Hartman On Blake

Review of Casey Nelson Blake, ed., The Arts of Democracy: Art, Public Culture, and the State (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). ISBN-13: 978-0-8122-4029-0. 361 pages.

Review by Andrew Hartman
Illinois State University
July 2010

“At stake in every struggle over art there is also the imposition of an art of living, that is, the transmutation of an arbitrary way of living into the legitimate way of life which casts every other way of living into arbitrariness.” Pierre Bourdieu


In what Patrick Buchanan described as a “dramatic understatement,” Ronald Reagan’s 1989 farewell address included a simple critique of artists and other cultural producers. “For those who create the popular culture,” Reagan lamented, “patriotism is no longer in style.” Buchanan was more explicit: “America’s art and culture are, more and more, openly anti-Christian, anti-American, nihilistic.” The culture had not lived up to the conservative promise of what Sidney Blumenthal termed “Reaganism and the neokitsch aesthetic,” a nostalgic rendering of 1950s America, when John Wayne and Ward Cleaver were models for all things decent. Instead, the 1980s gave us Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, which portrayed, in Reverend Donald Wildmon’s contemptuous words, a “weak, insecure, mentally deranged Jesus.” It also gave us Andres Serrano’s seemingly blasphemous Piss Christ—literally a crucifix submerged in a jar of the artist’s urine—and Robert Mapplethorpe’s highly stylized, homoerotic black-and-white photography. “While the right has been busy winning primaries and elections,” Buchanan wrote in 1989, “the left has been quietly seizing the commanding heights of American art and culture.”

The anxious commentary by conservatives like Reagan, Buchanan, and Wildmon was less proof of leftist cultural hegemony than of the culture wars, or the “fragmentation of public experience,” which, in the words of Casey Nelson Blake, “represents Americans’ multiple visions of a good life in ways that rule out the very possibility of a common conversation between citizens” (5). Blake, a professor of history at Columbia University, is the editor of The Arts of Democracy: Art, Public Culture, and the State, a compelling and useful anthology of essays that addresses “the often contradictory impulses that have shaped the relationship between the arts and public life in modern America” (2). Along with the rest of the Penn Press series, “The Arts and Intellectual Life In Modern America,” which Blake also edits, The Arts of Democracy seeks to place expressive culture in dialog with ideas. (See Tim Lacy’s review of another book in this series, Richard Cándida Smith’s The Modern Moves West: California Artists and Democratic Culture in the Twentieth Century. Also see Lacy’s interview of Smith.) Blake and the other contributors to this anthology largely succeed in their mission to connect art to a broader intellectual context, especially insofar as they relate art to political culture.

In Blake’s introduction, three types of response to the September 11, 2001 attacks nicely illustrate how art interacts with public culture and the state. First, the avalanche of artistic expression in New York City following the hateful demolition of the World Trade Center reminds us that humans long for symbolic representation, especially in their darkest hour. Second, efforts on the part of authorities to channel this artistic outpouring exemplify how cultural politics are transposed onto politics writ large, or, how the state seeks to control the cultivation of its citizen-subjects. And third, the eventual battle over the meaning of September 11 demonstrates that in postmodern America, there can be no common conversation, even about a collective trauma. “By the time of the fourth anniversary of the attacks,” Blake writes, “the familiar dynamic of the cultural wars had extinguished any hope for the rebuilt World Trade Center as an open, public space. Conservative relatives of the victims and their political and media allies mobilized to banish a proposed ‘Freedom Center’ for the site on the grounds that it might dishonor the dead” (2).

Although battles over September 11 representations work well as an introduction to a book on art and politics, the culture wars of the previous two decades seem to weigh more heavily on The Arts of Democracy. Michael Kammen’s chapter, “Culture and the State in America,” a revised edition of his well-known 1996 Journal of American History article, is a case in point. He introduces his chapter by referencing the highly publicized 1980s and 1990s shouting matches over art, including the fierce legislative attack on the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) budget, which stemmed from conservative disgust over NEA money that subsidized Serrano and Mapplethorpe. Kammen’s chapter seeks to place the intellectual and political history of the NEA, created in 1965 as part of Lyndon’s Johnson’s Great Society, in a context that predates the culture wars—in a time before 1995, when Newt Gingrich suggested in Time magazine that “removing cultural funding from the federal budget ultimately will improve the arts and the country.” Kammen, then, is cognizant of an important historical shift in how the NEA was perceived by various people. He writes: “We tend to forget that in 1964-65, when the NEA was being hesitantly created, some of the most prestigious artists, art critics, and arts institutions felt suspicious of politicians and believed that they had more to lose than to gain from any involvement in the political process. Three decades later, that pattern of mistrust has been turned inside out. Now it is numerous politicians who regard artists and arts organizations as tainted and unreliable” (71).

Similarly, in an essay titled, “A Modernist Vision: The Origins and Early Years of the National Endowment for the Arts’ Visual Arts Program,” Donna Binkiewicz historicizes the aesthetic preferences of the NEA, always political, to demonstrate that typical understandings of the NEA, rooted in the culture wars narratives, lack historical depth. In other words, the NEA did not always support the avant-garde, or what Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC), the endowment’s fiercest political critic, described as “gross, vulgar, and offensive” art. Rather, Binkiewicz details the ways in which the early NEA was a product of Cold War liberalism, as opposed to “the radical avant-garde façade that conservatives like Jesse Helms plastered upon it during the 1990s” (171). The early NEA funded modernist styles that, far from avant-garde, had long been acceptable to mainstream consumers of art. It also endowed art thought devoid of political meaning, which ran against the grain of the more innovative visual art of that era. “While American visual art in the 1960s embraced pop, minimalism, performance, feminist, black, and Chicano arts that were more critical of American society,” Binkiewicz writes, “federal art support continued to favor older modernist forms. NEA grants tilted especially toward abstract expressionist and color field artists, who had risen to dominate the art world in the 1950s and whose works were seen as the best representation of American freedom during the Cold War” (172). The Johnson administration blocked artists it considered too political from joining the National Council on the Arts, including critic Susan Sontag, outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War, and painter Ben Shahn, creator of social realist pieces such as The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti, 1931-32. In short, the history of the NEA demonstrates that earlier struggles over art and federal largesse were between Cold War liberals and cultural leftists, a division that seemingly died out when culture war divisions between secular liberals and traditionalist conservatives became paramount.

