cover image Of Time and the City: American Modernism from the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery

Of Time and the City: American Modernism from the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery

Daphne Anderson Deeds. American Federation of Arts, $45 (80pp) ISBN 978-0-8122-8226-9

Not simply a European import, modernism in American painting and sculpture was shaped by a distinctively American response to a changed world, as revealed in this sprightly catalogue of a traveling exhibition. Deeds assesses native modernists' personal interpretations of established styles, such as Charles Demuth's cubist-realism. A curator at the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Nebraska, she asserts that Ralph Waldo Emerson's transcendentalism inspired modernists' quest for intangibles, while theosophical mysticism and William James's pragmatism paved the way for Americans' embrace of cubism, futurism and experiments with pure form. She discerns a spiritualist motive behind much of American modernism up to 1930. Marsden Hartley, Stuart Davis, Elie Nadelman, Georgia O'Keeffe and Man Ray are among the artists showcased in 52 plates (41 in color). (Jan.)