American Experiment (206 page)

The transcending ethic of Greenwich Village was liberation. “Everybody was freeing themselves and the world,” a Village writer recalled, “and everybody was freeing the world faster than everybody else.” Nowhere had the early ideas of Sigmund Freud been more happily, more greedily, embraced. Carl Jung even visited the Village in 1912 and lectured at the Liberal Club. Villagers endlessly discussed the meaning of their dreams, outdated morality, sexual permissiveness, and personal liberation, when they were not debating Marxism, socialism, trade unionism, bossism, pacifism, birth control, educational reform, abolition of prostitution, or Havelock Ellis’s notions of sexual liberation.

The Village was, to be sure, far more a broker of ideas than a generator of them. Its rebellions drew from myriad intellectual and artistic sources. Villagers followed the writings of the European philosophers and social critics, visited the great men abroad, talked with Europeans who made the fabled Village their first stop on arrival. Nietzsche’s assaults on Christian morality and middle-class culture, Henri Bergson’s faith in relativity and intuition, Shaw’s and Ibsen’s acid portraits of bourgeois greed and hypocrisy fueled the Villagers’ iconoclasm. James’s and John Dewey’s relativism and pragmatism gave sanction to their own skepticism and experimentation.

Everyone knew everyone else in the Village. On the street you might run into the long-arrived literary man William Dean Howells or the just-arriving Sinclair Lewis, the dancer Isadora Duncan, the ebullient young radicals John Reed and Max Eastman, the novelist Theodore Dreiser, the precocious young critic Randolph Bourne. If you stayed long enough, you saw everybody: one boardinghouse, on Washington Square South, was home at various times to Norris, Crane, O. Henry, Dreiser, Reed, Eugene O’Neill, Alan Seeger, Zona Gale. You came to know the eccentrics too, like the young man of respectable Chicago family who called himself a bastard and everyone he met a “bourgeois pig.”

The best place to meet people in the Village, if you wanted hours of
uninhibited talk, was the fabled salon of Mabel Dodge Luhan. A vibrant and imposing woman, with cool, dark gray eyes and a voice “like a viola, soft, caressing, mellow,” Luhan threw herself into everything—art, politics, feminism, union struggles. In her salon you could meet Big Bill Haywood in from the labor wars, the anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, Lincoln Steffens, British socialists, visiting feminists. She boasted of her salon as a ferment of “Socialists, Trade-Unionists, Anarchists, Suffragists, Poets, Relations, Lawyers, Murderers, Old Friends, Psychoanalysts, I.W.W.s, Single Taxers, Birth Controlists, Newspapermen, Artists, Modern-Artists, Clubwomen, Women’s-place-is-in-the-home Women”—and even clergymen.

Luhan and John Reed had a passionate love affair, after which he called her a “keen, cold, amorous” woman who demanded continuous change and excitement. Surely she wanted change; everyone in the Village seemed to want change, change for its own sake. Luhan wrote:

Melt, You Women!

Melt to August—grow ON and Ripen

Give Yourselves Up!

That is the only way to be Alive,

That is what you want, isn’t it?

To be alive?

Life lies in the Change,

Try it and see.

“Constant revolutionizing of production,” Marx had written sixty years earlier in the
Communist Manifesto,
“uninterrupted disturbance of all social relations, everlasting uncertainty and agitation, distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier times. All fixed, fast-frozen relationships, with their train of venerable ideas and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become obsolete before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.” Villagers saw themselves as rebels against the system; Marxists saw them as a zany, fleeting expression of it.

Nothing seemed more volatile in the first decade than the visual arts. Nor was there a more obvious target for rebels. A small number of powerful institutions seemed to control the public outlets of artistic expression at century’s end: the National Academy of Design and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago. These custodians of “high art” insisted upon the romantic landscape, the still life, the portrait of the celebrated, and best of all, the painting that told a moral story or epitomized a historical moment. “Organized by the urban elite,
dominated by ladies of high society, staffed by professionally trained personnel, housing classic works of European art donated by wealthy private collectors,” according to Alan Trachtenberg, the museums “established as a physical fact the notion that culture filtered downward from a distant past, from overseas, from the sacred founts of wealth and private power.”

