September 4
Thursday, 7 P.M.

Slide lecture by Bram Dijkstra, distinguished cultural historian and author of American Expressionism: Art and Social Change, 1920-1950. Dijkstra shows how American art produced between the two world wars —led by WPA artists mainly from immigrant backgrounds—was not just art with a social content, “it is great art with a social content."

Unlike the Regionalists, Expressionist artists were often outsiders to what was then the American mainstream. They include children of turn-of-the-century immigrants from Eastern Europe (William Gropper, Ben Shahn, Philip Guston), Southern Europe (Louis Guglielmi, Rico Lebrun), or Asia (Yasuo Kuniyoshi); many were African-American (Jacob Lawrence, Hale Woodruff). But whatever their background, all of these men and women brought a new spirit of idealism to American art.

Bram Dijkstra is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at the University of California at San Diego. He has published numerous books, including Cubism, Stieglitz and the Early Poetry of William Carlos Williams (1969); Georgia O’Keefe and the Eros of Place (1998); and the widely acclaimed Evil Sisters: The Threat of Female Sexuality and the Cult of Manhood (1996).

Co-presented by Facing History & Ourselves.