American Expressionism

by Bram Dijkstra

During the 1920s and '30s and until the end of World War II, a distinctly American form of Expressionism evolved. Most of the artists in this movement, children of immigrants from eastern and southern Europe, African-Americans and other outsiders to American mainstream culture, grew up in the urban ghettoes of the East Coast or Chicago. Their art was sympathetic to the disposessed and reflected a deep concern with the lives of working people. Providing a look at this art - and the beginnings of a new movement, Abstract Expressionism, which followed it - cultural historian Bram Dijkstra offers insights into the roots of painting in modern America.

Genres: Art

288 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 2003

About the author

Bram Dijkstra is a professor of English literature. He joined the faculty of the University of California, San Diego in 1966, and taught there until he retired and became an emeritus in 2000.

He is the author of seven books on literary and artistic subjects. These include:
Cubism, Stieglitz and the Early Poetry of William Carlos Williams (1969);
Georgia O'Keeffe and the Eros of Place (1998);
Expressionism in America (2001),
but he is probably best known for two books that have escaped the academic world into the world of popular culture:
Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-siècle Culture (1986); and
Evil Sisters: The Threat of Female Sexuality and the Cult of Manhood (1996):
books which discuss vamp imagery, femmes fatales, and similar threatening images of female sexuality in a number of works of literature and art. In comedian Steve Martin's short novel Shopgirl, Martin's heroine claims that Idols of Perversity is her favourite book.

Reviews

[Rick · Rating 3 out of 5]

The main weakness of American Expressionism is the extreme and unrelenting bias of the author. Dijkstra is quick to establish a divide between the evil, racist, self-aggrandizing, “Nordic” (i.e., Northern European) ruling class, and the sincere and socially engaged Eastern European, Southern European, and Asian immigrant class. For Dijkstra, the main criterion for art is social commitment. He consequently dismisses American regionalists like Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood out of hand and goes on to say that “we must … confront the troubling connections that did, and continue to, exist between regionalism and the conventions of Nazi and Soviet propaganda art” (53). After World War II, American art was robbed of content when corporate art collectors fundamentally changed the market, all to fulfill the “frivolous ambitions of vastly overpaid CEOs” (118). Dijkstra clearly believes what he’s saying, but that does not keep him from being at times disingenuous. Particularly pathetic is his pointing out the corporate and “Nordic” bias implicit in the fact that none of the “alien” names he is writing about are included in the spell-checker dictionary on Microsoft Word (16)!

[Duncan Weller · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a remarkable history of a movement you may not have heard of, a pre-WWII flourishing of art imbued with concern for humanity. Bram Dijikstra brilliantly and pointedly examines the movement, how it came to be and how and why it was nearly wiped out from the history books. A book any artist will enjoy reading.