Description
Book SynopsisAfter World War I, artists without formal training crashed the gates of major museums in the United States, diversifying the art world across lines of race, ethnicity, class, ability, and gender. At the center of this fundamental reevaluation of who could be an artist in America were John Kane, Horace Pippin, and Anna Mary Robertson Grandma Moses. The stories of these three artists not only intertwine with the major critical debates of their period but also prefigure the call for inclusion in representations of American art today. In Gatecrashers, Katherine Jentleson offers a valuable corrective to the history of twentieth-century art by expanding narratives of interwar American modernism and providing an origin story for contemporary fascination with self-taught artists.
Trade Review"
Gatecrashers is an important contribution and corrective to our understanding of the history of American art in the crucial decades before and after the Second World War." * Burlington Magazine *
"
Gatecrashers successfully destabilizes received binaries, giving us crucial new insights into familiar 'representatives' of the self-taught moniker, which in turn complicate that status." * caa.reviews *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
ONE Modern Primitives and National Identity
TWO “The Most Truly American”
John Kane’s Naturalized Appeal
THREE Both New Negro and American
Horace Pippin’s Crossover Appeal
FOUR Goodwill Grandma
Anna Mary Robertson Moses’s Cold War Appeal
FIVE Expanding the Matrix of American Art
Notes
Selected Bibliography
List of Illustrations
Index