Now the establishment scented rebellion. Said the director of the Metropolitan, an appointee of J. P. Morgan, “There is a state of unrest all over the world in art as in all other things. It is the same in literature, as in music, in painting and in sculpture. And I dislike unrest.” The chief source of “unrest” in American art was the movement toward a new realism. Its precursors were Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins.

“When I select a thing,” Homer once said, “I paint it exactly as it appears.” Born in 1836 in Maine, Homer was retained by
Harper’s Weekly
to record Civil War battlefield scenes, resulting in such graphic paintings as
Rainy Day in Camp
and
Sharpshooter on Picket Duty.
Years of painting lyrical pastoral scenes followed his war work, but when in 1883 Homer reestablished himself in his beloved Maine, he found in the violent power of the sea an enduring theme for his now-darkened temperament. Vigorous paintings in the 1880s and 1890s such as
The Life Line, The Herring Net, Undertow,
and
The Gulf Stream
depicted men and women pitted against boiling waters, at war with brooding and furious nature.

Thomas Eakins apprenticed under the genre painter Jean Léon Gérôme in Paris and analyzed the work of Goya in Spain, but perhaps more influential in the formation of his style was his study of anatomy at a medical college, fortified by his use of nude models in defiance of Philadelphia prudery. His work with Eadweard Muybridge, a pioneering photographer who with a series of cameras fixed staccato glimpses of men and animals in motion, supplemented Eakins’s knowledge of “physiology from top to toe.” Eakins’s pictures of athletes—boxers, wrestlers, rowers—rendered in fine anatomical detail, and such daring portraits as that of Dr. Gross cutting open a living body, established him as Realism’s foremost transitional figure.

By the turn of the century, the influence of Impressionism on American art was marked. Artists returned from France with reports of paintings that glowed with the reflected diffusion of light over yellows and greens and browns, and with news of painters named Monet and Pissarro and Cezanne who seemed less concerned with
what
they saw than with
how
they saw. In Greenwich Village, there emerged a group of artists who absorbed the lessons of Impressionism but united them to Eakins’s faithfulness to detail, to the social satire of Goya and Hogarth and Daumier, and, finally, to a bent for common, homely subjects and indigenous American scenes. The
result was the new Realism. Inevitably these artists were dubbed the “Ashcan School” and labeled socialists or anarchists for daring to “paint drunks and slatterns, pushcarts and coal mines, bedrooms and barrooms”—to “deliberately and conscientiously paint the ugly wherever it occurs.” They were more fairly called “The Eight.”

The finest artist of the Eight was doubtless John Sloan, who could paint with equal skill the wake of a ferry, a line of tenement dwellers’ clothes drying in the bright sun, the Third Avenue elevated, or a couple of aging, sharp-eyed ladies in a coach on Fifth Avenue critically scrutinizing their passing rivals. But the most influential member was Robert Henri, for he was a brilliant teacher, if only a fair artist. Unlike Sloan, who had never left America, Henri had been rigorously schooled in France. He returned to America in the early 1890s with two convictions: that real people and real events should be the only subjects of painting and that these subjects had to be infused with the artist’s own moral or-religious point of view. Henri helped George Bellows, Edward Hopper, Rockwell Kent, and a host of other artists to see that life and art could not be separated, that the crucial thing was not the subject painted but the intention of the artist, that the idea of “art for art’s sake” was morally bankrupt.

Henri’s most important ally in storming the gates of the art establishment was the photographic genius Alfred Stieglitz. Still in his mid-thirties as the new century dawned, Stieglitz had grown up in an upper East Side brownstone full of good wines and books and presided over by an imperious German-Jewish father who had prospered as a wool merchant. Enrolled by his father in an engineering program in Germany, Stieglitz perceived photography as part of the accelerating industrialism of the early 1880s and spent the next quarter-century establishing it as an art form as valid as painting or poetry. Returning to America in 1890, he joined a camera club, quit it as too conservative, and established his own periodical,
Camera Work,
a term he used to include any faithful picturing of life’s deepest experiences. He had to face the hostility of painters who, he noted wryly, wished they could reproduce effects as clearly as did his “machine-made” objects. Calling themselves “Photo-Secessionists,” he and Edward Steichen established, in 1905, the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession at 291 Fifth Avenue.

