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INEQUALITY IN THE PERUVIAN ANDES
CLASS AND ETHNICITY IN CUZCO
PIERRE L. VAN DEN BERGHE AND GEORGE P. PRIMOV

Focusing on the relationsip between class and ethnicity, van den Berghe and Primov analyze class inequalities, social stratification, language, and the geography, history, and political structures of Cuzco in this study of ethnic relations in the Andean area.
ISBN 0-8262-0213-6  $17.50
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University of Missouri Press
107 Swallow Hall  Columbia, Missouri 65201
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she may isolate and enlarge a detail until it covers the whole canvas. Often her keen sense of observation of a color, an image, or a quality of light that has stayed with her as a memory from her long life sums up a mood she communicates with minimal, condensed phrases. In few words, she conveys the depression and frustration her academic art training caused her. Of the atmosphere at the Art Institute in Chicago, which she entered in 1904 as a precocious but fiercely independent eighteen-year-old student, she writes, "I have never understood why we had such dark olive green rooms for art schools. The Anatomy Class was in one of those dark-colored half-lighted dismal rooms." Drab green here expresses the feeling of the dreary academic routine against which she rebelled so strongly that she stopped painting for four years.

Between 1908 and 1912, O'Keefe did not paint because she felt she had nothing new to say. In the summer of 1912, her sister persuaded her to take a course at the University of Virginia with Alon Bement, who introduced her to the ideas of Kandinsky and the teaching methods of Arthur Wesley Dow. In autumn, 1914, O'Keeffe returned to New York to enroll as Dow's student at Teachers College, Columbia University. Through Dow, she came into contact with a new method of composition developed by Dow and his mentor, the brilliant scholar and Orientalist, Ernest Fenollosa, who did more than anyone else to introduce Japanese art to America.  

According to the Fenollosa-Dow approach, filling space beautifully, rather than being true to nature in the academic sense, was the basic concern of art. Balancing out tonal contrasts - as in the light-dark opposition the Japanese referred to as notan - as well as creating strong surface patterns on paper or canvas were the fundamental objectives of this new method of design, which rejected the sculptural illusionism of Western naturalistic painting in favor of the flattened, highly stylized art of China and Japan. We know from class lists that Dow assigned Fenollosa's Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art as well as his review of Gonse's L'Art Japonais.

Probably these texts introduced O'Keeffe to Far Eastern art, which she came to see as an alternative to academic art that was preferable to Cubism, which she considered European and derivative, not original or American. Although "the men" might go to Europe, she had other ambitions. She had traveled through the Southwest, and she preferred to stay home. "I was quite excited over our country," she recalls in this book, "and I knew that at that time almost any one of those great minds would have been living in Europe if it had been possible for them. They didn't even want to live in New York-- how was the Great American Thing going to happen?" It was nothing less than the Great American Thing she was after.

To understand the setting within which O'Keeffe's are was formulated, one must remember that Fenollosa was a major intellectual force in America during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when O'Keeffe was growing up. Although Fenollosa's influence on Ezra Pound has been examined to some extent, his influence on other aspects of American modernism remains to be fully understood. Through Dow, if not directly, O'Keeffe was aware of Fenollosa's approach; it is possible that she transmitted his ideas to the Stieglitz circle. (Fenollosa's notions concerning art education as fundamental to the democratization of American culture certainly had an impact on Dewey's theories as well.)

When O'Keeffe was growing up in Wisconsin, Fenollosa was lecturing widely in the Midwest, spreading the doctrine that the American people should be taught the fundamental aesthetic principles in public schools, so that art could be made equally available to all. This utopian ideal was conceived while he was teaching in Japan, where he had become impressed by the extent to which art had been integrated into Far Eastern cultures, as opposed to its relative alienation from the life of the common man in the West. Fenollosa has studied ancient Chinese and Japanese painting manuals; he was particularly struck by the accessibility of traditional art to all social classes in Japan. He wished to develop a similarly organic relationship between art and society in America.

Fenollosa's aspirations for a democratic art available to all must, I think, be seen as central to the thinking of the entire Stieglitz circle, all of whom rejected hermetic imagery for subjects familiar to everyone. O'Keeffe was particularly vehement in her rejection of French aesthetic theory. her dislike for the jargon that helped to alienate the general public from modern art is summed up in her remarks upon visiting Mont Sainte-Victoire on her first trip to Europe in 1956: "How could they attach all those analytical remarks to anything [Cézanne] did with that little mountain? All those words piled on top of that poor little mountain seemed too much."

It is likely that Fenollosa'a demands for a democratic art figured in O'Keeffe's decision to limit the range of her subject matter, except in her abstractions, to familiar images that eliminate the need for commentary, criticism, or interpretation. The Stieglitz circle was generally hostile to criticism; and O'Keeffe was particularly unhappy with interpretations, particularly symbolic interpretations, of her work. In a preface to her 1939 exhibition at An American Place, the gallery Stieglitz ran after closing "291," she caustically admonishes her critics for hanging "all your own associations with flowers on my flower.... You write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower--and I don't." As she says elsewhere, the only criticism that ever counted for her was what Stieglitz had to say.

Often enough, O'Keefe's dismissal of her critics was reciprocated by critical rejection of her work, particularly her more representational paintings, which were especially popular with the public. Those who believed modernism derived from a main current of French art left O'Keeffe's art outside that current. Her work has been found lacking in complexity by some critics who appreciate Matisse and find an absence of Parisian sophistication in O'Keeffe's ordinary flowers and trees. Indeed the experiences O'Keeffe describes as being memorable to her might strike the reader as being banal--after all, who has not camped out under the stars, gone sight-seeing, or inspected a leaf or flower?

O'Keeffe's effort to find meaning in the commonplace seems to derive less [...]

The New York Review