastic arts, in

a very specifi c way. Pivoting on the inspiration that African art provided to the European

FIGURE 2FIGURE 2

FIGURE 3FIGURE 3

51

claudio zambianchi

avant-garde of the early twentieth century, African American intellectuals believed that

African roots, which could lead to the creation of an African American art of the future,

could be rediscovered and reclaimed through those modern prototypes. In the anthology

that is to be considered a “manifesto of [African American] cultural independence”5 and

one of the key documents of the “Harlem Renaissance” – Th e New Negro: An Interpretation,

edited in 1925 by Alain Locke – the attention is mostly focused on African American

poetry and music. Even the famous art collector Albert C. Barnes, who contributed to the

anthology with a paper about “Negro Art and America,” discussed the achievements of

both black popular music, particularly the spiritual, and black poetry at length. Although

the attention devoted by Barnes to African American plastic arts was comparatively scarce,

the author nevertheless “considered African art as a starting point for the development

of a Negro art idiom.”6 Black intellectuals such as Alain Locke, however, wanted modern

African American art to be part of an advanced American culture, without any further

specifi cation. As Locke wrote to Paul Kellogg in 1926: “I don’t see any more reason for

holding the Negro mind and spirit down to the crudeness of its forebears than for la-

menting that the silly Celts became Irish, or the Goths, Germans, or the Franks, French,

or the Angles, English.”7 Th e legacy of African art was therefore to be “transformed”8 in

order to become one of the means towards the creation of new forms of modern artistic

expression, as well as a clue to a reached “cultural maturity”9 of black art. Th at is why

Locke’s preferences ran to cultured young African American artists who were infl uenced

by modern European art. One such artist was Aaron Douglas who, together with the

German-born artist Winold Reiss, provided some of the drawings that illustrated the

anthology.10 Harlem intellectuals were trying to mediate between two diff erent and, in

some respects, opposite needs: on the one hand, they wanted to use the materials of

black folklore and African heritage, beyond and counter to white stereotypes of a tame

African American culture; on the other hand, they claimed a role in modern American

culture. One viable way to negotiate these issues was the invitation to fi lter African and

folk sources through models of modern European art: “Th ere would be little hope of an

infl uence of African art upon the western African descendants,” Locke stated, “if there

were not at present a growing infl uence of African art upon European art in general.

But led by these tendencies, there is the possibility that the sensitive artistic mind of the

American Negro, stimulated by a cultural pride and interest, will receive from African art

profound and galvanizing infl uence.”11 However, the greatest African American artist of

the succeeding generation, Jacob Lawrence, was more infl uenced by European modernist

sources than he was by African art. His great cycles about the life and history of his people

show – as Dorothy Adlow wrote in 1947 – “features of pictorial presentation that have

evolved in the modern school… Th ere is abstraction, some primitivistic mannerism, and

much expressionist vigor.”12

From the above-mentioned examples, chosen somewhat randomly, it may seem

that the presence of Europe in American art during the fi rst three decades of the

52

“we need a closer contact with paris”

twentieth century was overwhelming. In the epilogue of his book Port of New York,

Paul Rosenfeld, one of the art critics closer to Alfred Stieglitz, stated, “something has

happened in New York.”13 He was referring to the fact that at about that time (1924),

after decades of reliance on European art, American artists could begin to feel confi dent

about their own means and be “content to remain in New York …” He went on to say,

“Perhaps the tradition of life imported over the Atlantic has commenced expressing itself

in terms of the new environment, giving the Port of New York [chosen as the symbol

of cultural exchange between Europe and the U. S.] a sense at last, and the entire land

the sense of the Port of New York.”14 Rosenfeld’s prophetic tone notwithstanding, the

language of European art was actually used to articulate the meanings of national art in

the U.S. through the end of the thirties. Only when the Port of New York opened its

gates, not to American artists leaving for Europe but to artists escaping from Europe in

the late thirties and early forties because of dictatorship and war, things changed, and

Rosenfeld’s words materialized.

Th ere are only a few cases in which the infl uence of Europe on early-twentieth-cen-

tury American art is not so prominent. One of them, perhaps the most typical, is that of

Edward Hopper. Although Hopper went to Paris and experienced the art of the Parisian

avant-garde in the fi rst decade of the century, in the second half of the twenties, when he

started to produce the images he is most known for, he did what he could to rid himself

of any European infl uence. And, characteristically, he did so by way of subtraction, to the

point that the critic Peter Schjeldahl once wrote: “A Hopper has no style, properly speak-

ing.”15 It is as if this very conservative artist, captivated by provincial courthouses, small

town main streets, and uninhabited Victorian buildings, in other words, by an America

eaten up piece by piece by modernity, found the only way to talk about this by eliminating

any reference to modern styles and going back to a sort of primitive, native, vernacular

mode of expression. Georgia O’Keeff e’s immaculate presentations of skulls and fl owers in

the twenties and thirties also show a similar attempt to be rid of all European infl uence in

terms of both style and subject matter, even if she had been infl uenced in the fi rst phase

of her career by European trends such as Cubism and Kandinsky’s abstraction.16

Th ese, however, are the exceptions in an entirely diff erent outline. Until the end

of the 1930s, American art depended heavily on European art for its development.

