Creative composites: modernism, race, and the Stieglitz circle 9780520272491

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THE PUBLISHER GRATEFPULLY ACKNOWLEDGES. THE-GENEROUS: SUPPORT, OF THE: ART

ENDOWMENT FUND OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS FOUNDATION. THE PUBLISHER ALSO GRATEFULLY ACKNOWLEDGES THE GENEROUS CONTRIBUTION TO THIS BOOK PROVIDED BY THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON.

CREATIVE COMPOSITES

THE PHILLIPS BOOK PRIZE SERIES The Phillips Book Prize supports publication of a first book by an emerging scholar. The manuscript selected for this annual award represents new and innovative research in modern or contemporary art from ca. 1880 to the present. The Phillips Book Prize is awarded by an editorial committee of The Phillips Collection Center for the Study of Modern Art. 1. Alicia Volk, x Pursuit of Universalism: Yorozu Tetsugoré and Japanese Modern Art 2. Terri Weissman, Lhe Realisms of Berenice Abbott

3. André Dombrowski, Cézanne, Murder, and Modern Life 4. Lauren Kroiz, Creative Composites: Modernism, Race, and the Stieglitz Circle s. Robert Slifkin, Out of Time: Philip Guston and the Refiguration of Postwar American Art

CREATIVE COMPOSITES MODERNISM, RACE, AND: THE STiecGhiTZ CikCee

Lauren Kroiz

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS | Berkeley Los Angeles London THE PHILLIPS COLLECTION | Washington, D.C.

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press

Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England © 2012 by Lauren Kroiz

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kroiz, Lauren, 1980Creative composites : modernism, race, and the Stieglitz circle / Lauren Kroiz. — 1st [edition].

p. cm.— (The Phillips book prize series ; 4) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-520-272.49-1 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Modernism (Art)—United States. 2. Arts, American—2oth century. 3. Art criticism—United States—History—zoth century.

4. Artandrace. 5. Stieglitz, Alfred, 1864-1946—Friends and

associates. I. Title. NX456.5.M64K76 2012

709.7309041—dc23 2012005117 Manufactured in the United States of America

2) 20> AS: AB’ 17. AGr 35... 14 IS. AZ

1S: OD: FO. SR He ce eT The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R 2002) (Permanence of Paper).

TO MY MOM AND DAD

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CONTEN ES

Introduction I I Defining Straight Photography: Artistic Pluralism or Assimilation to Painting’s “Foreign Tongue” Il 2 “The Caricaturist’s Way”: Abstraction and Constructive

Miscegenation 49 3 The Promise of Cinema: Harnessing Spirit, Nation, and Art 93 4 The Sense of Things: Collage, [lustration, and Regional

American Culture 143

Conclusion 187

Notes 193 Selected Bibliography 243

List of Illustrations 247 Acknowledgments 251

Index 255 Plates follow page 168

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INTRODUCTION

There is something in this art situation analogous to what has been so long going on in our racial melting pot. The United States is invaded by aliens, thousands of whom constitute So many acute perils to the health of the body politic. Modernism is of precisely the same heterogeneous alien origin and is imperiling the republic of art in the same way. It began, as our excessive immigration began, in an insidiously plausible manner.... These movements have been promoted by types not yet fitted for their first papers in aesthetic naturalization—the makers of true Ellis Island Art. —Royal Cortissoz, American Artists, 1923

The New York critic Royal Cortissoz, infamously attacking modernism by calling it Ellis Island Art, cast new art forms as troubling immigrants.' Even as temporary federal quotas were reducing immigration, the Brooklyn-born critic (himself the son of immigrants from Martinique and Spain) connected changes in the aesthetics of the early twentieth-century U.S. art world with those in the nation’s population and deemed modernism dangerously heterogeneous and alien. Cortissoz objected neither to images depicting Ellis Island nor to conventional art created by immigrants but to art that experimented with new forms and media.” His censure linked aesthetics and demographics at a theoretical and structural level by drawing an analogy between the varied media and methods of modern art and America’s new ethnic and racial diversity. Alone, Cortissoz’s attack on modernism could be read as evidence of one critic’s chauvinism and aesthetic conventionalism, but what are we to make of similarly racial metaphors employed by New York avant-gardes in their own theories of modern art in the United States? Creative Composites answers that question by analyzing the aesthetic, material, and

1

theoretical developments in the circles of artists and critics allied with the New York photographer Alfred Stieglitz from 1890 to 1946.° I present a synthetic account of the work of heretofore marginalized immigrants—the Japanese German critic Sadakichi Hartmann, the Mexican-born artist Marius de Zayas, and the English Sri Lankan curator Ananda K. Coomaraswamy—each of whom formed a conflicted partnership with Stieglitz. They confronted the arts of what Hartmann termed the “grey race” (America’s homogenized, bland, bloodless Puritans) with a more complex aesthetic, positioning themselves as critical hybrids and diasporic outsiders and identifying marginal media as the means by which to make and theorize a new art in the New World. In so doing, they formulated what I calla composite modernism, exploiting the dissonance between diverse new media and combining those media in productive heterogeneity. To both encompass and move beyond Cortissoz’s antagonistic label “Ellis Island Art,” use the phrase composite modernism with reference to the works and theories of immigrants as well as the ideas and images of U.S.-born painters commonly associated with the Stieglitz circle, such as Arthur Dove. This modernism engaged with America’s

modern heterogeneity, theorizing not only refinement in a medium but also the proliferation and differentiation of media. I take the term composite from a description in “The Physiognomy of the New Yorker,” by the Philadelphia-born “SpanishHebrew” poet Benjamin de Casseres, published in Stieglitz’s journal Camera Work in 1910. De Casseres noted that the New Yorker’s face was “a composite creation, embodying the spirit of the Great Republic.” In New York City, which he described as “a rough-cast of America-that-shall-be,” the very faces of the inhabitants revealed how the

United States was becoming a cosmopolitan nation of diverse foreign immigrants.‘ Using the term composite in the pages of Camera Work, de Casseres invoked three distinct discourses and definitions with which I frame composite modernism. First, he drew on the adjective’s common use to describe anything “made up of various parts or elements.”° Second, writing in a journal devoted to photography, he evoked the famous late nineteenth-century experiments in “composite photography” by the British statistician and founder of eugenics, Francis Galton, who layered exposures of individuals to illustrate general types that contradicted composite’s common denotation by “combining the typical or essential characteristics of individuals making up a group.”° Finally, articles in the New York popular press during the period supply a third discourse, fleshing out de Casseres’s composite face by envisioning the coming “composite type,” who would bea synthesis of races at the genetic level.’ To summarize, de Casseres’s (and my own) historically situated use of the term composite refers to individuals, groups, or images pushed together but maintaining their difference, layered to reveal their same-

ness, or synthesized (frequently by sexual reproduction) into something new— significations that parallel popular period models for integrating ethnic and racial difference in the United States: cultural pluralism, assimilation, and miscegenation. A Hegelian notion of differentiation as an ongoing generative process animates my definition of composite modernism; none of the meanings of composite, however, should

2 INTRODUCTION

be considered a successful or final negotiation of difference. Instead, for early modernists in New York, operatingina milieu where boundaries of races and media were under construction and under pressure, the continual process of categorization, differentiation, and synthesis was precisely what fomented aesthetic change.* The modernists inventively negotiated difference—an engagement with diverse media sublimated only later in theories, still dominant, of medium specificity as the self-reflexive refinement of an artwork’s form. Indeed, studying this early U.S. modernism can suggest how to productively reframe current issues in contemporary art theory, such as the impact of our own era’s new technologies, new media, and ethnic hybridity on models of art making and viewership, in a broader disciplinary history. Late in his life, Stieglitz critiqued the emerging Greenbergian model in a striking extended metaphor in which the art world of the 1940s, with its hierarchical segregation of media, was like “a great Noah’s ark in which every species must be separated from the other species, so that finally, as they are all placed in their separate cells, they grow so self-conscious that finally, if one were to take them out and put them together they would all fall upon one another and kill each other.”? As his elaborate description of

media’s angry, animal response to isolation suggests and as the chapters that follow demonstrate, to define media in the Stieglitz circle in the decades from 1890 to 1940 requires opening up our own sense of the term to examine the multiple ways in which the group applied the words media and medium to aesthetic categories we might now identify as “genre” or “style.” For example, Stieglitz, defending Picasso’s work to a German photographer, used the word to describe abstraction itself, calling it “a new medium of expression—the true medium.”!° Old classifications of species, media, and peoples

seemed unstable and inadequate to defining modern art in composite New York. AIthough formalist criticism has used medium specificity to isolate the study of art from other modes of history writing, this book restores the historical context of modernist media theory to reveal how the struggle to integrate difference lies at the heart of American modernism.

Composite Modernism in the Era of Exclusion Early twentieth-century modernism occupies an uneasy place in the history of American art, frequently identified as a hodgepodge of European imitators whose works fill the terrain between the expression of Manifest Destiny in Hudson River Valley landscapes and of Cold War superpower status in Abstract Expressionist canvases. Michael Leja grapples creatively with that issue in Looking Askance, arguing that we can trace the early reception of modernism in the United States to a particular national vision made skeptical by fraud and deception in advertising and by the increasing exactness of science.'' My book follows Leja’s in emphasizing the importance of new visual lan-

INTRODUCTION 3

guages and technologies of image making to American modernism but adds to his account of urban hucksters and quacks by recovering the period’s profound uncertainty over racial identity and its visual markers. I take into account, in considering how modern art in the United States was formulated, the practice of immigration historians, who call the period from 1882 to 1943 the Era of Exclusion.'* I argue that debates about

what American modernism could be were informed by the historical context: those debates took place in northern cities, where an unprecedented influx of new immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, along with native-born blacks and whites from southern and rural regions, provoked fresh uncertainty about who and what could be considered American. National concerns about race, immigration, and urbanism at the turn of the century have frequently been examined at the level of subject matter. For example, alongside the Stieglitz circle in New York a group of American realist painters known as the Eight, and later as the Ashcan school, pursued the modern city as a subject. Stieglitz recollected showing with that group, which included George Luks, at New York’s National Arts Club in 1908. Critiquing the “line, form, and color” of their paintings as “mediocre,” Stieglitz claimed he had parted with the Eight because “T could not feel committed to what was mere literature, just because it was labeled social realism.”! Although it is unclear what paintings Stieglitz saw in 1908 (and whether he remembered the event and his feelings about it accurately decades later), perhaps they included George Luks’s Street Scene of 1905, which foregrounded clear vignettes of picturesque life in the city’s immigrant neighborhoods (Plate 1). As the art historian Rebecca Zurier has pointed out, many of the Eight worked as illustrators for the popular press.'* Yet Stieglitz described his departure from this group carefully, objecting not to its ties with popular art, its social agenda, or its technical mediocrity, but to its violation of the principal tenets of medium specificity—its painting was “mere” literature. How, then, could the new social reality of New York be depicted in the visual arts? Would it require a new way of seeing? Would the challenge call for a new medium altogether? Certainly the new photographic medium seemed to lend itself to racialized projects. Historians have explored the photographic depiction of New York’s urban poor, especially in recounting how American photographers such as Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine focused on the squalid lives of immigrants to provoke social reform.'? Social and cultural historians have often faulted Stieglitz as a photographer because he did not pursue such a reform-driven agenda. Most notably, Alan Trachtenberg, in his essay “Camera Work/Social Work,” claims that Stieglitz and his circle acted to “defeat and transcend the factual report” of photography in their struggle to transform the medium into art. Hine’s photograph of 1905 On the Ferry Boat Leaving Ellis Island, Italian Family is often compared with Stieglitz’s famous 1907 image The Steerage (Figure 1 and Plate 2). Although Hine portrays a family unit identified by ethnicity and destination in a representation far removed from Stieglitz’s ambiguous multilayered image, neither photograph is more decisively factual than the other. Crafting a narrative of arrival,

4 INTRODUCTION

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both members of the German American community to which the New Yorker StaatsZeitung appealed. Stieglitz had even attended secondary school and received training in photography in Germany during the 1880s. Returning to New York in 1890, he recalled being devastated by the predominance of business over culture.*' Stieglitz joined New York’s Society of Amateur Photographers, but instead of a vibrant group of dedicated artists, he found his colleagues to be only dabblers or dull professionals. Hartmann, in praising Stieglitz’s work, advanced similar complaints, calling on photographers to commit to their medium asa specific art. He argued that if photography would use “its means according to its purposes, then the way is open for raising it from an amusement for dilettantes toa self-sufficient art.” To illustrate the way of self sufficient art, Hartmann singled out Stieglitz’s Winter—Fifth Avenue (Figure 4), a photograph taken during an 1893 blizzard, praising it because it had been made “completely technically without any retouching.” Hartmann based his early praise of Stieglitz on the photographer’s use of the means specific to photography, his technical avoidance of handwork. As the critic developed his argument for straight photography, however, simply avoiding retouching was not enough to define photography as art; what had not been done could not constitute a positive achievement. For Hartmann, the urban setting of Winter—Fifth Avenue and the method of its making also came to be the essential components of its photographic artistry. Beginning with his praise for Stieglitz’s photographs of New York, Hartmann urged artistic photographers to adopt a new method and subject. Selfconsciously opposing reforming photographers like Riis, who wanted New York’s immigrant neighborhoods to assimilate established norms, Hartmann called for artistic photographs that would frame those same neighborhoods as picturesque and celebrate American identity as plural.

FIFTH AVENUE Hartmann, reviewing Stieglitz’s 1897 portfolio Picturesque Bits of New York and Other

Studies, extended his consideration beyond darkroom retouching to praise Stieglitz’s photographic process and method. Stieglitz did not pose subjects as a studio painter might but instead waited patiently (possibly “for years”) to make a single exposure at the exact moment when he found the composition’s components in chance alignment.*° Hartmann again commended Winter—Fifth Avenue for its “expression of an everyday occurrence of metropolitan life under special atmospheric conditions, rendered faithfully and yet with consummate art.” Describing the mundane scene depicted, Hartmann acknowledged the photograph might not seem pictorial to a painter. Yet precisely that difference from expressions in other media set it above other images in the portfolio, made it “more original and individual than the others because it reminds one of nothing else.”*4 Sarah Greenough, in her catalogue Alfred Stieglitz: The Key Set, speculates that Stieglitz turned his focus to urban scenes in response to Hartmann’s effusive praise.”

18 DEFINING STRAIGHT PHOTOGRAPHY

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The sparsely populated, mysterious street scene represented a departure from the image that had catapulted Stieglitz to the center of the international photography world, his 1887 photograph A Good Joke (Figure 5), depicting a group of laughing peasant children in Venice, which had won first prize in a contest judged by Peter Henry Emerson.2° Hartmann’s review celebrated the originality of Winter—Fifth Avenue but dismissed another of Stieglitz’s award-winning European photographs, The Letter Box (Figure 6), an image of two German peasant girls whose compositional techniques resembled those of A Good Joke. Hartmann deemed The Letter Box “merely a genre study, an attempt at storytelling that arouses no special interest.”*’ Winter—Fifth Avenue, in contrast, used the medium itself to turn a quotidian urban scene into an artistic expression impossible by any other means. Hartmann declared that photography’s new artistic direction, its “special interest,” would derive from original compositions and methods, rather than from replicating the narrative content of genre painting.

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DEFINING STRAIGHT PHOTOGRAPHY 19

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by President Woodrow Wilson to Ellis Island, focusing on “a young Swedish girl in her native costume [who] presented striking contrast to the Americanized sister in a neat tailor-made gown.”** Such reports demonstrated the visual power of assimilation, which changed the old exterior markers of identity as immigrants turned into citizens. Changes in dress on the part of immigrants, in addition to the tests for health and literacy they had to undergo, confirmed that appearance alone was no longer a sufficient basis for judging foreign strangers. The photographer Stieglitz, in a famous review of the 1913 Armory Show (which, perhaps not coincidentally, was published on the same day and in the very newspaper where the Ellis Island story appeared), urged audiences to cease their “habitual worship of eternal repetitions of mere externals of people,” and counseled artists to avoid doing what the photographer could do better.*” As photography gained widespread acceptance, caricature, once a primary genre for representing physiognomy, competed with other ways of recording appearance.” For example, in late nineteenth-century England, Francis Galton, who coined the term “eugenics,” also invented composite photography. This technique layered photographic exposures of many different individuals to make a single blended portrait, revealing and abstracting the general physical appearance of a social or racial type, such as the criminal or the Jew. The layering system compensated for the impossibility, in an unmanipulated photograph, of emulating caricature, which depended on a quick schematic illustration of the personality that depended on the artist’s discerning analysis and amplification.”' If individuals could change from native costume to tailor-made gown, disguise the shape of their heads with a new hairstyle,

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60 ‘THE CARICATURIST'S WAY"

or alter the very features of their face with surgery, then their appearance could not be relied on to reveal information about them. What could replace it? Caricature, with its potential for abstraction, could be used to represent what lay beyond the “mere externals of people,” to make difference (of individuals or types) visible and comprehensible. Caricature and photography were opposites, relying on and providing different forms of information; in the New York Stieglitz circle this opposition became artistically and theoretically productive.

