Modernity and Modernism in Twentieth-Century American Picturebooks

Abstract

American (US) picturebooks subsumed and indigenised European avant-garde influences in an uneasy tension with the impulses of industrial capitalism, often made apparent in incongruities between image and text. This article revisits the various historical forces that ultimately shaped American picturebooks, taking a hard look at the prevailing narrative. Taking the introduction of the mass-produced Little Golden Book series of the 1940s as a critical moment in which the various threads were integrated and said to have consolidated (Op de Beeck), it reveals the residual underlying tension and contradictions between form and content, ideology and aesthetics, and text and image that inhere in such a resolution.