472 pp., 7 x 10, 24 color and 225 b&w illus., notes, bibl., index

Although this volume is not a history, it has a rough chronology about it. Thus, Robert Cantwell's "White City Elegy" takes us back to the late nineteenth century as it examines the Chicago Exposition of 1893, an event that its organizers intended to be a celebration of the past in the belief that the civilization of the United States marked the apex of all that had come before. "Greece lives, but Greece no more!" the thoroughly traditional poet Richard Watson Gilder wrote to celebrate the "White City." For him the exposition marked a new blooming of "the undying seed" that had been blown westward to America, "a veiled and virgin shore!" "Ah! happy West," he exalted, "Greece flowers anew, and all her temples soar!"[4] They soared briefly in Chicago, but as Cantwell points out, the buildings were sheathed in staff, a fiber and plaster material that literally began to melt away on being applied to the frames of the pseudo-Greek edifices. "The White City was only a mock-up," he notes, "perplexingly suspended between reality and representation. . . . in many respects a simulacrum formally indistinguishable from its postmodern counterparts in theme parks, shopping malls, and redeveloped urban centers." Still a distance from such "postmodern counterparts," Carl Sandburg's 1914 poem "Chicago" suggests how far toward modernity that city had come some two decades after the White City. Not steeped in the issues that would affect his more intellectually sophisticated contemporaries such as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens--the list goes on and on--Sandburg nevertheless giddily exalted the new city he saw before him, admiring it--with good American optimism, one might observe--as "Hog Butcher for the World, / Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, / Player with railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler; / Stormy, husky, brawling / City of the Big Shoulders."[5] Like artists of the Ashcan School who were painting American cities at about the same time, Sandburg knew what was the landscape of the emerging modern nation; but they had an inherent optimism that differentiated them from Eliot, for instance--one has only to think of the London of his early poetry--or artist Max Weber, whose 1915 cubist work Rush Hour (Plate 4) is much more ambivalent about the urban scene than are most of the works of the Ashcan artists.

Dealing with an event chronologically prior to what is generally considered the era of high modernism in the United States--the 1910s to the 1960s and beyond--Cantwell perceives the threads of modernism and even postmodernism woven into one late nineteenth-century episode. The other essays work similarly: each fits into the continuum of the twentieth century while always touching thematically on the issue of modernism in practice. Jon Michael Spencer's essay about "Modernism and the Negro Renaissance" engages the debate about how successful the renaissance was as a modernist movement, and he concludes that it was more successful than not. The work of writers, artists, composers, critics, and performers such as Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps, Zora Neale Hurston, Aaron Douglas, William Grant Still, W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, Paul Robeson, and Marian Anderson made Americans aware of the vibrant eclecticism in African American culture. No longer did the African American artist have to engage in what critic Houston Baker termed the "mastery of form," that is, "manipulating the stereotypes whites had of blacks." As a result of the renaissance years artists could engage in the 'deformation of mastery'--the straightforward debunking of white people's racist radicalism,"[6] something seen in William H. Johnson's Street Life, Harlem (Plate 5).

Spencer agrees with commentator Edwin Embree that "the triumph of the first half of the century involved the transformation of the minds of whites to the point where no intelligent white person could believe any longer that blacks were their biological inferiors," a matter Thomas Fahy considers in his examination, "Exotic Fantasies, Shameful Realities," of the freak show in the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century United States. Although white people still resented growing racial and ethnic minorities as the twentieth century progressed, they could no longer assuage their feelings with crude--and cruel--representations of these minorities. "In part," notes Fahy, "the Harlem Renaissance had helped facilitate a greater recognition of oppression, for its artistic accomplishments challenged the devaluing of black individuals and culture." By the 1940s and after, the freak show was attacked in literature "for perpetuating abusive treatments of nonwhites." Modernist literature, that is, was a significant force in causing social change. No longer could a P. T. Barnum degrade an African American by exhibiting him as "Congo, the Ape Man" or "The Wild Dancing South African Bushman." Rather, a writer such as Ralph Ellison could engage in the "deformation of mastery" and satirize white stereotyping, and photographer Roy DeCarava could undertake a project about the people of Harlem that was 'serious,' 'artistic,' and universally 'human,'" Maren Stange notes in her essay about DeCarava's photography. That the "formal autonomy" he and other modernists dreamed of has not been achieved is no surprise; it remains "a distant ideal."

