This seminar explores the art and material culture of the United States and Europe at the turn of the twentieth century. Class sessions will be organized around case studies of diverse subjects in diverse media, including Aubrey Beardsley’s erotic Art Nouveau illustration, Alfred Stieglitz’s urban photography, Marcel Duchamp’s readymades and Pablo Picasso’s cubist collage. Focused tightly on a period that reaches its climax and conclusion in the First World War, we will consider modern artists’ utopian, revolutionary, technologized and dystopian agendas. Concentrating on connections and exchange between modern art movements across the Atlantic Ocean, we will consider theories of modernism and modernity, avant-garde and popular culture, nationalism and colonialism.