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AMERICAN SALONS

Name: AMERICAN SALONS
Author: Robert M. Crunden
ISBN: 0-19-506569-7

ENCOUNTERS WITH EUROPEAN MODERNISM, 1885-1917

by Robert M. Crunden ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 1992

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``My purpose is to tell a story,'' Crunden (American Civilization/Univ. of Texas at Austin; Ministers of Reform, 1982, etc.) writes in this spirited, learned, and epic first volume in a projected three-volume history of American encounters with modernism. After introducing the ``precursors'' of American modernism (James Whistler, William and Henry James), Crunden describes centers of modernism such as Philadelphia, Chicago, New Orleans, Los Angeles, and Baltimore, their special institutions, and the music, film, and people associated with them—Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Sherwood Anderson, Jelly Roll Morton, Charlie Chaplin, Gertrude and Leo Stein—who were seminal to modernism in America. American encounters with European modernism took place in the salons of W.B. Yeats in England (where, ironically, Pound met T.S. Eliot and Robert Frost) and of the Steins in Paris (where Picasso painted Gertrude and discussed William James). The alchemy of people and places continued in N.Y.C., in the salons of Alfred Stieglitz, Mabel Dodge, and others, who in turn encouraged new artists, styles, criticism, exhibits such as the Armory Show, and various kinds of communal endeavors such as the Provincetown Playhouse. Each group had its own preoccupations—whether photography, education, politics, or painting—and each had its own personality. Crunden excels at depicting personalities, building his story on well-told biography and anecdote: The first encounter between modernism and postmodernism, he tells us, was a pretend tennis match between Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp in New Jersey. The author concludes with a stunning reading of Wallace Stevens's ``Sunday Morning'' as a summation of American modernism. Crunden assimilates an amazing amount of information and, like his modernists, brings an inventive form, charm, color, and imagination to what were once aesthetic abstractions. He tells his ``story'' very well indeed.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1992

ISBN: 0-19-506569-7

Page Count: 528

Publisher: Oxford Univ.

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1992

Categories:

ART & PHOTOGRAPHY

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THE BODY

PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE HUMAN FORM

by William A. Ewing ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1994

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Through thoughtful essays, Ewing (Breaking Bounds, not reviewed) transforms a fantastic collection of photographs into a history of photography itself. With careful arrangement and stylish writing free of art- critic blather, Ewing has rendered accessible an almost intimidatingly wide range of works. The introduction covers attitudes toward photographed nudity (and therefore toward sexuality), beginning with a photograph of two topless Zulu women published in a British magazine circa 1879. Setting a pattern for the remainder of the book, Ewing discusses how these photographs reproduced their subjects and simultaneously served as a mirror for contemporary British culture. Chapters carry vague titles like ``Probes'' and ``Metamorphosis,'' which are pithily defined (in these cases as ``the realm of scientific exploration'' and ``the body transformed,'' respectively). Each section starts with a mini- essay expounding a basic principle and tying together the photos. For example, ``Flesh'' links Regina DeLuise's nude woman gripping the heavy, knotted rope of a tire swing and Robert Davies's close- up of a navel. ``Eros'' ponders the personal nature of sexuality, and an 1865 photograph of one woman inserting an umbrella in a second, tuba-playing model's behind is grouped with some squeaky- clean, pin-up-style shots from the 1950s. The shocking chapter entitled ``Estrangement'' contains a range of striking, often disturbing images, including a servant crucified for killing his boss's son and a grotesquely obese sideshow man with a relatively tiny towel placed over his behind, as well as a series showing ``the Hilton Siamese Twins of Texas'' cheerfully swimming, playing tennis, dancing, and flirting in tandem. Some ground is covered twice, and there is an occasional oversight (the essay on ``Estrangement'' brings up the 19th-century popularity of photographs of corpses of loved ones, but no examples are offered). Overall, however, the result is engrossing and the balance of text and photos just right. Stunning, clever, and very provoking.

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994

ISBN: 0-8118-0762-2

Page Count: 448

Publisher: Chronicle Books

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1994

Categories:

ART & PHOTOGRAPHY

- BOOK REVIEW
HUMAN.KIND.
by William A. Ewing & Elisa Rusca

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DEGAS IN NEW ORLEANS

ENCOUNTERS IN THE CREOLE WORLD OF KATE CHOPIN AND GEORGE WASHINGTON CABLE

by Christopher Benfey ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 12, 1997

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This lifeless account of Edgar Degas's 1872 visit to New Orleans unsuccessfully tries to link his artistic breakthrough with the city's Reconstruction-era social turmoil. Benfey (American Literature/Mt. Holyoke Coll.; The Double Life of Stephen Crane, 1992) claims the French painter's five-month sojourn with his mother's family ``is something of a legend in New Orleans.'' There's nothing legendary in Benfey's workaday account. A private man bent on being ``famous but unknown,'' Degas stayed indoors because his eyesight (which he fancied was failing) couldn't stand the intense southern light; he pined for black models but painted family members instead. Admitting the challenge posed by his ``notoriously secret'' subject, Benfey expands his critical field of vision to encompass New Orleans writers George Washington Cable and Kate Chopin—even though there's no evidence they crossed paths with Degas. Their work, obsessed with the enormous changes transforming New Orleans society in the Civil War's aftermath, is supposed to help us ``decipher the underlying meanings in Degas paintings and letters.'' Chopin gets top billing, but the largely forgotten Cable gets more ink, including a provocative but unsubstantiated suggestion that this creator of the archetypal ``tragic mulatto'' is the granddaddy of southern literature. Benfey, the first biographer to focus on Degas's American roots, adds valuable insight to the artist's work with his analysis of the effects American technology, architecture, and commerce had on his paintings. But Benfey's glosses of Chopin and Cable don't bring Degas into sharper focus; they push the enigmatic Frenchman further to the edges of an already sprawling, speculative biography. Conjecture about the psychological root of Degas's racial ambivalence—namely the possibility of black blood in the American side of the family—is overstated and underdocumented. Ambitious, perhaps, but Benfey's wide net nevertheless allows his primary subject to slip away, lost in a fog of lit-crit theory and psychobabble. (illustrations, not seen)