Seeing no incompatibility between fine photography and fine art, Stieglitz became a leading sponsor of advanced art. The work of unknown painters and sculptors at “291” seemed sometimes to eclipse even the brilliant photographs. His was the first gallery in New York to show, and
Camera Work
the first magazine in America to explain, the Postimpressionist art of Matisse, Cézanne, and Picasso. He was audacious enough to
display Rodin’s provocative drawings of nude women, which even admirers of the Frenchman’s sculptures denounced as a “not very elevating” sight in a public gallery. He gave the first exhibit anywhere of Negro sculpture presented as art rather than as anthropological artifacts. By making available to the public art which might not otherwise have been seen, “291” and other small galleries gave artists institutional leverage against the establishment dealers, critics, art academies, and museums.

It took a group of independent artists, bursting with creativity and innovation, to bring off the most shattering public event in American art—the Armory Show of 1913. Renegades of the stature of Henri, Sloan, Bellows, Maurice Prendergast, and many others, representing diverse schools, raised money, hired the 69th Regiment Armory at Lexington and 25th, and scoured Europe and America for the best and most varied paintings, lithographs, and sculptures. Quarreling all the way—Henri even dropped out—they gathered 1,600 pictures and sculptures. The towering brick walls of the grim armory were hung with long green drapes, the huge drill floor divided into corridors and cubicles. Gossip floated about Manhattan that the organizers were planning to shock the public. And so they did, but less with the rumored erotic art than with a profusion of painting and sculpture the likes of which few of their visitors had seen.

The tens of thousands of visitors, Oliver Larkin wrote later, first encountered Barnard’s monumental
Prodigal Son,
passed by naturalistic portrait heads by Jo Davidson, moved on to a stunning French display of Delacroix, Daumier, Corot, Monet, Manet, and Degas, climaxing with Cézanne’s
The Poor House on the Hill,
Renoir’s vibrant
Boating Party,
and a Gauguin frieze of tawny Samoans under vines heavy with exotic fruits. Next the Fauves, the wild men: Rouault’s
Parade;
Derain’s jug on a windowsill, framed by stiff and bare trees behind; Matisse’s dancing nudes. And then the Cubists: the young Picasso’s
Woman with a Mustard Pot
and—the talk of the town— Duchamp’s
Nude Descending a Staircase,
an elegantly convulsive vision of an angulated, abstractive woman moving downward in a complex of geometric shapes and slashing lines.

And, not least, the “American room”; “John Sloan’s girls dried their hair on a rooftop in the sun,” Larkin wrote; Robert Henri’s gypsy was “painted with as few broad strokes as possible”; George Bellows presented “prize fighters in rapid pencil notation, and constructed in solid, lively paint the snow-covered docks along the river, the stevedores working, the tugboats sending white puffs into a crisp blue sky.”

The Establishment fought back through its reviews of the show. Cézanne was a smug ignoramus, the
Century
judged, Van Gogh a nutty incompetent, Picasso as cheeky as Barnum himself. Along with a nod to the show’s
enterprise, Theodore Roosevelt entered some reservations: he found little to recommend in the Cubists, the Futurists, and the “Near-Impressionists.” The Cubists would interest those who liked the colored pictures in the Sunday papers—indeed, the nice Navajo rug in his bathroom he deemed a better example of “proper” Cubism; the Futurists should be called “past-ists” because their paintings resembled the “later work” of Paleolithic cave artists; and as for the
Nude Descending a Staircase,
it was simply a “naked man going down stairs.”

Greenwich Village critics had their own reservations about the Armory Show, or at least about the new art forms. If the Romantics had ignored the impact of industrialism on American life with their bent for landscapes, still lifes, and sentimental vignettes, the “modernists” were ignoring it by their emphasis on abstraction, Cubism, Futurism, and other evasions. The world of Cézanne and Van Gogh, Larkin wrote later, “set a premium on the pseudo artist with his facile solution and his shallow grasp: The fruitful continuity between art and the normal experience of mankind had broken down.” Why? “Henry Adams concluded it had happened when the Virgin ceased to be a power and became a picture; Tolstoy said it was when the artist forgot his fraternity with suffering men; Veblen, when art became a showy index of superfluous wealth.”