Introducing Picasso to New York In 1910, when some photographers who were members of Stieglitz’s Photo-Secession began to complain that the 291 gallery was no longer showing photography, their colleague Paul Haviland responded, in the pages of Camera Work, that photography could be sure of its position among the arts only by “standing the test of comparison with other media” and avoiding isolation. He encouraged photographers eager to advance their work to follow “the modern evolution of media.”°” Haviland and de Zayas, writing together, laid out their aesthetic theory in 4 Study of the Modern Evolution of Plastic Expression, a book published in 1913 by 291.°* Filled with footnotes citing Herbert Spencer and other theorists of biological and anthropological evolution, this long analytic text had a very different tone from that of the racy poetry of de Zayas’s 1915 manifesto but shared its methodology of uniting aesthetic evolution with positivist racial theory. De Zayas, while responding to anxieties about difference in the social sphere in his caricatures, also located debates about race, racial mixture, and eugenics at the center of his early modernist aesthetic theories. De Zayas began his theoretical practice when he left New York for Paris in rg10. There, after establishing himself as the European contact and scout for Stieglitz’s 291 gallery, he organized the 1911 Picasso exhibition.°* Having been introduced to Picasso by Paul Haviland’s brother, Frank, de Zayas quickly developed a friendship with his fellow speaker of Spanish. Although Picasso’s work was largely unknown in the United

States at this time, the one published article on the artist, written by the American humorist and poet Gelett Burgess, described him in stereotypical physiognomic terms that de Zayas may have been able to identify with: “Picasso is a devil. I use the term in the most complimentary sense, for he’s young, fresh, olive-skinned, black eyes and black hair, a Spanish type, with an exuberant, superfluous ounce of blood in him.”” Although the eugenicist Madison Grant did not explicitly cite Spain (as he had Mexico) as an example of the dangers of miscegenation, Picasso’s olive skin seemed to suggest something extra (Moorish patrimony?) in the artist’s European heritage.*° When Picasso’s exhibition at 291 opened on March 28, 1911, de Zayas contextualized the new analytic cubism for New Yorkers by displaying Picasso’s recent cubist drawings

“THE CARICATURIST’S WAY" 61

and watercolors in a retrospective mode and situating them in the pamphlet that accompanied the exhibition as the outgrowth of the artist’s earlier virtuosic representational works on paper. In his essay, de Zayas used his own medium, caricature, as an analogue and offered a culturally diverse set of historical precedents for Picasso’s unfamiliar forms, thus introducing the abstract works to New York as the fulfillment of art's evolutionary imperative.”’ This understudied episode in Picasso’s American recep-

tion reveals that the New York art world followed de Zayas in relating modern abstraction to biological evolution or devolution. De Zayas’s text was actually a translated and abridged version of an essay written for América, a Spanish-language New York-based magazine that drew on interviews with Picasso in Paris for an account of his theory and method.’® As de Zayas explained it, the artist first receives “a direct impression from external nature,” after which he “analyses, develops, and translates” that “direct impression.” De Zayas’s choice of verbs made the abstract painter a scientist or linguist, who takes these interim steps before he finally “executes [the work] in his own particular style.” This artistic process—beginning with a visual encounter of a subject and aiming to communicate the idea or emotion it provoked in the artist—resonated with de Zayas’s own caricature. (Reviewers, moreover, found Picasso’s work similarly humorous.) In fact, in the original Spanish essay, de Zayas explicitly related Picasso’s work to his own medium: “Let it be kept in mind that when I make a caricature I don’t say to the public: ‘this is how so-and-so is, but this is how I see so-and-so through my lens ofa caricaturist.””” The caricaturist and the modern artist, rather than express the physical world exactly, interpreted that world by seeing it through a medium-based personal lens. Besides relating Picasso’s cubist forms to those of caricature, de Zayas connected Picasso’s compositions formally to works of past cultures,°° arguing that what seemed radically innovative, such as deformations of conventional systems of perspective and shadow, had actually evolved from previous aesthetic developments, as art itself had evolved throughout history and across media and races.°! De Zayas advanced a model of modernist abstraction that linked all cultures cohesively. He urged audiences to consider Picasso’s works not only as the personal practice of a genius painter but also as the result of an evolutionary trend that bred aesthetic forms from many races.” Puzzled New York critics, at a loss to judge Picasso's works, relied on the evolutionary claims of de Zayas’s text, focusing on the use of “primitive” racialized forms. Many reviewers described the attributes of past cultures that could be found in Picasso’s work.

Although a few considered the drawings and watercolors on display evolutionary, most understood Picasso to negate the very idea of progress in his return to the primitive.°* The art critic Joseph Edgar Chamberlain (who emphasized Picasso’s Spanish origin by using the honorific Sefior) argued, “It would be an error to apply to Senor Picasso’s method any term that implied progress, or advance, or development. .. . [T]hese things of Picasso’s are neo-African.” Chamberlain, known for his support of Ashcan school painters, explained that the drawings were “supposed to be the result of a sort of geo-

62 ‘THE CARICATURIST’S WAY"

metrical obsession in the soul of the artist,” but he could see only “a rude, primitive attempt to represent the human and figure as blocks and slabs.” Picasso’s “neo-A fricanism,” he concluded (enlisting de Zayas’s language of personal and geometrical vision), “jars our ‘personal motives’ and we think it jars the personal motives of 9,999 out of every 10,000 Americans and Europeans.”® Shifting from formal to racial terms, Chamberlain argued that the works’ abstraction covertly referenced a return to Africa that would unsettle any American or European (implicitly white) viewer. Although Chamberlain’s reaction is distressingly racist, it does not misunderstand de Zayas’s text. The caricaturist, in introducing Picasso’s art, had attempted to minimize its jarring zewness by positioning it as an evolution. Thus what was unsettling in the importation of Picasso’s works to the United States was not the shock of the new, but the shock of racial and cultural difference, anxiety about which frequently surfaces in historical accounts of social experience in the modern city. Examining New York art criticism of the period, however, suggests that such anxiety also figured in the creation and reception of modern art. The aesthetics and social implications of an evolutionary composite modernism, though de Zayas wrapped them in the theoretical language of cosmopolitan refinement, nonetheless had the potential to upset New Yorkers’ assumptions about cultural and artistic progress.

“Absolute” and “Relative” Caricature As de Zayas became an influential critic of modern art and befriended its practitioners, he self-reflexively reformulated his own practice of caricature.® In a letter to Stieglitz from Paris in December 1910, the caricaturist noted that he was storing up “a tremendous amount of impressions,” and although he had not yet discovered how to channel them, he promised “they might fecundate in my brains and I will be able to deliver in a healthy way, or may be I will only get an indigestion [sic] and will have to vomit. In either case I will do something.”®’ A few months later, de Zayas confided to Stieglitz that despite feeling physically ill, he had begun caricatures for a “philosophical collection.”°* The use of the word philosophical to identify these new works suggests that de Zayas was working through an investigation of caricature’s truths and principles. When a mysterious stomach ailment forced him to return to New York in November 1911, de Zayas brought with him the ideas for a new method of abstract caricature. The Exhibition of Caricatures, Absolute and Relative opened at 291 on April 8, 1913, soon after the February opening of the landmark New York Armory Show, an event that exposed many Americans to European modern art for the first time. In his newspaper review of the Armory Show, Stieglitz (who participated directly only by lending the works of artists in his collection, including Picasso’s Standing Female Nude) dis-

tinguished between the aims of photography and the other arts and celebrated the ‘THE CARICATURIST’S WAY" 63

“painters and sculptors who decline to go on doing what the camera does better.”®? To drive home the power of the camera to displace those artists and audiences who were content with strictly representational work, Stieglitz mounted his own retrospective, showing “the straightest kind of straight photography” at 291 during the monthlong Armory Show.”” The next exhibition at 291—of abstract postcubist studies by Francis Picabia (de Zayas’s friend, who had become the controversial star of the Armory Show as the only French artist to attend the event)—amazed New York audiences.’! These

two shows, of American straight photography and European abstract painting, were followed, and hybridized, by the premiere of de Zayas’s new mode of caricature. Stieglitz called Picabia’s and de Zayas’s shows “the last words of abstraction in plastic form. ...

Heaven knows what the future has in store for us. It is all very wonderful and yet very

logical and very sane, although to most people the quintessence of insanity.”’? In mounting exhibitions of photography, abstract modern painting, and caricature, Stieglitz implied that a new logic linked these diverse works. De Zayas set out to image and explain that new logic in his show, where eighteen charcoal caricatures were divided equally between the absolute and relative modes announced by the exhibition’s title. Each group of nine representational “relative” drawings and nine abstract “absolute” works used the same materials (charcoal and paper) and had the same dimensions (just over twenty-four by eighteen inches). By relating the two approaches to caricature in size and materials, de Zayas presented the new works as an evolutionary investigation of the true expressive potential of his medium. De Zayas theorized his new works in the pamphlet accompanying the exhibition,

titled “Caricature: Absolute and Relative,” that was also printed twice in Camera Work.’* Focusing largely on his new abstract absolute mode, de Zayas explained the process by which he could represent the invisible (things beyond externals) objectively in visual form. His drawings were based in his long practice, as a caricaturist, of what he called his experimental analysis, by which he had determined that “the facial expressions and the expressions of the body of a man reveal only his habits, his social customs, never or at any rate very seldom, his psychological self, and absolutely never his specific value, place or significance in relation to existing things.””* De Zayas, a self-reflexive critic of his own artistic practice, argued that he had been forced to develop his style because traditional drawing focused only on the material self (the externals of the body) and could represent only limited components of individuality, so that the caricaturist had to repeat himself constantly. A new mode of caricature, focused on the spirit as well as on physical matter and on the very “idea of man,” would create wider and more

meaningful opportunities.” How could this absolute caricature be achieved? How could de Zayas’s medium evolve to represent the invisible visually?

Matter and spirit were inextricably linked, de Zayas explained, and thus both must be captured in any complete representation of an individual. Yet because a subject's body and soul “constitute two different entities,” the caricaturist could not represent them in the same manner.”° Previous caricaturists had tried, forcing feelings and emo-

64 ‘THE CARICATURIST'S WAY"

tions into “concrete form” through grimaces or outsize smiles, but modern art opened the door toa more complete representation by means of “material equivalents—abstract form.”’’ Acknowledging the limitations of mapping signs of difference on the body, de Zayas offered the new abstraction, counterintuitively, as the method for representing the true composite nature of modern individuality. How exactly were abstract caricatures to reveal composite identity? De Zayas explained his theory in his essay on the exhibition, developing it coherently in a series of numbered subpoints. His work visualized “(1) The spirit of man by algebraic formula; (2) His material self by geometrical equivalents; (3) and his initial force by trajectories within the rectangle that encloses the plastic expression and represents life.””* In this statement de Zayas referenced no specific works, but it is possible to discern how he represented the three components in the drawings, exemplifying the new abstract mode of “absolute” caricature. (1) The new method called first for the use of algebraic symbols: spirit, which could be represented only by the “abstract equivalents” of mathematics.’” The art historian Douglas Hyland has investigated these equations and concluded that the complexity of the algebraic formulas used in each portrait corresponded to de Zayas’s judgment of the complexity of the subject’s intellect.” For example, the convoluted algebraic formula used in the caricature of Stieglitz corresponded to his speculative intellectual nature (Figure 21). A caricature of Theodore Roosevelt, representing his spirit with an equation that reduced to zero, drew on mathematics to insult the former president (Figure

22). The equations are occasionally nonsense when they are interpreted strictly as mathematics. (In the case of Roosevelt, de Zayas even made a mistake in his algebra, inverting the numerator and denominator of his fraction, that was quickly pointed out by a reviewer of the 1913 show.) Better at caricature than at mathematics, de Zayas developed an idea of algebra as an “abstract equivalent.” (The second word of that phrase would surface again in Stieglitz’s 1922-35 series of cloud photographs.) De Zayas’s ex-

pressions of abstract mathematics opposed phrenology and physiognomy, whose numerical systems mapped the physical measurements of the head and the body to the psychological inner self. De Zayas’s theoretical justification of his symbolic method resisted the pressure to regulate immigration by national quotas based on simple mathematical ratios by using complex formulas to represent the individual spirit abstractly. (2) De Zayas placed his second element—caricature’s traditional role in representing the material self—squarely between his two abstracted elements. This representational component, ostensibly straightforward, has proved the most perplexing for art historians. Where in the image Alfred Stieglitz (Figure 21), for example, can we see the physical body? In the glasses found in the pair of darkened circles at the center? In the mustache implicit in the striped triangle in the lower left? In fact, de Zayas provided more clues for A/fred Stieglitz than for other abstract caricatures in his memoir of the 1940s, where he recalled the inspiration for this, the first of his radically abstract works. The composition had come to him when he was traveling

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back to the United States in 1911. Stopping in London to study the ethnographic collections at the British Museum, he saw an object from Pukapuka (an isolated island in the central Pacific) that the museum label identified as a “trap for catching souls” (Figure 23).°! The circles of rope and their use, de Zayas wrote, reminded him of Stieglitz both “physically” and “spiritually,” suggesting the theory of abstract caricature. Scholars have taken de Zayas’s account literally, but given the artist's own commentary on abstraction from nature and formal appropriation—for example, in the case of Picasso—we must look at Alfred Stieglitz, not as a direct copy of the Pukapukan spirit catcher, but as its translation, by “philosophical” abstraction, into the native language of caricature. The abstract caricature may bear a stronger physical resemblance to the Pukapukan spirit catcher than to Stieglitz (even though the catcher too has been modified).** That likeness has led the art historian Willard Bohn to generalize de Zayas’s narrative about the origin of his abstract caricature. Bohn argues that because the drawing depicted Stieglitz, using the spirit catcher as an intermediate step in that depiction, each ensuing caricature must also represent the abstraction of an object de Zayas considered a physical and spiritual equivalent of the person. This approach hampers the interpretation of the de Zayas images for which no intermediary object seemed to exist. Bohn calls them hermetic—and that characterization applies to most of the abstract caricatures. Moreover, Bohn’s interpretation removes the subject’s physical body from the absolute caricatures despite de Zayas’s explicit claim that the portraits integrated matter and spirit.

‘THE CARICATURIST’S WAY" 67

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spirit catcher, but also to a relative caricature of Stieglitz he had made in 1912, titled Laccoucheur d’idées (Figure 24). Both relative and absolute caricatures attempted to show Stieglitz’s fecund relationship to ideas and souls, and both used light and dark circles as formal elements. This formal and conceptual similarity suggests that de Zayas’s absolute caricatures were based on physical resemblances—often as rendered in his own antecedent caricatures—rather than intermediary objects. Visual analysis supports this interpretation. Although Bohn connects the teacup shape of Haviland’s abstract caricature (Figure 2s) to his role as the representative of his family’s porcelain business, the image is more compellingly linked to de Zayas’s previous caricatures of Haviland (Figures 26 and 27). The first relative charcoal drawing depicts the subject in profile, with the upper arms held awkwardly close to the torso but flapping out from the elbow, with the right hand bent downward as if boneless, the fingertips curled in toward the body. In the second relative drawing the arms form symmetrical curves that extend from the body and return at the hips, each hand slipped into a pocket. The resemblances suggest that de Zayas’s abstract caricatures depict Haviland’s body (perhaps shaped vaguely like a teacup) as distilled in earlier caricatures. The absolute abstract caricature of the journalist and Photo-Secession intimate Agnes Meyer also closely resembles one that de Zayas drew several years earlier, with

68 ‘THE CARICATURIST'S WAY"

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the curving line at right in the abstract caricature mimicking the curve of Meyer’s back in the prior work (Figure 28 and Figure 29).*° Finally, reading de Zayas’s two modes of

caricature in juxtaposition suggests that 7wo Friends, with its unnamed subjects, isan abstraction of the relative caricature Rodin and Steichen; the two works have similar

semicircular eyes at upper right and a zigzag beard at lower left (Figures 30 and 31).*4 Perceiving this formal resemblance is vital to understanding de Zayas’s caricature. His high abstraction of spirit retained the representative elements of bodies, making his subjects hybrids of the material fact and the abstract idea. (3) The final, most complex component of de Zayas’s theory of caricature was the

simplest in graphic representation: “the initial force” that “binds the spirit and the matter together and makes them actuate.” This force took form as a line representing a subject’s path through life that also, de Zayas explained, “related to the evolution of humanity,” mapping the progress of individuals in relation to that of all humanity. In de Zayas’s caricature of Stieglitz, for example, a vertical line rises up, cutting dramati-

cally through the center of the image. This upward line of “initial force” suggests Stieglitz’s continual evolution. De Zayas linked the compositional work of this evolutionary line with chemistry; it described the combination reaction that bound spirit

“THE CARICATURIST’S WAY" 71

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and body together and resulted in a new “third definite psychological or metaphysical entity.” Simple lines represented the more general phenomenon of “universal progress” and unified the composite individual by bonding the representational and the abstract, matter and spirit, body and soul.» De Zayas traced the origins of his abstract absolute caricature to his previous study of “universal progress” in the arts of “primitive races.” Although in 1940 he identified a specific ethnographic work (the Pukapukan spirit catcher) as his formal source of inspiration, he made a more conceptual link when first describing his new caricatures. “Primitive” arts, he wrote in his exhibition pamphlet of 1913, represented abstractly what early peoples took to be “supernatural elements” external to the individual, elements that modern science has proved exist naturally in the individual. De Zayas’s absolute caricature was inspired by ethnological accounts of envisioning the invisible,

but he translated them into mathematical and chemical equations to represent the modern individual. He claimed that his practice used contemporary science to give abstract form to animist spiritual ideals, creating modern demonstrations of those ideals rather than copying primitive morphologies, and pursuing a practice combining such ideals scientifically tor the modern age. De Zayas drew his language of abstraction from mathematics, chemistry, and ethnography as well as from his own prior art, creating a hybrid form of symbolic knowledge. Unlike other modern artists who pursued abstraction for its formal purity, de Zayas made it a tool for representing and reintegrating the hybridity of modern identity and experience. De Zayas’s composite caricatures effected a constructive miscegenation of modes of depiction—“primitive” and modern, abstract and representational, material and symbolic—to go beyond externals in visualizing an individual’s coherence of body and spirit.

