Creative composites

de Lauren Kroiz

"In New York at the turn of the twentieth century, the photographer and modern-art impresario Alfred Stieglitz and his allies embraced a racialized aesthetic discourse in their expressions of identity. Creative composites examines the often neglected role played by immigrant artists and critics in the Stieglitz circle, including Japanese German author Sadakichi Hartmann, Mexican-born caricaturist Marius de Zayas and English Sri Lankan curator Ananda Coomaraswamy, as well as better-known U.S.-born painters such as Arthur Dove and Georgia O'Keeffe. In this book, Lauren Kroiz argues for a new understanding of early American modernism as a 'composite modernism.' She analyzes episodes in the use of diverse new media--photography, caricature, film, and collage--by the members of the Stieglitz circle to frame their modernist practice as part of the ongoing national dilemma of integrating difference."--book jacket.