Artforum¹s Bookforum
"[A] compelling argument for the richness and complexity of this underappreciated phase of American art."


Times Literary Supplement
"[Q]uestions the assumption that . . . [the] modernist movement only took root in America in the 1940s with Abstract Expressionism."


Book Description
The influential and charismatic photographer Alfred Stieglitz became a passionate promoter of American artists during the 1920s and 1930s. Democratic Visions looks in depth at the most significant group among these artists, the Stieglitz Circle, which included such luminaries as Charles Demuth, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Paul Strand. Together with several well-known writers and critics, the Circle forged a new link between critical theory and artistic practice that was to become a uniquely American way of making and exhibiting art. Celeste Connor provides a synthetic and critical examination of the visual art, critical theory, and social context of these artists and writers in what will surely become the definitive reference on the Stieglitz Circle. Connor has uncovered invaluable new primary source material including correspondence between Stieglitz and his colleagues and writings by Circle members. In clear and accessible prose, she uses this material to bring to life the fertile social, political, and economic contexts of the era. A necessary addition to social historical perspectives on art, Democratic Visions also contributes to current debates about Western art, linking important issues of the 1920s and 1930s to the present day.


About the Author
Celeste Connor is Adjunct Professor of Art History at the California College of Arts & Crafts.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The influential and charismatic photographer Alfred Stieglitz became a passionate promoter of American artists during the 1920s and 1930s. Democratic Visions looks in depth at the most significant group of these artists, the Stieglitz circle, which included such luminaries as Charles Demuth, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Paul Strand. Together with several well-known writers and critics, the circle forged a new link between critical theory and artistic practice that was to become a uniquely American way of making and exhibiting art. Celeste Connor provides a synthetic and critical examination of the visual art, critical theory, and social context of these artists and writers in what will surely become the definitive reference on the Stieglitz circle.

FROM THE CRITICS

Times Literary Supplement

Eloquently questions the assumption that an integrated and internationally orientated modernist movement only took root in America in the 1940s with Abstract Expressionism.

Artforum’s Bookforum

[B]est read alongside a more broad-based account like Wanda Corn's recent 'The Great American Thing.' Taken together, these books constitute a veritable renaissance in Stieglitz-circle studies-and a compelling argument for the richness and complexity of this underappreciated phase of American art.

Times Literary Supplement