MIXING PHOTOGRAPHIC COCKTAILS De Zayas’s marriage of opposing modes of depiction spread across media in the Stieglitz circle to influence photography. Stieglitz’s 1915 photograph of de Zayas between an African mask and a Picasso etching is only one of the many portraits Stieglitz created about that time (see Figure 17). Sarah Greenough has suggested that during this period Stieglitz became newly interested in photographic portraiture, a project I propose began when de Zayas began his new abstract mode of caricature. Two of Stieglitz’s 1913 photographs, one of de Zayas in front of his representational charcoal caricature John Marin and Alfred Stieglitz (Figure 32) and another of the painter John Marin in front of the same drawing (Figure 33), suggest how caricature could open new ways of seeing and new methods of photographic practice. Greenough links the compositional technique of Stieglitz’s earlier portraits, such as the 1912 photograph of Arthur Dove (Figure 34), in which a single figure emerges out of a dark field, to that of photographic pioneers from the 1840s such as David Octavius Hilland Robert Abramson. Stieglitz, she argues, by invoking medium-specific precedents, intended these portraits to differentiate be-

76 ‘THE CARICATURIST'S WAY’

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tween photography and other forms of portraiture.8° The two photographs taken in front of de Zayas’s drawing John Marin and Alfred Stieglitz, however, can be seen asa step in another direction, toward composite portraits created by combining the human subject with an expressive image in another medium. In competition with other forms of portraiture, specifically caricature, Stieglitz explored a new representational strategy for his medium of straight photography. In his photographic portraits with caricatures, Stieglitz used the background plane as an active layer of nonphotographic representation. For example, Stieglitz positioned de Zayas’s head in the frame so as to locate him between his two caricatures, of Marin and Stieglitz, and create a new trio of friends. In contrast, Stieglitz posed the painter John Marin leaning rather awkwardly to his left to locate his body in the center of the frame and his head directly in front of his own caricature; his photographic portrait replaced its charcoal image. Although Stieglitz continued to photograph against dark backgrounds, he also pursued the new strategy of these layered photographs, systematically juxtaposing portrait subjects and works of modern art, such as the 1915 portraits of the painters Charles Demuth and Alfred Maurer in front of Picasso’s 1912 drawing Head ofa Man and portraits of his daughter Kitty and of 291’s secretary, Marie J. Rapp, directly in front of Picasso's 1909 Head of a Woman (Figure 35). Occasionally Stieglitz’s subjects

‘THE CARICATURIST’S WAY" 77

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posed before a work that was pointedly their own, as in a 1915 photograph of the French painter Francis Picabia, sitting directly in front of his 1914 painting This Has to Do with Me (C est de moi qw il sagit) when it was on view at 291.5’ Departing from conventions

dramatizing the act of creation by showing painters at an easel ex plein air or in their studio, or even positioning an artist beside a canvas, Stieglitz framed individuals directly in front of a finished artwork on view in his gallery. Unlike pictorial photography, which encouraged painting on the negative, Stieglitz’s new method amalgamated photographic and nonphotographic modes of representation, including two-dimensional artworks as an expressive field in a “straight” representation. Negotiating with caricature, Stieglitz expanded photography to render aspects of personality invisible in merely external views of people, symbolically linking the subject of his portrait to the abstract artwork of the background plane in ways that signified beyond authorship. Stieglitz found a new photographic “cocktail,” enabling him to create complex portraits in his “straight” representational medium by mixing in two-dimensional abstractions.

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Africa and Europe, the potential for constructive miscegenation of black and white, to the center of the gallery and the new world of art.!°°

The Passing of Faith in the Melting Pot In March 1915, four months after the African art show closed, de Zayas, Haviland, and Agnes Meyer launched a new journal, conceived as an experimental alternative and supplement to Camera Work (in which de Zayas would publish his racy manifesto). They named their publication after Stieglitz’s gallery, and Stieglitz himself acted as the fourth editor. Stieglitz later recalled that his early enthusiasm for the journal 297 had sprung from his long-held hope for an American magazine “devoted to true satire” and from a desire to provide a venue for de Zayas and other younger artists to circulate and develop their work.'°? Not everyone in the Stieglitz circle was amused by 2gr. Sadakichi Hartmann wrote to Stieglitz after reading the journal “for the first and last time” in May 1915: “I must confess I never expected to see such an accumulation of balderdash, bombast, rodomontade, gallimaufry, salmagundi and ‘T scratch you on the back if you tickle me’ rant and prattle under one cover. Die sind ja keine blaue Reiter! No doubt, your intention was to show how many art bums, whirling dervishes, she apes, navel philosophers and free lunch devotees you could induce at one time to sit down and take themselves seriously.”"'° Hartmann was right: the heart of the avant-garde was no longer innocent, ideal, and spiritual, as that of the German artists who called themselves Der Blaue Reiter had been. The composite modernists no longer aimed at pure art but were devoted to seemingly irrational juxtapositions and hybrid forms. Picabia drove home the death of German idealism by using Gothic script to form the word Ideal in his now famous mechanomorphic drawing of Stieglitz, published in the July-August 1915 issue of 297 (Figure 39). In the portrait he represents Stieglitz asa combination of camera (in black) and automobile gearshift and break (in red). Because the camera’s bellows droop, the gearshift is set in neutral, and the brake is engaged, critics have interpreted the image as a symbolic portrayal of Stieglitz as impotent and

exhausted.''' In the image Picabia accused Stieglitz of remaining stuck in the dead European past by continuing to strive for the ideal—exactly what Hartmann had accused Stieglitz of killing off by betraying his German idealist roots with a bunch of art bums.'’* The machine portraits Picabia published in 297 signaled a triumph of “the caricaturist’s way’; their publication as caricatures in a satirical periodical also refocuses debates about the drawing’s supposed animosity or celebration of Stieglitz. In Picabia’s machine caricature of Stieglitz, the flaccid camera bellows do not attain the “Ideal” because photography itself could not achieve that goal. As de Zayas put it in his proclamation “Photography is not Art” and in his response to Stieglitz’s question, “What is 291?” “[291 is] Not an Idea or an Ideal, but something more potent, a Fact.”''* Learning

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Figure 39 Francis Picabia, /ci, cest ici Stieglitz, as published in 297, nos. 5-6, July-August 1915. Courtesy of the International Dada Archive, Special Collections, University of Iowa.

from de Zayas, Picabia meant his drawing as a corrective, a reminder to Stieglitz and other photographers of the caricaturist’s claim that the camera could capture fact and material truth but could not depict the ideal. With the transition to 297 and the death of modern art in Europe, the singular “Tdeal” had to be abandoned for composites made from what Caffin had identified as the objective truths of (white) representational photography and (black) abstract caricature. The machine drawing of Stieglitz as a camera with a flaccid bellows appeared in the same issue as de Zayas’s manifesto on the hybrid breeding of American modern art with which this chapter opened. That text, like Picabia’s caricatures, figures sex as both humorous double entendre and part of an evolutionary process of natural selection.!!* Picabia, in denying Stieglitz full sexual potency in his drawing, as de Zayas had in his article, complimented de Zayas by depicting him as a sexual-mechanical hybrid in De Zayas! De Zayas! (Plate 4). The subject in Picabia’s image is not a discrete mechanical object; Picabia departed here from his other machine portraits in creating a more elaborate and obscure composite. His diagram constructs de Zayas from automobile parts, including an electrical and crank system, that connect to the strangely erect empty corset at the heart and the sex.'”? If this engine were actually to start, the female undergarment (and any woman inhabiting it) would be pulled in. The inscription at upper right, “Jai vu/et cest toi qw il sagit,” identifies this seducing machine as de Zayas and suggests that the caricaturist was indeed able to mate with America and produce a new art as his offspring. Historians have read as biographical the second inscription on the de Zayas portrait, “De Zayas! De Zayas! /Je suis venu sur les rivages du Pont-Euxin,” below, over a schematic rendering of the sun on the sea. The very syntax of the quotation evokes classical epic. William Homer traces the words to Ovid and argues that both Picabia and de Zayas felt sorrow as exiles in America, isolated from their native lands as Ovid was in Tomis.!!° Willard Bohn, however, traces the quotation to Xenophon’s Anabasis, locating Picabia’s “De Zayas! De Zayas!” as a response to Xenophon’s soldiers’ joyful exclamations of “Thalassa, Thalassa!” a reference available to Picabia in the pink pages of the Petit Larousse he is known to have used to generate titles. Bohn thus argues that Picabia welcomed de Zayas as Xenophon’s soldiers welcomed the sight of the Black Sea, as a sign that they were near home.''” This quotation from Xenephon also circulated in Jules Verne’s appropriation of the Anabasis, his 1883 book Kéraban-le-tétu, which Picabia—fascinated by the writings of Raymond Roussel, who was himself obsessed with Jules Verne—may have known. Verne’s book places the quotation in the narrative of a humorous, if at times perilous, journey more closely paralleling the experiences of Picabia and de Zayas than those of ancient Greek voyagers. Kéraban-le-tétu frames quotations from Xenephon in a series of confusions involving seduction and burlesque, recounting the tale ofa very stubborn merchant, Kéraban, who, determined not to pay the tax on crossing the Bosporus, evades the collectors by traveling all the way around the Black Sea, incurring far greater expenses on the way. The text repeats many incidents

‘THE CARICATURIST’S WAY" 87

from Xenophon’s Avabasis, including the exclamation “Le Mer! Le Mer!,” but in Verne’s

book the party’s happiness is generated by proximity, not to home, but to the end of one absurd journey and the beginning of another. Even if Picabia did not know Verne’s text, his caricature of de Zayas can productively be considered both a reference to alienation and homecoming and the use ofan ancient source to convey the black humor of an absurd modern journey in a perilous time. In August 1915 de Zayas and Picabia took their own absurd journey, to call on Stieglitz

at Lake George, in New York, where he was vacationing. Driving wildly from New York City, they arrived at two o'clock in the morning to propose a new “Modern Gallery,” acommercial exhibition space.'!* In announcing the new gallery, de Zayas allowed that Stieglitz’s 291 had “demonstrated that it is possible to avoid commercialism by eliminating it,” but he argued that Stieglitz’s demonstration would “be infertile” unless it was followed by a “commercial intervention” that would force “the producers and consumers of art into a relation of mutual service.”'!? De Zayas protested behind the scenes against Stieglitz’s reservations that such a gallery aimed “only to fight commercialism with commercialism,” writing to Haviland that in contrast to 291, the Modern Gallery would feed artists “with something more positive than hot air.”’*° As the language of fertility and fecundity extended into the display and marketing of art, the caricaturist and the photographer grew increasingly estranged. Perhaps to reassure Stieglitz of his own fecundity following the attacks of de Zayas’s manifesto and Picabia’s caricature, the next edition of 297, published in October as the Modern Gallery opened, cleverly printed an enlargement of Stieglitz’s favorite photograph, The Steerage (Plate 2). An essay on that work by Haviland expanded on the sexualized relationship in it of man and machine. Calling the mechanical camera the photographer's “daughter born without a mother,” Haviland explained that the two depended on each other, for the superior machine lacked thought and needed man’s direction. It was “through their mating” that “they complete one another.” One of “the fruits of this union” of man and machine was the photograph.’”! The fertile photographer joined with his mother/daughter camera to produce a hybrid photographic off spring, Lhe Steerage.

Haviland’s symbolic and sexualized celebration of Stieglitz as the embodiment of the machine age, however, was in tension with de Zayas’s more restrained praise. De Zayas described The Steerage, which, he mentioned pointedly, had been taken nearly a decade earlier, in 1907, as Stieglitz’s “verification of a fact.” By thus representing the objective exterior world, photography, “in which the genius of man leaves to the machine its full power of expression,” allowed art to break with conventional beauty. A fter praising Stieglitz for his wisdom in simply getting out of the way of the machine, de Zayas added a compliment: “Stieglitz comprises the history of photography in the United States. ‘Camera Work’ bears witness to this.” An ensuing letter from de Zayas to Stieglitz suggests that the photographer (possibly now bothered additionally by the increasingly independent Modern Gallery) found this acclaim insulting, because it

88 ‘THE CARICATURIST'S WAY"

pointedly removed the man from any “fecund” role in relation to this machine and positioned him as already history. Only de Zayas’s side of the discussion is documented,

so any conclusions must be drawn from the caricaturist’s attempt to appease his photographer patron: “I don’t see how my meaning could be misunderstood. When I say ‘Stieglitz represente l’histoire de la photographie aux Etats Unis. “Camera Work” en est le teémoignage.’ (I copy the French text because I wrote it originally in French and Iam not responsible for the translation.) By that phrase I meant that the work you have done for Photography represents the history of Photography in the United States. ... I don’t believe I was wrong in saying that you represent or comprise the history of photography in the United States.”!*? It seems unlikely that Stieglitz was asking for recognition for others. Was he dismayed to be consigned to history, annoyed to be depicted, yet again, as a flaccid machine, stalled in its fecundity? When Picabia’s wife, Gabrielle Buffet, arrived in New York in October 1915, 291 faced

further challenges. Just as the Modern Gallery opened, she came to force her husband to return to his military mission, buying Caribbean sugar for French forces (the original reason Picabia himself had returned to New York in May 1915). The Picabia scholar William Camfield has speculated that because Buffet tried to “shield” her husband from punishment for desertion, Picabia caricatured her as an automobile windshield in one of his final mechanomorphic portraits, Gabrielle Buffet: She Corrects Manners Laughingly (Elle corrige les moeurs en riant), of 1915 (Figure 40).'*° But she also acted as a shield in de Zayas’s sense of the term—a “capote,” or prophylactic, against her husband’s productive mating with America. When Picabia had gone and relations with Stieglitz continued to fray, de Zayas struggled alone to impregnate America with his particular hybrid strain of modernism. Sarah Greenough has suggested that de Zayas, by asserting that only a Cortez-inspired mating of foreigners would produce true American art, drove Stieglitz, “confident in the ability of his countrymen,” to find authentic American artists to prove de Zayas wrong. “Perhaps not coincidentally,” she argues, Paul Strand and Georgia O’Keefte debuted at 291 soon after the publication of de Zayas’s manifesto, in the spring of 1916.!7+

De Zayas had returned to New York, “retreating, and with all the honors of war,” yet the effects of the conflict in Europe followed him to the United States. With war raging in Europe, many called for isolationism, as well as racial and cultural conformity in the United States; a new nationalism swept the country once America entered the war, in 1917. The overriding desire for isolation, homogenization, and unity had far-reaching results, which included the passage (in 1917, 1918, 1921, and 192 4) of increasingly restric-

tive federal laws governing immigration. As the American historian John Higham writes, “With the passing of faith in the melting pot there perished the ideal of nationality as an unfinished, steadily improving, cosmopolitan blend.”!”? For de Zayas national diversity indicated, not fragmentation, but the raw material for breeding a new coherent, robust modern art. De Zayas’s New York modernism was defined precisely by its heterogeneous composite hybridized nature. He had opened the door to formally

“THE CARICATURIST’S WAY" 89

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menial labor (Figure 4.4). The photograph, with its negative critique, aimed to envision the absence of productive spirituality in America; in the early 1920s, Stieglitz also attempted to use photography positively to create shared spiritual values that would free Americans from the manipulations of industry. Stieglitz recounted the ways his photographs, especially his cloud studies, might and did communicate with viewers on a spiri-

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how a mechanical art form might engage with the culture of industrial standardization in creating a new modern, syncretic spiritual practice. In the mid-1910s, critics, from the experimental poet Vachel Lindsay to the Harvard psychology professor Hugo Munsterberg, began to study film’s appeal and to explain its ability to connect with audiences. Lindsay described cinema as an easily read universal, symbolic pictorial language—a modern hieroglyphic—whereas Munsterberg noted how the structure of the motion picture transparently mimicked human mental processes, with shifting attention visualized in cuts, close-ups, and flashbacks." These early idealistic notions of film as a universal means of communication were influential in the United States during the 1910s and 1920s, though they are now largely eclipsed by later European theories of cinema as a culture industry supporting the industrialized and mechanized market.’” The promise of film as a universal language may have remained unfulfilled for the early critics and for Stieglitz, but if we take their idealization seriously, it is possible to see in it another discourse that entwines photography’s popularization with spiritualization. In arguing that cinema and its aesthetics inspired Stieglitz in the 1920s, I depart from the pervasive view that his interwar circle opposed such new technologies. Wanda Corn, in her study of what she calls the second Stieglitz circle, cites a passage from Stieglitz’s correspondence to argue that he turned away from technical innovation. In the summer of 1924, after his photographs had entered the MFA, Stieglitz complained in a letter, “As longas there are dividends & the ‘help’ is happy owning Fords & Victrolas & Radios & can go to movies of which Eastman has the film monopoly why the Hell should any one care about the quality of a postal?”’’ This passage has been widely quoted, but the question at the end of it has been left unanswered. To understand how Stieglitz opposed both industrialists and the “help,” one must know that it was Stieglitz himself who cared, deeply, about the quality of “a postal”—the unit of precut, inexpensive photographic cardstock offered by the Eastman Kodak Company.'* It was, in fact, with the postal that Stieglitz made his own experiments in mass production. By printing his cloud photographs on postal stock, he hoped to create a limitless quantity of prints from his negatives so that his images could circulate like “a popular magazine, or even a daily paper.” Although this project, like his films, was never realized, Stieglitz’s aims (and his failure to achieve them) demonstrate how his wish to disseminate his images to an audience devoted to Fords, Victrolas, radios, and the movies shaped his artistic process during this era. Fundamentally, he objected, not to the medium of film, but to what it seemed destined to communicate in a system of commercial standardization, epitomized by the practices of Eastman and Ford. Like many interwar cultural critics, Stieglitz critiqued the way industrial monopolies, in alliance with the forces of antiimmigrant and anti-Semitic nativism (which Ford championed), threatened to reduce American individuals to the homogenous, passionless, productive citizenry satirized by Spiritual America.'® In asking about the postal, Stieglitz posed a larger question: would photography’s popular appeal be used to create an American culture united under Fordist standardization or syncretic spiritualization?

THE PROMISE OF CINEMA 99

In his new alliance with Coomaraswamy, Stieglitz reformulated de Zayas’s constructive miscegenation as a transcultural spirituality, attempting to shift composite modernism into the realm of the spirit. Coomaraswamy’s role in making modernist photography a spiritual art explains the surprisingly radical collection at the MFA; perhaps more important, it also opens a new way to read Stieglitz’s serial photographs in a global history ofart, recovering the ways that modernist breaks and medium specificities were

initially informed and understood by their continuities with other cultures and art forms. Stieglitz’s mission to create popular art with American spirit responded to nativists’ calls in the 1920s for a national culture but also drew on Coomaraswamy’s comparative studies of metaphysics to create artwork that was a spiritual composite.

