Babylon, New Jerusalem, and the Brooklyn Bridge: Modern spirituality in American ar

At the beginning of the twentieth century, New York City was a city on the rise, literally and figuratively. Beyond even the elevated visage, technological and industrial advancements, and chaotic anonymity of the new American metropolis, however, the city became the muse of the twentieth-century artist, fostering new theological and aesthetic possibilities and dilemmas alike within its environs. Sublimity and beauty coexisted in the urban environment, just as materialism and spirituality both pervaded the city's burgeoning character. In particular, Georgia O'Keeffe, Alfred Stieglitz, and Joseph Stella all turned to the city time and again in their artwork, highlighting the salvific possibilities and spiritual pitfalls of the city and its effect upon human experience.;Disputing the line of thinking that claims that such artists were part of a secularizing process, this project demonstrates instead the specific ways that these iconic modernists used religious currents as present in American literature and pragmatism for their depictions of New York. However, art history has largely ignored the theological dimensions of these seminal modernists. O'Keeffe, Stieglitz, and Stella drew deeply on a canon of spiritual writing by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman, and were engaged with the subsequent pragmatist philosophy, where religion played a central role (particularly in the work of William James). The work of these spiritual forebears permeated these artists' celebrations of embodied experience, the sanctity of the surrounding world, and art's transcendent power, imbuing a particularly American sense of religious expression in such seemingly secular works. In essence, establishing the connections between these artists and this spiritual lineage in American literature and philosophy will allow us to see these well-known depictions of the city in a different light, and thereby to call forth the neglected narrative of modern art's spiritual history. This dissertation explores the way these artists created new images of the metropolis that were shaped by a democratic theology of spiritual experience. The American urban environment fostered the creation of a visual language capable of expressing this new spiritual experience, rendering even Babylon as within reach of redemption.