American Painting: From the Armory Show to the Depression is a history of modern painting in the United States in the exciting period between 1913 and 1929—the years when the schools of modernism and conservatism struggled for dominance in American art.

It begins with the emergence of a school of realism, dubbed in derision the Ash Can School, an artistic outgrowth of the liberal reform movement and of the general cultural revolt at the beginning of the twentieth-century. The introduction of modernism through Alfred Stieglitz and his circle and the first great exhibition of modern art at the Armory Show in 1913 is described as a clean break from this establishment American academic tradition. The period ended with the coming of the Depression when the realist tradition reasserted itself in a new generation of American Scene and Regionalist painters.

This book investigates the impact of Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism, Purism, etc., upon American artists; the original Dada and mechanistic experiments of Duchamp and Picabia in this country and their effects; the development of a native school of Cubist Realism; pseudo-scientific theories as a reaction among some more conservative artists to the new movements; and the many experiments and eventual assimilation of modernism by leading artists of the period.