“Home” and “Homeless” in Art between the Wars

This chapter shows how the impulse for stability and rootedness issues from a sense of homelessness, while the tolerance for ambiguity and multiple meanings was enabled by a feeling of being “at home in the world,” an ability to occupy two positions at once. In the early decades of the twentieth century, modernity, and its associated dynamic of modernization, were commonly linked to the homeless condition of culture in the United States. To find a way beyond the Symbolist traditions of homelessness, the first generation of American modernists focused on nature’s blending of biological growth with the psychic rhythms of human creativity. Such forms of expression reaffirmed belief in the exceptionalism of national culture, thinly rooted in history but rich in nature and democratic values. Art-making acquired a cult-like sacral character in Stieglitz’s missionizing, earning the Stieglitz artists occasionally caustic assessments as a cliquish clerisy, bound by esoteric beliefs.