Ethnic Modernism, 1910-1950

African Americans, European immigrants, and members of other minority groups were, as immigrants and ethnics, part of modernity, as they lived through experiences of migration, ethnic identification, and often, alienation. In many ways, they also participated in, and significantly advanced, the course of modernism in the US; Afro-American artists, including Fletcher Henderson, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Charlie Parker, were central to the development of the new American music; modern composers Arnold Schönberg and Kurt Weill escaped to America from fascist Europe; immigrant artists like Joseph Stella, Max Weber, Ben Shahn, Man Ray, and Marcel Duchamp helped to establish modernist art; European exiles like Josef Albers were prominently active in such institutions as Black Mountain College while Hans Hoffmann taught the principles of modernist art and "abstract expressionism" in New York. Important modern art collectors and curators like Leo Stein, Etta Cone, and Juliana Force were the children or grandchildren of immigrants. The participation of these immigrants, children of immigrants, exiles, and African Americans among other marginalized groups helped make possible the breakthrough of modernism and its ultimate acceptance as truly American.

Looking back at modernism, Harry Levin marveled at the fact that "The Picasso" could have become the name of a New York apartment building, and Lionel Trilling wondered what had changed to make modernism teachable in so many American colleges. In the 1920s, Eda Lou Walton, an avant-garde professor of modern literature at New York University, had to smuggle a copy of Ulysses through US customs in order to discuss it in her private boudoir with adventurous young undergraduate boys. By the 1950s, Joyce could readily be assigned to coed students who had not yet reached the legal drinking age.

The public reactions were strong against modernist paintings in the famous 1913 Armory Show, such as Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1912), which was frequently ridiculed by cartoonists: the New York Evening Sun parodied it, under the general heading "Seeing New York with a Cubist" as The Rude Descending a Staircase (Rush hour at the Subway). Theodore Roosevelt wrote: "Take the picture which for some reason is called A naked man going down stairs. There is in my bath-room a really good Navajo rug which, on any proper interpretation of the Cubist theory, is a far more satisfactory and decorative picture. Now if, for some inscrutable reason, it suited somebody to call this rug a picture of, say, A well-dressed man going up a ladder, the name would fit the facts just about as well as in the case of the Cubist picture of the Naked man going down stairs" (Roosevelt).

Antimodernist opposition clearly had the upper hand, and the overwhelming majority of American works of art that were exhibited before World War II at the Venice Biennale, for example, were not modernist. The single exception was the 1934 Biennale, for which Juliana Force of the new Whitney Museum made the selections, and at which much American modernist work was shown, including Edward Hopper's Early Sunday Morning, Georgia O'Keeffe's Mountains, New Mexico, Max Weber's Chinese Restaurant, Reginald Marsh's Why Not Use the 'L', and Walt Kuhn's Blue Clown. The exhibit was marred, however, by the central presence of a lifelike effigy of William Randolph Hearst's mistress, the actress Marion Davies (by portraitist Tadé Styka), which Hearst's men had managed to sneak into the American Pavilion without Force's knowledge, and which Force was unable to have legally removed before the Biennale season ended. The conflict between Hearst and Force seemed representative of the intensifying struggle between fascist realism and democratic modernism, since Hearst had published caricatures of modernist paintings as well aspositive press reports on Mussolini, was on his way to meet Hitler, and knew the fascist director of the Biennale, whereas Force was a democratic spirit and described modern American art in the 1934 Biennale catalogue in cosmopolitan terms as coming out of "the fusion of different races...