Creative Composites

In turn-of-the-century New York, the photographer and modern art impresario Alfred Stieglitz and his allies embraced a racialized aesthetic discourse in their expressions of identity in the modern era. This book examines the often-neglected role played by immigrant artists and critics in the Stieglitz circle, including Japanese-German author Sadakichi Hartmann, Mexican-born caricaturist Marius de Zayas and English Sri-Lankan curator Ananda Coomaraswamy, as well as better-known U.S.-born painters, including Arthur Dove and Georgia O'Keeffe. Creative Composites argues for a new understanding of early American modernism as a composite modernism." It analyzes episodes in the Stieglitz circle's use of diverse new media photography, caricature, film, and collage to frame their modernist practice as part of the ongoing national dilemma of integrating difference.