| This dissertation examines the changing definitions and uses of Native American art and culture by New York's artistic and cultural avant-garde, 1910-1950. Works of art and the activities of patrons, curators, literati, and social scientists are considered. The avant-garde's idea of Native America, manifest in art, art criticism, patronage patterns, and institutional practices, was based on specific ideas about race, evolution, consciousness, nationalism, and modernity.;Chapter One, which argues that "The Indian" is an abstract category, discusses the "primitive" and its correlate, primitivism, as well as two aspects of the early modern conception of Indians and their art: the evolutionist paradigm; and ethnology and Romanticism in the Southwest. Chapter Two, which focuses on collecting and exhibiting Native art in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, is concerned especially with the emergence of public collections in New York. The importance of the New York-New Mexico continuum is revealed in Chapter Three, which analyzes the patronage and criticism of Indian art at the Santa Fe and Taos colonies, 1915-30, including that of Marsden Hartley and Mabel Dodge Luhan.;Chapter Four is devoted to avant-garde artistic responses to Native America, from the Armory Show through the 1940s. Works by Max Weber, Marsden Hartley, and others are discussed, and it is demonstrated that Indian art and culture were catalysts for modernist abstraction. Exhibitions of Native art in New York, 1931-41, are the focus of Chapter Five, with much attention given to the Museum of Modern Art's Indian Art of the United States (1941).;The Indian-inspired primitivism of Abstract Expressionism was related to both the darkness of the war years and the intersection in New York intellectual life of Jungian and Nietzschean thought and American ethnology. Thus, Chapter Six deals with the impact of Nietzsche and Northwest Coast Indian art and ceremony on Barnett Newman's art and criticism, and explains how Abstract Expressionists such as Adolph Gottlieb, and Richard Pousette-Dart used Native American art, myth, and ritual to create redemptive abstractions. Chapter Seven presents a revisionist interpretation of Jackson Pollock's drip paintings, linking them to Navajo healing ceremonies. |
