If American modernism had a soundtrack, it would be jazz. A homegrown genre, its music came to define the burgeoning northern cities, the cultural forms of black expression, and an avant-garde impetus to question established boundaries.
Tag: twentieth-century art
When I was working on my dissertation on constructions of American cultural identities in fin-de-siècle Paris at Washington University in St. Louis in about 2009, I stumbled upon a five hundred page English-language novel published in 1904 by a French artist.
John W. Winkler (1894–1979) was born in Vienna and immigrated to the United States as a young man. Arriving in San Francisco in 1912, he studied with the painter and printmaker Frank Van Sloun at the San Francisco Institute of Art, and by the 1920s, he was an internationally celebrated etcher.
