Advancing Art&Dasign Grant Wood Revisited Author(s): Matthew Baigell Source: Art Journal, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Winter, 1966-1967), pp. 116-122 Published by: CAA Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/775034 Accessed: 13-11-2018 12:12 UTC REFERENCES Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article: https://www.jstor.org/stable/775034?seq=l&cid=pdf-ref erence#ref erences_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms CAA is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Art J*ournal JSTOR This content downloaded from 147.251.103.7 on Tue, 13 Nov 2018 12:12:38 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Matthew Baigell Grant Wood Revisited For those of us who watch kiddie TV shows along with the children, Grant Wood's American Gothic has been an advertising fact of life for well over a year. The lips of the farm couple move, singing the praises of a brand of cornflakes made from real corn. And this is a pity! Grant Wood has been so closely associated with corn of one sort or another for so many years that we are prevented from seeing the artist who in a handful of paintings dating from the early 1930's attacked American institutions at least as bitterly as any other American artist. Paradoxically, the very paintings with which he is most popularly associated, and therefore the ones considered most corny, are the paintings containing his most acid comments. Although Wood is considered a mid-western re-gionalist, he should not be regarded as a flag waving hayseed. A Democrat from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, he had journeyed abroad four times by 1930.1 And, when it came during the Depression, he strongly supported the New Deal. We should not, therefore, be duped by his famous remark delivered shortly after his first New York exhibition: "I realized [while in Paris] that all the really good ideas I'd ever had came to me while I was milking a cow. So I went back to Iowa."2 He was then evidently playing with relish the role of a "mid-western" painter and could not have meant what he said. He was never even a farmer. Instead, his interest in mid-western subject matter grew, as he said, not ". . . from a 'booster spirit' for any particular locality, but [was] founded upon the conviction that a true art expression must grow up from the soil itself. . ."3 In the early 1930's, he did not always find sacred the soil of the mid-west nor the people it supported. He saw quite clearly the reality of mid-western America during the first years of the Depression, and sought to capture it in sardonic fashion. One of his first, and ultimately most popular, paintings in this mode was American Gothic, a prizewinner when exhibited at the 1 Biographical information is taken from Darrell Garwood, Artist in Iowa: A Life of Grant Wood, New York, 1944. ' This statement first appeared, as far as can be determined, in The Art Digest, Feb. 1, 1936, p. 18. ' F. A. Whiting, Jr., "Stone, Steel, and Fire: Stone City Comes to Life," The American Magazine of Art, Dec. 1932, p. 337. ' "An Iowa Secret," The Art Digest, Oct. 1, 1933, p. 6. Fig. 1. Gronf Wood, AMERICAN GOTHIC 1930. Oil. Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago, Friends of American Art Collection. Chicago Art Institute in 1930 (Fig. 1). The genesis of this painting goes back at least as far as the day in 1929 when Wood took a motor trip through the town of Eldon, Iowa. I saw a trim white cottage, with a trim white porch— a cottage built on severe Gothic lines. This gave me an idea. That idea was to find two people who by their severely straight-laced characters would fit into such a home. I looked about among the folks I knew around my home town, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, but could find none among the farmers—for the cottage was to be a farmer's home. I finally induced my own maiden sister to pose and had her comb her hair straight down her ears, with a severely plain part in the middle. The next job was to find a man to represent the husband. My quest finally narrowed down to the local dentist, who reluctantly consented to pose. I sent to a Chicago mail order house for the prim, colonial print apron my sister wears and for the trim, spotless overalls the dentist has on. I posed them side by side, with the dentist holding stiffly upright in his right hand, a three-tined pitchfork. The trim white cottage appears over their shoulders in the background.4 Even though Wood's sense of humor is evident in the painting, his distaste for his subjects is also quite apparent. This is made clear by Darrell Garwood, his biog- ART JOURNAL XXVI 2 116 This content downloaded from 147.251.103.7 on Tue, 13 Nov 2018 12:12:38 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms rapher, who states that Wood found the Eldon house pretentious, a flimsy structural absurdity supporting a Gothic window.5 Furthermore, Garwood also mentions that "Grant intended to satirize the narrow prejudices of the Bible Belt, which