John Ford and the Guggenheim Museum. They’re both American icons. And they’re both commonly cited for their influence on other cultures.
But reverse the question. How much do they reflect the impact of other cultures on America? That’s what Richard Pells, a professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin who has written previously about the global reach of American culture, sets out to ask in Modernist America: Art, Movies, and the Globalization of American Culture, recently published by Yale University Press.
The Chronicle spoke to him about his book:
Q: You note the term “modernism” is elastic. How do you define it?
Modernism is a controversial term for anyone who uses it. For my purposes, I mean the ways that European painters, architects, novelists, poets, composers, and filmmakers transformed their art forms to make people see, hear, and think in entirely new ways about the upheavals of the 20th century. They believed that only by making painting more abstract (Picasso, Kandinsky), architecture more functional (Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius), music more dissonant (Stravinsky, Schoenberg), literature more complex (James Joyce), movies more experimental (the German Expressionists of the 1920s), could they help people begin to grapple with the wars, scientific and technological changes, and terror against whole populations that marked the modern world.
Q: Scholars have written recently about the spread of popular culture throughout the world. Has there been less focus on the internationalization of “high-brow” culture—and its relation to popular culture?
I think there has. I am interested in the interconnections between high and popular culture, especially as they are reflected in movies. I don’t think the two categories—high and low—can be arbitrarily separated, either in America or elsewhere in the world. Orson Welles, like Steven Spielberg today, was extremely conversant with movements in art and literature, which he incorporated into his films. Yet, again like Spielberg, he was also a superb entertainer. The same is true for jazz musicians like Charlie Parker and Miles Davis—they were extremely knowledgeable about the transformations in modern music, yet they made these part of their jazz repertoire.
Q: What made you reverse the way you evaluate America’s place in global culture? And how common or uncommon is that perspective?
When most people write about the global impact of American culture, they emphasize either the ways that American culture has subverted foreign traditions, or the ways that foreigners have resisted or adapted American culture to their own needs. I did that in my previous book, Not Like Us: How Europeans Have Loved, Hated, and Transformed American Culture Since World War II. But in Modernist America, I want to show how Americans adapt to and change foreign cultures, making them into something new that ultimately has had worldwide popularity. My point is that Americans are as much receivers of other people’s cultures as they exporters of their own culture.
Q: How does understanding modernist America help us understand what you call America’s “mixed-up cultures”?
It’s important to understand that America’s culture is both unique and cosmopolitan, and that it is not just lowbrow entertainment but also the highest form of art. In painting, literature, jazz, Broadway musicals, and above all movies, Americans have given the world a new form of culture that mirrors the dislocations and excitement of the 20th and early 21st centuries.—Karen Winkler
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