A Series of Perfect Pictures Stieglitz’s direct engagement with film had begun by 1912, the year he published, in Camera Work, Sadakichi Hartmann’s “Esthetic Significance of the Motion Picture,” one of the earliest theorizations of cinema as art. Hartmann, who had defined straight photography a decade earlier, began his essay on the aesthetics of film by noting its popularity: “It contains some element that appeals to the masses, and whenever I see one of these auditoriums packed to standing room only, I become conscious that I am in the presence of something that touches the pulse-beat of time.” In the modern world, an artwork’s appeal rested on some ““buck-eye’ element” in it that “the average mind can seize.” The “motion picture possesses [such an element] to an almost alarming degree.”"” Traditional fine art faced daunting challenges with a modern audience: it required “too much intellectual exertion,” cost too much for the middle class to buy, and could be seen in museums only during the hours when most people were at work. Ignoring upper-class prejudice against the cinema, Hartmann deemed film a medium “in harmony with our present life’s philosophy” that also had the potential to become “truly artistic” if it could give up artifice and simply “reveal action in a series of perfect pictures.”'®

No one in the U.S. avant-garde fulfilled the promise of that “truly artistic” and popular “series of perfect pictures” until Stieglitz began photographing O’Keeffe, when she traveled to New York from Texas in 1917. From the beginning, Stieglitz fantasized about the work he would do, writing O’Keefte just days after she had visited him at 291: “I think I could do thousands of things of you—a life work to express you.””” Stieglitz did not imagine waiting for the single summary snap, as he had earlier, in taking Winter— Fifth Avenue, nor did his perfect pictures aim to reveal action, as Hartmann had proposed. Instead, Stieglitz, in his “composite portrait” of O’Keefte, responded to a challenge like the one that had motivated de Zayas in his abstract caricatures: he combined modes of depiction, devising a new artistic method to represent O’Keeffe’s complex

100 THE PROMISE OF CINEMA

identity as a modern individual. In my own account of this represented identity, I draw on studies of its gendered dimension but concentrate on Stieglitz’s efforts in the series to redefine photography as a medium that (like film) could appeal to the masses. The section that follows, focusing on how Stieglitz imagined his photographs connecting directly and transparently with viewers, also considers the complex shifting stakes of what he aimed to communicate.

YOU DON’T SEE THEM: IMMEDIATE IMAGES Stieglitz quickly sent O’Keeffe some of his photographs of her, including two prints of her hands (most likely Figures 45 and 46).*° He explained, “Everyone who sees me working at the prints is struck by the hands—I know how you feel when you look at them—you don’t see them—can’t|—]it is the feeling in them—the marvelous expressiveness of them—I could make 1000 photographs of them—all different—yet all the same.”*! O’Keefte, however, was not the only one unable to “see” these photographs. Framing his images of her, Stieglitz divorced seeing from looking to argue that any viewer of his new work would perceive only the feeling, not the physical medium of the photograph. Writing to his old friend Hartmann in 1919, Stieglitz explained: “All who have seen the work say it is a revelation.—It is straight. No tricks of any kind.—No humbug.—No sentimentalism.—Not old nor new.—It is so sharp that you can see the pores in a face—& yet it is abstract.—All say that they don’t feel they are conscious of any medium.”** Stieglitz proudly listed the contradictory qualities of his new photographic series. The work was technically “straight,” created mechanically and without tricks, but it was also a revelation, something disclosed by divine or supernatural means. It existed outside of time, “not old nor new.” It was simultaneously a “sharp” representation of the bodily (“pores”) and an abstraction. Most important, with these paradoxical

attributes photography itself disappeared for viewers, who experienced the image unconscious of any medium. The specificity and abstraction of these “straight” photographic portraits combined, according to Stieglitz, to produce unmediated pictures. The historian of photography Anne McCauley links Stieglitz’s 1919 image, first exhibited and donated to the MFA as The White Hand, to an emerging cinematic use of close-ups of parts of bodies to communicate important details of the plot (Figure 47).”° In it, O’Keeffe’s pose, left hand pressed between breasts, replicates the 1917 portrait Stieglitz had sent O'Keeffe, a repeated gesture that suggests a shared language of pantomimed symbols.”4 In The White Hand, O’Keeffe’s right breast hovers near the bottom

of the print, and her robe echoes its vertical edges, compressing the frame around her as if the subject self-consciously acknowledged the limits of the print. In the diffuse light and long exposure, her slightly blurred fingers and white robe appear to be the same color. Delicate shadows trace the edges of the composition’s elements, but scarcely indicate depth. The photograph’s whiteness, the subtle values and tones that attest to Stieglitz’s technical skill, becomes both field and ground; the image’s collapsed space

THE PROMISE OF CINEMA 101

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and its subject become identical to the picture plane. The cropping and the identity of the object with the picture plane that now seem to define the photograph’s modernist, self-reflexive medium specificity enabled Stieglitz’s imagined viewer to forget the medium entirely and consider the depiction as at once exactly representational and abstract (unmediated, as Munsterberg theorized the close-up in films). Charles Sheeler’s Side of White Barn, Doylestown (ca. 1917) provides another example

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of period conceptions of unmediated photography (Figure 48).”? Although the subjects of Sheeler’s and Stieglitz’s images differ greatly, Sheeler’s shares several elements with Stieglitz’s comparably sized White Hand: frontality, compressed plane, and technically virtuosic white tones. Side of White Barn, also part of a series, has been celebrated by scholars as “perhaps the first photograph in which the subject is absolutely identified with the picture plane.””° Critics in the 1920s recognized the correlation between the subject (side of barn) and the medium’s structure (the picture plane) in Sheeler’s photography, but they interpreted the link differently. In a 1923 review, the critic Forbes Watson claimed that Sheeler aimed to depict only “the fundamental character of the natural object and to permit the medium to interfere as little as possible with the spectator’s vision of the pictorial result.”*” That argument—that ideally the medium should not enter into the perceiving act of the viewer—strikingly parallels Stieglitz’s own earlier

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claims that viewers of his new photographs did not see the medium, suggesting that viewers in the late 1910s and 1920s perceived what we now define as a modern conscious-

ness of medium and its specificity (an identity of the object with the flat picture plane) as the element that enabled their unmediated relationship with the image.

IMMEDIACY AND IDENTITY Stieglitz explained to Hartmann the transparent quality of his photographs of O’Keefte by describing the experience of viewers who had seen them as a “revelation,” a word

with distinctly spiritual overtones.”° As for Sheeler, scholars have connected his straightforward technique in Side of White Barn with his commercial photographs of architecture, art, and products such as typewriters.”? That commercial practice set Sheeler off from the Stieglitz circle and allied him more closely with Walter Arensberg’s circleand Marius de Zayas, who employed Sheeler and exhibited his work at the Modern

Gallery (which had begun as a commercial offshoot of Stieglitz’s 291). De Zayas tried to associate Sheeler’s work with international currents of artistic modernism, calling

THE PROMISE OF CINEMA 105

the photographs evidence that “cubism exists in nature” and suggesting Sheeler was “influenced by Negro Art.”°? When period critics compared Sheeler with Picasso, however, they voiced relief at being able to recognize the photographer's subject—an iconic Pennsylvania agrarian building in the case of Side of White Barn.*' Sheelet’s photographs, set ina quintessentially American place (the rural landscape of Doylestown, in Bucks County), joined modernist art to the national vernacular and a folk art revival.** Indeed, the whitewash of the barn allows its board-and-batten surface to alternate for viewers between a modernist grid and Americana. While it seems unlikely that Sheeler repainted the barn himself, he is known to have whitewashed the interior of the Doylestown house before photographing it.** The color white unifies these photographs, the assumedly neutral modernist plane replacing the aesthetic atmosphere of urban, Rembrandtesque filth that Sadakichi Hartmann celebrated. De Zayas attempted to mix African art into Sheeler’s American modernism, but most other influential viewers of Sheeler’s photographs saw only a clean white barn covered by a traditional thrifty agrarian method (that even referenced the popular character Tom Sawyer). Sheeler’s work profited from its association with rustic Americana, and the artist’s presumed right to claim his share (he had been born in Philadelphia) of the nation’s celebrated colonial past. Stieglitz, in contrast, born in urban New Jersey to German Jewish immigrant parents, faced a more difficult task in securing the Americanness of his photographs. His 1921 catalogue introducing his O’Keefte photographs culminated in his famous autobiographical declaration: “I was born in Hoboken. Iam an American. Photography is my passion. The search for Truth my obsession.”** Though this proclamation is among Stieglitz’s most frequently quoted utterances, he did not claim nationality based on his birth until he was fifty-seven years old. The internationally renown photographer self-consciously attempted to locate himself as native born in a post— World War I art world and national culture increasingly hostile to immigrants (especially Jewish immigrants). The art historian Caroline Jones has identified Stieglitz’s obsessive “search for Truth” as a self-conscious move to ally himself with the American

philosophical tradition of pragmatism, but the pragmatism Stieglitz advanced was inflected by a spiritual and ethnic symbolism.” Stieglitz’s ally Waldo Frank had warned

that the pragmatists’ ideas could quickly turn into “cynical dogmas of utilitarian supineness,” but praised Stieglitz for investigating the mystical aspects of Truth that were his Jewish birthright.*° Several scholars have considered how the celebration of O’Keefte

as a woman artist by critics of the Stieglitz circle, including Frank and Paul Rosenfeld, marginalized and essentialized her and her artwork and how it also paralleled their celebration of Stieglitz as a Jew.’ Stieglitz—notably unobservant—was reluctant to take on the mantle they bestowed, identifying himself only as “American” and deeming “religion” obsolete in the note that followed his 1921 statement. Profoundly ambivalent about his ethnic heritage, he was under competing pressures from the nativist mainstream and from avant-gardists who celebrated him, his Truth, and his photographic practice as specifically Jewish.**®

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Identity is ambiguous in Stieglitz’s serial images of O’Keeffe, which he called a com-

posite portrait, echoing the phrase that the eugenicist Francis Galton had used for the compositions he made of the characteristic features of groups (from criminals and invalids to races and families) by layering the exposures of several portrait negatives to create a single print or a new plate with the image of a “general” type. The art historian Camara Dia Holloway has argued that photographs of O’Keeffe, such as The White Hand, represent Stieglitz’s attempt to “defuse the inherent instability of the meaning of whiteness” in racial terms.°? Holloway argues that Stieglitz, in photographing O’Keeffe repeatedly, exerted his own power by his controlling gaze and secured his own whiteness through O Keeffe’s.*° By departing decisively from Galton, however, arranging his photographs in series instead of combining them into the portrait of a “white type,” Stieglitz also left multiplicity and uncertainty encoded in the portrait. O’ Keeffe, as Stieglitz photographed her, fulfilled most of the visible requirements of nativists’ demands for racial “whiteness,” but in the hundreds of images he made, he also left strategic space for her ethnic and religious heritage—an Irish Catholic surname combined with Georgia after her Hungarian revolutionist grand father.*! Inverting Galton’s approach as well as the eugenicist’s delineation and enforcement of standards, Stieglitz’s created multiple images of O'Keeffe, “all different—yet all the same,” demonstrating through the series’ unmediated “revelation” that difference (in gender, ethnicity, or religion) might exist even in an American individual.”

STIEGLITZ AS SHOWMAN AND PROPHET Stieglitz’s 1921 exhibition (his first solo show since 1913) centered on forty-five of his new photographs of O’Keeffe. Displaying them in a section called “A Demonstration

of Portraiture,” Stieglitz identified them as “One Portrait.” He also separated that portrait into thematic sections—“A Woman,” “Hands,” “Feet,” “Hands and Breasts,” “Torsos, and “Interpretations’—that emphasize the links between his photographs and the intertitles used in films. Indeed, Stieglitz’s odd rubric for these photographs borrows the word demonstration from advertising that tries to prove a new technology both functional and useful to the public. Stieglitz’s statement in the catalogue for the show, moreover, tantalizingly blurred the line between his demonstration of artistic achievement and his social daring: “Some important prints of this period are not being shown, as I feel that the public is not quite ready to receive them.” Stieglitz’s provocative framing of the sexuality embodied in his photographs moved the modernist patron Mabel Dodge to call the photographer a “showman.”*? Several scholars have explored how Stieglitz’s photographs shaped the reception of O’Keeffe’s painting in intensely gendered and sexualized terms, but for Stieglitz himself, showmanship opened the possibility that his photographs would appeal to a popular audience.** His demonstration would prove the utility of his photographic portraiture to the public. Whereas the critic Paul Rosenfeld suggested that in his photographs of O’Keeffe’s

THE PROMISE OF CINEMA 107

hands Stieglitz had found “a symbol of himself,” Coomaraswamy located Stieglitz’s photographs “in the great tradition,” where “symbols are used correctly.’* Coomaraswamy’s assessment suggests how Stieglitz’s aim in using gestural symbols was not, or not only, esoteric personal expression but also popular appeal. In his 1921 statement Stieglitz,

responding to critics who found his photographs “essentially aristocratic and expensive,”

set out a new populist aim: “My ideal is to achieve the ability to produce numberless prints from each negative, prints all sufficiently alive, yet indistinguishably alike, and to be able to circulate them at a price not higher than that of a popular magazine, or even a daily paper.”*° In the same statement, however, Stieglitz continued to stress his avoidance of mechanized reproduction and to emphasize the preciousness of the photograph. Each print was at once an artistic problem to solve with exacting labor and an infinitely reproducible image. In fact, even as he planned photographs to sell toa popular audience, Stieglitz publicized the five-thousand-dollar fee he requested for “one of the photographs, a nude, one that was a unique impression with the plate destroyed.’*” The critic Henry McBride reported the situation and the price (roughly equivalent to that of an expensive painting in the period) and noted the public’s reaction: “Gracious Heavens! $5,000 for a mere photograph! And then everyone had to see the exhibition over again, the crowd around the nude being particularly dense.”** Although Stieglitz’s different pricing schemes seem contradictory—widely affordable and wildly expensive, populist and elitist—both were designed to get viewers in front of his images, to introduce them to photography’s own “buck-eye” element. The motion picture, expensive to create but inexpensive to view and consume, provided a model for uniting the specific, immiscible, straight photograph with the new ideal of universal media. In the early 1920s, Stieglitz struggled to find a new artistic direction and a persona that would appeal to the broadest audience, from aesthetic nativists to critics celebrating his Jewish spirituality. He began photographing clouds in 1922, titling his first series Music—A Sequence of Ten Cloud Photographs to ally the photographs with the motion of film as well as with music. By 1923, he had shifted the format of his series from nine-by-seven-inch prints to unenlarged (41/2 x 3'/2 in.) contact prints, which he first called Songs of the Sky and renamed Equivalents in 1925. Even as Stieglitz’s unmediated photography began to shift to an emotional and spiritual language of equivalence, he continued to aim for mass appeal. The roles of spiritual prophet avd commercial showman may seem antagonistic, but Stieglitz made them mutually constitutive. The regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton would later point out sarcastically that Stieglitz’s religiosity, his pretensions to being a “seer” and a “prophet,” joined him to America, a country with more cults than any other nation on the globe.*? Pointedly, Benton equated Stieglitz with Father Divine—the black minister who distributed to his followers books of practical psychology and The Life and Teachings of Masters of the Far East—and with Aimee Semple McPherson, the female evangelist who first used modern technologies, such as the automobile and radio, to spread her religious

108 THE PROMISE OF CINEMA

message. Benton intended an insult, but Stieglitz and Coomaraswamy did work much like those period spiritual leaders, assimilating new technologies and diverse Western and Eastern sources to create a multiethnic and transcultural American modernism.

Ananda Coomaraswamy and the Living Art of Photography Stieglitz and Coomaraswamy first met a month before the opening of Stieglitz’s 1923 solo exhibition, in which his photographs of clouds debuted alongside the composite portrait of O’Keeffe.*° After spending an evening with Stieglitz in New York in late February or early March 1923, Coomaraswamy wrote to Stieglitz, enthusiastically deeming the photographs “a revelation and totally different from all others!”*' A month later the curator told Stieglitz he had convinced the MFA to accept a dozen of Stieglitz’s photographs “in spite of the fact that photography as art is rather unfamiliar to most of our trustees.”** That the great “traditionalist” Coomaraswamy,a scholar and collector of eighteenth-century Indian painting, would organize the pioneering collection of modernist photography at the MFA—a museum that itself had a reputation for aesthetic conservatism—may seem surprising. But the philosophy of art he espoused in the late 1910s and 1920s actually advanced values instantiated most clearly in the modern West in photographic media. Coomaraswamy introduced the new photography collection at the end of 1923 with an article in the MFA Bulletin lauding Stieglitz and describing photography as “one of the few living arts,” a medium that exposed a large picture-taking audience to “the specific problems confronting the artist.”>* This celebration of a popular form was in keeping with the arguments Coomaraswamy often made for the living arts and tra-

ditional crafts of India, but in the case of photography, he noted that even though an amateur’s personal “snapshot” was rarely artistic, the process of its making could be aesthetically instructive. Instead of praising photography as a new modernist objective medium, as many advocates did, Coomaraswamy positioned it as a living artistic practice, teaching an implicitly universal aesthetic language and communicating shared spiritual truths. Described in this way, modernist photography could enter the MFA. After all, the museum’s collection of Japanese and Chinese art was one of the earliest and largest in the United States; its holdings included prints and paintings, as well as textiles, swords, and ceramics. And indeed, Coomaraswamy found his strongest ally for beginning the photography collection in John Ellerton Lodge, the MFA’s specialist in Chinese art.” Coomaraswamy did not ask the MFA to be aesthetically radical in accepting photography; instead he encouraged it to maintain its global view and consider photography one of the West’s own living arts.

