To understand postwar American modernism one needs to consider the dynamic field of cultural production that preceded the postwar global hegemony of American culture. In fact, the postwar activity and dissemination of this modernism was arguably a cumulative endpoint of several decades of enthusiastic and creative energy around a particular brand of modernism. As Ann Douglas points out in Terrible Honesty, “(the) modern world as we know it today all the phenomena that to our minds spell the contemporary…arrive on the scene (in the 1920s), and although these phenomena have been extended and vastly empowered in the decades since, they have not fundamentally altered” (1995:192).

The opening of the Museum of Modern Art in 1929 signaled America’s commitment to modernist tendencies in the creative arts of the twentieth century. But the term, modern, is a highly contentious one. If it is an impossible task to define and date precisely international “modernism,” it may be possible, however, to trace the discursive terrain that manufactured American modernism. In other words, late nineteenth and early twentiethcentury ideas of the modern (and, thus, modernism) in America can be sketched as a complicated discourse that brings together a hyper force of creativity with vast amounts of capital, a fascination with nature and machine, an uncertainty of the use of rural and urban spaces, the failures and successes of efficient mechanical reproduction and assembly-line production and a dream of a recognizable American art. This amalgamation of disparate cultural activity played itself out in the creative forms of poetry, novels, painting, photography, film-making, dance and architecture.

The most influential voice for American modernism was that of the nineteenth-century poet Walt Whitman (1819–92). His elegiac poetry and prose fused the tropes of machine and nature in order to present his vision of an ideal America. In his Democratic Vistas (1870), Whitman eschewed the tradition of Europe as the driving force behind America’s own creative enterprise. America, he claimed, needed to find its own unique national voice. Stripped bare of what he saw as the dilettanti art of Europe, Whitman proposed a creative sensibility that was manly in virtue and neither effeminate nor decadent in form and content. American art, in other words, should combine the heartiness of nature with the precision and function of a machine. Whitman’s call did not go unheard.

American artists such as photographers/filmmakers Paul Strand and Pare Lorentz, and photographers Lewis Hine and Alfred Stieglitz, painters Robert Henri, Georgia O’Keefe and Charles Sheeler, and architect Frank Lloyd Wright acknowledged Whitman as an important creative force in their work. These artists forged a modernist sensibility that sought to represent the American work of art as an intermingling of Midwest ruggedness with the promise of modernage machinery American artists, especially after the First World War, succeeded in producing an image that streamlined nature and machine while, more strikingly it masculinized the parameters of American creativity.

“The general opinion is,” wrote critic Henry McBride in 1922, “that (the new American artists) are to be as lusty as those that Walt Whitman prophesied for us.” Lusty, but strong, virile, efficient and undeniably American, one need only look at the collaborative film project based on a Whitman poem (“Man(a)hatta,” 1920) between Strand and Sheeler to see the poet’s dream of a sublime American modern art come to fruition.

This lusty and virile American modernism wended its way through the twentieth century where it found its apogee in the work of abstract expressionist painter, Jackson Pollock (1912–56). Trained by the hand of regionalist painter, Thomas Hart Benton (1889–1975), Pollock (along with art critic Clement Greenberg in the late 1940s and early 1950s) championed an American art that, like Whitman, refused the “effeminate” European tradition and sensibility of art. Garbed in jean jacket, T-shirt and cowboy boots, Pollock exhibited both himself and his work as the pure American masculine ideal of artist and art. As Pollock saw it, he and his work were the profound (American) conjunction of man, nature and art. In 1944 he told painter Hans Hofmann, with perfect Whitmanesque sublimeness, “I am Nature.” To this day, the encomiums continue to be sung for this apparent modernist tradition extant between Pollock and Whitman. Carter Ratcliff, for example, states that Pollock’s work “(evokes) a sense of the limitless possibility the best of his canvases gave us—for the first time—a pictorial equivalent to the American infinite that spreads through Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass” (1996:3).

With Pollock, America had hoped to find its “pure” national voice, while it hegemonically positioned his work as the international representation of Modern Art. As Serge Guilbaut argues, Pollock’s paintings emerged precisely at the moment when post-Second World War American culture began to saturate the world. Pollock’s paintings now sell for millions of dollars and hang in many major international corporate centers and museums.

To be sure, the tension underscoring the notion of American modernism is riddled with complicated conflict. But the masculinist (and arguably misogynist and homophobic) influence of Whitman as it is reworked by twentieth-century artists cannot be underestimated. But there were interesting cracks in this earnest version of American art.

While admiring the work of Whitman, artists such as poet Charles Henri Ford resisted the heteromasculinizing of American art by championing a convergence of multiple strains of creative practice. His art journal, View (1940–7), co-edited with Parker Tyler, explored the perverse strains of surrealism, magic realism, the analytic art of Marcel Duchamp and the pleasures of the Hollywood film. Painter Paul Cadmus and photographer George Platt-Lynes also embraced a non-American modern aesthetic.

Carl Van Vechten (photographer/impresario) along with painter Florine Stettheimer carried the exotic visions of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe to America. Van Vechten was also instrumental in launching the careers of several young writers (Langston Hughes, for example) who would later become associated with the Harlem Renaissance.

Along with Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and Countee Cullen penned a new literature and poetry that evoked the creative energies of life in 1920s Harlem. During the 1950s, filmmakers/ artists Kenneth Anger and Joseph Cornell compiled the waste from culture industry production and adorned their films and objets d’art with it. Bebop and swing jazz, modern dance, advertising, movies and egregious camp aesthetics were other vital forces of American modernism. Painters Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns also turned away from the “pure” notions of abstract expressionism in order to present America to itself as a well-worn tradition of symbols and junk.

After Pollock’s death, the 1960s witnessed a reinvestment and interest in European art movements such as Futurism and Surrealism—Andy Warhol and pop being, of course, the most visible transgression of the “pure” American art movement. Warhol’s ability to play with representation within the quick and ever-(r)evolving universe of technology and media loosened the old-guard terms for American modernism. Many have argued that the 1960s can be marked as the historical break between modernism and postmodernism.

Like modernism, postmodern is yet another term burdened with varying definitions of ideological weight.