by Jon Lackman | 29 January 2010 | Americas, Books, Modern
In CAA Reviews, Kate Morris considers Native Moderns: American Indian Painting, 1940–1960 by Bill Anthes:
[Anthes] asserts that, though the study focuses on American Indian painting in the immediate postwar period, his is “not merely a recovery project with the goal of adding a few neglected figures to the canon of American modernism.” Rather, he insists that “bringing Native American modernism to the foreground rewrites the canon and the key terms of American modernism.” Over the course of six chapters and a postscript, Anthes substantiates this claim, demonstrating that the major concerns and characteristic themes of postwar art and culture—the shaping of individual and national identities, the expansion and contraction of geopolitical realms, tensions between representational and abstract forms, between the traditional and the avant-garde, and between urban and rural existence, as well as an ongoing fascination with primitivism, authenticity, and (self-)invention—are inextricably entwined with the very real circumstances of Native American lives and cultures in transition at mid-century.