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“THE GREAT BUDDHIST SCHOLAR AND ART CRITIC’ Coomaraswamy arrived in New York from England in 1916, as Stieglitz’s 291 gallery was closing. Born in Sri Lanka (then colonial Ceylon) to a Sri Lankan legislator and his British wife, Coomaraswamy was raised in Britain after his father’s early death. In 1902, an adult Coomaraswamy returned to the country of his birth with his first wife, the photographer and crafts advocate Ethel Mary Partridge, to study the region’s geology. He earned a doctorate for these mineralogical studies from London University in 1906. In addition to this professional pursuit, he also began during these

years to study local art and politics. During the decade that followed, Coomaraswamy turned to these new interests, writing numerous books on Sri Lankan and Indian art while traveling frequently between England and India. By 1916 his participation in the movement for Indian nationalism, his campaign for native arts, and his objections to military service had made Britain politically uncomfortable, and instability in India had dashed his hopes of donating his extensive art collection to an Indian national museum.’ So Coomaraswamy joined his second wife, the British singer and Indian raga specialist Ratan Devi (née Alice Richardson) on her U.S. concert tour. Much like Hartmann, de Zayas, and Picabia before him, Coomaraswamy was adept at self-publicity, positioning himself as an exotic expert and embarking on his own lecture circuit. He also began writing articles for Vanity Fair, a “smart magazine” aimed at the urban leisure class, to introduce Indian art and himself (billed as “the great Buddhist scholar and art critic,” “a member of the old warrior or Kshatriya caste, a Tamil of high rank and dignity”) to an American audience.”® In advocating for Indian art, Coomaraswamy confronted the stereotypes of U.S. audiences, for whom Indian art was mechanical, created by rules so systematized that the artist’s personality could not enter (a criticism similar to those leveled against photography). He himself viewed the art he studied and collected as one with an “Artistic sisterhood to ‘Modernist’ Art”—and an “essentially mystic” form whose “subject matter is universal.”*? In his Vanity Fair series, Coomaraswamy cautioned that true art was inspired, not by artists’ individual innovation or self-expression, but by the religious and philosophical “need that some great thing should be clearly and repeatedly expressed in a manner comprehensible to everyone.”® Against the violent backdrop of World War I, Coomaraswamy explained how this repetitious art quieted the restless mind and the senses, creating a peace that was “the ultimate gift of art and the common meeting ground of East and West,” a deracinated and composite ethnic spirituality from which all people might derive benefit.” After less than a year, Coomaraswamy had convinced America’s cultural elite; by 1917 the MFA trustee Denman Ross had purchased much of his collection, and the MFA had offered him a permanent position as its first Keeper of Indian Art. Coomaraswamy continued to lecture to audiences as an expert who could generalize from Indian art (and implicitly his own racial background) on the appropriate role of art in

110 THE PROMISE OF CINEMA

the East and the West. In an article written for the Art Bulletin in 1923—at the same time he was convincing the MFA to accept Stieglitz’s photographs—Coomaraswamy reiterated that the true artist should not try to express himself or to create beauty, but ought to work “like an engineer” to produce artworks with “intelligible meaning” and “purpose.’® In the article Coomaraswamy opposed the pure abstraction of much modern painting, arguing that for art to serve its purpose—to connect common life and divinity ina comprehensible manner—its forms had to come from the world. That fusion of science, technology, and spirituality contrasts with other models—those of expressionism and symbolism, for example—in which the artist channels emotion and imagination. Coomaraswamy’s vision of the artist as an engineer repeatedly deriving comprehensible images from nature begins to explain his advocacy of modernist photography, even as he dismissed most other forms of modernist art. The characteristics that led Coomaraswamy to champion photography as a living art could also be found in movies. He theorized that medium thoughtfully in his letters, musing, “I sometimes think they [films] correspond (in a sense) to epic drama—representing quite idealized characters. Also using formulas (symbols), much more than the stage does. Also they are much more definitely American than stage plays (which always more or less try to be artistic).”°? Although Coomaraswamy never wrote professionally on cinema, during the 1920s he was a devoted cinephile who collected and even made films. Linking cinema to a tradition of dramatic epics, he celebrated the movies’ use of idealized characters and symbolic formulas. The reference to epic drama drew on his studies of the subject in India, but Coomaraswamy claimed that films belonged to America, giving the nation its very own type of epic. Films could represent the national essence, Coomaraswamy argued, because they gave up self-conscious attempts to be artistic to embrace formulas with wide appeal. As straight photographers had rejected self-consciously painterly techniques, film rejected artistry and became American while retaining the formulas, symbols, and idealization that assured its universality.

“HANDS LIKE LOTUS FLOWERS” In addition to his theoretical writings, Coomaraswamy’s photographs and films shed light on the roles he imagined for those media. Coomaraswamy’s first wife, Ethel Partridge, may have introduced him to photography. She traveled with him to colonial Ceylon and there used photography to capture the living arts of artisans. Following his divorce from Partridge in 1910, Coomaraswamy began to explore photography on his own. Although he reproduced his own photos frequently in his books, his work in the medium has largely escaped critical notice. Coomaraswamy viewed photography as both a tool for documenting objects in his work as art collector, curator, and scholar and as a means of creating images he deemed artistic in their own right, such as the three he donated to the MFA.*4

Coomaraswamy’s images of dancers dominate his photographic oeuvre in both THE PROMISE OF CINEMA 111

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prints.”°” Although it remains unclear which prints elicited Stieglitz’s praise, Coomaraswamy most likely included those of his third wife, Stella Bloch, a Polish-born Jewish dancer famous for her performance of Javanese dances.®* Correspondence between Coomaraswamy, in Boston, and Bloch, who lived in New York, indicates that their

relationship began in April 1917 with an exchange of drawings and photographs. (Stieglitz and O’Keeffe’s relationship began similiarly, about the same time.) The image of Bloch that Coomaraswamy donated to the MFA (see Figure 41) was just one of the large collection of photographs he began taking of her in 1917 (including Figures 51 and 52). Although I have located fewer than twenty of those photographs, Coomaraswamy

claimed to have made many more, writing to Bloch, “It does zo¢ suit my constitution to be away from you. I often look [at] your photos and study them (over 300!).”® In November 1917 he wrote to Bloch, giving her his own evocative interpretation of his photographs: “I think your hands are particularly charming. It often impresses me how exactly you exemplify some of the classical similes of Indian poetry—such as, arms like the stalk of a water lily, hands like lotus flowers, hair like a black snake (hanging in one long line, not falling loose), and sidelong glances like arrows.””° Like Stieglitz, in the photographic series he was beginning with O’Keeffe at the same moment, Coomaraswamy prized his model’s hands, but he understood the images as demonstrations of ancient Indian symbolic gestures, at once erotic and spiritual, in which body and spirit were conjoined. Coomaraswamy embraced symbolic systems that had developed in poetry, finding them illustrated in his own images of Bloch’s body. Applying those systems to her poses, Coomaraswamy suggests in his letter that he connected the photographs of her with those he had published in The Mirror of Gesture, in which the movement of the body speaks an abstract symbolic language. Coomaraswamy’s photographs of Bloch present instructive formal parallels with Stieglitz’s of O’Keeffe, underscoring how Stieglitz’s ideal of the unmediated photograph could be created by and speak to an embodied subject. For example, Coomaraswamy’s Untitled (Hand and Breast), circa 1920, demonstrates precisely the same gesture as Stieglitz’s White Hand (Figure 51; see Figure 47). In Coomaraswamy’s image, however, the figure turns slightly away from the photographer, placing the rings on her pinky and ring finger at the center of the composition. The jewelry draws attention to the position of her fingers and also links Bloch with the Indian dancer, discussed earlier (see Figures 49 and 50), who wears rings on the same fingers of the left hand. The framing of Coomaraswamy’s Torso #z (ca. 1920) also recalls Stieglitz’s 1918 photograph of O’Keeffe’s torso (Figures 52 and 53). In Stieglitz’s image, O’Keeffe’s backlit torso fills the frame, monumentally still. Coomaraswamy’s includes Bloch’s neck, shoulders, and hands (as well as her stockinged thighs). With her angled hip, dramatically bent elbows, twisted left hand pressed to her stomach, and right hand turned up and out from her body at the wrist, Bloch seems in the midst of a pose in an Indian dance. Although there is little evidence that Coomaraswamy was inspired by Stieglitz’s composite portrait of O'Keeffe, he arrived at similar compositional techniques in his photographs

114 THE PROMISE OF CINEMA

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record the dances of East and South Asia. Coomaraswamy’s extant silent films focus almost exclusively on dances, frequently performances cut and spliced with massproduced travelogues from his collection of commercial ethnographic movies.”’ Often grainy, frequently overexposed, and edited with jump cuts, some of the films record entire performances (including Japanese Noh and Cambodian Khmer classical dance); in others single dancers perform, accompanied by a single musician (Figures 54-56). Intertitles created by Coomaraswamy instruct viewers on the meaning of each episode, providing the information to put Western audiences on common ground with the Eastern performers. Those intertitles, along with letters from Coomaraswamy to Bloch, suggest that he intended to show the films publicly and use them in lectures.’* Coomaraswamy’s plan to show his movies in Boston met resistance, however, even before his return from Asia.

The MFA expressed gratitude for the still photographs he had collected for the library, but the associate director, Charles Henry Hawes, complained about the inconvenience when one of the curator’s films was “detained by the Post Office and had to be run off to prove that the subject was not pugilistic.” The associate director dismissed the curator’s cinematic venture, writing to Coomaraswamy that when he opened the film cans, he had been “disappointed that they did not contain pound cake!”’? Whether Coomaraswamy ever delivered his planned presentations is not known, but the surviving reels of his forgotten films address a larger 1920s cinematic discourse on gesture and dance, responding to and departing from the period’s popular commercial genres.”* The cinema scholar Fatimah Tobing Rony notes that dance was among ethnographic film’s most

118 THE PROMISE OF CINEMA

popular early subjects, understood as a bodily expression that exposed “the physical, irrational nature of language.””? She and other film scholars have argued that the “primitive” gestures of ethnographic subjects functioned as a “purer” form of visual communication, to counter the mass consumerism thought to be engendered by contemporaneous narrative spectaculars. During the period, stage performers, including Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis, and Loie Fuller, further popularized this spectacular model of dance as irrational personal expression.’”° Coomaraswamy publicly faulted these modern dancers for relying on their own novelty instead of on traditional dance practices.’’ He concentrated in his films, as in his photographs, on performers who trained rigorously in traditional forms, creating sequences in which bodily gestures certified the rationality of language and coded cultural production. Coomaraswamy described the “idealized characters” and “formulas (symbols)” as film’s particular strength, when pointing out to Bloch how commercial movies rendered gesture universally legible. In his writing and his artistic work, Coomaraswamy aimed to move beyond either personal irrationality or the specialist’s esoteric cultural knowledge to focus on photographs, film, and dance as living arts, at once spiritual and popular.

STIEGLITZ S SONGS OF THE SKY Before he left on his tour to record dances, Coomaraswamy proposed to the director of the MFA that the museum expand its photography collection beyond his own and Stieglitz’s gifts, promising that he would secure about a hundred and fifty prints, “by invitation and without cost,” from various photographers. Coomaraswamy convinced the trustees to approve this “severely limited” collection, persuading them to agree to the conditions he stipulated: that the collection be kept as art in the Prints Department (rather than as reference material in the library) and exhibited for at least two weeks every five years, and that reproductions be made only for illustration in museum publications.’> Coomaraswamy designed those conditions to invent and secure photography as art in the institution. Stieglitz pushed for an even more privileged place for his medium by refusing to send his work unframed or to print his photographs to fit the museum’s standard-size mats, arguing that because “photography is still in trial” its needs should be put before the institution’s ease of use.’” Although such refusals might have ended negotiations with another curator, Coomaraswamy understood Stieglitz’s reservations and accepted his demands. Coomaraswamy secured for Stieglitz an exception to museum policy, but he became less enthusiastic about the MFA’s photography collection after receiving work from other photographers. He wrote of his surprise to Bloch: “I find I hardly like Clarence White’s pictures at all!”®° In fact, although Coomaraswamy had announced in the MFA Bulletin that White would donate The Four-Poster Bed, Factory Town in Winter, and In the Orchard (Figure 57), the works were not accessioned into the MFA’s collection until

THE PROMISE OF CINEMA 119

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they were rediscovered nearly half a century after White’s initial gift.°' The museum seems to have dismissed them because of Coomaraswamy’s own ambivalence. The fate of these works suggests the tenuous status of the photography collection and also helps to clarify what the curator valued in a photograph. White’s pictorialist scenes in a European symbolist tradition—a maid plumps the pillow ofa smooth bed, spindly bare trees screen a factory town, and women pick up apples while strolling in an orchard— represent the pictorial photography White and Stieglitz quarreled over in 1910. White viewed them as artistic; Stieglitz thought they drew too heavily on traditions of painting.®* Under Coomaraswamy’s guidance in the 1920s, only his own three photographs and twenty-seven by Stieglitz entered the museum as artworks. Among the twenty-seven photographs that Stieglitz donated to the MFA were five prints of clouds that he had never shown publicly, Songs of the Sky in Five Pictures (Figures 58-62). These small photographs continued Stieglitz’s Music series of 1922. The new photographs of clouds that Stieglitz contact-printed from negatives for the MFA were only half as large as his earlier cloud photographs, marking the photographer's transition to the intimate scale that would characterize his Equivalents series. The small

THE PROMISE OF CINEMA 121

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Figure 59 Alfred Stieglitz, Songs of the Sky in Five Pictures (No. 2), 1923. Gelatin silver print, 37/g x 4°/g in.

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Gift of Alfred Stieglitz, 24.1733.2. Photograph © 2012 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. © 2012 The Georgia O’ Keeffe Museum / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

size of Songs of the Sky links them with Stieglitz’s first experiments in printing on postal

paper to appeal to the popular audience for motion pictures, and the shifting position of the clouds gives the series a sense of the unfolding action of a film.*? The first photograph in Songs shows a dark sky with white feathery forms that cross the frame from upper right to lower left, leaving dark masses in both upper corners. Although there is a greater brightness in the lower left quadrant of the image, the exact location of the sun (the source of that brightness) is unclear. In the second image the contrast and drama of the sky are heightened; a black form stretches across the center, rimmed by gray, lit by only a bright spot of what we intuit to be the sun. In the third photograph the entire circle of the bright sun is shown, casting light in the upper part of the image, while the remainder is in relative darkness. With the fourth image the white disc of the sun moves up slightly, casting light through a diffuse and clouded sky. The culminating fifth image lacks the extreme contrast of the others. Sunlight disperses through it as the values blend in subtle gradations, from a light gray in the upper right to a dark gray in the lower left. By arranging these works in a sequence, like a filmstrip, Stieglitz made his series a visual account of the sun’s emergence. Although scholars often link

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Figure 60 Figure 61

Alfred Stieglitz, Songs of the Sky in Five Pictures Alfred Stieglitz, Songs of the Sky in Five Pictures (No. 3), 1923. Gelatin silver print, 4°/g x 3'/ in. (No. 4), 1923. Gelatin silver print, 4°/g x 31/2 in.

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Gift of Alfred Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Gift of Alfred Stieglitz, 24.1733.3. Photograph © 2012 Museum Stieglitz, 24.1733.4. Photograph © 2012 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. © 2012 The Georgia O'Keeffe of Fine Arts, Boston. © 2012 The Georgia Museum / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. O’Keeffe Museum / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

these photographs with precedents in European symbolism, Stieglitz actually departed from the established pictorialist symbolist system (exemplified by White’s long unaccessioned images) to create an unmediated living art." Stieglitz described his photographs’ direct communication in his famous account of how he began his photographic series of clouds, written in mid-1923, when he was printing Songs of the Sky for the MFA and working most closely with Coomaraswamy. Stieglitz began the essay by attacking his ally Waldo Frank (who had celebrated him as a “Jewish mystic”) for claiming that Stieglitz’s photographs were the result of his “powers of hypnotism.” He drew his notion of hypnotism from an essay published in a 1922 issue of the magazine MSS, edited by Paul Strand and devoted to the question, “Can a Photograph Have the Significance of Art?”® Frank’s article did not even use the word hypnotism, but it did deny Stieglitz sole artistic authority by suggesting that the subjects of Stieglitz’s portraits and his personal relationships with them gave his photographs their significance.*° Stieglitz wrote that to prove Frank wrong, he aimed “through clouds to put down

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THE PROMISE OF CINEMA 123

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my philosophy of life—to show that my photographs were not due to subject matter—not to special trees, or faces, or interiors, to special privileges, clouds were there for everyone.”

Even though the subject matter was available to all, not everyone could make those photographs. Stieglitz pointed out that he had been thinking about clouds since the very beginning of his photographic studies. His new photographs were a test of what he had learned over his forty-year career, for clouds, with their harsh backlighting and chromatic propensity to overexpose, “were the most difficult to photograph—nearly impossible.” Stieglitz also identified his new images as “straight photographs, all gaslight paper [so called because it could be developed in the dim light of a gas lamp], except one palladiotype. Allin the power of every photographer of all time.”*’ Foregrounding the technique and technology only to dismiss them, Stieglitz allied himself with amateur photographers but then proclaimed that neither the subject of photography nor its material was responsible for his breakthrough; his own skill and spiritual vision had made it possible. Reporting viewers’ reactions to the 1923 debut of Songs in his statement, Stieglitz noted that several pictorial photographers thought his images could not be art because they “look like photographs.” He responded with a new tactic, describing the goals of

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his photographs of clouds in his new rhetoric of serial photography, which differentiated

between seeing and looking: “My aim is increasingly to make my photographs look so much like photographs that unless one has eyes and sees, they won't be seen—and still everyone will never forget them having once looked at them.”** Refuting the accusation that his photographs depended on his relationships with subjects—that they were the results of hypnosis—Stieglitz internalized the hypnotist’s model of unconscious suggestion. In his dematerialized photographs even the “unseen” image would have lasting impact on any viewer. Preparing his prints for the MFA at the end of 1923, Stieglitz clarified the spiritual intent of this unmediated, even subliminal, communication, boasting to the poet Hart Crane, “All are affected greatly & forget photography entirely—several people feel I have photographed God. May be.”®? In his published account that same year, Stieglitz

anticipated another reaction, writing that he had “wanted a series of photographs which when seen by Ernest Bloch (the great composer) he would exclaim: Music! music! ...and would say he’d have to write a symphony called ‘Clouds.’ Not like Debussy’s but much, much more.””® Stieglitz’s reference to a composer and to music (in the titles of his earliest cloud series, Music and Songs of the Sky) invokes a strategy of early abstraction used frequently by the several artists the photographer had championed, from the symbolist Pamela Colman Smith to the expressionist Wassily Kandinsky. In preferring Bloch over the famous modern composer Debussy, however, Stieglitz differed from Kandinsky, who identified Debussy as one of the modern composers who create “a spiritual impression.”?! Significantly, Bloch had achieved fame as a Jewish composer.”” An immigrant living in New York, he was best known for music and spirituality in the Jewish tradition—for scores including Three Jewish Poems (1913) and Schelomo, a Hebraic Rhapsody (1916). Music historians have examined how period commentators related the sounds of Bloch’s modernism to his ethnic identity and to Jewish liturgical and folk song,”* Indeed, Waldo Frank celebrated both Bloch and Stieglitz as specifically Jewish intellectuals. Period critics, including Frank, understood Bloch’s Judaism much as they heard the innovations or dissonances of his musical compositions—as exotic and revolutionary. Frank’s protégé Rosenfeld described Bloch’s music as “expressive of what is racial in the Jew.” Connecting Bloch to this essentialized “Jewish” point of view and the newly modern experience, Rosenfeld wrote, “European life in breaking away from the old tribal and communal sanctions had prepared the hour for the resurrection of the Jewish spirit. Industrial civilization had made everyone have the psychology of the Jew, the psychology of the homeless man, and now in his turn the Jew was able to teach people how they might live as citizens of the world.” * In this, Rosenfeld argued, Bloch differed from the Russian composers who had prepared the way for his compositions; his music was not an alternation between Europe and Asia, as theirs had been, but a dislocated, transcultural “amalgam of the two.” The Jewish point of view for Rosenfeld had become newly universal. Bloch’s symphony and Stieglitz’s sequences of cloud images taught the

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same lesson, creating the feeling of instability that was both the “Jewish spirit” and the pervasive modern psychology of the homeless. Indeed, subsequent critics have foregrounded the ambiguity and uncertainty evoked by Stieglitz’s cloud photographs. Rosalind Krauss describes how the cropped abstract images call forth intense feelings of vertigo and dislocation.”? Although for her the cloud images are the epitome of medium specificity as an unmooring of photography from the world, Stieglitz’s reference to Bloch opens a new way to read the experience of unsteadiness induced by these photographs of skies without a ground plane. The embodied sensory disorientation induced by the sounds of Bloch’s music taught people how to live as citizens of the modern world. Stieglitz suggests that his own photographs of clouds were not merely a riposte to Frank’s implication that “hypnotism” played a part in his portrait work, but also homage to Frank’s ideas.”° The invocation of Bloch in Stieglitz’s narrative urges a reading of the cloud-filled vertiginous spaces of Eguivalents along the lines suggested by Coomaraswamy—as elements of the natural world used to express some great thing in a widely comprehensible manner.”’ Stieglitz did not use Jewish religious symbols explicitly, nor was his identification with Judaism untroubled, but his own narrative offers cues for reading the images that seem to be private mystical trivia as a broader spiritual language. Viewing these works in light of Coomaraswamy’s transcultural theory of traditional art practice may make

it possible to see in the formal features of Equivalents, which some have read as a modernist aesthetic break, continuities with earlier forms. These readings against the grain help to explain what drew Coomaraswamy and the MFA to accept photography as art. The spiritualization of photography relied initially on the medium’s social character. In the context of the mid-1920s, Stieglitz’s and Coomaraswamy’s spiritualized

photography presented an alternative to the prevalent American nativist idea that shared culture would be achieved through nostalgia or ethnic homogeneity. Coomaraswamy, in his writing, photographs, and curatorial choices, encouraged photography that, like all enduring art, was a shared spiritual practice communicating in a symbolic language.