Many American artists moved to Paris, while some important avant-garde European

artists, such as Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia, went from Paris to New York. Th e

Armory Show gave an enormous impulse to the American-European exchange in the

arts: in the years before 1913, when the show was held in New York, one could only see

modern European art in a few elitist galleries, especially that of Alfred Stieglitz. After

that time, all of the New York art world (galleries, collections, museums of modern art)

began to center around modern European art. Th e big shows put together by the great

American institutions, for example the Museum of Modern Art in New York (founded

53

claudio zambianchi

in 1929), were mostly devoted to French art, and American artists strongly opposed this

state of aff airs. Th e great collections of modern art were also based mainly on European

art, not to speak of the Stein brothers’ collections, put together in Paris with the work of

the Fauves and the Cubists and, among others, the collection of Albert Gallatin that, for

the most part, included Cubist and Abstract art of the teens and twenties. Gallatin also

owned De Chirico’s Temple Fatal (1914; Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art), a

painting which was studied by De Kooning and Gorky in the late twenties. It also provided

the compositional basis and some literal elements for one of Gorky’s fi rst independent

cycles, Nighttime, Enigma and Nostalgia, 17 the theme of which he pursued in several

drawings and paintings of the late twenties and early thirties. Katherine Dreier’s collec-

tion, Societé Anonyme Ltd., was begun in 1920 with the help of Marcel Duchamp and

included mostly European works of art. Th e story of Europe’s presence in the American

art of the fi rst half of the twentieth century is, therefore, at the core of the development of

Modern American art. To trace even a short story of that exchange would be to epitomize

nearly the entire history of American art in these decades. Th is is why for this paper I

have chosen to single out only some of the phases of the American-European interaction,

in order to show how things changed from the beginning to the end of the period under

scrutiny, roughly from 1900 to 1950.

From the beginning of the century, American artists went to Europe, mostly to Paris,

to learn about modern art, following a path that had already been typical of the nineteenth

century. James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Winslow Homer, and Th omas Eakins, followed

by American Impressionists such as William Merritt Chase and John Singer Sargent, all

went to Paris in order to learn painting techniques and were infl uenced by modern French

art. Roughly speaking, American art at the beginning of the century was dominated by

two trends: an academic, classical one, which spoke the international language of the

academies of fi ne arts, still alive and powerful in the art worlds of both Europe and the

U.S.; and a tame, impressionistic style that had spread from France throughout Europe and

the U.S. in the 1880s and 1890s. When the Ashcan School mixed those French sources

with vernacular elements from newspaper illustration and insisted on truly American

subjects, it seemed so revolutionary that in 1907 the paintings of Henri and his follow-

ers were refused by the jury of the exhibition of the National Academy of Design, even

though Henri himself was one of the jurors. Henri and his friends therefore decided to

start an independent exhibiting body, called “Th e Eight,” following a pattern started in

France by the Impressionists and widely adopted by modern European artists.18 Five of

the Eight were Ashcan painters – Henri, Glackens, Luks, Shinn, and Sloan – while the

other three belonged to diff erent trends: Ernest Lawson was an American impressionist;

Maurice Prendergast was a Post-Impressionist deeply infl uenced by the French Nabis,

originally developing a taste for richly textured surfaces; and Arthur B. Davies was a some-

what belated Symbolist painter. Th e Eight held their fi rst and only exhibition in 1908 at

the Macbeth Gallery in New York. Two years later, in 1910, a much larger Exhibition of

54

“we need a closer contact with paris”

Independent Artists was held, modeled on the shows of the French Salon des Indépendants,

with all the artists paying a fee for the right to exhibit their work. Th e aim of groups like

the Eight and the Independents was to reform the art world, but they were not directly

meant to support a specifi c trend of American modern art. Furthermore, the issue of

the Americanness of American art in the thought of some of the main characters of the

Eight has some generally spiritualistic, Whitmanesque overtones that render it diffi cult

to defi ne in a specifi c way. Robert Henri stated, for example, that the truly American

artist of the future would not be the one who paints American subjects, or “a man who

has never been abroad;” rather, he or she “will not be a typical American at all, but will

be heir to the world instead of a part of it.”19 To Henri, the creation of an American art

meant, “to build our own projection on the art of the past, wherever it may be,”20 while

the aim of future American art should be to bring “the art spirit … into the very life of

the people.”21 John Sloan is more specifi c about the sources in French art upon which he

and the other painters of the Ashcan School relied: “Th e French school,” he wrote, “is the

only one that has survived in a healthy way during the past two hundred years.”22 What

Sloan saw as the excesses of “individualism” of the French school were to be tempered,23

and in order to dispense with artistry Sloan suggested that younger artists “have a plastic

illustrative point of view about life.”24 Th is could be achieved by doing “illustration for

a while” as he himself and some of his colleagues did for work, fi rst in Philadelphia and

then in New York. “Get out of the school and studio. Go out into the streets and look

for life.”25 In Sloan’s words, one can see the two recent traditions that the Ashcan painters

relied upon intermingled: French painting of modern life and newspaper illustration, pro-

viding together the grounds for a realistic, democratic art, based upon direct observation.