The last two essays, those about film by Lucy Fischer and Ray Carney, demonstrate how that medium draws on themes at the core of modernist thought at midcentury and after. Industrialization, urbanization, immigration, changes in ideas about religion and natural law, and the growth of science as a dominant influence in our lives have had a profound effect on our culture, moving it away from the sureties of Victorianism to the doubts of the modern age. Fischer, in "The Savage Eye: Edward Hopper and the Cinema," quotes from All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity by Marshall Berman. Although he was defining the late-nineteenth-century cultural landscape of Europe, she observes that Berman might well have been speaking about "the world contained in the canvasses of Edward Hopper," one of the most recognized--and recognizable--modernist painters in the United States. Berman saw "the highly developed, differentiated and dynamic new landscape" as one of

steam engines, automatic factories, railroads, vast new industrial zones; of teeming cities that have grown overnight, often with dreadful human consequences; of daily newspapers, telegraphs, telephones and other mass media, communicating on an ever wider scale; of increasingly strong national states and multinational aggregations of capital; of mass social movements fighting these modernizations from above with their own modernizations from below; of an ever expanding world market embracing all, capable of the most spectacular growth, capable of appalling waste and devastation, capable of everything except solidity and stability.[7]

Ray Carney writes about "Two Forms of Cinematic Modernism," idealist and pragmatic. Whereas idealist, visionary film holds to "quick, summary, shorthand truth," pragmatic works provide "lumpy, rough, dirty knowledge"--"hazy expressions" is how Carney defines their truths, and he notes that "the pragmatic narrative imagines a somewhat loose universe, with room for inconsistent, unique, and mutable expressions." "Life is lived minute by minute in the present, not from the perspective of eternity,'" Carney asserts, in effect describing the existentialism at the center of modernism. Lest we think he is actually describing postmodernism, he adds toward the end of his essay,

It is equally important to emphasize the chasm separating the pragmatic position from the skepticism and suspension of value judgments implicit in postmodern understandings. In the open-endedness and sprawl of their narratives, in their rejection of monotonic paths through experience and their relish of different angles of vision, pragmatic artists are not arguing (in the postmodernist vein) that there are no truths, but that there are many. The pragmatist replaces truth with truths--plural truth replacing unitary truth, present truth leaving past truth behind, your truth compared with my truth.

And painful it often is: God is frequently not in His heaven, nor are things right with the world. Although he was discussing literature, Irving Howe in an introduction to a volume of essays entitled Literary Modernism described characteristics of the movement that apply to modernism generally.[9] Among them is that "The Problem of Belief Becomes Exacerbated, Sometimes to the Point of Dismissal." As in the films Ray Carney examines, Howe saw existentialism in modern literature; also as in the films, Howe noted that "A Central Direction in Modernist Literature is Toward the Self-Sufficiency of the Work." When life is a matter of shifts and partial truths, the work of art, the architecturally striking building, or many another cultural artifact becomes the creator's assertion of self. "We are freeing ourselves of the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth, or what have you, that have been the devices of Western European painting," declared, in 1948, abstract expressionist painter and critic Barnett Newman, whose mature work gives little hint of any such devices (Plate 6). His group of artists, which includes most famously Jackson Pollock, chose not to make "cathedrals out of Christ, man, or 'life,' [and] are making it out of ourselves, out of our own feelings. The image we produce is the self-evident one of revelation, real and concrete, that can be understood by anyone who will look at it without the nostalgic glasses of history."[10]

Not that most modernists did away with history, as Newman might have been suggesting. Rather, they perceived it in new ways, as in the case of the writers Lucinda MacKethan considers in "Barren Ground, Mother Earth: Female Embodiments of Southern Modernism." These writers present their southern women characters not as "fruitful," maternal figures but as threatening, "women whose potential for both fecundity and barrenness represents a confusing, threatening challenge to male identity, power, and creativity." MacKethan writes about the high culture represented in works by T. S. Eliot, Eudora Welty, William Faulkner, and James Agee. But the modernist themes she finds there are in popular culture as well, which she demonstrates in discussing Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind.

