While European modernism was thriving in the early 1900s through avant-garde movements like Cubism and Expressionism, “American modernism” was a term in search of a definition. During these years, artists and designers as well as the American public struggled to acknowledge, understand, accept and finally control a machine-driven world.” 1 As the Brooklyn Museum explained for an exhibition on Machine Age art, “Americans developed an aesthetics of their own, based on the machine. As such, it offered artists a compelling image for interpreting modernity in the postwar world. The airplane had moved front and center in the American imagination. Brave souls could travel by passenger airline service, buy their own “Ford flivver of the skies,” or compete to set a flight record like Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart. By the end of the decade, however, the airplane had become a phenomenon that one could experience firsthand. In 1920, the airplane was only seventeen years old-a modern wonder that most people witnessed from the sidelines in theater newsreels and barnstorming air shows. – Elsie Driggs, Aeroplane, oil on canvas, 1928 MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, HOUSTON

– Stanton Macdonald-Wright, Aeroplane Synchromy in Yellow-Orange, oil on canvas, 1920 METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART The “Aeroplane” in Visual Art of the 1920s.

Airplane symbol