However, compared with the Fauves and the Cubists, the realism of the Ashcan School,

although scandalous in the U.S. at the time, looks timid and belated, especially if one

considers that New York artists could see French avant-garde art from 1908 in the small

gallery that photographer Alfred Stieglitz opened at 291 (then 293) Fifth Avenue. He had

started by exhibiting only photographic works of the Photosecession, but with the 1908

show of Auguste Rodin’s drawings, he began to exhibit the work of modern European

artists such as Matisse, Picasso, Cézanne, and so on. A small group of artists and collectors

in touch with the current developments of modern European art gathered around 291.

Stieglitz’s patronage extended to fi nancing the stay of American artists in Paris,26 where

a large colony of U.S. painters had gone in the fi rst fi fteen years of the century. Among

them were the main fi gures of would-be Early American Modernism: Marsden Hartley,

Patrick Henry Bruce, Max Weber, Joseph Stella, and Arthur Dove.

Th e newly discovered organizational capabilities of the American independent art-

ists, and the keen interest in Parisian and, more generally, European avant-garde induced

by Stieglitz and the American go-betweens on both sides of the Atlantic form the back-

ground of the Armory Show, the greatest exhibition of modern art ever put together on

American soil.27 In 1912, the Association of American Painters and Sculptors, founded

55

claudio zambianchi

at the end of 1911, decided to organize a large exhibition of American modern art. Th ey

also planned to show a smaller quantity of modern European works; at the end of the

summer of 1912, Arthur B. Davies, the president of the Association, got news of the

Cologne Sonderbund, a great exhibition of modern art organized in the German city.

Walt Kuhn, the secretary of the Association, managed to sail to Germany to make it in

time for the last day of the exhibition, and arranged for many of the works to be loaned to

the Armory Show. He then moved on to Munich, Berlin, and Holland, where – through

the heirs of Vincent Van Gogh – he secured the loan of many of Van Gogh’s paintings.

While in Paris he was joined by Davies and they toured the studios there with the help of

American artist Walter Pach, choosing many paintings of the Parisian avant-garde, includ-

ing the three most controversial works of the exhibition, namely Constantin Brancusi’s

M.lle Pogany (1912), Henri Matisse’s Blue Nude (1907; Baltimore Museum of Art), and

Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, no. 2 (1912; Philadelphia, Philadelphia

Museum of Art; www.otto.to.it). Th e latter was probably the most criticized work of the

entire exhibition in New York (when the show moved to Chicago, Matisse was instead

the main target of conservative criticism.)28 Kuhn and Davies then went to London

where the second Post-Impressionist exhibition was still open at the Grafton Galleries.

Th e show, organized by Roger Fry, included important paintings by Cézanne, Van Gogh,

Gauguin, Matisse, and the Cubists, and Pach and Davies secured the loan of some of

these paintings for the Armory Show. Moreover, Fry’s formalism, expressed in his theory

of the “signifi cant form,” provided important critical groundwork for the understanding

of modern art in the U.S. Even if the European works of art only made up a fourth of the

works in the Armory Show, they received much more attention than the remaining three

fourths, which mostly showed how American painting was reliant on European models.

Not all of the early American modernists who gathered around Stieglitz were included in

the American selection at the Armory Show, but the general aspect of their work at that

time was European. Weber’s Chinese Restaurant of 1915 (New York, Whitney Museum of

American Art; www.otto.to.it), Battle of Lights, Coney Island of 1913-14 by Joseph Stella

(Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery and Sculpture Garden, University of Nebraska Lincoln;

www.otto.to.it) (an Italian immigrant aware of Futurism), very diff erent and much

more modern than, respectively, Sloan’s painting bearing the same title,29 and an urban

landscape such as Glackens’s Italo-American Celebration, c.1912 (Museum of Fine Arts,

Boston, www.otto.to.it) all depended on Cubistic or Futuristic prototypes. Moreover, in

1914, one year after the Armory Show, Marius de Zayas, the caricaturist who traveled

to France on Stieglitz’s behalf in order to keep abreast of the new artistic trends, wrote

to the photographer: “I am working hard in making these people understand the conve-

nience of a commerce of ideas with America. And I want to absorb the spirit of what they

are doing to bring it to ‘291’. We need a closer contact with Paris, there is no question

about that.”30 Even the abstract work of the Synchromists, Morgan Russell and Stanton

McDonald Wright, is an American version of Robert Delaunay’s Orphism.

FIGURE 4FIGURE 4

FIGURE 5FIGURE 5

FIGURE 6FIGURE 6

FIGURE 7FIGURE 7

56

“we need a closer contact with paris”

Th ere were three main consequences of the Armory Show on American Art. Firstly,

after the closing of the exhibition, the American general public had a broader idea of

what modern European art was. Secondly, American modernist artists – mainly based in

New York – had better opportunities for their work to be seen and bought, thanks to the

fl ourishing of new galleries and the interest roused among important collectors. Th irdly,

since the Armory Show had been an overall success, and not just a succès de scandale,

some of the more adventurous and controversial European artists decided to leave Paris

for New York at the outbreak of the First World War. Among them was the anti-hero of

the Armory Show, Marcel Duchamp. Th e success of the Armory Show demonstrated that

there were better opportunities for modern artists in the U.S. than in countries like France

where the art world was dominated by stronger traditional forces. As Robert Lebel has

pointed out, there is a paradox in the situation induced by the Armory Show: while the

exhibition was meant to promote modern American art, it actually favored avant-garde

European art at the expense of the autochthones.31 As soon as they reached the U.S.,

artists like Duchamp and Picabia took the lead among the advanced milieu of American

art. Picabia had already been to New York in 1913, when the Armory Show was still

on, and was repeatedly interviewed by the press regarding modern art. In 1915, he went

again, this time for a longer stay together with his wife Gabrielle Buff et, and he was

joined by Marcel Duchamp. While during his fi rst stay Picabia had moved in Stieglitz’s

circle, in 1915 both he and Duchamp befriended Walter Arensberg. A rich intellectual

and collector, Arensberg had recently converted to modern art and had gathered around

him a circle of artists and intellectuals that gave life to what became known as New York

Dada around 1920, right before Arensberg and his wife moved to California in 1921.

