Debating Modernism: Stieglitz, Duchamp, and the New York Avant-Garde

This handsome, complexly imagined catalogue for a traveling art exhibition of the same name proffers a new, organizing schism to early-century avant-garde artmaking: namely, a division between French arch-conceptualist Marcel Duchamp and red-blooded American photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who foresaw radically different aesthetic futures for American modernism, and whose personalities set the tone of the New York art world at the time. In two well-considered essays, with rich reproductions by luminaries such as Georgia O'Keefe, Arthur Dove, and Marsden Hartley (on the Stieglitz side), and Man Ray, Francis Picabia, and Jean Crotti (on Duchamp's side), the authors trace divergent responses to artistic polarities of the day--masculine/feminine, Nature/machine--and find in both camps a similar recourse to the wellsprings of eroticism. Through sparring publicity and convivial debate, the respective circles of Duchamp and Stieglitz ultimately reformulated the New York art scene's expectations about what art was and could be, in ways that appear both strange and persistently relevant for artists today. For those interested in modern art and its foundations, this catalogue presents an original and well-executed argument, which may alter received conceptions of American intellectual history in general. 86 color and b&w illustrations.