The Great American thing: modern art and national identity, 1915-1935/ Corn

xxiii, 447 hal.; ill.; 27 c

Progressive primitivism: Race, gender and turn-of-the-century American art.

This dissertation explores concepts of art, race, and gender in the turn-of-the-century celebration of Native American handicrafts. Identifying the Progressive Era interest in Indian art as distinct from the modernist concerns of the twenties and thirties, I identify this phenomenon of the reformist Arts and Crafts Movement. Anglo-Americans of this period promoted private and federal support of "pre-industrial" Indian art to facilitate their own social and cultural progress and accelerate the "civilization" of Indian people. Middle-class women arguing that the advance of American civilization depended on the active participation of their sex helped redefine both the manufacture and enjoyment of Indian art as female activities. Like other aspects of federal assimilationist policy of the time, the celebration of Indian art encouraged Indian people to develop a modern, transcultural understanding of Indianness. This history is not only vital to the understanding of the subsequent course of Native American art, but it illuminates the role of visual culture in concepts of American cultural identity. While American artistic culture of this period is frequently described as anti-modern, conservative, and masculinist, my research allows us to see this period, and the history of American art in general, as a site in which attitudes toward art and commerce, and gender and race, are contested.I have arranged this material in four chapters. Chapter one analyzes the cultural messages about primitivism, civilization and gender in the use of Indian art as home decoration by examining photographs of the George Wharton James, Jewett and Joseph Keppler collections. Chapter two looks at publications celebrating handicraft-oriented Indian reform projects designed by non-Indians Sybil Carter and Estelle Reel to bring Native American women into a middle class American economy and value system. Chapter three examines the relationship between gender, primitivism and early American modernism in representations of Native American artists by pictorialist photographer Gertrude Kasebier. The last chapter looks at how Angel DeCora, a Winnebago painter, manipulated contemporary aesthetic ideas to advance a politicized theory of Indian art within the context of the Indian rights movement.Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 1999.School code: 0212