What had struck the Americans at the Armory Show, that is, pictures like Duchamp’s

Nude Descending a Staircase and Picabia’s Th e Procession, Seville (1912; www.otto.to.it),

was already superseded by the works that both artists, especially Duchamp, began to

produce right after their landing in the States. Duchamp invented the “ready made” in

New York. Although the Bicycle Wheel and the Bottle Rack had been made respectively in

1913 and 1914 when he was still in Paris, the idea to build a consistent artistic practice

upon these works began in the U.S. Th e practice began in New York when Duchamp

chose a snow shovel and gave it the title In Advance of the Broken Arm in 1915. Th e most

notorious of the ready-mades was Fountain. To make a long story short, in 1917 when

a revived Independent Society of American Artists was in the process of organizing its

fi rst exhibition, the committee received a urinal, signed by R. Mutt, to be installed fl at

on a podium. Th e rules of the Society provided that each artist member had the right

to exhibit what he or she wanted. However, the submission of the urinal – bought

ready-made by Marcel Duchamp at a plumber’s store, with the help of Walter Arensberg

and Joseph Stella – was too much. George Bellows, one of the Ashcan School artists,

strongly opposed the exposition of the urinal, but Arensberg, playing the observant of

the rules, simply said that the committee could do nothing but allow the Fountain into

FIGURE 8FIGURE 8

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claudio zambianchi

the exhibition. Duchamp, who was a member of the hanging committee, was delighted.

Eventually, the work was rejected, probably destroyed, and the only record we have of

the original work is a photograph taken by the “amused” Alfred Stieglitz, who played

with light and shadow in order to create a sort of spiritual, mysterious image out of a

urinal (www.otto.to.it).32 Th e meaning of the work in terms of the displacement of an

everyday object and the importance of idea over facture in a work of art was articulated

by Duchamp himself, his friend Beatrice Wood, and Louise Norton in Th e Blind Man, a

little magazine that lived on Arensberg’s money.33 Th e direct infl uence of the ready-made

on American art of the late teens was not so widespread. Morton Schamberg’s and Elsa

von Freytag Loringhoven’s God, of 1917, and Man Ray’s New York (1917; New York,

Whitney Museum of American Art) are among the early examples to show its impact.

Duchamp’s mental conception of art, however, was much more infl uential on the American

art of the late fi fties and sixties. Nevertheless, the mock idolatry of the “machine,” even

a “bachelor machine,” that we can see in both Duchamp’s and Picabia’s work, was very

infl uential on American art at the time. In Duchamp’s most famous American work,

Th e Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of

Art; www.otto.to.it), begun in New York in 1915 and abandoned unfi nished in 1923,

the idea of an impossible relationship between male and female is conveyed through a

complicated machine-like device; while Picabia’s Ici, c’est ici Stieglitz Foi et Amour (1915)

has been considered by scholars as a sort of sexual pun that metaphorically alludes to the

increasingly marginal position of the photographer in the New York avant-garde world,

with the bellows of the camera actually recalling a fl accid penis.34 In Young American

Girl in a State of Nudity (1915), the girl is portrayed as an automobile sparkplug. In

the work of both Picabia and Duchamp there is an ironic notion of the machine that

Americans, for the most part, did not share. Many of the American artists who were

members of Arensberg’s circle also described the machine with the same exactitude as

Picabia’s sparkplug, but the former actually took it seriously. What Duchamp repeatedly

said tongue-in-cheek about the machine being the greatest American contribution to the

twentieth century was taken literally: Charles Sheeler even said, “our factories are our

substitutes for religious expression.”35 Many American intellectuals were indeed convinced

that a specifi cally American culture could be built upon the machine. An entire trend

of American Modernist art portrayed the machine as quintessentially American subject

matter. Even if this process had started before World War One (a feeling of awe is con-

veyed, for example, by John Marin’s depictions of the Woolworth Building of the early

teens)36, it was only after the war that a large number of American artists started to deal

consistently with machine-related subjects. Th is course of events culminated in the great

1927 Machine Age exhibition. Joseph Stella’s depictions of the Brooklyn Bridge, Georgia

O’Keeff e’s skyscrapers, Charles Sheeler’s Ford Rouge River Plant paintings, and Stuart

Davis’s eggbeaters all demonstrate the fact that skyscrapers, bridges, industrial plants,

powerhouses, dams, and modern household appliances had become signifi cant aspects

FIGURE 9FIGURE 9

FIGURE 10FIGURE 10

58

“we need a closer contact with paris”

of the American landscape and homes. Signs of industrial development and advanced

technology were considered to be the answer to the quest for a national style.37 Many