The Special Knowledge of Photographers Stieglitz drew on the aesthetics of cinema and spoke frequently of harnessing his serial photographs in a film, but Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler’s Manhatta remains the only film completed by members of his New York circle in the 1920s.?* Because their cinematic depiction of the city is often regarded as America’s first avant-garde film, it

presents an optimal point for considering changes in the relation of photography, photographic series, and film. Sheeler’s growing distance from Stieglitz and his group in the years following Manhatta’s creation also brings to the fore breaks and ruptures

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in modernist photography and contests among members of the group as Strand and Stieglitz saw Sheeler ally himself with the commercial standardization of photography and the racial standardization of American culture. Stieglitz drew on Coomaraswamy’s notion of living, syncretic spirituality in an attempt to intervene against the standardization of art and nation.

“THE SPIRIT OF NEW YORK” Strand and Sheeler’s 1920 collaboration appears to have evolved from Strand’s knowledge of New York (he had grown up on the Upper West Side) and Sheeler’s knowledge of filmmaking (he had recently purchased an expensive French-made Parvo camera). Little more is known about the movie’s inspiration or who was responsible for which parts. Even the title is a source of uncertainty. Although the film is known froma single surviving print titled Manhatta (probably a simplification of the title of Walt Whitman’s poem “Mannahatta”), it premiered at Broadway’s Rialto Theater on July 24, 1921, with the far more celebratory title New York the Magnificent, which placed it in the established commercial genre of the “scenic.””? Although the film is now celebrated as avant-garde, Strand initially described it to Stieglitz as an “entering wedge” into the field of commercial cinema aimed at a popular audience.” Strand wrote a press release for New York the Magnificent that cited the filmmakers’ art world credentials to rouse public interest. He explained that “the intention of the photographers has been to apply their special knowledge gained from experiments in still photography, to the motion picture—to register through conscious selection and space-filling those elements which are expressive of the spirit of New York, of its power and beauty and movement.”!"! They restricted their focus “to the towering geometry

of lower Manhattan and its environs.”!°* Within those constraints the filmmakers aimed to “register directly the living forms in front of them and to reduce [them] through the most rigid selection, volumes, lines, and masses, to their intensest terms of expressiveness. Through these does the spirit manifest itself.” Selection was, Strand argued, the special knowledge of the still photographer, who was forced by the medium to be adept at deciding what to include in a limited frame. Using this power of selection in film, the photographer would express the city’s spirit in living form. Scholars have pointed out that the subjects Strand and Sheeler chose for Manhatta were inspired by Stieglitz’s still photographs of New York published in the October 1911 issue of Camera Work (in which The Steerage debuted).'°* The first five of these sixteen photographs captured lower Manhattan from a ferry and from across the Hudson, but the images that follow also covered several other locales outside the small area of lower Manhattan selected by Strand and Sheeler.!°* Charles Brock, refining the connection between Manhatta and Stieglitz’s still photography, argues that by limiting the camera’s movement and isolating motion in the static urban infrastructure, the filmmakers focused on determining “the threshold at which still photographs become

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motion pictures.”!? Manhatta, unfolding in twelve sections, each introduced by an intertitle that quotes from a poem by Walt Whitman, animates the rigorous selection, creating a moving picture that follows the course of a day in the city, from sunrise to sunset.

The film opens with an intertitle that reads, “City of the world (for all races are here) / City of tall facades of marble and iron / Proud and passionate city.” This excerpt from Whitman’s “City of Ships” suggests that the film will be a portrait of New York, as defined by its racial diversity and its architecture. The first scene, showing the morning arrival of the ferry from Staten Island, foregrounds the daily rhythms of the commuter (and implicitly identifies the residents of what was historically the least diverse and most suburban borough of New York as made up of “all races”).!°° Chronicling these bustling subjects, often from some distance above them, the film quickly shuts

out discrepancies to create a harmonious unitary city and standardized workers. Even a brief scene of heroized manual laborers reveals nothing of their individual identity because it frames them in low light, digging a foundation, and backlit, working on the steel frame of a building (Figure 63). Individuals become silhouettes joined to and structured by the buildings they are creating. Brief scenes of human figures laboring and commuting soon give way to architectural portraits detailing the smoke and skyscrapers of lower Manhattan in long tracking shots.'°” At the end of their day people move through lower Manhattan along a path beside the graveyard of Trinity Church,

seemingly oblivious to the implications of spirituality and mortality in the setting (Figure 64). Celebrating the architecture and structure of the city, the film seems to suggest that the city’s spirit inheres in its buildings and their dynamic smoke rather than in its anonymous builders or in undistinguished passing commuters. Given Manhatta’s focus on architecture and its isolation of a small section of lower Manhattan (the film avoids, for example, the diverse adjoining neighborhoods where immigrants lived), studies of the film have critiqued it for turning a blind eye to the problems of “urban squalor,” unlike Strand’s earlier still photographic portraits of anonymous men and women on the Lower East Side, such as Man, Five Points Square, New York, 1916. Jaan Suarez suggests that Manhatta’s “inability to picture difference reflects an oppressive underside of modernity,” but he also notes perceptively that what We see as repressive might have seemed “utopian” in the early 1920s, because it enacted and prioritized unity in an era of racial tension.'°* Indeed, the film’s vision of a clean, structured, standardized, and productive city seems of a piece with an emerging vocabulary of American modernity. That context belies contemporary readings of the film as a portrait of urban alienation and connects Manhatta with the tumultuous reinvention of New York pushed by period advertising professionals and business leaders. As calls for immigration reform grew and post-World War I race tensions led to riots, clean modern skyscrapers and office workers replaced crime, poverty, and immigrants as the city’s public face.'°” Waldo Frank’s account of New York in his book Our America, of 1919, suggests how

128 THE PROMISE OF CINEMA

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Figure 64 (bottom) Manhatta (1920-21) by Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand, digital frame enlargement from 35mm black-and-white motion picture film, © 2008 Anthology Film Archives. All rights reserved.

the Stieglitz circle of the early 1920s might have understood “the spirit of New York” expressed by Manhatta’s heroic urban architecture and standardized productive workforce, which may now seem alienating. Inspired by a Parisian who told him that she loved New York but could not stand New Yorkers, Frank explained that while European cities and their citizens in the late 1910s were unified, in New York there was an evident

disparity between urban architecture and urban inhabitants. Frank averred that the New Yorker was no longer a “true pioneer.” He traced a history of the city in which a pioneer “race came first. Then came the city that was its product. And now another race that is the product of the city.”!’” Emphasizing New York’s impressive buildings (like Strand and Sheeler), Frank divided the city expressed in architecture—in which “high white towers are arrows of will... a lofty, arrogant, lustful city, beaten through by an iron rhythm”’—from that embodied by its “lowly... driven... drab” inhabitants.!"! The men and women who lived in Manhattan, according to Frank, were not the city’s productive builders but the debased products of its enervating environment. Yet all was not lost; Frank argued that artists and immigrants could “leaven” the drabness of the current “race” of New Yorkers.'!* Although Sheeler and Strand may have viewed the spirit of New York in the 1920s differently from Frank, from others in the Stieglitz circle, and even from each other, Manhatta, in its dialogue with Our America, demonstrates how separating the city’s architecture and inhabitants might have conveyed to the motion picture’s wide audience the need fora more syncretic New York, invigorated

by immigrants and artists.

An account of the premiere of Manhatta under its original title, New York the Magnificent, narrates how the film inspired the return of the popular audience to an earlier cultural moment of New York’s pioneer race. Harriet Underhill, reviewing the film for the New York Tribune, praised Sheeler and Strand’s showcasing in it of “what every New Yorker thinks is the greatest city in the world.” Its civic appeal was heightened, she noted, by the orchestra’s accompaniment of the film. It played “all of the old favorites’—Tin Pan Alley songs that included “Annie Rooney” (a song about a poor orphan girl popularized by the performer known as the Bowery Girl), “She May Have Seen Better Days” (an account of a fallen woman in the slums and the dangers of the city), and “My Mother Was a Lady” (the tale ofa young woman's difficulties in the city, when she went there to find her brother, which were resolved by the words of the title). Celebrations of, and warnings to, those arriving in New York, these songs had been vaudeville hits in the 1890s, the decade when commercial skyscrapers began to transform the landscape of Lower Manhattan. In her review Underhill suggested the effect of the music and film on the audience: “Two minutes more of it and there would have been community singing—a few intrepid souls were tuning up, as it was.”!!? Although the extent of Strand and Sheeler’s involvement in selecting the music or other elements of the theatrical experience remains unclear, the accompanying songs demonstrate that earlier cultural narratives of New York, inspired by urban transience and struggles against poverty, did interact with Manhatta’s celebration of the city’s stabile built form.

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Stieglitz and Strand’s exchange of letters about Manhatta more explicitly contextualize the enthusiasms and concerns both photographers brought to making and showing the film. In 1921, for example, when Marius de Zayas suggested that Strand and Sheeler reedit their work for a Dadaist event in Paris, a worried Strand asked Stieglitz for advice, confiding that he did not “quite trust” de Zayas.' 14 Stieglitz, still nursing his own grudge against de Zayas, replied that his only concern was that Strand receive the credit he deserved for the collaboration: “It’s one of those ticklish questions when one of two is an ‘artist’ and the other only a photographer!”!"? Stieglitz suggested, in implicitly pointing to public perception, how in the 1920s “photographer” and “artist” signified differently, the photographer as the mechanically recording cameraman rather than as an artistic equal in the conception of the project. Although this quotation has been considered evidence of Stieglitz’s fear that Strand would abandon photography for the newer medium of film, the uneasy discussion actually developed from Strand’s anxiety about de Zayas. Stieglitz, in his correspondence with Strand, was generally supportive of his work in motion pictures, writing in August 1920, when Manhatta was still in production, “Your summer’s work—or rather your year’s work—will have a power a big one by the time 1921 knocks at the door. Undoubtedly you are doing some fine work where you are. A new field.”!!° Far from objecting to Strand’s involvement in film, Stieglitz was enthusiastic about the next cinematic venture Strand was planning to undertake with Sheeler, in which the two aimed to slow down and analyze athletic motion.” That film, had it been completed, might have provided a counterpoint to the hurried commuters in Manhatta, as well as to Stieglitz’s series portrait of O’Keefte and Coomaraswamy’s films of dancers’ trained bodies. And in slowing down human motion, Strand and Sheeler might have moved their film even closer to serial photography and a symbolic language of bodily gesture. Unfortunately, their collaboration had al-

ready begun to fracture in 1921, and after Manhatta they produced no other films together.

NO ONE MATERIAL By 1923 Sheeler and Strand were engaged in a sharp dispute about the nature of photography and American art, inspired by Sheeler’s review, for Arts, of Stieglitz’s 1923 exhibition. In his first assignment as an author contributing to the journal where he worked as a photographer, Sheeler began with comments about the material of photography. He compared the use of platinum in photographic printing to the “material preciousness . . . of gold leaf in Italian painting,” praising Stieglitz for “having achieved the High Renaissance in photography through his earlier platinum prints.” Sheeler then alluded to the wartime regulation of platinum as a strategic metal, the material’s subsequent price increase, and the effects on Stieglitz’s work: “Conditions outside of his control necessitated experimenting in another medium, the various silver papers and adapting them to his need. The necessity has introduced new blood, the pulse has

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quickened.”''® Sheeler’s review praised Stieglitz’s experiments for reinvigorating his photography, but his technical approach reduced Stieglitz’s new transcendent unmediated images to base materiality. Sheeler’s former collaborator Strand cried foul. Taken out of context, Strand’s reaction, which caused a break with Sheeler that lasted until the 1950s, seems disproportionate to the offense. A celebratory profile of Sheeler, by the journal’s editor, Forbes Watson, in the same issue of Arts most likely increased Strand’s and Stieglitz’s resentment.'’” That article heralded Sheeler as an outstanding American artist, proof that the nation was finally realizing itself by turning away from imitations of foreign modernism. Ignoring the important influence of Stieglitz (and de Zayas) on Sheeler’s work, Watson dismissed pro-French “anti-Puritan nonsense” in an almost unmistakable barb directed at Stieglitz’s 291 years. Watson argued such painting based on theory would fail “unless one had the particular racial characteristics of those who enjoy muddling their paint with philosophy.” Sheeler surpassed them by returning to America’s “native inheritance” of “good taste” and simplicity, evident in the country’s decorative arts and architecture.'*° Marshaling religion, race, and aesthetic inheritance to celebrate Sheeler, Watson made a pernicious argument to delimit whose influence and art would count as American.

Strand protested Sheeler’s review to Watson and to the popular New York Sun and Globe newspaper. The letter he wrote, which the Sun and Globe published, objected first to Sheeler’s passing comparison of Stieglitz’s photographs to painting. But he then turned quickly to the material. He argued that platinum made the photographic image permanent and that the mineral bore a high price only because of its wartime designation as strategic. Because Sheeler failed to disclose those facts in his review, Strand claimed that Sheeler was encouraging the material “deprivation” of artists. Strand personalized his objections by insulting Sheeler’s own use of inexpensive and easy-tohandle gaslight paper, asserting that it “make[s| one unpleasantly aware of the material first and content second.” Rejecting a model of medium specificity in which the material properties of the photograph (the texture of its paper or the sharpness of its tones) predominated, Strand set aside Stieglitz’s turn-ofthe-century technical experiments in straight photography. Announcing that “no one material is the material,” Strand argued, “The real menace in the use of materials is not preciousness but standardization.”'*' Any printing method that disappeared would constrict the field of photography. Both its autonomy and its capacity to express a “philosophy of life” demanded that it not use any single material exclusively. Stieglitz confined the expression of his concerns about photographic materials to his private letters, occasionally lamenting that he no longer had Camera Work with which to “raise hell” against Eastman and the “Kodak Monopoly.” Strand, however, expended his anger publicly on his onetime friend Sheeler.'”* In celebrating the market’s effect on Stieglitz’s new work, Sheeler had cast his lot (as Strand saw it) with the menace of standardization. Sheeler responded to Strand’s public letter with a private one, accusing the young photographer of acting as Stieglitz’s mouthpiece, but ending on a conciliatory note:

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“Differences of opinion are more interesting than agreement.”!** Strand’s wife, Beck, wrote Stieglitz that she thought her husband had lost Sheeler’s friendship for good.'**4 Stieglitz responded that he hoped the two would remain friends but also warned her that Sheeler’s “head may be becoming swollen in the fashion of his most ungainly belly.”!*? Beck replied that she and her husband were convinced that Sheeler’s wife, Katharine, hated them. “Paul says he bets she is calling him a ‘dirty Jew. ”!”° Stieglitz’s metaphor of a ballooning (white) body exploded for the Strands into anxieties about racial enmity, sown, perhaps, by Watson’s article lauding Sheeler’s “native inheritance.”

