The Cube in the Kaleidoscope: The American Reception of French Cubism, 1918--1938

This dissertation examines the advent of American Cubism during the interwar period. According to this study, American Cubism is no unified stylistic or aesthetic object; rather, it constitutes a variable, ever-shifting complex of cultural concepts acted out among a social system. Borrowing loosely from the French social historian, Pierre Bourdieu, this dissertation challenges the common interpretation of Cubism's entry into the United States as a story of one-way influence and appropriation, substituting for that causative narrative several disjunct, yet mutually informing case studies. In making its way from Paris to New York, French Cubism is thus understood as leading to various conceptual and stylistic consequences, entering a new "field of cultural production" comprising variously competing, yet conjoining histories---from nineteenth-century aestheticism to international Constructivism.