Lacy On Cándida Smith: Thinking Through Modern Art

Review of Richard Cándida Smith’s The Modern Moves West: California Artists and Democratic Culture in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). ISBN 978-0-8122-4188-4. 252 pages.

Review by Tim Lacy
University of Illinois at Chicago
April 2010


Thinking Through Modern Art


In The Modern Moves West, Berkeley Professor Richard Cándida Smith tackles the intellectual and cultural history of modern art in California. He explores aesthetic theory, the core-periphery tension in the institutional art world, art education, and the potentially explosive intersections of art and politics. By focusing on visual, stationary media in the work of Sam Rodia, Jay DeFeo, Wally Hedrick, Noah Purifoy, Marcos Ramírez ERRE, and Daniel Joseph Martínez, Cándida Smith presents an incredibly rich look at California’s pantheon of twentieth-century modern artists.

To read this book is to enter a world where a particular community used painting, sculpture, and assemblage art to grapple with the acids and innovations of modernity. In relation to California and the American West, Patricia Nelson Limerick’s notion of a “the legacy of conquest” is implicitly at work in Cándida Smith’s narrative. California is indeed a land of jostling due to internal migration, immigration, and racial politics.[1] But this book concentrates on explaining how modern art, and its postmodern successors, assisted in bringing these conflicting cultural visions together under a democratic aesthetic as the twentieth century progressed.

The Modern Moves West is a recent addition to Penn Press’s new series, “The Arts and Intellectual Life in Modern America,” edited by Casey Nelson Blake. That series welcomes manuscripts “in architecture and the visual arts or music, dance, theater, and literature.” Thus far the visual arts seem prominent, but there are only six books in the series.[2] If Cándida Smith’s contribution is indicative of the series on the whole, then that endeavor is intent on underscoring how art enriches America’s intellectual life, and how all of this comes together to foster (or hamper) democracy.

In his introduction, Cándida Smith offers a number of formulations of his thesis in relation to the themes outlined above. I believe, however, that the following ...[Continue here]

Research Issues: JAH's RSO Function And New Works On U.S. Intellectual History

If you don't already take advantage of your JAH subscription to receive what's called an RSO update (Recent Scholarship Online), I would encourage you to do so.

Below is a selection of new books and articles on intellectual history received by JAH since the last RSO update in March. I say "received" because not all of the works were published in 2010. This list has been thinned out a bit because I deleted sublistings of individual contributions from the Alice Kessler-Harris and Maurizio Vaudagna edited collection.

You can set up your RSO to screen by categories and keywords. Here are mine (reflective of my ongoing projects):

Categories: Education; Intellectual; Mass Communications; Print Culture; Religion; Social and Cultural; Midwest
Keywords: Mortimer Adler, Mortimer J. Adler, Robert Hutchins, great books*, Paideia, Clifton Fadiman, John Erskine

I used to scan the reviews and books received sections of JAH for new scholarship. Thanks to RSO, now I can simply read the reviews that interest me rather than worry about missing a new title because I don't have the metadata/LOC categories. Otherwise, how would I have known---based on the titles alone---that the books by Bilder et al., Hunt, Kim, Mirra, and Weaver held forth on matters related to intellectual history?

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E-mail Update for April 2010
Category: "Intellectual"

Baker, Lee D., Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. xiv, 277 pp. Cloth, $79.95, isbn 978-0-8223-4686-9. Paper, $22.95, isbn 978-0-8223-4698-2.) Document Type: Book
Categories: African American; American Indian; Intellectual; Race

Bilder, Mary Sarah, Maeva Marcus, and R. Kent Newmyer, eds., Blackstone in America: Selected Essays of Kathryn Preyer. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. xiv, 287 pp. $85.00, isbn 978-0-521-49087-0.) Document Type: Book
Categories: Gender, Masculinity, and Femininity; Intellectual; Legal and Constitutional; Women

Crowder, Ralph L., “The Historical Context and Political Significance of Harlem’s Street Scholar Community,” Afro-Americans in New York Life and History, 34 (Jan. 2010), 34–71. Document Type: Article
Categories: African American; East; Education; Intellectual; Social and Cultural; Urban and Suburban

Gooding-Williams, Robert, In the Shadow of Du Bois: Afro-Modern Political Thought in America. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009. xii, 350 pp. $35.00, isbn 978-0-674-03526-3.) Document Type: Book
Categories: African American; Intellectual; Politics; Race

Hunt, Bruce J., Pursuing Power and Light: Technology and Physics from James Watt to Albert Einstein. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. x, 182 pp. Cloth, $45.00, isbn 978-0-8018-9358-2. Paper, $20.00, isbn 978-0-8018-9359-9.) Document Type: Book
Categories: Business and Economics; Intellectual; Science and Technology

James, Samuel, “Louis Mink, ‘Postmodernism,’ and the Vocation of Historiography,” Modern Intellectual History, 7 (April 2010), 151–84. Document Type: Article
Categories: Intellectual; Theory and Methodology

Kessler-Harris, Alice, and Maurizio Vaudagna, eds., Democracy and Social Rights in the “Two Wests.” (Turin: Otto, 2009. ii, 351 pp. Paper, €25,00, isbn 978-88-95285-16-0.) Document Type: Book
Categories: Intellectual; Politics; Transnational and Comparative

Kester, Scott J., The Haunted Philosophe: James Madison, Republicanism, and Slavery. (Lanham: Lexington, 2008. x, 132 pp. $55.00, isbn 978-0-7391-2174-0.)Document Type: Book
Categories: Intellectual; Politics; Revolutionary and Early National

Kim, Jin Hee, “1930–40 Nyundae Miguk gisikineui daejung munwha insik” (New York intellectuals and mass culture in the 1930s and 1940s), Mikuthak Nonjip/Korean Journal of American Studies, 40 (no. 3, 2008), 5–38. In Korean. Document Type: Article
Categories: East; Intellectual; Social and Cultural; Transnational and Comparative; Urban and Suburban

Mirra, Carl, The Admirable Radical: Staughton Lynd and Cold War Dissent, 1945–1970. (Kent: Kent State University Press, 2010. xvi, 224 pp. $34.95, isbn 978-1-60635-051-5.) Document Type: Book
Categories: African American; Biography; Education; Intellectual

Martínez, David, “Pulling Down the Clouds: The O’odham Intellectual Tradition during the ‘Time of Famine,’” American Indian Quarterly, 34 (Winter 2010), 1–32. Document Type: Article
Categories: American Indian; Education; Intellectual; Print Culture; Religion; West

Pianko, Noam, “‘The True Liberalism of Zionism’: Horace Kallen, Jewish Nationalism, and the Limits of American Pluralism,” American Jewish History, 94 (Dec. 2008), 299–329. Document Type: Article
Categories: Biography; Ethnicity; Intellectual; International Relations; Jewish

Weaver, Gina Marie, Ideologies of Forgetting: Rape in the Vietnam War. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010. xviii, 198 pp. Cloth, $75.00, isbn 978-1-4384-2999-1. Paper, $24.95, isbn 978-1-4384-2998-4.) Document Type: Book
Categories: Crime and Violence; Intellectual; Military; Print Culture; Vietnam; Women