Centering Modernism: J. Jay McVicker and Postwar American Art by Louise Siddons (review)

The title of Louise Siddons’s book, Centering Modernism: J. Jay McVicker and Postwar American Art, is both bold and appropriate. Not only is her Oklahoma subject at quite literally the geographic center of the continental United States, but Siddons also shows the state to be a perhaps surprising aesthetic center of mid-twentieth-century modern art. Rather than serving as a decentering of American art that simply refocuses readers away from the predominant “New York–centricity” of the field, Siddons’s work removes the very necessity of a center-periphery argument, offering a remapping based not on a roots-and-branches model but on a rhizomatic, or horizontal and unhierarchical, model (p. 29). Such a mapping system allows places in middle America—in “so-called flyover country”—to emerge as deeply networked to the coasts and not as the expected isolated cultural backwaters “from which progressives have continually been in flight” (pp. 7, 4). Siddons demonstrates that the “coastalization of American art,” which we now take for granted, was not predetermined in the post–World War II era, but rather was actively constructed by art markets, critics, and historians based on the coasts (p. 2).

This carefully researched and clearly written account centers on a single little-known artist—J. Jay McVicker—who constructed his art career from his home base in Stillwater, Oklahoma, at Oklahoma State University, the institution where Siddons herself is currently employed. McVicker was a painter, but also a printmaker, watercolorist, and sculptor—working in media that are severely sidelined in canonical accounts of modern American art. But one question that readers must ask is whether McVicker’s art is worthy of such a monographic study, or if the rich archive that Siddons deploys so skillfully merely offers a forum for undermining existing art historical narratives. Though the latter is still a useful project, Siddons has also convincingly argued that McVicker’s art is indeed “outstanding” and can hold its own in comparison with the many renowned modernists she also discusses in the book (p. 3). Centering Modernism is beautifully illustrated with large full-color images so that readers can evaluate this claim for themselves, while the author’s close readings of McVicker’s works further help readers see his value as an innovative modernist.

Another strength of Siddons’s book is that it provides a needed biography for McVicker though the work is not limited to biographical methods. Rather, the author employs period theory—the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, for instance—as well as histories of relevant technological developments, such as the rise of the aviation industry in middle America, to show that McVicker’s life can be a lens through which to understand the United States at midcentury, rather than as only an end in itself. She also brings in the period term schizoid, which allows her to explore how an artist like McVicker could be both geometric and biomorphic, or organic, in style, both painterly and hard-edged in technique, and locally inspired but not regionalist in the reductive sense of the word. Indeed, schizoid operated as a kind of zeitgeist for the postwar era, according to Siddons, where contradictions and paradoxes counteracted ideologies of purity. For example, she quotes a period writer, stating, “The paradox of American art is its un-Americanness,” and she shows that, while New York synecdochically stood for America in the art world, U.S. art was in fact more broadly international, especially with its pan-American connections (p. 135). Finally, Siddons argues that coastal cities like New York and Los Angeles were as much regions of art as Oklahoma. She reminds readers that, given the archival evidence in middle America, we have only scratched the surface of our understanding of a truly transcontinental and international...