Rather than analyzing the more distant history of political struggle over art, Paul DiMaggio and Bethany Bryson, in their contribution titled, “Public Attitudes toward Cultural Authority and Cultural Diversity in Higher Education and the Arts,” mine more recent poll data to unmask the conventional culture wars wisdom as false. Specifically, DiMaggio and Bryson rely upon a 1993 opinion survey about attitudes towards the arts and education. Whereas conservatives like Allan Bloom and Roger Kimball argued that college made students more relativistic, and thus less likely to support traditional or high cultural forms such as the canon and fine art, the survey indicated that college graduates had more respect for high culture than non-college graduates. However, the survey also suggested that college graduates were likelier to support multiculturalism, which, in the minds of DiMaggio and Bryson, is evidence that the bifurcation between traditional and multicultural education is a false one. Although this is an important conclusion to draw, the authors then extrapolate from it to make the dubious claim that “if there was a culture war in progress, clearly most of the population had not enlisted on either side” (255). This form of analysis is common among sociologists and political scientists such as Alan Wolfe and Morris Fiorina, who too frequently put a narrow type of empiricism to work to dismiss the culture wars as the over-hyped preoccupation of the political class and the media. Such a characterization amounts to truism: elite actors generally defined or redefined the boundaries of most national political discourse. To DiMaggio and Bryson’s credit, they do not entirely write off cultural conflict as mere hype. Rather, they claim that the poll data “suggests that explanations for conflict over education and the arts must be sought not in the structure of public opinion but in the specific institutional features of these fields and in the strategies and tactics of mobilized social movements” (263). This is a wise suggestion as far as it goes. But institutional history alone will not clarify the large degree to which intellectual discourse was shaped by the culture wars, and why so many Americans consumed culture war controversies.

An alternative way to conceptualize cultural controversy is through an analysis of the fragmentations and hybrid forms that accompanied the shift from modernism to postmodernism, another of the central threads that tie the chapters of The Arts of Democracy together. In one of my favorite essays of the anthology, Michele Bogart’s “Norman Rockwell, Public Artist” demonstrates that the boundaries between modernism and postmodernism were blurred even at the height of the former. Such porosity, though, goes unnoticed, largely because art historians tend to focus their scholarly lenses on modernist art that they consider “good”—“abstract, politically progressive, and vigorously noncommercial” (33). By rethinking Norman Rockwell’s oeuvre, long criticized as “inauthentic, commercial kitsch,” Bogart seeks to reclaim Rockwell as an artist who anticipated the postmodern crossover between public and private. Bogart’s Rockwell, in other words, was more correct than his critics in his assertion “that commercial and fine art were integrally connected in twentieth-century America” (47). According to Bogart, Rockwell consciously used paintings such as The Connoisseur (1962), a depiction of a man facing an abstract expressionist painting, to point out that “boundaries asserted firmly by cosmopolitan critics were… arbitrary, narrow-minded, and elitist” (49), anticipating the more conscious postmodern turn of artists like Andy Warhol.

Penny Von Eschen’s piece, “The Goodwill Ambassador: Duke Ellington and Black Worldliness,” also documents how one artist defied modern boundaries. Von Eschen contends that Duke Ellington’s views of the world, and of his music in particular, were largely shaped by his relentless touring around the globe at the behest of the State Department—tours that “represented the international arm of what Casey Blake has described as a distinctly modern moment in American art that was self-consciously tied to definitions of Cold War freedom” (152). That said, although Ellington believed in the purposes of the American Cold War, he resisted official State Department narratives about “jazz,” rejecting the word itself as too American-centric. When lecturing to overseas audiences, Ellington described his music as international, hybrid, even pan-African, a framework Von Eschen labels a “black counterculture of modernity,” borrowing a phrase from Paul Gilroy. In this vein, Von Eschen concludes that, although the culture-as-diplomacy tactic smacked of imperialism, “to export American culture was to inevitably export its hybridity, its complexities, its tensions and contradictions” (167). In other words, the State Department got more than it bargained for.

Casey Nelson Blake’s own contribution, “Between Civics and Politics: The Modernist Moment in Federal Public Art,” explores the era sandwiched between Alexander Calder’s sculpture La Grande Vitesse, installed in Grand Rapids in 1969, and the 1989 dismantling of Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc in Manhattan—two decades that “mark the modernist moment in federally funded public art” (200). La Grande Vitesse was the first work funded by the Art in Public Places program of the NEA and, although it was not without its critics, most Grand Rapids residents celebrated it as a monument to civic pride. On the other hand, Tilted Arc, also built with public funds, was removed from Federal Plaza after eight years of protests and lawsuits. Various reasons were given as to why people wanted Serra’s sculpture removed, but none as satisfying as Blake’s historical explanation. “The unraveling of that modernist project for public art, so soon after its inception,” Blake writes, “reminds us that the transition from artistic modernism to postmodernism was not simply a shift in taste or aesthetic style. Rather, the crisis of modernist art in public spaces was intimately related to the crisis of the Kennedy-era liberalism that inspired it. Controversies over public art reveal that the movement from modernism to postmodernism was a thoroughly political process, shaped by deep conflicts over power and the structure of public life” (201). How did this work? Blake relates the dissatisfaction with public art installations to the dissatisfaction with urban liberalism, which crumbled under the weight of fiscal crisis and the failed promise of renewal. “Public art,” he argues, “invited attack as the most visible manifestation of the liberal state in urban spaces” (208).

Blake concludes that liberal modernism should be reevaluated as a flawed attempt to democratize art in public space. In framing art in negative terms—in opposition to Soviet totalitarianism—rather than as something the government should positively seek to construct, liberal modernism accentuated a privatized vision of art. “This was a recipe for public art without public purposes,” Blake contends, “an art created for a nation of private individuals” (203). In other words, liberal modernism sowed the seeds of its own demise. This then created a vacuum that conservatives proved successful at filling, illustrated by the popularity of the patriotic imagery of neo-traditionalism, such as Nizette Brennan’s Knoxville Flag. Neo-traditional art, an updated version of the Reagan era “neokitsch aesthetic,” articulates collective meaning in a time mostly devoid of it. The challenge, then, is to create an alternative to this conservative vision of the world, to build a public, democratic art that speaks in purposeful ways to our collective desires for peace and justice. At least, that’s the message I take from this excellent anthology.

[Editor's note: Click here for the permanent link to this review.]

Hartman On Blake

Review of Casey Nelson Blake, ed., The Arts of Democracy: Art, Public Culture, and the State (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). ISBN-13: 978-0-8122-4029-0. 361 pages.