European intellectuals – especially the ones who praised “utilitarian structures”38 – were

also convinced that America was the land of the machine. Th is point of view may either

be tinged with irony and amusement, as in the case of Duchamp, or taken quite seriously,

as in the case of Le Corbusier. Europeans also provided the sources for the most famous

painters of the American industrial landscape of the twenties and thirties. Milton Brown,

in one of the fi rst art historical papers on Precisionism, or Cubist-Realism as he called it,

stressed the links of this trend with European Modernism (especially Cubism, Purism,

and Futurism), even if he was convinced that he was dealing with “a recognizable and

infl uential American style.”39

Most of the so-called Immaculates, or Precisionists, were part of Arensberg’s circle:

for example, Charles Sheeler who, together with Charles Demuth, was the most important

painter of this trend. Precisionism made a deep impact on the American art of the twen-

ties and early thirties and it is a curious mix of idealization of the machine, a hard-edge

quality of painting drawn from photography (Sheeler actually started as a photographer

and only later shifted to painting), and Ozenfant’s and Jeanneret’s Purism, another French

source. Sheeler’s crystal-like depiction of Ford’s automobile River Rouge Plant of 1931

is a hymn to American industry, as if the “mathematical structure” 40 that characterized

nineteenth-century luminist landscape painting and meant to suggest the hidden order

of nature was now applied to the American industrial scene. A title such as Classic Landscape

(1931; Washington, National Gallery of Art, www.otto.to.it) is only a further clue of the

awe with which technology was looked at by the painter. Th ere is more than a hint of

Synthetic Cubism in one of the famous New England scenes by Charles Demuth, Aucassin

and Nicolette (1921; Columbus Museum of Art), where two of the characters from the

famous medieval French fabliaux are transformed into industrial buildings. Demuth drew

from Picabia his way of portraying people through objects (“portrait posters”). His Th e

Figure 5 in Gold (1928; New York, Th e Metropolitan Museum of Art, www.otto.to.it),

for example, may be considered a portrait of his poet-friend William Carlos Williams

through the visual quotation of some of his verses.41 A Cubist root is also evident in the

work of other Modernist American artists working in the twenties and thirties, for example

Stuart Davis and Gerald Murphy. Davis had begun as a follower of the Ashcan School,

and Murphy was a member of the famous group of American expatriates known as “the

lost generation.” Th ey were both fascinated by the world of mass-produced goods and

advertisements presented in the fl at surfaces and fragmentariness of Synthetic Cubism.

Cubism, in actuality, casts a longer shadow over Modernist American art than any other

European style. Cubism and Mondrian’s NeoPlasticism are actually the main infl uences

behind the painting of the American Abstract Artists (A.A.A.), an association founded

in November 1936 to promote American abstraction in a context dominated, after 1929,

by various trends of fi guration: Regionalism, American Scene, and Social Realism.

FIGURE 11FIGURE 11

FIGURE 12FIGURE 12

59

claudio zambianchi

Th e artists of the A.A.A. complained that the great exhibitions of modern art in the U.S.

only included European art, as is evident for example in one of the big shows put together

by the then-director of the MoMA, Alfred Barr, Jr., in 1936: Cubism and Abstract Art.42

Th ey were also convinced that in a time of crisis like the Depression art could, or rather

should, be abstract, because modern language in the arts went hand-in-hand with pro-

gressive ideals. George L.K. Morris, one of the leaders of the group, was also one of the

fi nancial backers of the Partisan Review.43 It was in this periodical, in 1939, that the

then-unknown Clement Greenberg published his first and epoch-making essay

“Avant-Garde and Kitsch.” Centering on a European notion of avant-garde and examin-

ing it from a Marxist point of view, Greenberg maintained that after the industrial revolu-

tion, the only means to oppose a fake culture produced by industry for the masses and

liable to be exploited by dictatorships were avant-garde practices, that is to say, small

groups of intellectuals, producing diffi cult art, linked to small sections of the advanced

middle class. Th ese avant-garde groups had to produce a self-conscious art, one that

turned its “attention away from subject matter of common experience” and directed it

“upon the medium of the craft.”44 Delving deeply into the artists’ specifi c medium was

considered to be the only way “to keep culture moving,”45 the main historical purpose of

the avant-garde from Greenberg’s perspective. “Art for art’s sake” had become an historical

necessity.46 What is ironic is that Greenberg was to become, in just a few years, the major

supporter of Abstract Expressionism, an art that, far from abandoning subject matter in

order to get to the rarefi ed realm of pure form, insisted on the importance of content.

“Th ere is no such thing as good painting about nothing.”47 So wrote two of the Abstract

Expressionists, Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb, in 1943 with the help of Barnett

Newman, in a famous letter to the New York Times, considered to be the fi rst manifesto

of the new American painting. Once again, this new interest in content within abstrac-

tion is due to a European infl uence, especially that of the Surrealists who migrated en masse

from Europe between 1938 and 1942 because of the progressive nazi occupation of

Europe and the beginning of the war.48 Th is was part of what Rosamund Frost described

in 1942 as “the biggest intellectual migration since the fall of Constantinople.”49 Th e

migration was dramatically accelerated by the fall of Paris in June 1940: Kurt Seligmann

was the fi rst to get to New York, in 1939, and the last one was Max Ernst, in 1941, when

it became almost impossible to leave France. Along with the Surrealist immigrants there

were other important painters, all of whom worked in Paris before the nazi invasion of

the north of France. Th ese included André Masson and Yves Tanguy, for example, as well

as the Chilean Roberto Sebastian Matta, who was instrumental in familiarizing the