Their aesthetic disagreement over the goals of photography and the impact of the medium’s market-driven standardization quickly took on a racial cast. THE UGLINESS OF FORD Stieglitz’s professed hatred of the popular Ford car, when examined in light of Sheeler’s

photographic series of 1927 aestheticizing Ford’s River Rouge Plant, seems initially to underscore Stieglitz’s post-World War I elitism and disdain for new technologies. Sheeler’s images are hallmarks of American modernism, but what do they reveal about that modernism in the context of this chapter’s discussion? Coomaraswamy opposed factory production in favor of living arts, but in his syncretic spiritualization of photography and film he used popular factory-made machines; he celebrated the products of stilland motion-picture cameras that promised to create a shared language of symbols and a common aesthetic ground for Western artists and audiences.'”’ Stieglitz’s objections to Ford and his own photographs of the car suggest that he attempted similarly to appropriate the product of factory mass production and adopted popular media to transmit shared American values that might provide an alternative to the standardization embraced by Sheeler and Ford. Stieglitz complained to his friend Sherwood Anderson in a letter of 192.4: “Every time I see a Ford car something in me revolts—I hate the sight of one because of its absolute lack of any kind of quality feeling. And I try to persuade myself I’m prejudiced even though I know I’m not.—They are just wg/y things in line & texture.”!** In the 1920s the car to which Stieglitz objected was synonymous with its maker, Henry Ford.'”” Anderson, to whom Stieglitz confessed his revulsion, had himself demonized the automaker in A Story Teller’s Story, his autobiographical narrative of 1924: “Ford in Detroit has done more than any other man of my day to carry standardization to its logical end.” Anderson predicted that “[Ford would] come to be looked upon as the great killer of his age.”'*° He cited discussions with World War I veterans who told him that “before the war standardization had been carried to the highest pitch by the Germans,” and asked why America, once Germany had been defeated, could not reject the standardization of Ford and aim at new goals. Vachel Lindsay, the American poet who in a 1915 book had celebrated cinema as a new universal language of symbolic hieroglyphs, compared the Ford car with the motion picture in 1925:

THE PROMISE OF CINEMA 133

None of us has perhaps realized how closely akin is the motion picture to the allconquering Ford car. The most inert soul in the world once learning to drive a car, even a Ford, is swept relentlessly past his own resolutions and convictions. He who hated all speed maniacs will himself run down chickens on the road, the dogs and cats, and finally his own fellow man. Nothing but jail will slow him down. The motion picture does the same thing to the human mind. To the inevitable speeding-up process of the motion picture has quite recently been added the speeding up of all other things in America. The whole nervous psychology of the entire American race has thereby been completely revolutionized. More and more hieroglyphics, and more and more speed, are making one nation of all the tribes and tongues under this government, and really making them one separate tribe. And the rest of the world looks on aghast.'?! A common culture had finally been created, but it relied on a shared obsession with speed and a willingness to run down anything from a chicken to a fellow man. Film, whose universality Lindsay had celebrated a decade earlier, now seemed to close off the

country from the rest of the world. If America could claim that it no longer looked to Europe, Europe and a global audience increasingly looked at America, horrified by its standards (as exemplified by Ford and Hollywood). As a desirable alternative to the “middle-western anti-Jewish crusader Henry Ford,” Sherwood Anderson offered Stieglitz, Waldo Frank, Paul Rosenfeld, and other artistic Jewish intellectuals of New York.!*?

Although historians have explored Ford’s anti-Semitism and xenophobia at length, art historians have delicately overlooked them. Ford’s ongoing campaign for (racial as well as industrial) standardization, however, formed the context of Sheeler’s photographs and impelled Stieglitz’s rejection of the Ford. As the quoted passages from Anderson and Lindsay imply, Ford’s goals for “standardization” were applied beyond the realms of sheet metal and assembly lines. The Ford Company of the 1910s hired private investigators to visit workers’ homes and ensure their acculturation. Patronizing home inspections and compulsory English language classes took on sinister overtones when the automaker purchased a small newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, to advance his incendiary racial views and required that it be sold alongside his cars.'*? In May 1920 Ford began publishing what would become a long-running series, “The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem.”!** Although Stieglitz and Sheeler may not have come into direct contact with the newspaper, the automaker's views were well known in New York, where Ford had given his first public interview espousing anti-Semitism, stating, “The international financiers are behind all war. They are what is called the international Jew. ... Here [in America] the Jew is a threat.”!*° The industrialist quickly became one of the most public faces of a surge in anti-Semitism that paralleled and fed nativist anti-immigration movements of the 1920s. Finally, the general counsel for the American Farm Bureau Federation, Aaron Sapiro, sued Ford for

134 THE PROMISE OF CINEMA

libel for the articles he published targeting Jewish labor organizers for their supposed exploitation of the American farmer.!*° Sapiro and Ford settled out of court in 1927; Ford issued a public retraction and apology, claiming he had been too busy with his company to directly oversee the content of his publications and had learned with regret that he was regarded as an anti-Semite.'*’ Ford’s apology was well received, though many believed that the ghostwritten essay was a marketing ploy. Whether the retraction of 1927 was genuine or not, in that year the Dearborn Independent ceased publication, the Ford Company prepared to launch its Model A, and Ford brought Sheeler to the River Rouge Plant. In October, as Sheeler began his now famous project, photographing Ford’s factory to advertise the yet-to-be unveiled Model A, Sapiro made news by publicly

denying that Ford’s apology had been part of a scheme to sell cars.'*° The art historian Terry Smith, in his study of Sheeler’s River Rouge project, concludes that the photographer was hired to aestheticize the Ford Company and its products.'*? Although the earlier Model T had been intended for workingmen, Smith notes that the Model A was advertised in upper-class publications, including Vogue and Vanity Fair. Framing Sheeler’s photographs in the commercial realm where they were intended to operate, Smith quotes an advertising executive from Ford explaining the company’s approach: “Sell to the classes, the masses will follow.”!*° Ford had aimed his apology for the Independent's anti-Semitism at that same elite (and Stieglitz identified with it in rejecting the Model T’s crass functional lines). When Sheeler’s Criss-Crossed Conveyors appeared as a full-page illustration in Vanity Fair in February 1928, the text described the plant as a “public monument,” on a par with the United States Capitol, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Statue of Liberty (Figure 65).'*! Ford even replaced religion; as Sheeler later remarked, “Industry concerns the greatest numbers— it may be true, as has been said, that our factories are our substitute for religious expression.”!4? The automaker and his vertically integrated mass production displaced symbols of God, government, art, and liberty for the sophisticated Vanity Fair audience, pulled along by Sheeler’s monumentalizing image, which placed the awed viewer below Ford’s conveyors. Sheeler’s River Rouge project is not visibly anti-Semitic or anti-immigrant, but its history demonstrably connects what we deem virulent racial modes of “standardization” and acceptable industrial modes.'*? Sheeler’s aestheticizing abstraction of Ford’s modern industry (the elimination of labor and the spiritualizing of capital), accomplishes exactly what Ford intended. We, the elite audience Sheeler addressed, absolve Ford of his deeply held racism, and locate him (and his prejudices) at the heart of American modernity. Is Sheeler’s celebratory monumental project the only possible modernist reaction to Ford’s standardization and mass production? Although Stieglitz objected to the ugliness of Ford’s Model T, he did photograph O’Keeffe with her new black Model A (the same car Sheeler had been hired to publicize).!** The 1929 image Georgia O’Keeffe— after Return from New Mexico (also known as Equivalent O,), was created, as its title suggests, after the painter's return to Lake George from her first summer in New Mexico

THE PROMISE OF CINEMA 135

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af Beg Ford automobile factories in Detroit, of whichstacks, the view showslay magnitude thatFord; achievement is per a national day90,000 of the a segment of its chutes, elevators and power-house mayabove justifiably old Modelof“T” 12,000 cars day, it isby-word: expected,9,000 of thecars newper Ford: claim to being the most significant public monument in America, throwing its employees in Detroit and the total to be doubled in the coming year; and a vast shadow across the land probably more widely and more intimately than the United hive of fully developed corollary industries. Surely Henry Ford, the name or the

States Senate, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Statue of Liberty, or even man, does not seem terrible or fabulous, yet to millions of Americans he is the the novels of Harold Bell Wright. In hyperbole and anathema, it has been com- present-day Colossus of Business, an almost divine Master-Mind. In a landscape

pared, lyrically, reverently, vindictively, to the central ganglion of our nation, where size, quantity and speed are the cardinal virtues, it is natural that the

to an American altar of the God-Objective of Mass Production. But it is simply largest factory turning out the most cars in the least time should come to have one man’s monument to his own organizing and merchandising genius. The gross the quality of America’s Mecca, toward which the pious journey for prayer

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Figure 65 Charles Sheeler, Criss-Crossed Conveyors, River Rouge, Ford Motor Company, 1927. Published in “By Their Works Ye Shall Know Them,” Vanity Fair, February 1928. Courtesy Condé Nast Publications.

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Dusenberry ina series of anecdotes as an excellent diver and swimmer, an architect, and

a drunk, who sang the hymn “when tight.” Dove’s thing, in its use of material fragments, however, departed from the strategies of caricature and from Demuth’s emblem-

atic painted still-life portraiture. The art historian Nancy J. Scott has located Dove's illustrated jokes involving men who seem to fit the fun-loving Dusenberry’s description

as evidence of a “caricaturing impulse” in Portrait of Ralph Dusenberry, but the thing differs dramatically and, I argue, diametrically from those commercial illustrations.*° Although we might find an exaggerated likeness in this collection of objects, the material components have a more forceful presence. The rulers that frame Dove’s composition may refer symbolically to Dusenberry’s career as an architect, but they also reference their status as objects by measuring the artwork’s edges. In other words, Dove's things, unlike his illustrations—pictures in which his drawing exists to be seen through, not seen as marks on the page—are composed of elements that may function in depictive and symbolic ways, but also, always forcefully, register their physical materiality (even, [ hope, in photographic reproductions here) in resistance to the viewer's gaze. Just one week after mentioning his first “caricature painting” in his diary, Dove recorded “ ‘Miss Woolworth’ was borned |sic|.”>’ This odd phrase heralded the creation of the new artwork as if it were a child (Figure 76). Indeed, with Miss Woolworth Dove created an exaggerated portrait of a woman from a mask, earrings, artificial flowers, stockings, broach, necklace, garden gloves, watch, ring, miniature purse, and shoe insoles tacked in place with shiny rhinestone pins and framed by a fringed ribbon, all of

THE SENSE OF THINGS 155

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Figure 81 Arthur Dove, Portrait of Alfred Stieglitz, 1924. Assemblage of lens, mirrored glass plate, springs, steel wool, glue, and nails mounted to board, 15g x 12'/g in. The Museum of Modern Art, Purchase, 193.1955. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art/ Licensed by SCALA/ Art Resource, N.Y. © The Estate of Arthur G. Dove, courtesy Terry Dintenfass, Inc.

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Figure 82 Arthur Dove, Pen and Razor Blade, 1925. Collage of razor blade, magazine cutout, metal strip, crayon, ink, and paint on paper, 17'/2 x 7'/ in. Alfred Stieglitz / Georgia O'Keeffe Archive, Yale Collection of American Literature. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. © The Estate of Arthur G. Dove, courtesy Terry Dintenfass, Inc.

below), who gazes at the pen, acrumpled strip of shiny metal, and the rusty razor blade. Familiar objects interact and acquire powers beyond those illustrated in popular magazines. I leave power in the plural because Dove’s collages offer no single or even consistent response to his commercial illustrations. They relate to the subjects of his illustra-

tions in multiple ways, ranging from satirical critique to celebratory portrait. The deftness of Dove's collaged compositions, with their intricate and complex use of materials and signifiers, suggests the things suppressed by Stieglitz’s singular spiritualized ideal of American pictures.

History and Nostalgia Dove’s 1926 solo show, his first since 1912, combined his things and paintings to raise anew the questions about composite modernism and artistic medium that had motivated the early Stieglitz circle. One inspired reviewer, opening the definition to include any material objects, asked, “Why should not an artist be permitted to use any stuff as a medium, so long as it suits his purpose and the results satisfy and move him?” This critic cautioned, however, that “the danger of using familiar objects for new purposes is that the spectator cannot free himself from the usual associations of an object. A button will always search for a buttonhole.” In that reference to Goin’ Fishin’, which uses buttons and buttonholes as distinctive formal elements, the critic suggested the artist might derive a new “subtle power” from the associations of recognizable objects. Perhaps the reviewer singled out the materials of Goin’ Fishin’ because the composition was the largest (more than twenty-one by twenty-five inches) and most sculptural (framed in a shadow box two and a half inches deep) of all of Dove’s things. From its debut Goin’ Fishin’ became one of Dove’s most talked about works, as critics, collectors,

and the artist himself tried to explain how the subtle power of familiar objects had been turned to new purposes in this thing. Audiences would have identified the subject represented in the composition from its 1926 title Fishin’ Nigger. Although Goin’ Fishin’ has resisted scholarly interpretation, Nancy J. Scott’s scholarly analysis recovers from the original title the status of the work as an abstracted portrait evidencing the period racisms and conflicted views of African

Americans even among the artistic avant-garde. Beyond assessing the “racist disdain” Scott reads as motivating Goin’ Fishin’, I place Dove’s collage alongside his contemporaneous illustrations of dialect stories to locate this thing in the context of an increasingly racial and regional national culture in the 1920s that was championed by

new anthropologists and modernist critics. Dove returned to work in commercial illustration in the 1920s at the height of a dialect revival and drew several pictures of African Americans that probably inspired and served as models for Goin’ Fishin’. The earliest drawings of this subject I have discovered

THE SENSE OF THINGS 163

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Mili. y Mati f 5 > a § rank of de ‘Sociated Sons an’ Daughters of Like Her Pa — a = taken to station six thousand scrsoned white pets RES stationed at Camp a [Will Arise.” aa eves rte fon ol The legal formalities of marriage and ~ | N se PL SNVe seldiers in the immediate rear ns a pital

Lee, Virginia, for ‘training during the late —_ a over de State, terdin’ on de convention.” divorce are matters of small concern to a NX As the moment Sppecactied for them'to' go war, One afternoon during drill, announce- (a f Re “Well,” said the Admiral, “from- your certain class of negroes in the South, And ~< S over the top, they grew more and more nerment was made that next morning the com- 44 ae a: uniform I imagine you must be an official sometimes the irregularity of the family lime \, fry. vous. Finally a little undersized negro pri-

pany wouldabe\ OE tmined a ~ Admurl, - — a Pas Dis’ iS of high rank.” »: relationship is disclosed by the—_ most‘mob naively f" »ral + giant rh vateof turned to the buddy his side,what a great sar: Mito ; ‘ in A attacking “Yes Sub, replied Tom. “I innocent expressions. rare a man, and said:atMose, you After the troops were dismissed, a big, 3 ~~ AP date = de Royal High Ruler an’ Supreme King.” In Wilmington, North Carolina, there was = a 4 ; ra Ale reckon de papers back home goin’ ter say

awkward looking private approached the > ie > * 2nd .. That surely: is a supertatively exalted 2 middle-aged negress employed as cook in 3 Ll) 4 a! . — shed verdad: “TE -

dapper young corporal charge his mus squad Pig } Aficial sae. ae \of wayder.” fs tithe, ow ae Saat McGowan “You a white family. her age earnest; solicitation ; » , e a2 1 ele Rhetery : a0inos eo.off= clak x: seventeen yearsAtof | nigs kblocs, esrtisPreege- ~ Sod i, Compal, "whet 36 a: fortiication F I > ‘ yA bart meee Sub, pment peer hy ee oeeend ey eet hej onl deer i Ont / , ae Hy A, fs. ter read "bout like dlis—' Six Thowsand White And in a tone of utter contempt for such 3 "foe pe > King modestly, “dey is five above me.” morming last Spring the lady of the house fa - ik Troops Tromped to Death.

ignorance, the corporal replied; “Don't you > Fa | -f ' r ee overheard the mother scolding her daughter © #4 be Just Right

know ‘rithmetic a tall? ought oka party vy i. . Not from a Life some neglect duties A j faytourist, er 7while 7~ ter know no dat two twentyfications makesAnybody a i 4 ‘ ! 7 Some months y ago of visitors “YouSentence sho is one no for ‘count nigger,” she = © kof pA her Last W inter a Northern GZ ra ~ through the penitentiary at Richmond an’ is onery. is what youyour is, nothin’ AYSigil » & ] would like to oy'a little local moonExactly , FA ot A fed the warden. As| . they approached a gang of but. by You jus’Lazy zackly like pa, Ielse fs Te as about which he ofnatheheard 90 much. The pastor of the colored church in ye , Be 4 trustics at work in the yard, one of the party suttinly is glad I didn’t marry dat nigger, 1 43S SP . LN ae, Vith very little difficulty he secured a pint Southport, North Carolina, out for a morn S i Jit “tog, Se recognized an old acquaintance, a negro from never had no use for him nohow.” == a he Be ‘ A’ Mente itaele he One = riesedbnlced fortification.” > by Le ia Newport News, Va., was being shown said. ‘‘Shiflless, dat’s what you is; shiflless —,' ian wi » spending a few Gays in Atlanta, decided he

gh some mem RARE | :Feat INUITseach CK the pastor. PES ze i : ‘ae is a5 ar . vm’ / =i ~ orship. A - Miss Li v; A 4 Jat Tt ge on hishe taxi. . EE doe comewhat upon a’ twoycoftchissue [ } op: te Gg a his home ,\ :~"7ey “i prompt Te was . iy peculiarly vicious decoction andto be ps pire od :Rot in’,Srinter, Dostors.“ ‘ -pA . aetr» i ity : ¥town. ~ myo fc resigned, He dic not care Cae “GU THUNe centant Gere. tod hed maine cord tmetoee eS ANE | ANG SIR Sovche ead de Soest yup onde! Fc metday he asked the od negro how

language; and we is abo glad you is come to had paused er a frierndly chat, when hes Vi - > 4 f if, ae “4 gah ogee el = om hs} ie” j te il egg Hy be or yee cx xh ree | ‘cide it. Which is more properer to say, observed on the opposite side of the street a z i we * r ; { y ’ r es a rupt id hs maloteees os ca lan a OE ry = 3 beh or ae my =~ i ,

‘esackly” or ‘dezackly'?"” flamboyantly buxom negro woman, who was + t . . = . B Y sexi “Miss 1 ucy, deile, An’ another right vs SOP hn arked le aang The pastor pondered the question sagely, striding along with an air of proud superior “hy 4 a £4 ae | wt aie ne my all dressed uo in. Prince Mey, i. Suk » tid ‘th lukey, “It. was scratched his head, and replied; “Well, you ity, obviously conscious of the attention ryi\N SeesSE fy = AS Ses Ane § . ng, . f ¢ XA a. BAG, Ao el Ae a‘oy a ons Ex nt iett : sy ae*/oe oe * “~. .Z i wy / oa Yee, dl%ax - ee daeap >es. ta i‘ Seheee— ol ab ld

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seas = =a8 Demscems Bs a ea >aRey aa| aainm.-=0=a =z ———. = RH fe le Con wan 3 ‘a re a ¥e = Pe THAT ’GATOR HAS BEEN HERE NOT TWO HOURS SINCE (page 241)

Figure 85 Arthur Dove, illustration for Ellis Parker Butler, Jibby Jones and the Alligator: The Story of the Young Alligator-Hunter of the Upper Mississippi Valley, 1924. © The Estate of Arthur G. Dove, courtesy Terry Dintenfass, Inc.

