Debating American Modernism

From the crossfire between Marcel Duchamp and Alfred Stieglitz and their respective circles there emerged what Debra Bricker Balken calls "a critical reformulation of modernism, one that imprinted the direction of subsequent American art." Balken traces the fascinating threads of the debate between Duchamp and Stieglitz and their respective camps through the 1910s and '20s, and also addresses the sexualized imagery that appears in nearly all of these artists' works, a phenomenon that ironically unifies the two seemingly opposed factions. Jay Bochner provides an absorbing analysis of the artists' respective violations of American expectations about art.

Debating American Modernism includes reproductions of work by artists from both factions, from Arthur Dove, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Paul Strand to Man Ray, Francis Picabia, and Marsden Hartley, as well as by a group who melded the concerns of each, among them, Charles Demuth, Charles Sheeler, John Storrs, and Stuart Davis.