American painters with automatism (among the fi rst to experiment with automatism

were Pollock, William Baziotes, Peter Busa, and Gerome Kamrowski).50 Automatism

went against the received opinion that Americans had about Surrealism, known in the

States primarily through Dali’s fi gurative version of the thirties.51 After the fi rst automatic

experiments, stress began to fall not on the incongruous association of objects, but on

60

“we need a closer contact with paris”

the sign itself. An entire generation of American painters, who were looking for the means

to express the tragedy of their times and despised both an abstraction without content

and an outmoded fi guration, found an answer to their needs in the Surrealist notion of

an art which came directly from the unconscious. Th e connection established by the

Surrealists between the individual and the collective unconscious was especially important

for the young generation of American painters. Th rough it they were able to scrutinize

myth and so-called primitive art as expressions of the collective unconscious of the hu-

man species. From this perspective, phylogeny was equal to ontogenesis, and the search

for a historical tradition became less important than the recognition of the common roots

of the human being. André Breton, the founder of Surrealism, together with Claude

Lévi-Strauss, eventually got to New York in 1941. In December 1941, Max Ernst married

Peggy Guggenheim, who had moved her important collection of modern art from Europe

to New York. In the fall of 1942, she opened the gallery Art of Th is Century with the in-

tention of exhibiting mostly European art, but she soon realized that some space should

be given to young American painters as well. She was therefore the fi rst person to hold

one-man shows for Jackson Pollock, in 1943, and then for Mark Rothko and Clyff ord

Still. Marcel Duchamp, who for twenty-fi ve years had been traveling back and forth from

France to the United States, was in charge of installing the fi rst show of the European

Surrealist immigrants in 1942, Th e First Papers of Surrealism. Th is famous exhibition was

characterized by a string that ran throughout the gallery space and hindered the view of

the works: such a labyrinthine display has recently been interpreted by T.J. Demos as an

allusion to the “dislocation” of the entire group, and, in this respect, “part of an insistent

homeless aesthetic that negotiated geopolitical displacement.”52 Th is installation, much

more than the organic space created by Frederick Kiesler for the Surrealist room in the

Art of Th is Century gallery,53 pointed to a new situation for European intellectuals in the

U.S.: the pattern of infl uence had changed. In the fi rst four decades of the twentieth

century, the infl uence had gone one way, from Europe to the United States, and the art-

ists who moved to New York did so out of free choice. Now they were forced to leave

Europe and stay in the States, even though they did not know English (Breton, for ex-

ample, refused to learn it). Th e idea of Surrealist automatism was probably the single

most important infl uence in the shaping of some of the Abstract Expressionist artistic

practices – on Pollock’s dripping, just to mention the most famous example. Furthermore,

the anthropological interests of the Surrealists were among the main agents in the new

attention given to Native American art on the part of young American painters – as

shown, for example, by Adolph Gottlieb’s pictographs. From the late thirties to the early

forties, however, European art was stuck and American art was moving, and it was mov-

ing fast. It is only with the generation of the Abstract Expressionists that the Americanness

of American art starts to be consistently discussed in terms not only of style but also of

subject matter. Among the artists and critics of that time are signifi cant diff erences as to

what was considered American about Abstract Expressionist painting. Barnett Newman,

61

claudio zambianchi

for example, believed that what distinguished his and his fellows’ art was the quest for a

sublime quality that was quintessentially American, while the main trait of European art

had always been the pursuit of beauty and voluptuousness.54 Newman saw therefore a

hiatus between modern American art and modern European art: “I believe,” he stated,

“that here in America, some of us, free from the weight of European culture, are fi nding

the answer, by completely denying that art has any concern with the problem of beauty

and where to fi nd it.”55 Clement Greenberg, instead, saw the American avant-garde of

his days as the culmination of Modernist art, which he interpreted as art’s search for its

own means. While Greenberg stressed the continuity between European and American

avant-garde, he nevertheless pointed out how Abstract Expressionism was the fi rst move-

ment in American art to have a claim to maturity and originality in the international

context: “Th e abstract expressionists started out in the ‘40s with a diffi dence they could

not help feeling as American artists. Th ey were much aware of the provincial fate around

them. Th is country had had good painters in the past, but none with enough sustained

originality or power to enter the mainstream of Western art.”56 Notwithstanding the

many European sources, Abstract Expressionism developed such a new sensibility for

surface, brushwork, pictorial space, and large canvases that an “American-type” painting

could be said to be born. For both Newman and Greenberg formal qualities, rather than

subject matter, were the basis upon which to judge the specifi c American aspects of

American art.

On the basis of European discoveries, the new generation of American artists started

something new and original that they felt to be specifi cally American. It was widely

circulated in Europe after the war, together with the money for reconstruction, and pro-

moted by the federal government and important institutions such as the Art Institute of

Chicago and the New York MoMA as the epitome of a free art in a free country. Many

art historians actually think that in the early fi fties, Abstract Expressionism had become

a “weapon of the Cold War.”57 By the late fi fties, Europeans had to look to American art

for inspiration and, with few exceptions, the pattern of infl uence had been reversed. In

the second half of the twentieth century, the art historian needs to look for the American

presence in European art, rather than the opposite.