includes Southern Iowa."6 This may give us a clue to a more profound meaning Wood may have had in mind when he painted the picture. In a manner analogous to those persons in our own day who because of their concern with "freedom" would fight Communist collectivism with a collectivism of their own, might Wood have been suggesting that religious fundamentalists were doing the work not of God but of his opposite—namely, the Devil? Might we look upon the man with his pitchfork not as a religious farmer—the mythic New Jesus of the mid-west—but as the Devil himself, or as a symbol of the Devil's presence in Iowa? If so, then Wood's painting reaches beyond mere satire and his comment on the psychology of the Iowa couple is rooted considerably less in good-humored ridicule, as is usually thought, than in a savage kind of criticism.7 This notion is not a far-fetched one when we search the possible implications of other paintings Wood created in the early 1930's. But first, where might Wood have come upon the biting point of view, as well as hard, dry style of painting, that we see in American Gothic? So far as can be determined, it did not develop from a mid-west school of artists, or even from Wood's earlier works which had been, for the most part, a mish-mash of Romanticism and Barbizon-Impressionism.8 The most influential Iowa painter of the generation that matured just before World War I was Charles Cummings, an academic artist trained by Benjamin Constant.9 The level of quality he set has 5 Garwood, op. cit., p. 119. 6 Ibid., p. 120. ' That it mocks the old notions of mid-western yeomen can be seen by comparing the painting to the following description cited by Henry Nash Smith in his Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge: 1950), Vintage Books, reprint, p. 152, from a speech read in the Virginia House of Delegates in 1832. "Sir, our native, substantial, independent yeomanry constitute our pride, efficiency and strength; they are our defence in war, our ornaments in peace; and no population, I will venture to affirm, upon the face of the globe, is more distinguished for an elevated love of freedom—for morality, virtue, frugality and independence, than the Virginia peasantry west of the Blue Ridge." s His first painting in his new style is usually thought to be Woman with Plants, 1929. It is a portrait of his mother. 'American Guide Series, Iowa, New York, 1941, pp. 141-44. 117 Baigell: Grant Wood Revisited been described in the following terms: "The state had relegated pictorial art to the daughters of the women who had learned to paint on glass, years before."10 While this is not exactly a precise scholarly assessment, it describes quite accurately Iowan art before 1930, and other reports on the subject do nothing to alter its essential truth.11 The same can be said about the level of painting in other mid-western states as well. If there was a tradition of harsh realism during the opening decades of the century, it seems not to have been recorded in books or articles, most of which were written by the sisters of the painters, anyway. Realistic painters in other parts of the country about whom Wood might have known, such as Robert Henri and his circle, found life everything but grim and difficult. The painters of The Eight found enchantment in the slums, delight in the human anecdote, and joy in the excitement of living. Wood's realism, therefore, would hardly have grown from Henri's. Rather, it seems to relate more easily to the harsh realism of early twentieth century American literature, which, unlike eastern and mid-western painting was not overly muffled by gentility. As early as the 1890's, writers such as Hamlin Garland and Edgar W. Howe gave accounts of the hardships of mid-western life. Within Iowa itself, Alice French (Octave Thanet) wrote about problems of capital and labor at the turn of the century. Between 1915 and 1933, John T. Frederick published The Midland, a magazine devoted to pointing out the horrors of Iowa farm life. "It was Eugene O'Neill gone mad in the pigpens," as one local historian remembered it.12 During the 1920's and 1930's, Herbert Quick and Ruth Suckow wrote novels concerned with the difficulties faced by the pioneers, as well as with the spare farm life led by many Iowans. By this time, however, writers and critics across the country, ranging from Sherwood Anderson to H. L. Mencken and the earlier Van Wyck Brooks, were already describing the barrenness of American life and discrediting its puritan-ism and false gentility. Indeed, a harsh descriptive realism was more a literary than an artistic phenomenon during the first third of the century.13 Wood's brand of realism, then, as seen in American Gothic, has stronger literary than artistic antecedents. To amplify further this notion, we may compare descriptions "Phil Stong, Hawkeyes, New York, 1940, p. 43. 11 See, for example, Gladys E. Hamlin, "Mural Painting in Iowa," The Iowa Journal of History and Politics, July, 1939, pp. 227-307, and Zenobia B. Ness and Louise Orwig, Iowa Artists of the First Hundred Years, 1939. 