Artist and Identity in Twentieth-Century America

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.