ABSTRACT
This chapter examines major artists rebelled against European conventions for reasons of their own. After World War I, the cultivated European modernists and the self-trained American folk artists took more from each other's traditions. As American literature and music gained an audience in Europe, and as European modernists began to flee to the West, advanced artists with the full benefit of European exposure began to rediscover their own country. The Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr were only two of many reformers who found these ideas attractive and Frank Lloyd Wright one of many young reformers who presented his ideas to Hull-House audiences. The son of Russian-Jewish immigrants with no special musical talent, George Gershwin grew up in the great cultural melting pot of New York, absorbing black jazz along with dozens of other available styles. The little training he had was New York, but Gershwin was remarkably lazy and refused any sort of professional discipline for long.