12 Stong, op. cit., pp. 48-49. See also, American Guide Series, Iowa, p. 132. "See Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds, New York, 1942, especially Chapters 1, 4, 7, and 8. This content downloaded from 147.251.103.7 on Tue, 13 Nov 2018 12:12:38 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms of mid-westerners that appeared in novels by mid-western authors and in critical writings about their books with the man and woman in American Gothic. For example, Sherwood Anderson says in his novel Kit Brandon, "There is something that separates people, curiously, persistently, in America."14 In describing Edgar W. Howe's approach to subject matter, Henry Nash Smith has said the following: Howe's west offers neither color to the observer from without nor consolations to the people themselves. It is a world of grim, savage religion, of silent endurance, of families held together by no tenderness, of communities whose only amusement is malicious gossip. Howe's farmers seem on the whole to be prosperous enough, but some not easily analyzed bitterness has poisoned the springs of human feeling.15 And Max Lerner has recorded his impressions of American Gothic. "The record of the outer social tyranny and the inner repression may be read in the stony faces of Grant Wood's provincials."16 Granted, juxtaposition of such statements leaves one open to the charge of doing no more than shuffling one's reference cards, yet it is nevertheless true that they could not be so shuffled with regard to any other well-known realist, Edward Hopper excepted, prior to c. 1930. The reasons why Wood's American Gothic seems related to, if not probably influenced by, a broad literary tradition already a generation old, stems from at least two factors. First, there was the Depression, which may have prompted Wood to examine carefully the America with which he was most familiar. His major satiric works date from the years immediately after 1929, and, as will be suggested in a moment, they may reflect that point of view expressed by Edmund Wilson in 1932 who noted that many artists and writers ". . . wondered about the survival of republican American institutions."17 Second, Wood was opposed to the hateful nationalism engendered by organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan, strong in the mid-west in the 1920's, the Daughters of the American Revolution, and the American Legion. In fact, the painting of Daughters of Revolution was in part prompted by the DAR's reactions to one of his commissions. The transformation of Wood's attitude toward subject matter was equalled by a change in his style. Where his forms had once been softly modeled, they now be- "Sherwood Anderson, Kit Brandon, New York, 1936, p. 255. Cited in Kazin, op. cit., p. 217. " Smith, op. cit., p. 286. "Max Lerner, America as a Civilization, New York, 1964,1 (paperback), p. 152. 17 Edmund Wilson, The Shores of Light, New York, 1952, p. 499. came hard. Borders became more tautly defined and color was used more flatly. These modifications have been traditionally explained as growing from the influence of Northern European primitive and early Renaissance paintings Wood saw in Germany in 1927-28, or, very possibly, from Neue Sachlichkeit paintings (perhaps more with regard to a general regionalist outlook than to particular stylistic sources) he could have seen there.18 However, another factor may be suggested to account for these changes. Wood disliked intensely colonialism in American art. Although he was not a zenophobe, he nevertheless condemned American artists for imitating European styles rather than developing an art based on native values and experiences.19 It may be speculated that the Depression, acting as a catalyst on Wood, brought to a crisis the problem of stylistic influences, and, as a result, he turned to American primitive paintings and perhaps old, 19th-century tintypes for future stylistic cues. At the time American Gothic was painted, Wood knew that his Iowa contemporaries would be offended by it. To prevent, or at least forestall, protests, he did not enter it in the 1930 Iowa State Fair, but exhibited it first in Chicago instead.20 Even so, he was subject to abuse, and one irate housewife is reported to have threatened, by telephone, to smash his head in.21 Because of the uproar created by American Gothic, Wood altered his plans to make paintings of a circuit-riding minister and a Bible Belt revival meeting.22 He concentrated his gaze directly at his fellow Iowans instead and saw, evidently, the barrenness of life as it was then lived in that state. For in his two bitterest paintings, Victorian Survival, 1931, and Daughters of Revolution, 1932, he seems to have been saying that to live in Iowa was to be afflicted, an idea emphatically underlined by comparing these works with The Captain's Wife, 1924, and, Three Women of Provincetown, 1921 (?), two paintings by Charles W. Hawthorne, which may have served as models for Wood. (Figs. 2-5).23 13 H. W. Janson, "The International Aspects of Regionalism," College Art Journal, May 1943, pp. 110-114. ""The Tory Spirit," The Art Digest, Oct. 15, 1934, p. 13. w Garwood, op. cit., p. 124. 