Review by Andrew Hartman
Illinois State University
July 2010

“At stake in every struggle over art there is also the imposition of an art of living, that is, the transmutation of an arbitrary way of living into the legitimate way of life which casts every other way of living into arbitrariness.” Pierre Bourdieu


In what Patrick Buchanan described as a “dramatic understatement,” Ronald Reagan’s 1989 farewell address included a simple critique of artists and other cultural producers. “For those who create the popular culture,” Reagan lamented, “patriotism is no longer in style.” Buchanan was more explicit: “America’s art and culture are, more and more, openly anti-Christian, anti-American, nihilistic.” The culture had not lived up to the conservative promise of what Sidney Blumenthal termed “Reaganism and the neokitsch aesthetic,” a nostalgic rendering of 1950s America, when John Wayne and Ward Cleaver were models for all things decent. Instead, the 1980s gave us Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, which portrayed, in Reverend Donald Wildmon’s contemptuous words, a “weak, insecure, mentally deranged Jesus.” It also gave us Andres Serrano’s seemingly blasphemous Piss Christ—literally a crucifix submerged in a jar of the artist’s urine—and Robert Mapplethorpe’s highly stylized, homoerotic black-and-white photography. “While the right has been busy winning primaries and elections,” Buchanan wrote in 1989, “the left has been quietly seizing the commanding heights of American art and culture.”

The anxious commentary by conservatives like Reagan, Buchanan, and Wildmon was less proof of leftist cultural hegemony than of the culture wars, or the “fragmentation of public experience,” which, in the words of Casey Nelson Blake, “represents Americans’ multiple visions of a good life in ways that rule out the very possibility of a common conversation between citizens” (5). Blake, a professor of history at Columbia University, is the editor of The Arts of Democracy: Art, Public Culture, and the State, a compelling and useful anthology of essays that addresses “the often contradictory impulses that have shaped the relationship between the arts and public life in modern America” (2). Along with the rest of the Penn Press series, “The Arts and Intellectual Life In Modern America,” which Blake also edits, The Arts of Democracy seeks to place expressive culture in dialog with ideas. (See Tim Lacy’s review of another book in this series, Richard Cándida Smith’s The Modern Moves West: California Artists and Democratic Culture in the Twentieth Century. Also see Lacy’s interview of Smith.) Blake and the other contributors to this anthology largely succeed in their mission to connect art to a broader intellectual context, especially insofar as they relate art to political culture.

In Blake’s introduction, three types of response to the September 11, 2001 attacks nicely illustrate how art interacts with public culture and the state. First, the avalanche of artistic expression in New York City following the hateful demolition of the World Trade Center reminds us that humans long for symbolic representation, especially in their darkest hour. Second, efforts on the part of authorities to channel this artistic outpouring exemplify how cultural politics are transposed onto politics writ large, or, how the state seeks to control the cultivation of its citizen-subjects. And third, the eventual battle over the meaning of September 11 demonstrates that in postmodern America, there can be no common conversation, even about a collective trauma. “By the time of the fourth anniversary of the attacks,” Blake writes, “the familiar dynamic of the cultural wars had extinguished any hope for the rebuilt World Trade Center as an open, public space. Conservative relatives of the victims and their political and media allies mobilized to banish a proposed ‘Freedom Center’ for the site on the grounds that it might dishonor the dead” (2).

Although battles over September 11 representations work well as an introduction to a book on art and politics, the culture wars of the previous two decades seem to weigh more heavily on The Arts of Democracy. Michael Kammen’s chapter, “Culture and the State in America,” a revised edition of his well-known 1996 Journal of American History article, is a case in point. He introduces his chapter by referencing the highly publicized 1980s and 1990s shouting matches over art, including the fierce legislative attack on the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) budget, which stemmed from conservative disgust over NEA money that subsidized Serrano and Mapplethorpe. Kammen’s chapter seeks to place the intellectual and political history of the NEA, created in 1965 as part of Lyndon’s Johnson’s Great Society, in a context that predates the culture wars—in a time before 1995, when Newt Gingrich suggested in Time magazine that “removing cultural funding from the federal budget ultimately will improve the arts and the country.” Kammen, then, is cognizant of an important historical shift in how the NEA was perceived by various people. He writes: “We tend to forget that in 1964-65, when the NEA was being hesitantly created, some of the most prestigious artists, art critics, and arts institutions felt suspicious of politicians and believed that they had more to lose than to gain from any involvement in the political process. Three decades later, that pattern of mistrust has been turned inside out. Now it is numerous politicians who regard artists and arts organizations as tainted and unreliable” (71).

Similarly, in an essay titled, “A Modernist Vision: The Origins and Early Years of the National Endowment for the Arts’ Visual Arts Program,” Donna Binkiewicz historicizes the aesthetic preferences of the NEA, always political, to demonstrate that typical understandings of the NEA, rooted in the culture wars narratives, lack historical depth. In other words, the NEA did not always support the avant-garde, or what Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC), the endowment’s fiercest political critic, described as “gross, vulgar, and offensive” art. Rather, Binkiewicz details the ways in which the early NEA was a product of Cold War liberalism, as opposed to “the radical avant-garde façade that conservatives like Jesse Helms plastered upon it during the 1990s” (171). The early NEA funded modernist styles that, far from avant-garde, had long been acceptable to mainstream consumers of art. It also endowed art thought devoid of political meaning, which ran against the grain of the more innovative visual art of that era. “While American visual art in the 1960s embraced pop, minimalism, performance, feminist, black, and Chicano arts that were more critical of American society,” Binkiewicz writes, “federal art support continued to favor older modernist forms. NEA grants tilted especially toward abstract expressionist and color field artists, who had risen to dominate the art world in the 1950s and whose works were seen as the best representation of American freedom during the Cold War” (172). The Johnson administration blocked artists it considered too political from joining the National Council on the Arts, including critic Susan Sontag, outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War, and painter Ben Shahn, creator of social realist pieces such as The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti, 1931-32. In short, the history of the NEA demonstrates that earlier struggles over art and federal largesse were between Cold War liberals and cultural leftists, a division that seemingly died out when culture war divisions between secular liberals and traditionalist conservatives became paramount.

Rather than analyzing the more distant history of political struggle over art, Paul DiMaggio and Bethany Bryson, in their contribution titled, “Public Attitudes toward Cultural Authority and Cultural Diversity in Higher Education and the Arts,” mine more recent poll data to unmask the conventional culture wars wisdom as false. Specifically, DiMaggio and Bryson rely upon a 1993 opinion survey about attitudes towards the arts and education. Whereas conservatives like Allan Bloom and Roger Kimball argued that college made students more relativistic, and thus less likely to support traditional or high cultural forms such as the canon and fine art, the survey indicated that college graduates had more respect for high culture than non-college graduates. However, the survey also suggested that college graduates were likelier to support multiculturalism, which, in the minds of DiMaggio and Bryson, is evidence that the bifurcation between traditional and multicultural education is a false one. Although this is an important conclusion to draw, the authors then extrapolate from it to make the dubious claim that “if there was a culture war in progress, clearly most of the population had not enlisted on either side” (255). This form of analysis is common among sociologists and political scientists such as Alan Wolfe and Morris Fiorina, who too frequently put a narrow type of empiricism to work to dismiss the culture wars as the over-hyped preoccupation of the political class and the media. Such a characterization amounts to truism: elite actors generally defined or redefined the boundaries of most national political discourse. To DiMaggio and Bryson’s credit, they do not entirely write off cultural conflict as mere hype. Rather, they claim that the poll data “suggests that explanations for conflict over education and the arts must be sought not in the structure of public opinion but in the specific institutional features of these fields and in the strategies and tactics of mobilized social movements” (263). This is a wise suggestion as far as it goes. But institutional history alone will not clarify the large degree to which intellectual discourse was shaped by the culture wars, and why so many Americans consumed culture war controversies.

