06 Spiritual America Panel

That something which we call America lies not so much in political institutions as in its rock and skies and seas. —Paul Strand, photographer, in 1922 It is our geography that makes us American. It is from the earth [that] all things rise. —Marsden Hartley, artist (1877–1943) Some artists found their America in what they called a sense of place. Evoking the 19th-century American transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, they engaged in firsthand encounters with nature as an antidote to the commercialism and mass culture of machine-age America. The photographer Alfred Stieglitz and the core group of artists around him—Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Paul Strand—produced renderings of particular landscapes that they saw as embodying a new American aesthetic. Like the English author D. H. Lawrence, whom they much respected, they believed that “All creative art must rise out of a specific soil and flicker with a spirit of place.” Rather than painting the grand panorama of nature, they focused on its details. Using sinuous organic lines, glowing orbs of light, and earthy colors, they created abstract studies of solitary flowers, rocks, cobwebs, clouds, and leaves. In small corners of nature, they found larger forces at work or, as Hartley put it, “little visions of the great intangible.” Their art, intentionally meditative and spiritual, was a deliberate counterpoint to the machine-age idealism of many other American artists of that time.