02 Transatlantic Panel

GAT Exh. Transatlantique panel Draft 3, PF edit

1

Americans were rather in style in Europe in the twenties. Dollars, skyscrapers, jazz, everything transatlantic had a romantic air. —John Dos Passos, author (1896–1970) The future of the Western world lay with America. Everyone knew that. In Europe, they knew it better than they did in America. —Sherwood Anderson, author (1876–1941) Americans of the 18th and 19th centuries assumed Europe to be superior in matters of culture, while Europeans considered American art to be provincial. These stereotypes began shifting around World War I, when American artists started questioning their reliance on European models and sought to create an indigenous modern art. As the critic Robert Coady summed it up at the time, “With art in abundance and our arteries young, why should we nibble on the dead end of Europe?” Americans striving to create a distinctly national modern art had their counterparts in European vanguard artists who admired American technology and popular culture. Some of them took ocean liners to New York to experience its skyscrapers and crowded streets firsthand. Meanwhile, American artists voyaged to France to immerse themselves in the Parisian avant-garde. This energetic transatlantic traffic produced numerous exchanges and alliances. The works in this gallery show two ways in which this new internationalism was most directly reflected. The first was a forthright enthusiasm for the ocean liner, which made transatlantic passage both affordable and elegant. Artists painted and photographed the gleaming funnels, streamlined smoke stacks, and overall mechanical beauty of these modern ships. They also created art about the voyage itself, to and from ports such as Le Havre and New York. Some vanguard European artists made works extolling modern American phenomena—skyscrapers and suspension bridges, hardware stores, silent-film stars, jazz clubs, newspaper comic strips, Broadway’s lights and billboards, and the kinetic pulse of Manhattan streets. By voicing their enthusiasm for American technology and popular culture, these artists helped their New York counterparts rethink what they found significant about their home culture. As the American writer Malcolm Cowley put it, “We saw the America they wished us to see and admired it through their distant eyes.”