62

“we need a closer contact with paris”

* Claudio Zambianchi (b. 1958) is Associate Professor of the history of contemporary art at the University

“La Sapienza,” Rome. Th e author wishes to thank Maurizio Vaudagna for the invitation to the Vercelli

Conference and all the participants for asking stimulating questions in the discussion following the presen-

tation: it is on that basis that parts of the paper have been rewritten and further material has been added.

Lida Patrizia (Lulù) Cancrini’s revision of the English text has been extremely helpful. Th e quotation in the

title comes from a letter from Marius De Zayas to Alfred Stieglitz, July 9, 1914, quoted in Bram Dijkstra,

Cubism, Stieglitz and the Early Poems of William Carlos Williams (Princeton, 1969), 18.

1. “Th e Nude-Descending-a-Staircase Man Surveys Us,” Th e New York Tribune (September 12, 1915):

22; quoted in Erika Doss, Twentieth-Century American Art (Oxford and New York, 2002), 70; Doss’s book,

Wanda Corn, Th e Great American Th ing: Modern Art and National Identity 1915-1935 (Berkeley, Los Angeles

and London, 1999), and Barbara Haskell, Th e American Century: Art and Culture 1990-1950 (New York,

1999) have all been of invaluable help in the writing of this paper.

2. For Wood’s relationships with the Neue Sachlichkeit see for example Doss, Twentieth-Century American

Art, 111.

3. Th omas Hart Benton, An Artist in America (1951); excerpt in John W. McCoubrey, American Art

1700-1960 (Englewood Cliff s, N.J., 1965), 205.

4. For an interpretation of Gorky’s art in terms of individual meanings and as a quest for personal identity, see

Harry Rand, Arshile Gorky: Th e Implications of Symbols (1981; Berkeley, Los Angeles and Oxford, 1991).

5. Allan H. Spear, “Introduction” in Th e New Negro: An Interpretation, ed. Alain Locke (1925; New York

and London, 1968), V.

6. Lizzetta Le Falle-Collins, Th e Critical Context of Jacob Lawrence’s Early Works, 1938-1952 in Over the

Line: Th e Art and Life of Jacob Lawrence, eds. Peter T. Nesbett and Michelle DuBois (Seattle and London,

2000), 122; see also note 10, 135.

7. Letter from Locke to Paul Kellogg, February 23, 1926, quoted in Spear, “Introduction,” XVIII.

8. See Richard J. Powell, Re/Birth of a Nation, in Rhapsodies in Black: Art of the Harlem Renaissance, eds.

Richard J. Powell and David A. Bailey (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1997), 23.

9. Alain Locke, “Negro Youth Speaks” in Th e New Negro, ed. Locke, 47.

10. Alain Locke, “Th e Legacy of the Ancestral Arts” in Th e New Negro, ed. Locke, 266.

11. Ibid., 256

12. Dorothy Adlow, “Jacob Lawrence’s War Pictures,” Christian Science Monitor (December 6, 1947): 18,

quoted in Le Falle-Collins, Critical Context, 125.

13. Paul Rosenfeld, Port of New York (1924; Urbana, 1961), 290; for the importance of Rosenfeld and of this

particular book to the defi nition of an American cultural identity see Corn, Great American Th ing, 4-11.

14. Rosenfeld, Port of New York, 292, 294-95.

15. Peter Schjeldahl, “Hopperesque” (1988) in Th e Hydrogen Jukebox: Selected Writings of Peter Schjeldahl

1978-1990, ed. MaLin Wilson (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1991), 294.

16. For an interpretation of Georgia O’Keeff e’s Cow’s Skull – Red, White and Blue, 1931 (New York,

Th e Metropolitan Museum, www.otto.to.it) in terms of national identity see Corn, Great American Th ing,

239-91.

17. Rand, Arshile Gorky, 68-69

18. For a story of Th e Eight see Elizabeth Milroy, ed., Painters of a New Century: Th e Eight (Milwaukee,

1991), 21-28.

FIGURE 13FIGURE 13

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claudio zambianchi

19. Robert Henri, Th e Art Spirit (1923; New York, 1984), 128.

20. Ibid., 132.

21. Ibid., 188.

22. John Sloan, Gist of Art (1939; New York, 1977), 22.

23. Ibid.

24. Ibid., 81.

25. Ibid.

26. Doss, Twentieth-Century American Art, 61.

27. For a detailed account of the Armory Show see, Milton W. Brown, Th e Story of the Armory Show (1963;

New York, 1988).

28. See ibid., 210.

29. For the comparison between these paintings by Sloan and Weber, see, Doss, Twentieth-Century American

Art, 55.

30. Letter from De Zayas to Stieglitz, July 9, 1914, quoted in Dijkstra, Cubism, Stieglitz, 18.

31. Robert Lebel, “Paris – New York et retour avec Marcel Duchamp, dada et le surréalisme” (Paris – New

York and Back with Marcel Duchamp, Dada and Surrealism), in Paris – New York, ed. Pontus Hulten (1977;

Paris, 1991), 104.

32. Beatrice Wood, I Shock Myself: Th e Autobiography of Beatrice Wood, (Ojai, Calif., 1985), 30, quoted in

Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp: A Biography (New York, 1996), 183.