21 The Art Digest, Jan. 1931, p. 9. 22 Garwood, op. cit., p. 127. 23 These paintings, as well as others by Hawthorne, accompanied an article written about the artist just after his death. An academic figure, Hawthorne also painted workers and fishermen of Cape Cod. Leila Mechlin, "Charles W. Hawthorne," The American Magazine of Art, Aug. 1931, pp. 91-106. See also Elizabeth McCaus-land, Charles W. Hawthorne, New York, 1947. Born in 1872, Hawthorne died in 1930. ART JOURNAL XXV/ 2 118 This content downloaded from 147.251.103.7 on Tue, 13 Nov 2018 12:12:38 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Fig. 2. Granf Wood, VICTORIAN SURVIVAL, 7937. Oil. Courtesy of the Carnegie-Stout Public Library, Dubuque. Fig. 3. Grant Wood, DAUGHTERS OF REVOLUTION, 1932. Oil. Courtesy of the Cincinnati Art Museum. Like American Gothic, Victorian Survival lends itself to critical interpretation. If we can view the farmer in the earlier painting as suggesting, in some way, the presence of the Devil in the Iowa soul, may we then look upon the Victorian survivor as representing the presence of decay in the Iowa mind? She hardly qualifies as a proud daughter of the pioneers, and, of the heritage she passed on to the present, there is ". . . in the black, stiff figure, [and] the grim mouth of the invert . . . much bitter truth about the late and seldom lamented Victorian era."24 "Marquis W. Childs, "The Artist in Iowa," Creative Art, June, 1932, p. 462. 119 Baigell: Grant Wood Revisited Fig. 4. Charles W. Hawthorne, THE CAPTAIN'S WIFE, 1924. Oil. Whereabouts unknown. Fig. 5. Charles W. Hawthorne, THREE WOMEN OF PROVINCETOWN, 19211?). Oil. Courtesy of Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts. The creation of Daughters of Revolution, 1932, stems, in part, from difficulties Wood experienced at the hands of local DAR and American Legion chapters. After he had executed in Germany the designs for a stained glass window memorializing veterans of World War I, local branches of these patriotic groups, still en- This content downloaded from 147.251.103.7 on Tue, 13 Nov 2018 12:12:38 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms gaged in fighting that war, protested vigorously the completion of the window in the land of the enemy. As one English observer all too delicately recorded the squabble: "The Daughters of the American Revolution is a most estimable society, but there are moments when it seems not content to rest on its laurels; it is then that its policies are hardly those of the angels. . . ,"25 Of the squabble and of his painting, Grant Wood spoke more to the point. "They could ladle it out. I thought I'd see if they could take it."26 Posing the women in front of Emmanuel Leutze's Washington Crossing the Delaware was a masterstroke on Wood's part. Despite its histrionics as well as critical disfavor, Leut/e's painting touches a spot extraordinarily sensitive in the American psyche. For along with Gilbert Stuart's images of Washington, there is probably no more popular painting in America. By showing the general on his way to whip the Hessians at Trenton, Leutze incarnated the bravery, spirit, daring, impetuosity, youth, and all-conquering-spirit of the Revolution and, therefore, of all America. But who are the descendants of that Revolution? Tea-sipping ladies with aristocratic airs and hardening of the arteries. Everything the American Revolution stood for, these women obviously stand against. Destroyers, perhaps victims, of their heritage, they preserve what no longer exists. If we may say, then, that American Gothic points up a major failure of religion and that Victorian Survival suggests a failure of mind, may we view Daughters of Revolution as illustrating the perversion of Iowa's (or America's) democratic birthright? If the line of reasoning so far taken has any validity, we may assume that Wood, consciously or unconsciously, was questioning the future of America. He seems to be suggesting, at any rate, that life in America in the early 1930's was an experience in oppression of the mind and suppression of the spirit, and that Americans were bigoted, narrow-minded, prematurely aged, and self-righteous. Perhaps he even meant to question the entire democratic experiment when he painted the Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, 1931 (Fig. 6). Taking for his subject an event that had long since become myth—the ride that marked the start of the Revolutionary War—Wood portrayed it as if it were a tableau made of cardboard, a mock-up for a motion-picture stage-set. In fact, the scene appears almost as a newsreel. The horse and rider gallop over the long, winding road to the houses, and then on into the night. The painting's drama, however, unlike that of the previously mentioned works, is hollow and entirely theatrical. This is altogether unfortunate since Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, which has the least impact of this group of paintings, should have been his most profound work within the context of meanings suggested here. " W. S. Hall, Eyes on America, London, p. 78. K Garwood, op. cit., p. 138. Fig. 6. Grant Wood, MIDNIGHT RIDE OF PAUL REVERE, 1931. Oil. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, George A. Hearn Fund, 1950. All of these paintings were completed within a two-year period. On only one other occasion, when he painted Parson Weems' Fable in 1938-39, did Wood employ obviously satiric devices (Fig. 7). In this work, he attempted to show the story for what it was—a legend, a fabrication invented by elders for the benefit of children. Like Charles Willson Peak's famous portrait of himself standing in his museum, Parson Weems, smiling wryly, throws back the curtain and the show is on. These five paintings, despite the fact that Wood is remembered by them, are not typical examples of his work. The great majority of his paintings done after 1930 either record the commonplaces of mid-western life or describe a highly stylized Iowa landscape. It is perhaps more difficult to explain why he stopped making satiric paintings than to suggest why he began them in the first place. No doubt, the initial shock of the Depression lessened through the years, and any antagonisms it may have caused in Wood's mind were soon spent. As director of the Public Works of Art Projects in Iowa early in 1934, he may have felt able to contribute positively to America's revitalization.27 Or perhaps he came to believe that, with his increasing popularity as a regionalist, he had to paint pleasant themes. It may also be quite relevant to point out that, in the final analysis, he was an artist who, because of certain events, performed for a few moments beyond his innate capacities. In any case, an equally interesting and perhaps stranger point to consider is the popularity of his paintings with the public. They certainly do not flatter, and it is not for their composition, color, and exalted spirit that they have been remembered. Yet, one of them, American Gothic, is probably the most famous American painting of the century. The fascination this work holds over peo- " Ibid., pp. 162, 165. ART JOURNAL XXVI 2 120 This content downloaded from 147.251.103.7 on Tue, 13 Nov 2018 12:12:38 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Fig. 7. Grant Wood, PARSON WEEMS' FABLE, 7938-39. Oil. Coll. Ferry Marquand young. pie is in itself fascinating. Why, for example, do people invariably laugh when they either stand before it or see it in reproduction? Is it a laugh offered in nervous recognition of what they know is true about themselves but try so hard to repress? Do they see their self-portraits in middle-age, or those of their neighbors? Wood seems to have painted an equivalent of their life and given them an image of what they may actually be. Certainly, there is the shock of recognition in those faces. Whatever else one may think of American Gothic—once seen, it is never forgotten. Wood may have been from the provinces, but his intent was just as clear as that of any social realist of the period. As a matter of fact, there is probably no other group of paintings from the early 1930's that match his in popularity and vitriol except Ben Shahn's Sacco and Vanzetti series.28 Associating Wood with Shahn in this manner is important not for purposes of establishing links between the two men, but to suggest that growing up in the sticks did not necessarily preclude the development of a vision similar to one nurtured in the slums, and that the old labels of regionalism and social realism often mask profounder differences within the two groups than they reveal between them. For example, there are artists who habitually prefer to paint American myths, while others try to capture, broadly speaking, American realities. Some change back and forth, even oscillate, in a seemingly random manner. The difference between the two approaches can easily be seen by comparing Thomas Cole's The Architect's Dream, 1840, with Edward Hopper's Sunday, 1926 (Figs. 8-9). Where Cole had populated the still virgin hills of America with heavenly mansions, Hopper shows the banal streets that were eventually to run over them. The 2S Exhibited in 1932, they were illustrated in Creative Art, June, 1932, pp. 450-51. 