Stieglitz Groups: Race, Place, and the Essentializing Logics of American Modernism

Abstract

This dissertation offers a new interpretation of the second Stieglitz Circle (the loose group of artists whose key members – Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Paul Strand, and Georgia O’Keeffe – assembled around the Manhattan photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz beginning in the late 1910s) by connecting its members’ works to racism in the interwar United States. During this period, they developed what they described as a nationally representative modernist movement rooted in the distinctively “American” soil and spirit. Drawing on the artists’ papers, personal and professional correspondence, and historical and contemporary publications, this project seeks to historicize and change this understanding of their art, which remains influential today. It argues that, as they sought to define truths that seemed universal, these artists’ unreflective reliance upon both subjective, abstract, and intuitive forms of expression and popular ideas about the supposed inherent differences between human populations frequently led to generic and stereotypical representations of racial, ethnic, and regional identities in their works. These representations not only reflected the heightened focus on race in 1920s and ’30s America, but also helped to foment discrimination by playing into broader racialization practices. Nonetheless, for over a century, critics and historians’ failure to challenge the narratives that these artists claimed for their paintings, assemblages, and photographs has allowed these works to continue to resonate as timeless and nationally representative. The introduction situates the Circle’s work within the broader landscapes of nationalism and racial and ethnic discrimination within interwar U.S. society, uses Stieglitz’ oeuvre as an example of the logics its artists employed, and addresses disconnects between art history and critical race studies. A chapter on Marin draws on tourism studies scholarship as it investigates his attempted assimilation into what he perceived to be a rustic “Yankee” community on the Maine coast and describes how he attempted to channel the supposed unique physical and spiritual character of the “Maine folk”. A second chapter on O’Keeffe suggests that, in its representation of buildings, objects, and places of spiritual significance to local Indigenous and Hispanic groups, her Southwestern oeuvre frequently relied upon and perpetuated romantic stereotypes. The following chapter investigates how the abstract and allegorical works that Dove produced on Long Island connect to period racial stereotypes. Some such works are abstract evocations of encounters from everyday life, while others represent Dove’s internalized perceptions of entire identities and cultures. A final chapter analyzes how Stieglitz and O’Keeffe shaped interpretation of the group’s members from the 1910s until and beyond O’Keeffe’s 1986 death. For decades they perpetuated their preferred understandings of their art (which cast it as socio-politically disengaged) to the exclusion of other interpretations by encouraging like-minded critics and controlling artworks and archives. This analysis suggests that their elevation as enduring exemplars of American cultural identity long discouraged seeing their work as representative of a particular environment, let alone as implicated in racist cultural systems. By encouraging reevaluation of these artists, this project aims to not only emphasize the urgency of historiographical engagement and borrowing from critical whiteness studies scholars to other historians of U.S. art, but also to foster the development of a new popular understanding of how the works of famous artists like Dove, Marin, O’Keeffe, and Stieglitz connected to historical circumstances and what roles those works have played in shaping and perpetuating racial discrimination.