The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915-1935 by Corn, Wanda M - 1999

Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999. Hardcover. VG/VG- (Dust jacket shows some soiling. Clean contents). Blue cloth with red lettering on spine, color dust jacket, yellow spine with blue and black lettering. xxiii; 447 pp. Numerous color and bw plates. "Wanda M. Corn's long-awaited book proposes a remarkable revisioning of the history of American modern art between the two world wars. Moving away from issues of style and abstraction, she bases her work on a broad examination of culture and on discourses of national identity. Corn argues that the key questions for interwar modernists in New York and Paris were whether or not it was possible to create an art that was both American and modern, and if it was, what such an art would look like. Both European and American artists debated these questions and made art that responded to them." (flap of softcover edition).