The Little Art Colony and Us Modernism: Carmel, Provincetown, Taos
2021; Penn State University Press; Volume: 42; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/eugeoneirevi.42.2.0198
ISSN2161-4318
Autores ResumoAlthough she recognizes aesthetic innovation as a significant aspect of modernist art-making, Geneva Gano is primarily interested in little art colonies as site-specific social formations intersecting with a capitalist world-system. This approach, in keeping with contemporary modernist studies, highlights the significance of temporal and geographic contexts and the fraught relationship of modernism to capitalism, racism, sexism, nativism, and colonialism. Indeed, it is a perspective that vests new meaning in the idea of an arts “colony” inhabited by expatriate cosmopolitan “colonists” who “discovered” and populated remote locales, thus profoundly impacting, and displacing, existing communities.The Little Art Colony and US Modernism is organized into three major parts, bookended by an introduction and brief epilogue. Each part contains two chapters devoted to one of the three art colonies analyzed, the first chapter offering an overview of the historical development and characteristic social and artistic practices of the colony, the second a close analysis of a representative artist and work(s). Although logical, the structure invites some repetition, as the historical development of each colony is remarkably similar. Of special interest to this journal's readership is the attention granted the Provincetown Players, many members of whom reappear in Taos. This consideration of Provincetown in juxtaposition with comparable communities expands our understanding of O'Neill's artistic home.In her introduction Gano challenges the priority given to metropolitan centers within modernist studies, arguing instead for the “outsized influence” of the little art colony (9). She states her intention to demonstrate through three case studies “how the diffuse constellation of ideas, attitudes and practices associated with modernism articulates in and through particular place” and “how localised expressions of modernism intersect with, revise, reshape and redeploy versions of the modern across international networks” (3). The introduction also provides a concise account of the development of “modernism” as a construct that challenged established social orders and aesthetic forms and of the emergence of the little art colony as a manifestation of the modern. Although she maintains that the key figures selected for analysis (Robinson Jeffers, Eugene O'Neill, and D. H. Lawrence) are “no longer considered to be titans of modern literature” (an assertion some scholars may contest), Gano justifies her choices on the grounds that they “continue to be positioned in critical and popular memory as the representative, major figures of the art colonies with which they were closely affiliated” (22).Although ranging geographically from Cape Cod to California, these three regions of rare natural beauty came almost simultaneously to the attention of artists and entrepreneurs (from real estate, transportation, and tourism industries) at the end of the nineteenth century. The next two decades witnessed increasing cooperation between these two groups, and by the second decade of the twentieth century each community was firmly established as an “art colony” and a fashionable vacation destination/residence for the wealthy and privileged. In each region, native populations that engaged in declining industries were imaginatively and actually displaced by acts of artistic and cultural expression as well as industrial entrepreneurism. This study reveals considerable networking and overlapping among the art colonies, with arts patron Mabel Dodge Luhan a touchstone among all three.The first two chapters examine Carmel-by-the-Sea, located on the south side of California's Monterey Bay peninsula. Carmel's early bohemians included writers Jack London and Mary Austin and photographer Arnold Genthe, all of whom Gano names as participants in the creation of the “Carmel idea,” which “figured the village as a premodern, pastoral space of social freedom and fellowship, a comfortable ‘white space’ for leisure and pleasure” (44). Although Gano assesses Carmel as a fundamentally commercial venture in which artists' “privileged role” was to promote its “idea,” she views Robinson Jeffers as a rebel who undermined the Carmel brand (56, 58). In chapter 2 Gano astutely analyzes Jeffers's epic poem Tamar (1925), which presents Monterey Bay as a site of violence and terror. In the poem's central event, Tamar, a young white woman from a family plagued by incest and madness, is forced to dance naked and then raped by the spirits of Native Americans she has unwittingly summoned during a séance. Gano interprets this event as a symbolic act of “anticolonial retribution” and the subsequent downfall of Tamar's family as parallel to the downfall of the United States and Western imperialism (59). Despite Jeffers's lyrical jeremiads as well as works from other nonconforming artists who spent time in Carmel (Lincoln Steffens and Langston Hughes, for example), the colony flourished throughout the 1920s and 1930s and property values skyrocketed.Chapters 3 and 4 investigate Provincetown, a Cape Cod fishing village with a majority Portuguese population at the time of its “discovery” by artists and entrepreneurs. Gano recognizes labor journalist Mary Heaton Vorse, who bought a home in Provincetown in 1907, as pivotal in fostering Provincetown's modern-art community by bringing in the radical Greenwich Village element. Gano views these expatriate Villagers, including Jack Reed, Susan Glaspell, Jig Cook, Hutch Hapgood, Neith Boyce, and others, as serious artist/activists genuinely committed to anticommercial ideals and communal creation. These ideals, Gano maintains, found their deepest expression in the lives and works of the Provincetown Players. One of Gano's most original contributions to the Provincetown story is her identification of idealist philosopher Josiah Royce as coining the term “beloved community” (so closely associated with Jig Cook's vision) and as first articulating the “model of the beloved