121 Baigell: Grant Wood Revisited Fig. 8. Thomas Cole, THE ARCHITECTS DREAM, 7840. Oil. Courtesy of the Toledo Museum of Art Fig. 9. Edward Hopper, SUNDAY, 1926. Oil. Courtesy of The Phillips Collection, Washington. same contrast can be seen in poet Paul Engle's "America, turn and find yourself. Not a continent, but eternity is ahead," on the one hand, and Archibald MacLeish's 'America was promises," on the other.29 With regard to painting in the 1930's, the difference in attitude is to be seen in the paintings of Thomas Hart Benton and the Woods here illustrated. The former record an imagined, mythic past, the latter question the present. Similar polarities occurring in the work of a single artist help us distinguish between, say, Ben Shahn of the Utopian New Jersey murals (in which the poor immigrant arrives in the first panel and, a few panels later, finds himself midst ideal working conditions) and the Shahn of Sacco and Vanzetti. It would seem, then, that we do Grant Wood an injustice by associating him with the regionalist 29 Paul Engle, American Song, New York, 1934, p. xi, and, Archibald MacLeish, America Was Promises, New York, 1939. This content downloaded from 147.251.103.7 on Tue, 13 Nov 2018 12:12:38 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms movement, and with Benton in particular, with so little qualification. His most popular paintings reflect an attitude of mind quite remote from that of Benton's, and though both were from the mid-west, they did not always respond to it with the same spirit. This is particularly the case during the early 1930's when, in a handful of canvases, Wood was one of our most probing critics. MATTHEW BAIGELL, who received the Ph.D. degree from the University of Pennsylvania, is an assistant professor of art history at The Ohio State University. He co-authored "Happening in the Classroom: A New Way of Teaching Art" which appeared in last summer's issue. Abraham A. Davidson Cubism and the Early American Modernist In an article entitled "Toward a Re-interpretation of Cubism," Winthrop Judkins singled out a number of formal characteristics common to the still lifes of Picasso, Braque and Gris done between 1912 and 1916: planes which are at once transparent and opaque; tones of objects which "bleed" out and become background tones so that the object is part of, and at the same time in front of, the background; outlines which coincide with other outlines so that the continuity may be read around either or across both; surfaces which recede behind other surfaces and project over them simultaneously; shadows, mutually excluded by each other's light sources, standing side by side; etc. He concluded that "clearly that which all these things have in common, that of which they are an unending variety of manifestations, is this: A deliberate oscillation of appearances, a studied multiplicity of readings, a conscious compounding of identities, an iridescence of form."1 Robert Rosenblum, in his recent Cubism and Twentieth-Century Art,2 interprets the Cubist movement in a broader scope which includes, in part at least, the work of such painters as Chagall, Miro, Klee, Marin, Demuth, and many others. Basically, though, Rosenblum treats Picasso, Braque and Gris as the main figures. It is to them that the other Cubists are compared, and to some extent judged. In the first third of this century, several American Modernists produced paintings which seem to stem from the work of the classical Cubists. Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, Alfred Maurer, John Marin, and Max 1 Winthrop O. Judkins, "Toward a Reinterpretation of Cubism" Art Bulletin, 30 (December 1948), 270-278. 'Robert Rosenblum, Cubism and Twentieth-Century Art (New York, 1961). Weber were surely acquainted with the canvases of the Cubists. All of them had been in Paris at one time or another between 1908 and 1912, and presumably saw the early exhibitions of Cubism.3 Subsequently, they could 3 The years these painters spent in Europe are recorded in the principal monographs. Maurer was the first to reach Paris: he arrived in 1897 and, except for some very brief visits to New York, remained in France until 1914. Marin was in Paris in the summer of 1905, and participated in the Salons d'Automne of 1908 and 1910 and in the Salon des Independants of 1909. He returned to America permanently in May, 1911. Demuth spent a year in Paris in 1907, and returned for a two-year stay in 1912. Weber arrived in Paris in 1905 and stayed until December, 1908; he participated in the Salon d'Automne of 1908. Hartley did not reach Paris until late spring, 1912; and saw his first samples of Cubism at Stieglitz's 291 in 1911. (See especially the following: Elizabeth Mc-Causland, A. H. Maurer (New York, 1951); MacKinley Helm, John Marin (Boston, 1948); Andrew C. Ritchie, Charles Demuth (New York, 1950); Whitney Museum of American Art, Max Weber Retrospective Exhibition, New York, 1949; and Elizabeth McCausland, Marsden Hartley (Minneapolis, 1952). In Europe, the proto-Cubist work of Braque could have been seen at Kahnweiler's Gallery from November 9 through 20,1908, and that of Picasso at the Ambrose Vol-lard Gallery in 1909. Braque exhibited his early Cubist paintings at the Salon des Independants of 1908 and 1909 and at the Salon d'Automne of 1908. The main Cubist painters exhibited as a group at the Salon des Independants of 1910. For the early Cubist exhibitions, see John Golding, Cubism: A History and Analysis (London, 1959), pp. 19-46. ART JOURNAL XXVI 2 122 This content downloaded from 147.251.103.7 on Tue, 13 Nov 2018 12:12:38 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms