The prevailing view of American art some thirty or so years ago was that prior to the end of World War II the United States was hardly more than a distant outpost of Paris and Europe. That assumption has lately been challenged and largely replaced by years of diligent scholarship, which has often been pursued in connection with important exhibitions and their accompanying catalogues. As a result, we are now able to see that American art was more integral to the development of early modernism than was hitherto supposed. Today, it can be fairly said that even during World War I, from 1915 to 1918, New York was a major center of world art.

We were recently reminded of this and other important matters by the traveling exhibition called “Precisionism in America, 1915–1941,” organized by Gail Stavitsky of the Montclair Art Museum. This exhibition and its accompanying catalogue have made a significant addition to our understanding of American art in the early decades of this century. Together they clearly demonstrate that Precisionism, generally thought of as a uniquely American phenomenon, was in fact closely involved with an international art scene in which it played a key role. The current show is, in fact, the first to place the Precisionist aesthetic in the context of the whole classicizing move toward a stable, clarifying kind of art that characterized, in one form or another, much of the modern movement in this pivotal period—the years between the two world wars.