Artist and Identity in Twentieth-Century America

Demonstrates the importance of America as the defining element in American art.

This volume brings together a selection of essays by one of the leading scholars of American art. Matthew Baigell examines the work of a variety of artists, including Edward Hopper, Thomas Hart Benton, Ben Shahn, and Frank Stella, relating their art works closely to the social and cultural contexts in which they were created. Identifying important and recurring themes in this body of art, such as the persistence of Emersonian values, the search for national and regional identity, aspects of alienation, and the loss of individuality, he also explores the personal and religious identities of artists as revealed in their works. Collectively, Baigell's work demonstrates the importance of America as the defining element in American art.

1. Walt Whitman and early twentieth-century American art
2. American landscape painting and national identity: the Stieglitz circle and Emerson
3. The silent witness of Edward Hopper
4. American art and national identity: the 1920s
5. The beginnings of 'The American Wave' and the Depression
6. Grant Wood revisited
7. The relevancy of Curry's paintings of black freedom
8. Thomas Hart Benton and the Left
9. The Emersonian presence in abstract expressionism
10. American art around 1960 and the loss of self
11. Pearlstein's people
12. Robert Morris's latest works: slouching toward Armageddon
13. A ramble around early earthworks
14. Reflections on/of Richard Estes
15. Ben Shahn's Post-War Jewish paintings
16. Barnett Newman's stripe paintings and Kaballah: a Jewish take
17: Postscript: another kind of canon.