The Indian Craze: Primitivism, Modernism, and Transculturation in American Art, 1890–1915 (review)

Elizabeth Hutchinson's book, which began as an art history dissertation at Stanford, attends to what she calls the "Indian Craze." The "craze," which occurred in Europe and the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, describes the huge popularity of collecting and displaying American Indian–made objects, especially baskets, in middle-class non-Indian homes. The phrase is useful for suggesting the social, cultural, and economic significance of Native American crafts at the turn of the century, when Indian-made goods were circulating as commodities nationally and internationally—in the wake of ethnographic interest, displays at world's fairs and in museums of natural history, on the heels of the Arts and Crafts Movement, and during the emergence of mass tourism.

Each of the book's five chapters considers a different case study, arranged more or less chronologically. Chapter 1 examines the significance of "Indian corners," a variation of the Orientalist "cozy corner." Chapter 2 looks at the "Native industries curriculum" taught in Indian schools on and off reservations in the first decade of the twentieth century. In chapter 3, Hutchinson examines how non-Indian artists began to aestheticize Native American baskets, pottery, and weavings at the turn of the century. Chapter 4 discusses the photographer Gertrude Käsebier's "Indian Portraits," and chapter 5 considers the life and work of Winnebago artist Angel DeCora.

The chapters on Käsebier and DeCora are the strongest. These two artists deserve more scholarly attention, and Hutchinson gives a full historical rendering of each artist and her work. Her readings of Käsebier's portraits and DeCora's varied career as a designer, teacher, and activist are for the most part convincing, and it is a pleasure to see so many of their works gathered here. The chapter on the Native industries curriculum is also very good, providing lots of fresh information and insights about the "progressive" uses of craft and aesthetics to incorporate Native Americans (as well as recent immigrants) into "American" economy and culture.

Overall, the book is strong on primary research, well organized, and written in clear prose. Hutchinson also takes pains to locate Native agency in each of the case studies. However, the overarching argument of the book, that Indian-made objects were understood as "modern" by Indians and non-Indians as early as the late nineteenth century, is weakened by the failure to fully convey what she means by "modern." I don't disagree with the assertions that collecting Indian artifacts was "a means of embracing modern culture" and demonstrated a "sensitivity to the material object and a capacity for taste that were distinctly modern pleasures" or that the "modernity of the Indian corner" was related to the "spread of the culture of consumption" (16–17). But it's not always clear if "modern" means an aesthetic, a historical period, or a cultural attitude, a real problem for an argument that turns on such a slippery concept. Furthermore, the book's other main position, that Native American material culture was considered "art" by 1900, fifteen or so years earlier than other art historians have admitted, seems like splitting hairs. There is plenty of recent scholarship that shows how Native American material culture was appreciated by late nineteenth-century ethnographers, tourists, and collectors as aesthetically complex, meaningful, and pleasing, in other words, as "art."

In addition, there is some dissertation residue in Hutchinson's persistent claims for the book's originality and significance. Too often she dismisses or ignores other scholars' work in the field to claim this study as a first. She asserts that the book is the first to take "the private collecting of Native American art seriously" and "the first project to comprehensively relate the Indian craze to the emergence of modernist aesthetic ideas" (3, 7). In particular, the two chapters on private collections of Indian material culture (Chapter 1) and "Playing Indian: Native American Art and...