33. Because of its importance to the history of modern art, the story of Fountain has been told many times

by several authors; my main sources are the entry on the work in Arturo Schwarz, Th e Complete Works of

Marcel Duchamp (New York, 2000), 648-650 (see also 199-200), and Tomkins, Duchamp, 181-186.

34. See Corn, Great American Th ing, 23.

35. See Constance Rourke, Charles Sheeler: Artist in the American Tradition (New York, 1939), 137, quoted

in Richard Guy Wilson, “America and the Machine Age” in Th e Machine Age in America 1918-1941, eds.

Richard Guy Wilson, Diane H. Pilgrim, and Dickran Tashjian (New York, 1986), 24.

36. See for example Marin’s Woolworth Building, No. 28 (1912; Washington, Th e National Gallery of Art;

www.otto.to.it).

37. On these topics, see Wilson, Pilgrim, and Tashjian, Th e Machine Age.

38. Corn, Great American Th ing, 218

39. Milton Brown, “Cubist-Realism: An American Style,” Marsyas 3 (1943-1945): 139-160; quotation from

146.

40. Barbara Novak, American Painting of the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1979), 135.

41. Corn, Great American Th ing, 201.

42. On these events, see for example Melinda A. Lorenz, George L. K. Morris: Artist and Critic (Ann Arbor,

Mich., 1982), 37-52.

43. Ibid., 72.

44. Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (1939), in Clement Greenberg: Th e Collected Essays and

Criticism, vol. I: Perceptions and Judgments, 1939-1944, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago and London, 1986), 9.

FIGURE 14FIGURE 14

64

“we need a closer contact with paris”

45. Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” 8.

46. Ibid.

47. Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko, “Letter to the Editor,” Th e New York Times, June 13, 1943; in Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics: An Anthology, ed. Cliff ord Ross (New York, 1990), 206.

48. On these events see Martica Sawin, Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York School, (Cambridge, Mass., 1995).

49. Rosamund Frost, “First Fruits of Exile,” Art News 41 (March 15, 1942), quoted in Sawin, Surrealism in Exile, 196.

50. On automatism and the beginning of Abstract Expressionism, see Sawin, Surrealism in Exile, 84-88,

168-69, 239-42.

51. See Sawin, Surrealism in Exile, 78-79; and Dickran Tashjian, A Boatload of Madmen: Surrealism and the American Avant-Garde 1920-1950 (New York, 1995), 36, 50-65.

52. T.J. Demos, “Duchamp’s Labyrinth: First Papers of Surrealism, 1942,” October, n. 97 (2001): 108,

118.

53. Ibid., 102-105.

54. Barnett Newman, “Th e Sublime is Now” (1948), in Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. John P. O’Neill (New York, 1990), 170-173.

55. Newman, “Th e Sublime is Now,” 173.

56. Clement Greenberg, “‘American Type’ Painting” (1955), in Clement Greenberg: Th e Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. III: Affi rmations and Refusals, 1950-1956, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago and London, 1993),

234.

57. I draw this defi nition from Eva Cockcroft’s article “Abstract Expressionism: Weapon of the Cold War”

(1974), in Pollock and After: Th e Critical Debate, ed. Francis Frascina (London and New York, 2000), 147-54;

for other contributions to the topic see the second part of Frascina’s book and Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War, trans. Arthur Goldhammer

(Chicago and London, 1983).

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nova americana in english

The Place of Europe in American History:Twentieth-Century Perspectives

edited by M.Vaudagna

Tiziano Bonazzi, Daria Frezza, Claudio Zambianchi, Giuliana Muscio, Giuliana

Gemelli and Antonella Cardellicchio, Jörn Leonhard, Raffaella Baritono, Marco Mariano, Mario

Del Pero, Jennifer Klein, Elisabetta Vezzosi, Maurizio Vaudagna, Manuel Plana, Alessandra Lorini, Simone Cinotto

Books in the “Nova Americana” and “Nova Americana in English” series also appear in electronic format and can be found at the website www.otto.to.it.

For the last thirty years the place of Europe in twentieth-century American history has been marginalized. While the impact of the United States on European life has been frequently dealt with, the American history writing prevalent in the United States has debunked the traditional portrait of the American experience as “invented” by Europeans and their heirs in the “New World.” The so-called “new historians” have dismantled the old Eurocentric “victory tale,” which they have interpreted as the historical legitimization of the white, male and Anglo-Saxon elites. As a result, not only has Europe’s pretentious claim of being the main original source of the American experience been appropriately denied, but all “Atlantic crossings” have been overlooked. With the beginnings of the 1990s, however, the trend toward cultural globalism made some of the leading protagonists of the Americanist historical profession in the United States keenly aware of the need to reformulate American history from a transnational perspective. If in new terms, the interest in the place of Europe in U.S. history has begun to revive. Yet, when it comes to the twentieth century, there has not emerged to this day a significant variety of studies on the many ways in which Europe has been present, whether constructively or dramatically, in the American historical process. This book is an effort to try and fill the void. It takes into account four important areas of transatlantic exchanges: international relations, cultural borrowings, emigration, and comparative welfare states. The implication is that, while distant from the old Eurocentric rationale, the history of transatlantic relations is relevant to understand both Europe and the United States.

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