An alternative way to conceptualize cultural controversy is through an analysis of the fragmentations and hybrid forms that accompanied the shift from modernism to postmodernism, another of the central threads that tie the chapters of The Arts of Democracy together. In one of my favorite essays of the anthology, Michele Bogart’s “Norman Rockwell, Public Artist” demonstrates that the boundaries between modernism and postmodernism were blurred even at the height of the former. Such porosity, though, goes unnoticed, largely because art historians tend to focus their scholarly lenses on modernist art that they consider “good”—“abstract, politically progressive, and vigorously noncommercial” (33). By rethinking Norman Rockwell’s oeuvre, long criticized as “inauthentic, commercial kitsch,” Bogart seeks to reclaim Rockwell as an artist who anticipated the postmodern crossover between public and private. Bogart’s Rockwell, in other words, was more correct than his critics in his assertion “that commercial and fine art were integrally connected in twentieth-century America” (47). According to Bogart, Rockwell consciously used paintings such as The Connoisseur (1962), a depiction of a man facing an abstract expressionist painting, to point out that “boundaries asserted firmly by cosmopolitan critics were… arbitrary, narrow-minded, and elitist” (49), anticipating the more conscious postmodern turn of artists like Andy Warhol.

Penny Von Eschen’s piece, “The Goodwill Ambassador: Duke Ellington and Black Worldliness,” also documents how one artist defied modern boundaries. Von Eschen contends that Duke Ellington’s views of the world, and of his music in particular, were largely shaped by his relentless touring around the globe at the behest of the State Department—tours that “represented the international arm of what Casey Blake has described as a distinctly modern moment in American art that was self-consciously tied to definitions of Cold War freedom” (152). That said, although Ellington believed in the purposes of the American Cold War, he resisted official State Department narratives about “jazz,” rejecting the word itself as too American-centric. When lecturing to overseas audiences, Ellington described his music as international, hybrid, even pan-African, a framework Von Eschen labels a “black counterculture of modernity,” borrowing a phrase from Paul Gilroy. In this vein, Von Eschen concludes that, although the culture-as-diplomacy tactic smacked of imperialism, “to export American culture was to inevitably export its hybridity, its complexities, its tensions and contradictions” (167). In other words, the State Department got more than it bargained for.

Casey Nelson Blake’s own contribution, “Between Civics and Politics: The Modernist Moment in Federal Public Art,” explores the era sandwiched between Alexander Calder’s sculpture La Grande Vitesse, installed in Grand Rapids in 1969, and the 1989 dismantling of Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc in Manhattan—two decades that “mark the modernist moment in federally funded public art” (200). La Grande Vitesse was the first work funded by the Art in Public Places program of the NEA and, although it was not without its critics, most Grand Rapids residents celebrated it as a monument to civic pride. On the other hand, Tilted Arc, also built with public funds, was removed from Federal Plaza after eight years of protests and lawsuits. Various reasons were given as to why people wanted Serra’s sculpture removed, but none as satisfying as Blake’s historical explanation. “The unraveling of that modernist project for public art, so soon after its inception,” Blake writes, “reminds us that the transition from artistic modernism to postmodernism was not simply a shift in taste or aesthetic style. Rather, the crisis of modernist art in public spaces was intimately related to the crisis of the Kennedy-era liberalism that inspired it. Controversies over public art reveal that the movement from modernism to postmodernism was a thoroughly political process, shaped by deep conflicts over power and the structure of public life” (201). How did this work? Blake relates the dissatisfaction with public art installations to the dissatisfaction with urban liberalism, which crumbled under the weight of fiscal crisis and the failed promise of renewal. “Public art,” he argues, “invited attack as the most visible manifestation of the liberal state in urban spaces” (208).

Blake concludes that liberal modernism should be reevaluated as a flawed attempt to democratize art in public space. In framing art in negative terms—in opposition to Soviet totalitarianism—rather than as something the government should positively seek to construct, liberal modernism accentuated a privatized vision of art. “This was a recipe for public art without public purposes,” Blake contends, “an art created for a nation of private individuals” (203). In other words, liberal modernism sowed the seeds of its own demise. This then created a vacuum that conservatives proved successful at filling, illustrated by the popularity of the patriotic imagery of neo-traditionalism, such as Nizette Brennan’s Knoxville Flag. Neo-traditional art, an updated version of the Reagan era “neokitsch aesthetic,” articulates collective meaning in a time mostly devoid of it. The challenge, then, is to create an alternative to this conservative vision of the world, to build a public, democratic art that speaks in purposeful ways to our collective desires for peace and justice. At least, that’s the message I take from this excellent anthology.

[Editor's note: Click here for the permanent link to this review.]

An Interview With Richard Cándida Smith

On the heels of my April review of Richard Cándida Smith’s The Modern Moves West, I wrote him with a few questions about the book---and beyond. Here goes:

1. Lacy: At first I thought this book might be derived from your dissertation. And the overlap of topics got me thinking about your friendship with Noah Purifoy. But then I noticed that your dissertation abstract makes no mention of Purifoy. What can you tell me about how the story for this book developed?

Cándida Smith: My dissertation was published in 1995 as Utopia and Dissent: Art, Poetry, and Politics in California. That book had a quite different focus from the latest one The Modern Moves West: California Artists and Democratic Culture in the Twentieth Century. In the earlier book, I was concerned about how the development of aesthetic theory and practice in California provided an important resource (or repertory) for the discussion of broader social issues such as the cold war, the Vietnam War, racism, capital punishment, abortion, etc. The gist of the argument was that the ability of modernist aesthetics in California to bleed into broader social and political thinking grew out of the provincial nature of cultural life in the state, was a result of the weaknesses of the cultural scenes in California. That's the argument in brief, and the book, which is 500 pages long (only 50 pages of the diss. were cut) develops the argument in a complex way along with presenting lots and lots of detailed empirical evidence needed to sustain the argument and present my own theories of how modernism arrived in California and how local innovation worked. None of the material in the new book is reproduced from the dissertation. Utopia and Dissent contains a discussion of the abstract painter Jay DeFeo. Working on those pages actually sparked my interest in studying her more deeply, which then led to three published articles and the sections of this new book dealing in much greater depth with her education and the development of her approach to the use of paint, which was simultaneously sculptural and philosophical.

In the drafts I developed for my dissertation, I had two chapters dealing with the African American arts and literary scenes in California during mid-century. I cut them out, along with a chapter on communist writers, for a variety of reasons,. Keeping the dissertation at a reasonable length was central. But also I came to the conclusion that the larger argument I was making in Utopia and Dissent was consistent with the experience of African American artists. I did not want to become repetitious. I removed that material for development later that would allow fuller exploration of particular careers. Some of this, but not much, resurfaced in the new book, and what did resurface was so completely rethought as to be effectively new. While I was working on my dissertation, I was directing an oral history project on African American artists in Los Angeles,. Fairly long interviews were conducted with maybe 20 artists. That was how I got to know Purifoy. I was pleased after Utopia and Dissentthat the artists I had met during that project pretty much to a man and woman felt that the book spoke to "their experience." I did intend to return to this material but wasn't sure exactly how.

The strands I had left behind for further investigation, after completing Utopia and Dissent, took shape as I became increasingly concerned with the tension between professionalism and access. Increasing institutionalization and professionalization was one of the end points for Utopia and Dissent. As artists and writers confronted the controversies exacted as their works being became socially relevant, a way to escape arrests, beatings, and lengthy court trials was to invoke professional autonomy, which as the first book argued increasingly became the first line of defense. The foundations of professional autonomy as a basis for a modern critical culture was one of the core topics of my second book, Mallarmé's Children: Symbolism and the Renewal of Experience, which took as its starting point interactions between U.S. pragmatism and French symbolism, roughly 1880-1920. The new book continued the investigations of the previous two books while returning to California because it allowed for a close examination of core-periphery issues from what I hoped would be a fresh angle, eccentric only if one insists on mapping the questions along simple-minded political terms.

2. Lacy: The title of The Modern Moves West is mildly misleading. It seems to me that indigenous forms of modern art ~arose~ in California (Rodia, DeFeo, Purifoy), with some knowledge of history/contemporary trends, rather than any movement of NY/European/East Coast modern art to California. Would you agree? It seems that the California Modern is its own animal---or at least your work has done an excellent job of convincing me this is so.

Cándida Smith: As for the title, it is largely was intended as a play on words. To the degree that modern culture is an ideological structure with a set of epistemological assumptions, it can move from one place to another and in the process establishes core-periphery relationships with lasting consequences. So go the arguments of chapters one and two. Even if truly a fallacious idea, it has consequences, some positive for some people who discovered motivation to overcome isolation grounded in other factors besides ideology. However, if we have never, per Bruno Latour, been modern, or perhaps saying the same thing, we are always modern, then the impetus to establish institutional structures that can provide its members with predictable, replicable activities would be associated with the accumulation of surplus wealth (and not only capitalist accumulation), add to this an ideology of republican democracy, and you have a tension at the very center of California as a new society emerging out of the U.S. conquest of northern Mexico. Such are the arguments of the following chapters.

Inherent contradictions interest me because they spark innovation, though not necessarily of the kind that local boosters past and present imagine. I considered focusing primarily on institutional development, but that was less interesting, less human, less pertinent that focusing on people who literally had to claw their way to recognition, and what the different paths had to say about the relationship of professional and democratic values in California at different times. I focused on California not because it's a particularly wonderful or uniquely special society, but because I had access to the sources, I knew the back stories, and the balance of contending forces struck me as close to ideal types, hence generalizations would have some, varying degree of overlap with other places.

In terms of your specific question, yes, knowledge of local work was more direct, more immediate, always more impactful than knowledge of work done elsewhere before roughly 1970. However, the sources I think are very clear that a very large number of the artists in the state worked with an eye towards the heritage that they wanted to join. Contemporary work produced elsewhere was seen very sporadically, usually in reproductions, occasionally in small exhibitions that did not necessarily represent well what was going on elsewhere. It is very difficult to say that artists after 1945 were responding to, much less in active dialogue with, say the New York School, that is say “abstract expressionism.” What is much clearer from the archival and other evidence, is that artists and their local critics saw each other’s work frequently and they believed that they were making an independent contribution to some putative western (trans-Atlantic), national, or even global civilization. The leading entrepreneurial figures, such as Lorser Feitelson, Grace McCann Morley, or Walter Hopps, staked their authority on having connections with the cultural center, which was more likely to be Paris than New York until 1960. Even Sam Rodia, the builder of the Watts Towers, uneducated as he was, described his work in terms of being part of the big picture of western civilization, which is part of what removes him from the folk art traditions found in several contemporaries in California who also turned their homes into environmental folies, like Romano Gabriel in Eureka or Grandma Prisbey in Simi Valley. I wanted to explore the subjective expressions of defining oneself as "peripheral." Clearly, a thematized relationship to a putative center is needed to begin to express a peripheral identity, whether one thinks of being far from the center as a hidden strength or as a form of exile.

3. Lacy: I was surprised to see that, although Berkeley has a History of Art Department, your interaction with them on this project seems minimal. Is this a disciplinary issue (e.g. they don't think a lot about intellectual history, or the history of philosophies of aesthetics)? Or is it something else?

Cándida Smith: When I was at the University of Michigan, I had a close relationship with the art history program there, indeed to the point of directing a dissertation that a student did on Betye Saar. At Berkeley, I have relatively frequent interaction with Margaretta Lovell, the Americanist in the history of art department., through our shared participation in Berkeley's American studies program---where we both teach. Margaretta and I also participated in a material culture study group, and I learned a lot from her as I have tried to think through how objects articulate subjectivity. However, my deepest engagement with art history, one might say my training in art history, developed through oral history projects. While at UCLA, I worked in the oral history program and was responsible for the interviews done in art, literature, performance, etc. I did not do all the interviews myself, but I directed the interviewers in shaping interviews so they could add something new to the historical record and the conversation of scholars. That work led to a ten-year oral history project I did with Thomas Reese and Claire Lyons at the Getty Research Institute. We wanted to study the impact of the German immigration after the rise of Hitler on art history and museum practice in the United States and Britain. We interviewed around 75 people, all prominent art historians in the America, Britain, Germany, and Italy. We traced lineages of scholars based on descent from dissertation committee chairs in order to see how epistemological assumptions and methodologies changed over generations. The topics branched out somewhat, as they can, so at a certain point, archaeology replaced more painting and sculpture as a focus, as questions about how feminism and identity politics reshaped work done in the 1970s and after took on greater importance than the initial questions about competing national approaches to scholarship.

While I was writing the new book, I directed an oral history project on the history of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which turned 75 years old at the beginning of 2010. We interviewed 55 or so people for that project. I interviewed the curators myself, and my interviews were focused on art historical questions. That said, museum curators, while viewing themselves as art historians, seem to have radically different notions of what an art historian is than my academic colleagues do, or from what I had come to expect from interviewing four generations of academic art historians for the Getty project. The themes and the findings of the SFMOMA project, while not directly related to the new book, overlapped in many important ways. I found I could test assumptions I was forming while working on the book by exploring particular lines of questioning and relating them to other sources I found in the archives or in print. What I was hearing in the interviews encouraged me to strengthen some of the more tendentious arguments in The Modern Moves West. The interviews on SFMOMA are now accessible at this link. I wish the Getty interviews were on line too, but they can be read in the library of the Getty Research Institute at the Getty Center in Los Angeles.

I would not say there is an inherent tension between art history and intellectual history. As an intellectual historian, I am aware that we approach the history of a field differently than the practitioners of those fields do, but they are more likely to study and publish the history of their disciplines. And for very good reasons, they need to know where they came from and how that shapes what they do. Art historians have done considerable work on the history of their field and this undoubtedly shapes discussion of art itself, while those of us coming from intellectual or cultural history have different questions that we are asking. Parallel issues arise in the history of science, where historians of science and scientists exploring the history of their practice can bring dramatically divergent approaches to the history of a scientific field, which then leads to disagreements over the history of the basic science discussed. No doubt, I have disagreements with how the histories of both modern and contemporary art have been written---disagreements that I express directly in this book.

Nonetheless, those disagreements are secondary to the concerns that motivated me most deeply, which is how the relationship between democracy and expertise has developed, and how that affects how interpretations of our lives together and the problems we face are created and by whom and then disseminated and debated, and again by whom. The disciplinary questions are clearly a subset of that larger problematic and thus need to be treated as by products of larger structures of social relationships, as a means rather than a motivator.

Oral history has been a central part of how I've come to define my work. I entered intellectual history interested in the history of subjectivity, and oral history seemed to provide a necessary but strangely underused approach for getting at how conceptions of self, community, and alterity have developed over time in distinct communities. I've discussed oral culture as a distinct historical resource in several essays. I don't want to do "oral history" books as it is a method, and there are already many excellent books on oral history methodology. I want to write books exploring problems that appear to me as important. What I've learned about the contrasting ways people express their complex relationships with each other in different communicative media has helped me arrive at more complex approaches to the subjects that interest me.

4. Lacy: How would you characterize your relationship to intellectual history, particularly its U.S. variety?

Cándida Smith: There are different ways of answering this. One way has to do with my involvement, which is more than casual, in oral history. A second part of the answer has to do with my early interest in history of subjectivity---that is discursive frameworks that communities provide their members for mapping relationships in and with the world. That has developed into concern for understanding institutions as the most important historical framework for the development of discursive communities. Institutional frameworks, which are not quite the same thing as disciplinary organizations, strike me as central to how all intellectual and cultural life operates, yet remain underexplored historically. A third part of the answer lies in my training at UCLA, particularly with Deborah Silverman. European intellectual history that focused on cultural and artistic movements was where I started as a historian, and certainly my first book was an effort to apply lessons I had learned from Silverman's work on French fin-de-siècle aesthetic practices, as well as from Carl Schorske, Gerald Seigel, Peter Paret, Peter Stansky, and from many others who are well known in European intellectual history to a distinctively U.S. situation. My work has continued from there as I framed and reframed my questions. I continue to read a lot in European and Latin American literatures, as well as work done in the United States. Since my projects have been regional or trans-national, the nation as such strikes me as the best way to approach cultural and intellectual questions only in some cases. Every book requires its own framing, and part of the challenge of writing a book is to discover what the frame needs to be. The way I think about intellectual history must be running along a track that does not lead easily to national frames. A lot of work has been done on national cultures, so there should be plenty of room for work that focuses on regional experiences, as well as institutions that cross national boundaries.

-----------------------

I want to send a hearty thank you to Professor Richard Cándida Smith for indulging my questions. - TL

An Interview With Richard Cándida Smith

On the heels of my April review of Richard Cándida Smith’s The Modern Moves West, I wrote him with a few questions about the book---and beyond. Here goes:

1. Lacy: At first I thought this book might be derived from your dissertation. And the overlap of topics got me thinking about your friendship with Noah Purifoy. But then I noticed that your dissertation abstract makes no mention of Purifoy. What can you tell me about how the story for this book developed?

Cándida Smith: My dissertation was published in 1995 as Utopia and Dissent: Art, Poetry, and Politics in California. That book had a quite different focus from the latest one The Modern Moves West: California Artists and Democratic Culture in the Twentieth Century. In the earlier book, I was concerned about how the development of aesthetic theory and practice in California provided an important resource (or repertory) for the discussion of broader social issues such as the cold war, the Vietnam War, racism, capital punishment, abortion, etc. The gist of the argument was that the ability of modernist aesthetics in California to bleed into broader social and political thinking grew out of the provincial nature of cultural life in the state, was a result of the weaknesses of the cultural scenes in California. That's the argument in brief, and the book, which is 500 pages long (only 50 pages of the diss. were cut) develops the argument in a complex way along with presenting lots and lots of detailed empirical evidence needed to sustain the argument and present my own theories of how modernism arrived in California and how local innovation worked. None of the material in the new book is reproduced from the dissertation. Utopia and Dissent contains a discussion of the abstract painter Jay DeFeo. Working on those pages actually sparked my interest in studying her more deeply, which then led to three published articles and the sections of this new book dealing in much greater depth with her education and the development of her approach to the use of paint, which was simultaneously sculptural and philosophical.

In the drafts I developed for my dissertation, I had two chapters dealing with the African American arts and literary scenes in California during mid-century. I cut them out, along with a chapter on communist writers, for a variety of reasons,. Keeping the dissertation at a reasonable length was central. But also I came to the conclusion that the larger argument I was making in Utopia and Dissent was consistent with the experience of African American artists. I did not want to become repetitious. I removed that material for development later that would allow fuller exploration of particular careers. Some of this, but not much, resurfaced in the new book, and what did resurface was so completely rethought as to be effectively new. While I was working on my dissertation, I was directing an oral history project on African American artists in Los Angeles,. Fairly long interviews were conducted with maybe 20 artists. That was how I got to know Purifoy. I was pleased after Utopia and Dissentthat the artists I had met during that project pretty much to a man and woman felt that the book spoke to "their experience." I did intend to return to this material but wasn't sure exactly how.

