In this highly original study, Jeremy Braddock focuses on collective forms of modernist expression--the art collection, the anthology, and the archive--and their importance in the development of institutional and artistic culture in the United States.

Collecting as Modernist Practice demonstrates that modernism's cultural identity was secured not so much through the selection of a canon of significant works as by the development of new practices that shaped the social meaning of art. Offering the most systematic review to date of the Barnes Foundation, an intellectual genealogy and analysis of The New Negro anthology, and studies of a wide range of hitherto ignored anthologies and archives, Braddock reveals how artistic and literary collections helped define the modernist movement in the United States.

"Acute and important . . . a wide-ranging study based on the unexpected but revealing parallels between the selection of work for poetry anthologies and the acquisition of art for collections during the modernist era."--The Nation

"Braddock's book stands as a towering achievement. Essential."--Choice

"A book that's going to rewrite what we think about art objects, poems, property, museums, anthologies--and race and modernity and on and on . . . So comprehensive is it that it will be impossible to ignore."--Tim Morton, Rice University

"With his kaleidoscopic analysis of the efflorescence of collecting in the first decades of the twentieth century, Braddock transforms the cartography of transatlantic modernism. His remarkably erudite reading of a wide range of practices demonstrates not only the prevalence of collecting but also its significance as one of the key modes of modernist aesthetics."--Brent Hayes Edwards, Columbia University

"Braddock pieces together a fascinating and important new cultural history of modernism. It is a marvelous achievement, one that will be amply praised for the way it places African American culture at the center of modernism."--Jesse Matz, Kenyon College

Winner of the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize of the Modernist Studies Association

In this highly original study, Jeremy Braddock focuses on collective forms of modernist expression--the art collection, the anthology, and the archive--and their importance in the development of institutional and artistic culture in the United States.

Using extensive archival research, Braddock's study synthetically examines the overlooked practices of major American art collectors and literary editors: Albert Barnes, Alain Locke, Duncan Phillips, Alfred Kreymborg, Amy Lowell, Ezra Pound, Katherine Dreier, and Carl Van Vechten. He reveals the way collections were devised as both models for modernism's future institutionalization and culturally productive objects and aesthetic forms in themselves. Rather than anchoring his study in the familiar figures of the individual poet, artist, and work, Braddock gives us an entirely new account of how modernism was made, one centered on the figure of the collector and the practice of collecting.

Collecting as Modernist Practice demonstrates that modernism's cultural identity was secured not so much through the selection of a canon of significant works as by the development of new practices that shaped the social meaning of art. Braddock has us revisit the contested terrain of modernist culture prior to the dominance of institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art and the university curriculum so that we might consider modernisms that could have been.

Offering the most systematic review to date of the Barnes Foundation, an intellectual genealogy and analysis of The New Negro anthology, and studies of a wide range of hitherto ignored anthologies and archives, Braddock convincingly shows how artistic and literary collections helped define the modernist movement in the United States.