Indian Craze

In the early twentieth century, Native American baskets, blankets, and bowls could be purchased from department stores, “Indian stores,” dealers, and the U.S. government’s Indian schools. Men and women across the United States indulged in a widespread passion for collecting Native American art, which they displayed in domestic nooks called “Indian corners.” Elizabeth Hutchinson identifies this collecting as part of a larger “Indian craze” and links it to other activities such as the inclusion of Native American artifacts in art exhibitions sponsored by museums, arts and crafts societies, and World’s Fairs, and the use of indigenous handicrafts as models for non-Native artists exploring formal abstraction and emerging notions of artistic subjectivity. She argues that the Indian craze convinced policymakers that art was an aspect of “traditional” Native culture worth preserving, an attitude that continues to influence popular attitudes and federal legislation.Illustrating her argument with images culled from late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century publications, Hutchinson revises the standard history of the mainstream interest in Native American material culture as “art.” While many locate the development of this cross-cultural interest in the Southwest after the First World War, Hutchinson reveals that it began earlier and spread across the nation from west to east and from reservation to metropolis. She demonstrates that artists, teachers, and critics associated with the development of American modernism, including Arthur Wesley Dow and Gertrude Käsebier, were inspired by Native art. Native artists were also able to achieve some recognition as modern artists, as Hutchinson shows through her discussion of the Winnebago painter and educator Angel DeCora. By taking a transcultural approach, Hutchinson transforms our understanding of the role of Native Americans in modernist culture.

“While the experience of modernism in less urban western places was no doubt different, modernism still must have been present. Without the insights of Hutchinson's book, however, historians could not even begin to identify modernism in rural America at the turn of the twentieth century. In short, The Indian Craze is a potentially paradigm-shifting book, one that will force new discussions of who participates in the modern world and how.” - Flannery Burke, Journal of American History, “The Indian Craze revives a politically charged and artistically productive era, while challenging the binarism modern/antimodern art. . . . As Hutchinson effortlessly engages with the discourse on modernity, she also mindfully reveals that Native American art in all its forms is not a subclass of America’s art history, but is, in fact, part of its continuum, which early and substantially contributed to the ‘conversation’ about what counts as American art.” - Linda M. Waggoner, Great Plains Quarterly, “Hutchinson’s study demonstrates superior scholarship. It is detailed and nuanced and builds a complex and convincing argument. The Indian Craze provides a welcome and highly readable addition to the existing scholarship on this period.” - Jennifer McLerran, Journal of Arizona History, “The Indian Craze is an important addition to the art histories of Native North America and the United States alike. Hutchinson convincingly argues that the Anglo art world’s interest in Native American art and culture predates World War I, a few decades earlier than has generally been considered. . . . The Indian Craze shows us the innumerable benefits of attempting the difficult reconstruction of Native voices.” - John Ott, Visual Resources, “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. . . . 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. . . . Second, the book is also a key contribution to a new understanding of modernism in Western art and culture. . . . Third, Indian Craze is also a major contribution to the issue of transcultural hybridization.” - Jan Baetens, Leonardo

Elizabeth Hutchinson is Assistant Professor of Art History at Barnard College, Columbia University.