摩天大楼与“国家”——20世纪初美国精确主义艺术中的城市画像

Skyscrapers as a National Symbol:Precisionist Drawings of American Cities in the Early 20th Century

20世纪20年代至40年代,随着美国工业化进程的推进,精确主义艺术成为美国第一个本土的现代主义艺术流派。艺术家洞察性地发掘了20世纪美国生活独有的城市景观,并将其归类为一个显著特征加以总结,但这一过程的形成以及隐藏其后的一些因素,却鲜少被深入探讨。事实上,精确主义艺术家对摩天大楼情有独钟,不止是出于艺术家个体的主观选择,同时亦反映出一战后美国在成长为一个现代强国的过程中,在欧、美两种文化传统中或延续、或独立、或重叠的张力关系。本文将精确主义对于摩天大楼这一题材的选择,置于大众文化的社会语境和互文关系中,进而窥探机械时代的城市语境对艺术的渗透及国家身份的塑造。

From the 1920s to the 1940s,the advancement of industrialization in the United States made precisionist art the country's first native modernist school.Artists'insightful discovery of the urban landscape unique to the country in the 20th Century has become a category with distinct features,but how this come into being and factors behind it have rarely been explored in depth.In fact,precisionist artists'preference for skyscrapers not only represented their own choice,but also continuous,independent or overlapping tensions of European and American cultural traditions in the process of the United States growing into a great modern country after the World War I.This paper places precisionists'choice of skyscraper in social environment and mutual relationship of mass culture,to explore city's role in penetrating art and shaping national identity in the mechanical age.