Th
e P
lace
of E
uro
pe in
Am
erica
n H
istory
Ed. M
.Vau
dag
na
€ 30.00
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
[email protected]://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
57
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
63
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).
Th
e P
lace
of E
uro
pe in
Am
erica
n H
istory
Ed. M
.Vau
dag
na
€ 13.00 (on line)
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
Top Related