Her inclusion of the film version of Mitchell's remarkably successful novel leads us to an interesting point: modernism is not just a high culture matter; the modern and modernism pervade popular culture, which, after all, is hardly surprising when we recognize that all of our cultural expressions, high and low, emanate from the relationship between the creator and his or her community. The artist may tend toward what Marshall Berman would call "the modernism of withdrawal," that espoused by Barnett Newman, for example, or by "serious" writers such as Eliot, Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, or any number of other literary giants. "When one cannot choose but be ascetic, when the self can only be celebrated as it is excluded from society, or as it is exercised and admired in a fantastic one, we then, I think, do not have much reason to be cheery," declared Philip Roth in an essay entitled "Writing American Fiction" (1961). Roth was stupified, sickened, and infuriated by the reality of American culture. "The actuality," he asserted, "is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist."[11] Well, perhaps, we might respond, but such a vision, or one akin to it that sees modernism "as an unending permanent revolution against the totality of modern existence," to quote Berman again, is not the only modernism. He recognized that there is also an "affirmative vision of modernism" that developed in the 1960s and became the stance of pop art.[12]

Certainly pop art emerged in the 1960s as one significant strain of artistic expression, and its playfulness made it a part of postmodernism, but affirmation was hardly that new. Joan Shelley Rubin points out in her essay, "Modernism in Practice"--about the use of the "new poetry" in popular readings, that it was turned into something positive, even though, as in the case of Edwin Arlington Robinson, he "was self-consciously in revolt against the unnatural syntax and safe sentiments of late Victorian idealists. His dark vision of the human condition and his sense of the emptiness of old rules and pieties marked him as an early modernist." But the Literary Guild, a thoroughly bourgeois, money-oriented operation, drew freely from his work; so, too, did Methodist minister William L. Stidger from the poetry of another modernist, Edna St. Vincent Millay. Neither the guild nor Stidger was interested in conveying any dark vision of the human condition. Each used the new poetry in an attempt to uplift the middle classes and, in the case of the guild at least, to make a profit.

Modernism is such an all-encompassing thing that it contains the positive as well as the negative. Hence a number of the essays in A Modern Mosaic describe the exuberance that was part of modernism even in the 1930s, the era of the Great Depression. Writing about the "Dances of the Machine," John F. Kasson shows how "machine production drummed irresistible new beats and demanded new patterns of highly coordinated human movement that affected the entire society and became one of the defining elements of modernity." Kasson believes that "mechanical production in the early twentieth century stimulated not only profound changes in the workplace but also what may be regarded as varieties of modernism in the popular arts." Henry Ford's assembly line, Charlie Chaplin's film Modern Times, Fred Astaire's dancing, and Busby Berkeley's film spectacles all reflect the imposition of "the values of speed, standardization, interchangeability, uniformity, division of labor, and specialization of task."

The machine movement was one of the major outcroppings of modernism, Kasson demonstrates. Another example of this is the work of George Antheil, whose Ballet Mécanique might be considered one of the most extreme expressions of modernist enthusiasm to be created by an American. A native of Trenton, New Jersey, he became an expatriate "dramatically affected by international impulses--especially those of the machine movement," notes Carol Oja. First performed in 1927 in New York City, the ballet reflected "the new" that is fundamental to modernism. Antheil was much affected by Dada, the post-World War I avant-garde movement that sprang out of Europe and whose leaders such as Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp presented artistic experiments "amidst the chaotic swirl of ideologies and 'isms' that fed into Dada, ranging from futurism to the cubism of artists as different as Pablo Picasso and Max Weber." Antheil's Ballet, judged a failure at the time of its first performance, nevertheless has had a long shelf life and is one of the most remembered of the various Dada experiments, a composition that celebrates the Machine Age and with its chaotic, sometimes absurdist style is a precursor to the postmodernism that came later, fueled by a hatred of what the Machine Age had wrought: wars, degradation, urban miseries, and conformity that belittled individuals.

As Kasson and Oja make clear, American modernism often displayed an exuberance that we tend to overlook. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the New Deal art projects of the 1930s, a decade, William Leuchtenburg points out in "Art in the Great Depression," that is frequently "deplored as 'the dreary aesthetic stepchild of American art.'" Such is hardly the case; government-sponsored programs generated a remarkable amount of art in many forms: paintings, sculpture, and so forth. A New Deal muralist declared that the programs "kept the arts alive, . . . [and] turned what could have been a dead period into something very vital, vibrant." Established painters could continue their work and develop; new artists did not have to drop their work. All in all, modernism in the visual arts flowered when artists gave expression to such movements as surrealism, magic realism, and precisionist abstraction, and soon-to-be major figures such as Jackson Pollock had the freedom to develop, in his case into the leading artist in the post-World War II movement of abstract expressionism. Had the government programs not existed, the movements and their ideas would surely not have emerged so quickly, if at all; American art would have had less opportunity to develop its distinctive qualities; and the nation would never have benefited from the vast amount of public work that came to grace public buildings throughout the nation.

