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Founded in 1892, the Portland Art Association (PAA) served as Oregon's and the Pacific Northwest's leading visual arts institution for almost a century. While the Association formally dissolved in 1984, its legacy is felt strongly today in the work of its successor organizations, the Portland Art Museum and Pacific Northwest College of Art. Emerging during a period of considerable innovation in and fervent advocacy for the arts across America, the Association provided the organizational network and resources around which an energetic and diverse group of city leaders, civic reformers and philanthropists, as well as artists and art educators, coalesced. This thesis describes the collaboration among arts and civic advocates under the banner of aesthetic education during the Association's first four decades. Though art education continued to be critically important to the organization after 1932, the year the Association opened its new Museum, art was no longer conceived of as an instrument for improving general community life and programs focused on more specialized, fine arts-related activities.

Paul L. Rosenfeld ( 1890-1946) almost single-handedly established the music of living American composers on a solid critical foundation in the period between the two world wars. Although he built a reputation chiefly as a critic of music, he was a man ofletters who ranged across all the arts with unrivaled competence and ease. Rosenfeld's contemporaries acknowledged him as a champion of that strain of modernism which celebrated the interrelatedness of the arts. His importance for the wider culture of early twentieth-century American modernism also lay in his seriousness about the arts. Rosenfeld earned forward the American democratic and romantic belief, epitomized by Walt Whitman and Alfred Stieglitz, in the capacity of art to articulate basic values that enrich and even ennoble the human person. Such an idealistic conception of the value of art was increasingly losing favor among the American literati during the 1920s, the period when Rosenfeld enjoyed his greatest influence and prestige. During this decade of"terrible honesty," American intellectuals tended to dismiss the "ideals of men" in favor of a single-minded interest in a more bitter realism. Inasmuch as they denigrated the notion that art held any kind of privileged status as a conveyor of values, they were in effect nascent postmodemists. This study ofPaul Rosenfeld's life and work examines the achievements ofPaul Rosenfeld as a critic of the arts in their relation to the wider American culture of the interwar years, and as a purveyor of modernism against the background of the first strains of postmodemism. It will also treat at length Rosenfeld's efforts as a writer, editor, and minor philanthropist on behalf of establishing a distinctively American music, literature, and painting. This cultural nationalism, I argue, is best understood as part ofRosenfeld's modernist project. To a lesser degree this thesis also deals with the changing position of the man of letters in American life. / History / D. Litt et Phil. (History)

Paul L. Rosenfeld ( 1890-1946) almost single-handedly established the music of living American composers on a solid critical foundation in the period between the two world wars. Although he built a reputation chiefly as a critic of music, he was a man ofletters who ranged across all the arts with unrivaled competence and ease. Rosenfeld's contemporaries acknowledged him as a champion of that strain of modernism which celebrated the interrelatedness of the arts. His importance for the wider culture of early twentieth-century American modernism also lay in his seriousness about the arts. Rosenfeld earned forward the American democratic and romantic belief, epitomized by Walt Whitman and Alfred Stieglitz, in the capacity of art to articulate basic values that enrich and even ennoble the human person. Such an idealistic conception of the value of art was increasingly losing favor among the American literati during the 1920s, the period when Rosenfeld enjoyed his greatest influence and prestige. During this decade of"terrible honesty," American intellectuals tended to dismiss the "ideals of men" in favor of a single-minded interest in a more bitter realism. Inasmuch as they denigrated the notion that art held any kind of privileged status as a conveyor of values, they were in effect nascent postmodemists. This study ofPaul Rosenfeld's life and work examines the achievements ofPaul Rosenfeld as a critic of the arts in their relation to the wider American culture of the interwar years, and as a purveyor of modernism against the background of the first strains of postmodemism. It will also treat at length Rosenfeld's efforts as a writer, editor, and minor philanthropist on behalf of establishing a distinctively American music, literature, and painting. This cultural nationalism, I argue, is best understood as part ofRosenfeld's modernist project. To a lesser degree this thesis also deals with the changing position of the man of letters in American life. / History / D. Litt et Phil. (History)

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