The Indian Craze: Primitivism, Modernism, and Transculturation in American Art, 1890-1915

by Elizabeth Hutchinson
Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2009
304 pp., illus., 8 col./ 80 b&w. Trade, $89.95; paper, $24.95
ISBN13 978-0-8223-4390-5; ISBN13 978-0-8223-4408-7.

Reviewed by Jan Baetens

The stakes and interest of this excellent study go much beyond the limits of its specific historic topic, the sudden fashion of Native American art around 1900 (grosso modo between the big World Fairs and the First World War, which resulted in a thorough redefinition of modernism and modernity in the US). This fashion was not artistic in the traditional sense of the word. The passion for Indian “art” (the quotation marks are of course crucial) was inseparable from a passion for Indian “objects” (baskets, blankets, bowls, and so on, in short everything that could be sold in department stores) that became hugely popular for home decoration as it was inseparable from a larger (social, political, legal, educational, ideological) commitment to the establishment of new ways of integrating Native American in modern society, on the one hand, and rethinking the new “national” society in relationship with the past and traditions of the land that had been completely colonized by then.

Hutchinson’s book, very well written and exemplarily illustrated and designed, combines the best of at least three worlds: visual studies (for the focus is mainly on handicrafts, painting, photography), cultural history (for the study of the visual material is always done from the perspective of broader historical categories such as the relationship between primitivism and modernism and the relative and shifting position of notions such as art and non-art), and cultural studies (for it emphasizes the idea of transcultural debate and exchange between various traditions and backgrounds). In that sense it is a very welcome complement to the well-known 1979 book by Robert F. Burkhofer, The White Man's Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present. Hutchinson’s scope is not as broad as that of Burkhofer, and for that reason her analysis can do more justice to the complexity of the cultural mechanisms at play in what she calls the “Indian craze.”

Hutchinson’s book will provide the reader with many valuable insights in mainly three fields.

First, it offers a careful and well-balanced description of what the Indian craze actually meant: which kind of items were involved, how these items were produced, marketed, and sold, who was playing which kind of role in this business, and how important it is to go beyond stereotyped visions of Native American/White American relationships when studying the details of transcultural relationships. Hutchinson discusses in a very readable yet profound way issues such as the “industrialization” of local handicrafts and the problematic status of authenticity, all questions that are not only important to obtain a better understanding of Native American art but that prove dramatically important to intercultural studies in general (Indian Craze will undoubtedly very helpful to all those who have been inspired by James Clifford’s analysis of “art” in Western exchanges with non-Western worlds).

Second, the book is also a key contribution to a new understanding of modernism in Western art and culture, mainly through its very subtle analysis of the relationships between modernism and antimodernism or between modernism and primitivism. Hutchinson demonstrates very clearly the great complexity of the Indian craze, which has been claimed by both adepts of the art and craft movement and by promoters of abstract art, and the book offers us a more complex and thus better view of the contextual situatedness of all these concepts which we have been using too long in their narrowly defined art-historical sense. Extremely interesting in this regard is the chapter on Gertrude Käsebier, the famous pictorialist photographer who made a series of Indian portraits that thanks to Elizabeth Hutchinson we can now reread as a challenge to our canonical views of this type of aesthetics.

Third, Indian Craze is also a major contribution to the issue of transcultural hybridization. Hutchinson manages to stress the multilayered character of this kind of exchanges, which are always involving much more than global categories such as the Indian versus the non-Indian but which entails also non-ethnical differences (gender and class differences for instance). Moreover, she also underlines and illustrates very well the two-sidedness and reciprocity of these exchanges. Hybridization is not a matter of colonization versus resistance, but a complex interplay of give and take that is always embedded in very specific contexts and circumstances.

Finally, it is also a pleasure to mention that Indian Craze offers non-specialized readers in-depth readings of works and authors that may be less known, such as for instance the Winnebago painter and educator Angel DeCora. Her example shows that the Indian Craze was not a form of cannibalizing native traditions in order to make them marketable in the capitalist public space, but a complex negotiation in which the Indian cultures were contributed no less than other aspects of the US environment in shaping new forms of modernity.