During the 1920s and 1930s, Alfred Stieglitz's stylish New York galleries were a mecca to artistic innovators and avant garde thinkers, those struggling to cast off the burden of American puritanical thought and the fixed idea among the intellectual elite that important art, art that was real and would last, was being made only in Europe.

At the same time Duncan Phillips, a determined art collector and heir to a steel fortune, opened two rooms of his Washington, D.C., home to begin a museum of modern art. Although he collected some of the world's masterpieces, especially French Impressionism, he kept a diligent eye on the work being done in his own country.

That Stieglitz and Phillips would meet was destiny. Their long friendship, sometimes an uneasy alliance, brought forth a reevaluation of art in American culture. Their combined vision and resources invigorated a movement and prepared the way for public acceptance of American modernism.

The uniquely American style of the artists in the Stieglitz circle - Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, and Georgia O'Keeffe - defied European tradition and opened the door for artistic experimentation. In the American Grain gathers the Stieglitz circle as acquired by Phillips: paintings by all four artists, watercolors by Dove and Marin, assemblages by Dove, and Stieglitz's "Equivalents," his acclaimed photographs of clouds and sky.

The bold, original style of the works included here stand together to signal a shift in the development of art - its coming of age in America.