American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  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.”

  A few of the critics, apprehensive about the disjunction between art and life, were suspicious of photography
’s “machine-made” objects; in this they reflected, perhaps not always knowingly, John Ruskin and William Morris, who detested machines and machinery because they served commercial greed and threatened the handicrafts of the “people.”

  But Stieglitz refused to equate machines with artistic or human degradation. Stieglitz, Lewis Mumford wrote, subordinated the machine to his human direction through understanding its potentialities and capacities. “When used thus, as part of man’s organic equipment rather than as a substitute for a deficient organ, the machine becomes as integral as the original eyes or legs. Assimilating the machine in this fashion, Stieglitz was armed to reconquer the lost human provinces that had been forfeited by the one-sided triumph of the machine.” Living in New York City and summering at Lake George in the Adirondacks, Stieglitz was closely attuned to both the industrial and the natural environments around him, and this, together with his understanding of the European artistic heritage, enabled him to avoid the ephemeral and disjunctive tendencies that afflicted so many of his fellow artists.

  Though he worked in a quite different medium, Frank Lloyd Wright was no less aware than Stieglitz of the need to put mechanical and industrial power to the service of human aspirations. The young architect had long objected to the industrial uglification of America. “The buildings standing around there on the Chicago prairies were all tall and all tight,” he complained. Chimneys were lean and taller still—“sooty fingers threatening the sky.” Dormers were “cunning little buildings complete in themselves,” stuck onto the main roofslopes “to let the help poke their heads out of the attic for air.” Everything was overdecorated—walls “be-corniced or fancy-bracketed,” roofs “ridged and tipped, swanked and gabled,” the exterior “mixed to puzzle-pieces with cornerboards, panel-boards, window-frames, cornerblocks, plinth-blocks, rosettes, fantails, and jiggerwork in general.” If the home was to be a machine for living, Wright contended, this machine could and should help people live according to their “organic life” as well as in a democratic fashion. In a democracy especially, man must master the machine, not the reverse—and man could do so. The machine, Wright said, is “the tool which frees human labor, lengthens and broadens the life of the simplest man,” and in doing so becomes the basis of the “Democracy upon which we insist.”

  Writing: “Venerable Ideas Are Swept Away”

  Fascinated by the big city—by its railroad yards, elevated trains, ferries, tenements, chimneys, skyscrapers—painters like John Sloan and George Bellows used more than their canvases to register their views. Often they turned to the radical or avant-garde magazines that were sprouting across urban America. In 1912 Sloan became art editor of The Masses, a struggling left-wing journal. Drawing with pen, charcoal, and crayon on thin paper laid over a pebbly surface, Sloan revolutionized the style and format of magazine illustration. He insisted that he was serving on the journal as an artist, not as a polemicist. Art Young, the leading Masses cartoonist, had no such inhibitions, even though he had been a fellow art student with Henri in Paris. Borrowing from the work of Hogarth and Daumier, he savagely caricatured plutocrats, imperialists, censors, and police as agents of a vicious and bloated capitalism.

  The Masses had begun in 1911 as such a dull and doctrinaire sheet that it almost folded within a year. Then, in August 1912, Art Young read to the editorial board an article by an unknown young writer named Max Eastman. Impressed—and desperate—the group authorized a note to Eastman: “You are elected editor of the Masses, no pay.” The new editor, who freely admitted he knew nothing about art, brought to the journal a beguiling mixture of “scientific socialism,” applied logic, pragmatic experimentation, and Christian doctrines inherited from his parents, both of whom were Congregational ministers in upstate New York. But Eastman was no dogmatist. The pages of The Masses were soon open to a variety of radical philosophies and to a new and biting satirical tone.

  The journal’s editorial board boiled with squabbles, but Eastman was good-natured about it all. “We live on scraps,” he said. “Twenty fellows can’t get together to paste up a magazine without scrapping about it.” Nevertheless, several illustrators quit the staff in 1916 after Art Young accused Sloan and other artists of wanting to “run pictures of ash cans and girls hitching up their skirts in Horatio Street—regardless of idea—and without title.” The Masses never recovered from this secession.

