| This dissertation explores the various manifestations in which text appeared in the verbal and visual art forms of American modernism and argues that written language was an essential component of this group's artistic activity between 1900 and 1930. Participants in the dynamic, interdisciplinary intellectual community of American modernism, including Paul Strand, Florine Stettheimer, Charles Demuth, and Alfred Stieglitz, discovered that the meaning of their art as both modern and American could be inscribed in their work through the deployment of verbal strategies in their writing and their visual art. In my first chapter, I consider Stieglitz's role as the editor of the avant-garde periodicals Camera Work and 291 between 1903 and 1917 to suggest that although the written word functioned for the American modernists initially as a means of literal and conventional communication, it eventually came to signify the larger deconstruction of meaning and hierarchies underway in the artworld at large. My second chapter considers the use of "found" texts in the 1916 street photographs of Paul Strand. The framing of these found texts within the pages of Camera Work served an aestheticizing mission intended to humanize society through the benevolent mechanics of the camera. My final chapter explores the function of proper names as visual forms capable of signifying individual, national, and modern identity in portraits by Charles Demuth and Florine Stettheimer during the 1920s. In considering these artists and their works, I have employed primarily formal looking and social history, as well as some historical semiotics. For American modernists who sought to dissolve hierarchies between tradition and innovation, Europe and America, the established and the fledgling, the dissolution of boundaries between word and image provided a model for just such subversions of larger socio-cultural structures. |