The strands I had left behind for further investigation, after completing Utopia and Dissent, took shape as I became increasingly concerned with the tension between professionalism and access. Increasing institutionalization and professionalization was one of the end points for Utopia and Dissent. As artists and writers confronted the controversies exacted as their works being became socially relevant, a way to escape arrests, beatings, and lengthy court trials was to invoke professional autonomy, which as the first book argued increasingly became the first line of defense. The foundations of professional autonomy as a basis for a modern critical culture was one of the core topics of my second book, Mallarmé's Children: Symbolism and the Renewal of Experience, which took as its starting point interactions between U.S. pragmatism and French symbolism, roughly 1880-1920. The new book continued the investigations of the previous two books while returning to California because it allowed for a close examination of core-periphery issues from what I hoped would be a fresh angle, eccentric only if one insists on mapping the questions along simple-minded political terms.

2. Lacy: The title of The Modern Moves West is mildly misleading. It seems to me that indigenous forms of modern art ~arose~ in California (Rodia, DeFeo, Purifoy), with some knowledge of history/contemporary trends, rather than any movement of NY/European/East Coast modern art to California. Would you agree? It seems that the California Modern is its own animal---or at least your work has done an excellent job of convincing me this is so.

Cándida Smith: As for the title, it is largely was intended as a play on words. To the degree that modern culture is an ideological structure with a set of epistemological assumptions, it can move from one place to another and in the process establishes core-periphery relationships with lasting consequences. So go the arguments of chapters one and two. Even if truly a fallacious idea, it has consequences, some positive for some people who discovered motivation to overcome isolation grounded in other factors besides ideology. However, if we have never, per Bruno Latour, been modern, or perhaps saying the same thing, we are always modern, then the impetus to establish institutional structures that can provide its members with predictable, replicable activities would be associated with the accumulation of surplus wealth (and not only capitalist accumulation), add to this an ideology of republican democracy, and you have a tension at the very center of California as a new society emerging out of the U.S. conquest of northern Mexico. Such are the arguments of the following chapters.

Inherent contradictions interest me because they spark innovation, though not necessarily of the kind that local boosters past and present imagine. I considered focusing primarily on institutional development, but that was less interesting, less human, less pertinent that focusing on people who literally had to claw their way to recognition, and what the different paths had to say about the relationship of professional and democratic values in California at different times. I focused on California not because it's a particularly wonderful or uniquely special society, but because I had access to the sources, I knew the back stories, and the balance of contending forces struck me as close to ideal types, hence generalizations would have some, varying degree of overlap with other places.

In terms of your specific question, yes, knowledge of local work was more direct, more immediate, always more impactful than knowledge of work done elsewhere before roughly 1970. However, the sources I think are very clear that a very large number of the artists in the state worked with an eye towards the heritage that they wanted to join. Contemporary work produced elsewhere was seen very sporadically, usually in reproductions, occasionally in small exhibitions that did not necessarily represent well what was going on elsewhere. It is very difficult to say that artists after 1945 were responding to, much less in active dialogue with, say the New York School, that is say “abstract expressionism.” What is much clearer from the archival and other evidence, is that artists and their local critics saw each other’s work frequently and they believed that they were making an independent contribution to some putative western (trans-Atlantic), national, or even global civilization. The leading entrepreneurial figures, such as Lorser Feitelson, Grace McCann Morley, or Walter Hopps, staked their authority on having connections with the cultural center, which was more likely to be Paris than New York until 1960. Even Sam Rodia, the builder of the Watts Towers, uneducated as he was, described his work in terms of being part of the big picture of western civilization, which is part of what removes him from the folk art traditions found in several contemporaries in California who also turned their homes into environmental folies, like Romano Gabriel in Eureka or Grandma Prisbey in Simi Valley. I wanted to explore the subjective expressions of defining oneself as "peripheral." Clearly, a thematized relationship to a putative center is needed to begin to express a peripheral identity, whether one thinks of being far from the center as a hidden strength or as a form of exile.

3. Lacy: I was surprised to see that, although Berkeley has a History of Art Department, your interaction with them on this project seems minimal. Is this a disciplinary issue (e.g. they don't think a lot about intellectual history, or the history of philosophies of aesthetics)? Or is it something else?

Cándida Smith: When I was at the University of Michigan, I had a close relationship with the art history program there, indeed to the point of directing a dissertation that a student did on Betye Saar. At Berkeley, I have relatively frequent interaction with Margaretta Lovell, the Americanist in the history of art department., through our shared participation in Berkeley's American studies program---where we both teach. Margaretta and I also participated in a material culture study group, and I learned a lot from her as I have tried to think through how objects articulate subjectivity. However, my deepest engagement with art history, one might say my training in art history, developed through oral history projects. While at UCLA, I worked in the oral history program and was responsible for the interviews done in art, literature, performance, etc. I did not do all the interviews myself, but I directed the interviewers in shaping interviews so they could add something new to the historical record and the conversation of scholars. That work led to a ten-year oral history project I did with Thomas Reese and Claire Lyons at the Getty Research Institute. We wanted to study the impact of the German immigration after the rise of Hitler on art history and museum practice in the United States and Britain. We interviewed around 75 people, all prominent art historians in the America, Britain, Germany, and Italy. We traced lineages of scholars based on descent from dissertation committee chairs in order to see how epistemological assumptions and methodologies changed over generations. The topics branched out somewhat, as they can, so at a certain point, archaeology replaced more painting and sculpture as a focus, as questions about how feminism and identity politics reshaped work done in the 1970s and after took on greater importance than the initial questions about competing national approaches to scholarship.

While I was writing the new book, I directed an oral history project on the history of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which turned 75 years old at the beginning of 2010. We interviewed 55 or so people for that project. I interviewed the curators myself, and my interviews were focused on art historical questions. That said, museum curators, while viewing themselves as art historians, seem to have radically different notions of what an art historian is than my academic colleagues do, or from what I had come to expect from interviewing four generations of academic art historians for the Getty project. The themes and the findings of the SFMOMA project, while not directly related to the new book, overlapped in many important ways. I found I could test assumptions I was forming while working on the book by exploring particular lines of questioning and relating them to other sources I found in the archives or in print. What I was hearing in the interviews encouraged me to strengthen some of the more tendentious arguments in The Modern Moves West. The interviews on SFMOMA are now accessible at this link. I wish the Getty interviews were on line too, but they can be read in the library of the Getty Research Institute at the Getty Center in Los Angeles.

I would not say there is an inherent tension between art history and intellectual history. As an intellectual historian, I am aware that we approach the history of a field differently than the practitioners of those fields do, but they are more likely to study and publish the history of their disciplines. And for very good reasons, they need to know where they came from and how that shapes what they do. Art historians have done considerable work on the history of their field and this undoubtedly shapes discussion of art itself, while those of us coming from intellectual or cultural history have different questions that we are asking. Parallel issues arise in the history of science, where historians of science and scientists exploring the history of their practice can bring dramatically divergent approaches to the history of a scientific field, which then leads to disagreements over the history of the basic science discussed. No doubt, I have disagreements with how the histories of both modern and contemporary art have been written---disagreements that I express directly in this book.

Nonetheless, those disagreements are secondary to the concerns that motivated me most deeply, which is how the relationship between democracy and expertise has developed, and how that affects how interpretations of our lives together and the problems we face are created and by whom and then disseminated and debated, and again by whom. The disciplinary questions are clearly a subset of that larger problematic and thus need to be treated as by products of larger structures of social relationships, as a means rather than a motivator.

Oral history has been a central part of how I've come to define my work. I entered intellectual history interested in the history of subjectivity, and oral history seemed to provide a necessary but strangely underused approach for getting at how conceptions of self, community, and alterity have developed over time in distinct communities. I've discussed oral culture as a distinct historical resource in several essays. I don't want to do "oral history" books as it is a method, and there are already many excellent books on oral history methodology. I want to write books exploring problems that appear to me as important. What I've learned about the contrasting ways people express their complex relationships with each other in different communicative media has helped me arrive at more complex approaches to the subjects that interest me.

4. Lacy: How would you characterize your relationship to intellectual history, particularly its U.S. variety?

Cándida Smith: There are different ways of answering this. One way has to do with my involvement, which is more than casual, in oral history. A second part of the answer has to do with my early interest in history of subjectivity---that is discursive frameworks that communities provide their members for mapping relationships in and with the world. That has developed into concern for understanding institutions as the most important historical framework for the development of discursive communities. Institutional frameworks, which are not quite the same thing as disciplinary organizations, strike me as central to how all intellectual and cultural life operates, yet remain underexplored historically. A third part of the answer lies in my training at UCLA, particularly with Deborah Silverman. European intellectual history that focused on cultural and artistic movements was where I started as a historian, and certainly my first book was an effort to apply lessons I had learned from Silverman's work on French fin-de-siècle aesthetic practices, as well as from Carl Schorske, Gerald Seigel, Peter Paret, Peter Stansky, and from many others who are well known in European intellectual history to a distinctively U.S. situation. My work has continued from there as I framed and reframed my questions. I continue to read a lot in European and Latin American literatures, as well as work done in the United States. Since my projects have been regional or trans-national, the nation as such strikes me as the best way to approach cultural and intellectual questions only in some cases. Every book requires its own framing, and part of the challenge of writing a book is to discover what the frame needs to be. The way I think about intellectual history must be running along a track that does not lead easily to national frames. A lot of work has been done on national cultures, so there should be plenty of room for work that focuses on regional experiences, as well as institutions that cross national boundaries.

-----------------------

I want to send a hearty thank you to Professor Richard Cándida Smith for indulging my questions. - TL

Lacy On Cándida Smith: Thinking Through Modern Art

Review of Richard Cándida Smith’s The Modern Moves West: California Artists and Democratic Culture in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). ISBN 978-0-8122-4188-4. 252 pages.

Review by Tim Lacy
University of Illinois at Chicago
April 2010


Thinking Through Modern Art


In The Modern Moves West, Berkeley Professor Richard Cándida Smith tackles the intellectual and cultural history of modern art in California. He explores aesthetic theory, the core-periphery tension in the institutional art world, art education, and the potentially explosive intersections of art and politics. By focusing on visual, stationary media in the work of Sam Rodia, Jay DeFeo, Wally Hedrick, Noah Purifoy, Marcos Ramírez ERRE, and Daniel Joseph Martínez, Cándida Smith presents an incredibly rich look at California’s pantheon of twentieth-century modern artists.

To read this book is to enter a world where a particular community used painting, sculpture, and assemblage art to grapple with the acids and innovations of modernity. In relation to California and the American West, Patricia Nelson Limerick’s notion of a “the legacy of conquest” is implicitly at work in Cándida Smith’s narrative. California is indeed a land of jostling due to internal migration, immigration, and racial politics.[1] But this book concentrates on explaining how modern art, and its postmodern successors, assisted in bringing these conflicting cultural visions together under a democratic aesthetic as the twentieth century progressed.

The Modern Moves West is a recent addition to Penn Press’s new series, “The Arts and Intellectual Life in Modern America,” edited by Casey Nelson Blake. That series welcomes manuscripts “in architecture and the visual arts or music, dance, theater, and literature.” Thus far the visual arts seem prominent, but there are only six books in the series.[2] If Cándida Smith’s contribution is indicative of the series on the whole, then that endeavor is intent on underscoring how art enriches America’s intellectual life, and how all of this comes together to foster (or hamper) democracy.

In his introduction, Cándida Smith offers a number of formulations of his thesis in relation to the themes outlined above. I believe, however, that the following ...[Continue here]

Lacy On Cándida Smith: Thinking Through Modern Art

Review of Richard Cándida Smith’s The Modern Moves West: California Artists and Democratic Culture in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). ISBN 978-0-8122-4188-4. 252 pages.

Review by Tim Lacy
University of Illinois at Chicago
April 2010


Thinking Through Modern Art


In The Modern Moves West, Berkeley Professor Richard Cándida Smith tackles the intellectual and cultural history of modern art in California. He explores aesthetic theory, the core-periphery tension in the institutional art world, art education, and the potentially explosive intersections of art and politics. By focusing on visual, stationary media in the work of Sam Rodia, Jay DeFeo, Wally Hedrick, Noah Purifoy, Marcos Ramírez ERRE, and Daniel Joseph Martínez, Cándida Smith presents an incredibly rich look at California’s pantheon of twentieth-century modern artists.

To read this book is to enter a world where a particular community used painting, sculpture, and assemblage art to grapple with the acids and innovations of modernity. In relation to California and the American West, Patricia Nelson Limerick’s notion of a “the legacy of conquest” is implicitly at work in Cándida Smith’s narrative. California is indeed a land of jostling due to internal migration, immigration, and racial politics.[1] But this book concentrates on explaining how modern art, and its postmodern successors, assisted in bringing these conflicting cultural visions together under a democratic aesthetic as the twentieth century progressed.

The Modern Moves West is a recent addition to Penn Press’s new series, “The Arts and Intellectual Life in Modern America,” edited by Casey Nelson Blake. That series welcomes manuscripts “in architecture and the visual arts or music, dance, theater, and literature.” Thus far the visual arts seem prominent, but there are only six books in the series.[2] If Cándida Smith’s contribution is indicative of the series on the whole, then that endeavor is intent on underscoring how art enriches America’s intellectual life, and how all of this comes together to foster (or hamper) democracy.

In his introduction, Cándida Smith offers a number of formulations of his thesis in relation to the themes outlined above. I believe, however, that the following ...[Continue here]