Every bit as important for the arts and as a way of coming to understand American culture better was the Farm Security Administration (FSA) program for photographers. Miles Orvell, discussing the work of John Vachon in "Portrait of the Photographer as a Young Man," observes that "The FSA project was a crucial part of the pivotal turn of American twentieth-century culture--toward a central government's vision of reshaping habits of individualism through agricultural engineering and technocratic control, through social intervention and the rational employment of philanthropic surveillance." Vachon's work is less well known than that of photographers such as Walker Evans, Dorothy Lange, and Arnold Rothstein, but in fact he was every bit their equal in capturing "the honest presentation and preservation of the American scene," to quote him. Rather like the other great photographers of the FSA era, Vachon in his photographs and his writings conveys "the sense that his own existence is wrapped in the totality of modern civilization, its rhythms, its pleasures, its sights and sounds, its comforts. Yet deep within, not easily erased by the emoluments of the big money, there is an abiding sense of detachment and alienation."

The New Deal made public art a part of our national culture. Not everyone believed that this was an unmitigated benefit, of course. Such is the point of Casey Nelson Blake's essay, "Between Civics and Politics: The Modernist Moment in Federal Public Art," which examines the tensions during the last several decades between those who advocated government-funded public art and those who did not. In the spirit of the New Deal and in a generally liberal moment in the life of America, works by modernists such as sculptor Alexander Calder were funded by local and federal programs for the arts. The city of Grand Rapids, Michigan, proudly accepted a Calder piece in 1969. Five years later amid great hoopla Chicago dedicated another Calder work, this one bigger than the Grand Rapids piece. The ceremony had all the excitement and American boosterism of the imaginary celebration in the musical The Music Man. Seventy-six trombones did not lead the parade, but "thirteen circus wagons, eight clowns, ten unicyclists, bands, elephants, and countless other marchers, including Ronald McDonald and a man in a gorilla suit, made their way down State Street to the sculpture," according to Blake. Calder was part of the spectacle; he rode in "an enormous Schlitz beer wagon pulled by forty horses" as Chicago made the most of its "Whatchama-Calder."

Times change, however, and in 1989 the General Services Administration (GSA), having installed in lower Manhattan a minimalist steel sculpture entitled Tilted Arc by Richard Serra, ordered it removed, marking, in effect, the end of the "modernist moment in federally funded public art." What a shame, one might respond, for such extravaganzas as the Chicago celebration brought art to everyone and removed its elitist stamp. But "the very presence of modernist public arts works politicized the aesthetics of public spaces. . . . The result was a political crisis of the liberal-modernist project in public art that has still not been resolved." By 1993 the situation was such that the GSA turned down the proposal for an abstract sculpture by Nizette Brennan for a federal building in Knoxville, Tennessee. Brennan responded with 'Knoxville Flag,' a limestone Stars and Stripes" that, Blake observes, "signals the replacement of modernism as an official style by a new patriotic realism, dressed up in the rhetoric of conservative identity-politics." Times will change again, no doubt, but whether the mind of the American public can accept avant-garde art such as the best modern work is certainly unclear.

The issue of what is American in modernism is a constant in these essays. Not all of them dwell on it, but an at least unspoken theme that runs through the essays is that American modernism draws on a culture seen increasingly to be distinct from Europe's. Thus Antheil, while embracing Europe, wrote a ballet that emphasized American technology; the Literary Guild's and Reverend William Stidger's appropriations of modernist poetry are manifestations of American middle-class morality, and so forth. So, too, is modern dance distinctly American, as Randy Martin demonstrates in "Modern Dance and the American Century." This dance "brings into focus the means, the very techniques, through which the modern self is made," and its "coming into being is . . . a story of the century in which the United States itself comes into world prominence."

A Modern Mosaic is about how the modern self is made and how it exists in the twentieth century. The volume makes no attempt to discuss every aspect of modern American culture; an encyclopedia of modernism would be thousands of pages long. What this volume does is remind us that modernism has been and remains at the center of our collective being. To quote Marshall Berman one more time:

The culture of modernism will go on developing new visions and expressions of life: for the same economic and social drives that endlessly transform the world around us, both for good and for evil, also transform the inner lives of the men and women who fill this world and make it go. The process of modernization, even as it exploits and torments us, brings our energies and imaginations to life, drives us to grasp and confront the world that modernization makes, and to strive to make it our own.[13]