Grace Kuipers

What can the U.S. history of foreign extraction tell us about the aesthetics of American modernism? My dissertation proposes that American modernism in the 1930s emerged in dialogue with the Mexican minerals that increasingly fueled U.S. modernity. I analyze efforts by artists in the United States and Mexico to imagine a shared American modernism during this period, as the United States renegotiated its access to valuable minerals in Mexico. I focus on three artists and one exhibition, each of which was supported financially by the extractive interests of U.S. companies in Mexico. Across four chapters I analyze Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry; the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition American Sources of Modern Art; Jean Charlot’s lithographs of Maya Masonry; and William Spratling’s silver workshop in Taxco, Mexico.

I show how perceptions of underground resources featured prominently in artistic theories of the moment, demonstrating the ways in which artists forged an equivalence between minerals and other objects being unearthed from the subsoil, such as Mesoamerican art. As artists and critics in the 1930s struggled to define an American modernism that was independent of European tradition, they turned to Mesoamerican art as a source for distinctly American modernist form. But they also routinely drew comparisons with minerals, likening Aztec sculpture to oil reserves, or referring to Maya bas reliefs as a “mine” for authentically American abstraction. Ultimately, I argue, concepts of autochthonous American form both reflected and produced ways of seeing the Mexican subsoil: as a shared continental interior; as racially Indigenous; as a latent reserve in wait of development; or as a decentralized, multidimensional network of interconnected fragments. In doing so, I open up a new way of seeing American modernism that transcends national borders and uncovers its assumptions about race and the natural environment.