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Native Moderns : American Indian Painting, 1940-1960

Part of the Objects/Histories series
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Between 1940 and 1960, many Native American artists made bold departures from what was considered the traditional style of Indian painting.

They drew on European and non-Native American aesthetic innovations to create hybrid works that complicated notions of identity, authenticity, and tradition.

This richly illustrated volume focuses on the work of these pioneering Native artists, including Pueblo painters Jose Lente and Jimmy Byrnes, Ojibwe painters Patrick DesJarlait and George Morrison, Cheyenne painter Dick West, and Dakota painter Oscar Howe.

Bill Anthes argues for recognizing the transformative work of these Native American artists as distinctly modern, and he explains how bringing Native American modernism to the foreground rewrites the broader canon of American modernism.

In the mid-twentieth century, Native artists began to produce work that reflected the accelerating integration of Indian communities into the national mainstream as well as, in many instances, their own experiences beyond Indian reservations as soldiers or students.

During this period, a dynamic exchange among Native and non-Native collectors, artists, and writers emerged.Anthes describes the roles of several anthropologists in promoting modern Native art; the treatment of Native American "Primitivism" in the writing of Jewish American critic and painter Barnett Newman; and painter Yeffe Kimball's brazen appropriation of a Native identity.

While much attention has been paid to the inspiration Native American culture provided to non-Native modern artists, Anthes reveals a mutual cross-cultural exchange that enriched and transformed the art of both Natives and non-Natives.

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RRP £97.00
Product Details
Duke University Press
0822338505 / 9780822338505
Hardback
759.13
03/11/2006
United States
English
304 p. : ill. (chiefly col.)
research & professional Learn More
A study of Native American art and artists that represent a crucial and formative, though rarely recognized, aspect of American modernism.
A study of Native American art and artists that represent a crucial and formative, though rarely recognized, aspect of American modernism. 1KBB USA, 3JJ 20th century, ACBK Art of indigenous peoples, ACXD Art & design styles: c 1900 to c 1960, AFC Painting & paintings