Democratic Visions: Art and Theory of the Stieglitz Circle

The influential and charismatic photographer Alfred Stieglitz became a passionate promoter of American artists during the 1920s and 1930s. Democratic Visions looks in depth at the most significant group among these artists, the Stieglitz Circle, which included such luminaries as Charles Demuth, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Paul Strand. Together with several well-known writers and critics, the Circle forged a new link between critical theory and artistic practice that was to become a uniquely American way of making and exhibiting art. Celeste Connor provides a synthetic and critical examination of the visual art, critical theory, and social context of these artists and writers in what will surely become the definitive reference on the Stieglitz Circle.

Connor has uncovered invaluable new primary source material including correspondence between Stieglitz and his colleagues and writings by Circle members. In clear and accessible prose, she uses this material to bring to life the fertile social, political, and economic contexts of the era. A necessary addition to social historical perspectives on art, Democratic Visions also contributes to current debates about Western art, linking important issues of the 1920s and 1930s to the present day.