  In that same year of 1916, it happened that a wealthy New York socialite, Mrs. A. K. Rankine, and a young utopian socialist, James Oppenheim, were being treated by the same Jungian analyst. As a means of therapy, Rankine was urged to sponsor a magazine project of Oppenheim’s. With her funding, Oppenheim began to realize his dream of “the magazine which should evoke and mobilize all our native talent, both creative and critical....” For the new journal, The Seven Arts, Oppenheim gathered around him other writers in their twenties and thirties: Waldo Frank, whose association in Paris with the circle around La Nouvelle Revue Française had fired an interest in cultural nationalism; Van Wyck Brooks, who, under the influence of Santayana and other Harvard scholars, had written The Wine of the Puritans, a seminal critique of American fiction and poetry as sentimental, escapist, and imitative of English literature; and Randolph Bourne, who had fled to Greenwich Village via Columbia from his intellectually stifling middle-class home in New Jersey.

  The most arresting of this quartet was Bourne. “I shall never forget,” Oppenheim wrote, “how I had first to overcome my repugnance when I saw that child’s body, the humped back, the longish, almost medieval face, with a sewed-up mouth, and an ear gone awry. But he wore a cape, carried himself with an air, and then you listened to marvelous speech, often brilliant, holding you spellbound, and looked into blue eyes as young as a Spring dawn.” Bourne was even more arresting intellectually. Through those blue eyes he perceived Americans’ “belittling” attitudes toward women, the need for equal economic chances for women and their right to divorce and birth control, the antiquated curriculum of American education, the need to develop an American “transnationality” that respected immigrants’ old cultures instead of the “melting-pot” concept that was leaving Americans in “detached fragments.”

  A cosmopolitan and iconoclastic magazine of quite different cut was The Smart Set, founded in 1900. Far more amusing than The Masses, more irreverent than The Seven Arts, the monthly had a flair for presenting serious fiction by such authors as O. Henry, Zona Gale, Edith Wharton, and Damon Runyon. But even with H. L. Mencken as literary critic and George Jean Nathan as drama critic, The Smart Set almost foundered in 1910, only to be rescued by fresh editorial talent daring enough to gather the work of D. H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, August Strindberg, and William Butler Yeats. After Mencken and Nathan took over the top editorship at The Smart Set in 1914, the monthly realized Mencken’s aspirations for a magazine that was “lively without being nasty.... A magazine for civilized adults in their lighter moods. A sort of frivolous sister to the Atlantic.”

  It was Mencken who gave The Smart Set its distinctive style. Married to his beloved native Baltimore and to the Baltimore Sun, he kept his distance from the Greenwich Village dilettantes and bohemians, as he viewed them, by mailing material to Nathan and making only a tri-weekly trip to Manhattan, where he stayed at the Hotel Algonquin. But Mencken was as unorthodox as any Villager, working during long lunches at Luchow’s or at the Beaux Arts, offering a “Poet’s Free Lunch” of pretzels and smoked herring to visitors in his office, where his desk sported two large brass spittoons and the walls shrieked with posters of Follies girls. To Village radicals, however, he appeared a political and social Tory, and even though Mencken looked for fresh and unorthodox talent, he was cool toward some of the new poets, especially the Imagists and the experimenters in free verse.

  The new poets found a warmer welcome at such New York journals as Trend and Rogue, but these havens were short-lived. Others, a more enduring monthly, provided young poets with a forum for the widest experimentation, occasionally devoting an
entire issue to a movement or a theme. It was his connection with the Others crowd that brought Wallace Stevens to prominence in the New York literary world. Others published eighteen of his poems, including “Peter Quince at the Clavier” and “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.”

  But it was another journal, eight hundred miles to the west, that acted as midwife to the new era in poetry. In August 1912, after a season of fund-raising and hunts across library shelves for prospective poets, Harriet Monroe sent from Chicago a manifesto circular announcing Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. It would offer poets the chance, she wrote, “to be heard in their own place, without the limitations imposed by the popular magazine,” and its readers would be those interested in poetry as “the highest, most complete expression of truth and beauty.” Among the recipients of the circular was Ezra Pound, Idaho-born, living then in London. Monroe particularly wanted Pound’s aid because of his place at the center of “the keenest young literary group in England,” despite both his hostility toward most things American and doubts whether he would reply to the urgings of a Chicago spinster-poetess. To her surprise he did respond with a heartening letter enclosing poems for the first issue, pledges of further help, and the wish that Poetry would speed the advent of an American renaissance that would “make the Italian Renaissance look like a tempest in a teapot!” Poetry was launched.