American Expressionism: Art and Social Change 1920-1950

The conventional story of American visual art generally pegs postwar Abstract Expressionism, in the hands of Jackson Pollack, Willem de Kooning, etc., as the first truly mature manifestation of a national aesthetic, followed by Pop Art and minimalism as its glamorous and cerebral heirs. This polemical picture book seeks to overturn that history, finding in paintings of the pre-AbEx era a rich and undervalued tradition, and an antidote to a 20th-century art history that the author characterizes as fundamentally effete. Collecting images from provincial museums across the country, Dijkstra mixes well-known artists such as Jacob Lawrence and Georgia O'Keefe with consistently under-appreciated talents such as Albert Pinkham Ryder and Charles Burchfield, along with a canon of fascinating unknowns. Together, they flesh out an alternative history of much more humanistic dimensions than the hermetic and apolitical legacy of the postwar decades, with art that is decidedly more earthy and populist and socially engaged. Although Dijkstra pads the case with some sentimental choices--noble sharecroppers and grungy smelting factories and the like--his case stands as a convincing rebuff to the exhausted narratives of contemporary advanced art. Moreover, it resonates interestingly with the sources and practices of emerging artists in the post-conceptual era. This is a provocative, important book.