Native American Art and the New York Avant-Garde: A History of Cultural Primitivism
- ISBN-10
- 0292755473
- ISBN-13
- 9780292755475
- Category
- Art / American / General
- Pages
- 250
- Language
- English
- Published
- 1995
- Publisher
- University of Texas Press
- Author
- W. Jackson Rushing
Description
Avant-garde art between 1910 and 1950 is well known for its use of "primitive" imagery, often borrowed from traditional cultures in Africa and Oceania. Less recognized, however, is the use United States artists made of Native American art, myth, and ritual to craft a specifically American Modernist art. In this groundbreaking study, W. Jackson Rushing comprehensively explores the process by which Native American iconography was appropriated, transformed, and embodied in American avant-garde art of the Modernist period. Writing from the dual perspectives of cultural and art history, Rushing shows how national exhibitions of Native American art influenced such artists, critics, and patrons as Marsden Hartley, John Sloan, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Robert Henri, John Marin, Adolph Gottlieb, Barnett Newman, and especially Jackson Pollock, whose legendary drip paintings he convincingly links with the curative sand paintings of the Navajo. He traces the avant-garde adoption of Native American cultural forms to anxiety over industrialism and urbanism, post-World War I "return to roots" nationalism, the New Deal search for American strengths and values, and the notion of the "dark" Jungian unconscious current in the 1940s. Through its interdisciplinary approach, this book underscores the fact that even abstract art springs from specific cultural and political motivations and sources. Its message is especially timely, for Euro-American society is once again turning to Native American cultures for lessons on how to integrate our lives with the land, with tradition, and with the sacred.
Get the book
Similar books
-
Contemporary Native American Artists
By Dawn E. RenoKAREN CLARK Seneca ( 1948 – Steamburg , New York Beadworker , also creates rattles DORIAL CLARK Tuscarora / Cayuga ( 1940– ) Beadworker , wireworker , headdress worker EDUCATION : Murial Hewitt , Clark's cousin , taught her .
-
In August Company: The Collections of the Pierpont Morgan Library
By Pierpont Morgan LibraryIt was orchestrated by Berlioz and performed as ballet music in his 1841 production of Weber's Freischütz in Paris . The work is probably best known today in this orchestral version . It is also familiar to the world of dance through Le ...
-
J.M.W. Turner, "that Greatest of Landscape Painters": Watercolors from London Museums
By Andrew Wilton, Joseph Mallord William Turner, Richard P. TownsendPublished in conjunction with The Philbrook Museum of Art 1998 exhibition of 42 examples of Turner's work collected from the major London galleries.
-
Dike Blair: Now and Again
By Gary Indiana, Dike Blair, Xandra EdenIntroduction by Nancy M. Doll. Text by Xandra Eden, Gary Indiana.
-
Thomas Eakins
By National Gallery of Art, Thomas Eakins, Lloyd GoodrichThomas Eakins
-
The Lane Collection: 20th-century paintings in the American tradition ; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, April 13, 1983 - Aug....
By Theodore E. Stebbins, Amon Carter Museum of Western Art, BostonThe Lane Collection: 20th-century paintings in the American tradition ; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, April 13, 1983 - Aug....
-
The art of Betye and Alison Saar: secrets, dialogues, revelations : Wight art gallery, University of California Los Angeles, [January...
By Elizabeth ShepherdThe art of Betye and Alison Saar: secrets, dialogues, revelations : Wight art gallery, University of California Los Angeles, [January...
-
Gustave Baumann: Nearer to Art
By Martin F. Krause, David Acton, Madeline Carol Yurtseven... Eliza Draper Gardiner of Providence ; Rudolph Ruzicka and Florence Wyman Ivins of New York City ; and an enlarged contingent from Provincetown : Ethel Mars , Mary Bacon Jones , Tod Lindenmuth , and Juliette S. Nichols .
-
Abstrakter Expressionismus (Abstract Expressionism, Dt.). Der Triumph Der Amerikanischen Malerei
By Irving SandlerAbstrakter Expressionismus (Abstract Expressionism, Dt.). Der Triumph Der Amerikanischen Malerei
-
Robert Whitman: Playback
By Robert WhitmanRobert Whitman: Playback