community that the Provincetown Players emulated” (112). Although Royce is virtually absent from Provincetown scholarship—Emeline Jouve is noteworthy in discussing his influence on Glaspell's dramaturgy in Susan Glaspell's Poetics and Politics of Rebellion (2017)—Gano supports her claim by quoting from Royce's works and by observing that Royce taught at Harvard while Cook was enrolled there. Once again, Gano's choice for key artist, the professionally motivated Eugene O'Neill, occupies an insider/outsider position. According to Gano, Provincetown was not, for O'Neill, a place for creative play or utopian communal existence; the “social, economic and aesthetic practices” he “adapted and exported,” however, were crucial to his future career (129).Gano's key text for analysis, O'Neill's The Emperor Jones, is drawn from the Players' fifth (1920–21) New York season. The play, which dramatizes the harrowing physical and psychological journey of a Black Pullman porter-cum-island emperor to his death at the hands of his subjects, was an enormous commercial success. Gano highlights the importance of its historical context, specifically the 1915 run of The Birth of a Nation, the racist violence during the “Red Summer” of 1919, and the postwar “100 Percent American” movement, noting that the dedication of the Pilgrim Monument in Provincetown in 1910 and a tercentennial Mayflower ball hosted by Provincetown's Sail Loft Club in 1920 strengthened Provincetown's links to its Anglo-European past (103, 267 n. 72). Gano is by no means the first to find this play's representation of race egregious and to reject the notion that it somehow “transcends race,” but she brings to the conversation a greater emphasis on context and on O'Neill's employment of Provincetown's signature “superpersonalisation” (art/life blurring effected through writing and casting) to “affirm a culture of segregation and foster a sense of white unity” (132, 146, 270 n. 57).Chapters 5 and 6 examine the transformation of Taos, a former Spanish colonial trading post at the foot of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, into a modernist art colony comprising a critical mass of property-owning Anglo-Americans, artists, and art and nature lovers. Gano credits Mabel Dodge, who arrived in December 1917 and married Taos Puebloan Antonio Lujan in 1923, as effecting the transformation “almost overnight” (172). The plethora of artists whom Luhan (Dodge preferred the “h” in her married name) brought to Taos included theater designer Robert Edmond Jones; writers Mary Austin, Willa Cather, D. H. Lawrence, and Jean Toomer; photographer Ansel Adams; and painters Marsden Hartley, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Miguel Covarrubias.Gano reveals that, in addition to cultural and aesthetic enrichment, the “Taos mystique” offered a transcendent spiritual experience identified with the region's Native American peoples. A commodified version of this “mystique,” Gano assures us, sold well to tourists, and was more deferentially experienced and expressed by the artists whose support for the tourism and real estate industries was “mostly inadvertent” (274 n. 14). Gano identifies Native American ceremonial dance as the “most valuable asset of the region's expanding tourism industry and … [its] premiere subject for modern art” (182), naming D. H. Lawrence, who authored six essays on the subject, as its foremost interpreter during the 1920s. Gano analyzes his “The Dance of the Sprouting Corn” (1924), as representative in “purposefully frustrat[ing] his readers' expectations of white interpretative authority and subtly provok[ing] a reassessment of the impulse to possess ‘mastery’ over unknowable ‘mysteries’ of the Native American other” (207).The author's analysis of Lawrence's novel St. Mawr underscores its significance in locating the Taos mystique primarily within its landscape rather than its Indigenous peoples (a perspective notably held by Mabel Dodge Luhan). The novel centers on a modern woman's quest for free and authentic existence, a quest that takes her from a metropolitan milieu to the mountains of New Mexico. However, her attempt to acquire transcendence through possession—purchasing first the untamed horse St. Mawr, then a ranch—undercuts the allegedly spiritual or psychological quest. Gano interprets Lawrence's protagonist as an “active agent of the ranch's ultimate imbrication within the deadening, capitalist world-economy” (208).Gano's six-page epilogue considers the legacy of the little art colonies, finding contemporary descendants in more formal institutionalized programs such as short-term artist residencies and overtly commercialized metropolitan arts districts. The book is enhanced by fifteen well-chosen illustrations and meticulous citation. It lacks a bibliography and includes a few errors that I mention in the likely event that there will be later editions in which these corrections can be easily made: author Arthur Gelb's name appears as “Arthur Shaeffer” (267 n. 9), author Linda Ben-Zvi's name appears as “Susan Ben-Zvi” (268 n. 17), and the title of Glaspell's play Inheritors appears as The Inheritors (152, 272 n. 74, 290).I suspect, despite Gano's introductory justifications, some scholars may question her selection of O'Neill, despite his status, as the most representative of Provincetown playwrights, or her decision to analyze The Emperor Jones rather than a work that manifests their politically progressive ideals (Glaspell's The People or Inheritors, for example). That Gano's book is likely to provoke further investigation and debate, however, is one of its strengths. Extensively researched and cogently argued, The Little Art Colony and US Modernism broadens conceptions of modernism and modern art-making while confirming modernism's significance in effecting the socioeconomic, ideological, and cultural transformation of the Western world into the modern era with profound implications for today. Although the work is geared toward an interdisciplinary academic readership, the origin stories and the provocative accounts of the colonies' heydays are sufficiently engaging to attract a wider audience.
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