American Art

In the summer of 1924, as a departure from his concentration on portraits in his Harlem studio, James Van Der Zee served as the official photographer for the Pan-Africanist leader Marcus Garvey and his organization, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Many of the resulting photographs were published in the organization’s popular, internationally distributed newspaper, the Negro World. The newsprint medium in which the UNIA photographs appeared in reproduction, along with their editorial arrangement on the page, animated a different photographic vision from that of the gelatin silver print studio portraits often celebrated as Van Der Zee’s defining contribution to American art. This article illustrates how Van Der Zee’s first mass-produced images and their global circulation expanded the possibilities of the role of photography. During the New Negro era, the transformation of Van Der Zee’s photographs into newsprint became central to their significance.

In 1939 Georgia O’Keeffe traveled to the Territory of Hawai‘i to fulfill a commission for the advertising agency N. W. Ayer & Son. Her expenses were covered in exchange for two paintings to be used in advertisements for the Hawaiian Pineapple Company (now Dole Food Company), an enterprise entangled with the conquest of Hawai‘i. James Dole built his pineapple empire on the dispossession and oppression of Indigenous Hawaiians by U.S. missionaries, businessmen, and politicians. O’Keeffe’s experiences in and paintings of Hawai‘i were structured by colonialism, and Dole advertisements that feature her paintings served to justify and naturalize U.S. conquest. To understand O’Keeffe’s work as participating in the highly racialized project of colonialism is to disrupt dominant histories that, often unwittingly, contribute to the ongoing disenfranchisement of Indigenous peoples. Doing so is an important step toward “decolonizing” the history of American modernism.

This essay demonstrates how concepts of financial value, investment, and risk informed the pioneering watercolorist William Trost Richards’s approaches to the medium in the 1870s and 1880s. His earliest watercolor “drawings” were characterized by semi-transparent pigments layered on bright paper—materials and methods thought to embody the luminosity and truth-to-nature that distinguished watercolor from other mediums. Contemporary art dealers, critics, and other promoters eager to grow a commercial market for watercolors as “paintings,” raised in perceived stature, identified these properties as benchmarks of their investment value. In this context, Richards began mailing 3-by-5-inch watercolors he called “coupons”—analogous to the paper chits investors returned for interest payments on bond certificates—to George Whitney, a longstanding patron. These small sample artworks served as “promissory notes,” redeemable in the form of “a better picture.” Foregrounding the speculative nature of this exchange, the coupons motivated Richards to confront the relative precariousness of his paper-based medium, ultimately leading to a series of large-scale experimental watercolors that subverted the very techniques that had underpinned both the material- and truth-value of his earlier work.

This essay presents the case for an unambiguous reading of Grant Wood’s iconic painting, American Gothic (1930), as a carefully crafted exercise in storytelling. Through a nexus of subtly conceived clues, Wood narrates the story of a relatively young spinster unhappily facing a bleak future of sexual repression administered by the mores of regional America in that era. Explicit remarks made by Wood and his sister, who posed for the painting, support this conclusion. This interpretation also opens new vistas on the work’s cultural resonance and personal significance. Culturally, the painting is Wood’s contribution to the struggle of American bohemians and their literary allies against prevailing “Puritan” standards, values, and assumptions during the 1920s. On a personal level, in light of scholars’ growing certainty of Wood’s homosexuality, the artist’s empathetic treatment of the repressed spinster suggests she may represent an alter ego, a fellow victim of patriarchal religious culture.