American Expressionism: Art and Social Change, 1920-1950 Book

When Abstract Expressionism burst on the American scene in the 1940s, it elbowed another kind of American expressionism off the stage. Vivid evocations of the poor and disenfranchised in paintings by Jack Levine, Bernece Berkman and many others were now seen as stodgy and unsophisticated. In American Expressionism: Art and Social Change 1920-1950, cultural historian Bram Dijkstra argues that a generation of important left-wing artists, many of them Jewish, were the victims of intellectual, political and corporate interests bent on promoting a brighter, shinier United States. Unfortunately, Dijkstra undercuts his thesis with a haranguing tone, unconvincing analyses of individual works and a dated view of abstraction as inherently "anti-humanist". His sweeping denunciation of "Nordic" (i.e., white, Protestant) artists leads him to view even an heroically scaled painting of a black soldier by John Steuart Curry--a "Nordic" artist collected by the NAACP--as a racist cartoon. At the heart of this contentious volume are 233 illustrations by dozens of little-known artists united by a passion for social justice. --Cathy Curtis, Amazon.comRead More