73).°? Independently crafting the “jokes” and producing images to illustrate them on the assumption that he would be able to sell them, Dove imagines the South and its contribution to the national culture largely from mediated representations, including dialect stories and images that stereotyped African Americans. The women in the two original drawings, rendered in greater detail than Dove’s Elks illustrations, wear long dresses (striped, plaid, and patterned), aprons, and head wraps that identify them as laborers. The images themselves, however, are devoid of industry. In one a ramshackle clothesline, propped up by branches, leads into the distance; in the other a dozing man, probably Liza’s husband, reclines across the center of the scene. Although I find it tempting to read irony in these images that seem such exaggerated racist clichés, Dove's “jokes” clearly come at the expense of those he depicted and depend on period stereotypes of southern blacks as lazy and ignorant. Dove's Goin’ Fishin’ could be understood as another version of such illustrated jokes, perpetuating period regional and racial stereotypes of the southern Negro and invoking a body of hateful speech and colloquial dialect associated with the South. Indeed, anglers’ magazines from the 1920s reveal that the inversion of Dove’s title “Nigger Fishing” was period slang for the type of fishing usually done by lower-class fishermen, who fished for food, not for sport, casting from a pier with a bamboo rod and a worm as

166 THE SENSE OF THINGS

bait.’° Dove probably read stories full of such dialect phrases, regional types, and racially

stereotyped actions and objects to illustrate them and to write his own jokes to sell to magazines. The art historian Donna Cassidy’s arguments about Dove's later paintings based on jazz parallel my own and clarify my claim that Dove drew on an intensely mediated fantasy of regional identity in creating Goin’ Fishin’ (though I have not located a jazz song with any of the thing’s multiple titles). As Cassidy points out, in the later 1920s and the 1930s Dove used jazz in his art as an exemplary American art form but “did not go slumming in Harlem to see black jazz bands.””’ Instead, his “view of jazz was informed by the whitening, commercializing, and sanitizing of this music in the 1920s and 1930s” in recordings, radio broadcasts, and films intended for a popular American audience that in effect “disconnected [jazzasa form] from African American culture” and its origins in the South.”* Goin’ Fishin’ represents an earlier moment of Dove's mediated cultural appropriation, before he produced his jazz paintings. In 1920 W.E.B. Du Bois claimed that derogatory jokes like Dove's haunted all visual depictions of African Americans. In response to those black readers who objected to any illustrations of black faces on the cover of his journal the Crisis, Du Bois urged the community to “train ourselves to see the beauty in black” rather than “remain afraid of black pictures because they are the cruel reminders of the crimes of Sunday ‘comics.”’? Although the collage Goin’ Fishin’ draws its objects from jokes, the composition that results is not humorous; the work lacks the sense of mockery or parody common to Dove’s generic portraits—Miss Woolworth, The Critic, and The Intellectual—even as it participates in their conversion of a subject into a thing. Although I am tempted to read the collage as an expression of Dove’s resentment at being forced to traffic in stereotypes, or as an apology for his illustrations, the collage itself makes no decisive statement. Goin’ Fishin’ is certainly not antiracist, but Dove’s depiction of an African American type in the thing differs from that in his illustrations. If Dove’s illustrated jokes rely on what the pictures imply (as transparent representations of the funny way “they” live and speak), his things, including Goin’ Fishin’, estrange the viewer by their use of “any stuff” as a medium. Rather than read the collage as a picture or a racist joke, I posit this work as evidence of, and a springboard to, an alternative modernist regional-

ism in which racial meaning inheres in stuff—in subtly powerful buttons and buttonholes.

VULGAR TITLE Dove’s original title, Nigger Fishin, should inform any interpretation of his collage. In discussing the title before examining the work itself, I aim to contextualize Dove’s words so that we can see through and beyond them. The title is vulgar in two senses: it is crude and indecent, and it mimics the everyday speech of common people. Although it is impossible to know how the artist wanted viewers to read his thing’s title, a contemporaneous work by a member of New York’s avant-garde—the novel Nigger Heaven,

THE SENSE OF THINGS 167

by Carl Van Vechten—provides an instructive historical context. Published in 1926, the same year Dove’s Fishin’ Nigger was first exhibited, the book became the flashpoint for a public discussion of race and authorship in New York. W. E.B. Du Bois condemned the best seller’s title as a “blow in the face.””* A progressive white author, Van Vechten understood the pitfalls of the word he used in his title, writing that “while this informal epithet is freely used by Negroes among themselves . . . its employment bya white person is always fiercely resented.””? In her introduction to a reprint edition of the novel in 2000, the literary historian Kathleen Pfeiffer explains the reasons for this resentment: “To use ‘nigger’ is to evoke a history of brutality, oppression, and dehumanization; as long as that history exists, ‘nigger’ can never be a mere word.””° Nonetheless Pfeifter argues that Van Vechten’s book “accomplished a great deal precisely because of its controversial title” and that the book’s intention to expose the hypocrisy of taboos based on skin color should not be obscured by its offensive title.”” Dove’s thing and period discussions of it speak more obliquely to issues of race than Van Vechten’s text. Nonetheless, Goin’ Fishin’ participated in a now largely forgotten attempt by the New York avant-garde and the Stieglitz circle to represent African Americans as part of a racial, regional national culture. Although Van Wyck Brooks’s notion of a “usable past” helped usher in the rediscovery of folk arts and literary traditions, Brooks himself was unwilling to look for models too far from Anglo-American traditions; even as he praised popular culture, he clarified its appropriate race and class boundaries: “Not that we are Hottentots, or even peasants.”’* Both Frank and Anderson, however, struggled to depict the African American contribution to American culture, locating it at the center of southern regional identity. In 1920, Frank wrote to Stieglitz from Richmond about the unreciprocated camaraderie he felt (implicitly because of his Jewish ethnicity) with African Americans in the South: “The negroes move me deeply .. . their inaccessibility is a constant sorrow to me. They naturally look upon me as just a White. If only they knew how close Iam to them in spirit! But I can never tell them.”” Inspired by the poet Jean Toomer’s critique of Our America as devoid of vibrant southern black life, Frank traveled to the South with Toomer, passing as black and writing his 1923 novel Holiday in response to that trip.*° In 1922 Sherwood Anderson, a well-known

chronicler of life in white midwestern small towns, articulated his own new goals in a letter: “If I could really get inside the niggers and write about them with some intelligence, I'd be willing to be hanged later and perhaps would be.”*! Traveling in the South four years later, Anderson urged visitors to achieve that insight by consulting with the white anthropologist rather than directly interacting with blacks: “Try down there to associate with the negro; sit with him, eat with him, talk with him. You would learn nothing, A white man of the right sort will tell you everything more clearly.”** Today, Frank’s and Anderson’s statements are problematic on a number of levels, hinting at the dilemmas of identification and objectification inherent in their desire for essentialized cross-regional, cross-racial knowledge. Dove's title and his thing have much more in

168 THE SENSE OF THINGS

common with Anderson’s and Frank’s attempts to represent southern black life than with Van Vechten’s better-known fictional narrative of African Americans in Harlem, which recounts the interwar migration of African Americans from the South to northern

urban centers. Dove’s vulgar title does not interrogate racism, instead using racist language to capture the everyday language of a region. Dove’s Fishin’ Nigger called forth private objections and sympathetic explanations in the 1920s and 1930s, particularly from Dove’s politically progressive art world friends.*? Dove deflected attempts to explain or eliminate the offensive word in his title, however (unlike, for example, George Bellows, who changed the title of his 1909 painting from A Nigger and a White Man to Both Members of the Same Club). He even used the word again, in the title for his 1929 abstract oil painting Barge Nigger (now known as Colored Barge Man). Nonetheless, others felt compelled to explain why the word mattered to Dove. Herbert Seligmann, a Stieglitz circle intimate who also served on the executive board of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored

People (NAACP) during the 1920s, noting that Dove’s title was “given in accordance with colloquial use at the time,” stated that he would not alter it, “although personally I should not use a word to which colored people seriously object.” Seligmann claimed, moreover, that “both Dove and Stieglitz were entirely free of color prejudice.”** The leftist critic Elizabeth McCausland also tried to explain Dove’s title, writing in 1937, “The word Nigger, fraught with history, does not imply race discrimination; it is in the American language for good reasons; Dove uses it as naturally as he calls his father ‘my old man.’ This is the cadence of Huck Finn, the cadence which makes Dove’s written word peculiarly indigenous.”® According to McCausland, the word carried a national history, rather than a present-day racism; it referred to the importance of local dialect, which Twain articulated in the opening notes on the text of Huckleberry Finn. Continuing controversies over Twain’s book pit objections to the word “nigger” against the insistence on the work’s status as a national literary masterpiece demonstrating the importance of the Africanist presence to the construction of American identity. McCausland’s invocation of Twain, intended to excuse Dove from accusations of race discrimination, also suggested, covertly, the function of racial otherness in the construc-

tion of American modern art. Even Dove and Stieglitz disagreed about the significance of the thing’s vulgar title. Stieglitz claimed that Dove had been inspired to make the work by the story of a drowned black man. On first seeing the collage, Stieglitz said he had been as repelled as he would have been by “a black corpse floating in the water.” But in living with the thing, he had learned to overcome the shock and appreciate the construction precisely because of its repulsive subject matter, just as watching “the plays of Shakespeare we see murders and other unpleasant things represented on the stage and still we enjoy Shakespeare.”*¢ If for Stieglitz, Dove’s thing relied on an ominous tale of its origin, Dove himself disputed Stieglitz’s account in a 1936 letter to McCausland, who had used

THE SENSE OF THINGS 169

the story in the draft of an essay she sent to Dove for his comments. The artist clarified the issue: “I didn’t pull nigger [sic] out of water. He was just sitting on pier. Think you heard that story mixed with a child I pulled out.”*’ Yet as Scott points out, less than three percent of the population in Dove's Long Island county identified themselves as African American in the 1920 census. These demographics mean, not that Dove never saw a black fisherman on a Long Island pier, but that if and when he did see such a figure in New York, the scene triggered stereotypes of the South he already knew from his work in illustration.** Dove’s own account of his collage (which deflects questions about its subject by shifting to his memory of rescuing an assumedly white child) omitted and suppressed his commercial work drawing African Americans. In Dove's terse narrative, which eliminated morbid readings, the work did not imply another narrative or a joke; it was just a man sitting on a pier. Dove warned McCausland that publicizing Stieglitz’s macabre explanation might destroy his patron Duncan Phillips’s growing interest in purchasing Goin’ Fishin’. Mc-

Causland, confronting conflicting accounts and interests, published the following assessment: “ The picture set deep in a simplified shadow box and composed of bamboo fishing pole, faded blue chambray shirt-sleeve, fishing line [séc], log and paint is the life ofan anonymous Negro, seen and instinctively known by the artist.”®? The thing, which

McCausland described as a picture, became an anonymous black man’s life, its biographical narrative or, perhaps more likely, the meaning of his momentary and commonplace acts of sitting and fishing understood instinctively by Dove. But, what would it mean for Dove to have “instinctively known” his subject? It seems to mean something different from what Dove says about just seeing a black man sitting on a pier. In fact, the difference parallels the distinction, discussed above, between pictures and things, objects with a relation to us and things that sit apart. In his account Dove avoids the claim of rescuing, or even knowing, his subject—the strangeness, ambiguity, and muteness of his work suggest the man’s radical separateness. This othering could be read as a denial of common humanity (an objectification that denies to the other any possibility of agency as a subject), but it could also be a refusal of the cross-racial identification McCausland proposed (an objectification that denies the self any possibility of transparently or instinctively knowing another). Theories of the thing thus present an alternative to theories of the gaze, in which looking is always an assertion of power over the pictured subject. Focusing on how Dove’s Goin’ Fishin’ departs from the transparent picture of alife McCausland saw requires examining the artwork as a resistant material thing that sits apart.

MATERIAL MEANING In the mid-1930s Duncan Phillips, initially a critic of Dove's strange use of materials, entered a protracted negotiation with Stieglitz to acquire Goin’ Fishin’, then titled Nigger Goes a-Fishin’. The collector eventually bought it for two thousand dollars—the

170 THE SENSE OF THINGS

most that had ever been paid for any work by Dove.”° The transaction was remarkable because even after buying his first collage from Dove, Huntington Harbor I, in 1928, Phillips cautioned the artist against collage: “I do wish you would paint more pictures in the conventional way with brush and pigment for I think you owe it to the world to

do so.”?' Although Stieglitz and Dove privately ridiculed Phillips for his aesthetic conservatism, Phillips's fears about the durability of the stuff Dove used in making the works in collage caused his objections to them and informed his concern about the things. Just after making his first purchase of paintings from Dove in 1925, Phillips wrote the artist, concerned that the matte gold of Golden Storm—a work made from handmixed oil and metallic paint on plywood panel—appeared unprotected by varnish and might darken over time. Phillips expressed the “hope that you will always think of the future of what you create and not follow into the error of your spiritual ancestor, Albert P. Ryder, who was too careless as to the impermanence of his paint, the great cracks and fissures through his magical surfaces trouble me very much.””* Ryder was considered one of America’s few great nineteenth-century painters, his rediscovery part of the nation’s usable past. Thus Phillips flattered Dove by connecting him spiritually with Ryder, but the issue of physical impermanence formed a worrying corollary. Phillips shared his concerns with Stieglitz: “I have often wished that [Golden Storm] had been painted in oil on canvas so that it would have enduring life.” Aiming to build a public museum to educate Americans about art, Phillips doubted that a national modern art could rest on such material things. Conversely, Stieglitz championed Dove’s thing precisely for its distinctive use of materials. In addition to its vulgar title, Stieglitz explained, Goin’ Fishin’ had the power to “restore” to viewers, “through his use of materials,” a “sensibility, which we had lost in civilization.” ”* Stieglitz here rehearsed the primitivist tropes used in 291’s displays

of African Art, updating his argument so that materials rather than forms moved viewers to precivilized responses. Suggesting how a primitive and uncivilized quality could inhere in the materials of Dove’s thing, Helen Torr recorded in her diary, on July 22, 1925, that Dove had gone to Huntington Harbor (where he had bought the pristine white work gloves for Miss Woolworth) to purchase a “blue shirt for Negro thing.””? Dove then cut, burned, and painted that shirt. Did he buy a new shirt because he lacked a suitable used one or because his own shirt could never stand in for the Negro’s? The question remains impossible to answer, but Stieglitz’s assertion suggests how coded racial meanings inhere in the materials Dove used. In that deployment of materials, Goin’ Fishin’ shares formal strategies with Dove's previous things: materials overlap and bleed into each other. Instead of creating a resolved scene or portrait of fishing, Dove creates a work that is ambiguous because of the interpenetration in it of the materials that constitute the depiction. The objects and oil paint share a palette of muted blues and browns. From the right a skeletal hand—five radiating pieces of bamboo, split and nailed to rectangular lengths of darker wood—

THE SENSE OF THINGS 171

reaches into the middle of the composition. The shirtsleeve under that “hand” has a small burned hole and painted cuff. Below it, pointed to by the thumb of the hand, Dove affixed a button (taken from the cuffofa second shirtsleeve, where a twig replaces it), nailing it to a bowed fragment of distressed wood—a dark form that might be the pier Dove identified or a profile portrait of the black subject, suggested by a button eye and daubs of white painted teeth. A fragment of bamboo cut across the grain at lower left creates a button-like circle and a bright visual rhyme with the darker circle in the upper-right corner, a sun or moon represented in oil paint. The brushstrokes of that celestial body also trace the outline of a physical knot in the wood panel, further emphasizing the entwining of materials and depiction. The displaced button rhymes visually with other elements of the composition, but also always signifies its own familiar function, its search for a buttonhole. The button, objects, and fragments retain their individual agency even as they hint at unified signification, mixing with each other and with the paint, in ways that seem alternately playful and violent, to create a work that shifts between understandable picture and incomprehensible thing. Although Stieglitz and Phillips understood Dove’s thing and its materials differently, eventually they agreed on its importance. By 1935 Phillips, convinced, it seems, by years

of collecting Dove’s work and being tutored by the artist on his technical methods, began to overcome his initial concerns about the material fragility of things.”° Phillips eventually cajoled Stieglitz into letting him buy Dove's unique construction. At Phillips’s gallery Nigger Goes a-Fishin formed the centerpiece of the Retrospective Exhibition

of Works in Various Media by Arthur Dove, in 1937—Dove’s first retrospective. In his essay for the show’s catalogue, Phillips engaged Dove’s work in varied media and foregrounded the importance of the things, comparing those authentic works favorably to “dated... early cubist stunts” in collage by Picasso and Braque. Although Dove’s works had uniquely modern qualities, his art “stirs a vague, old nostalgia.—And this art is American to the core—old American, like the arts of Whitman and Ryder.””’ Phillips identified Goin’ Fishin’ as “wholesome ... poetic and redolent of life on the farm or along the shores of the lake.” Without mentioning the issues of race raised by the work’s title, he praised Dove’s “catchy song of blue overalls, bamboo poles in sections and wet logs.””® Phillips’s account of modernist nostalgia in some ways recalls McCausland’s comparisons of Dove’s work to Mark Twain's remarkably American cadences. Phillips, however, with his abstract invocation of music, stripped out the racial elements of Dove’s work and divorced the nostalgia awakened by the materials and their composition from any specific engagement with American history. As Phillips, during the 1930s, grew more enthusiastic about Dove’s work as particularly American, he also began to buy folk and “naive” art, including paintings by the French artist Henri Rousseau and the American John Kane. He also became an early collector of works by several black painters, including Horace Pippin, Jacob Lawrence, and Romare Bearden.”? Although these purchases look quite different from one another, Phillips’s interest in each seems to have been similarly motivated by his alarm

172 THE SENSE OF THINGS

over what he called the “growing standardization of art.”!°° Phillips worried publicly that the so-called American scene painters and their champion art critic Thomas Craven, “a particularly cynical enemy of aesthetics,” discounted individuality and personality in favor of social service.'*' Phillips complained about the influence of the New Deal’s Public Works of Art Project (even though he himself served as its regional chairman): “Everything seems typical rather than individual. Group consciousness meets us at every turn. I admit the exceptions are refreshing.”!”* In Dove, folk artists, and black painters, Phillips found his exceptions. As the regionalism of the American scene painters became doctrinaire, Phillips saw in Dove’s thing an alternative model for the relationship between the individual artist and region that would create a national art. The triumph of Phillips’s coming to understand Goin’ Fishin’'—when he was able to see how its materials create a playful rhythm and a “vague, old nostalgia”—has subsumed and suppressed Stieglitz’s terrible narrative ofa black man’s drowning, Dove’s terse statement, and even McCausland’s explanation of the fraught title. For each of those viewers Dove’s Goin’ Fishin’ is a picture with racial subject matter, communicated explicitly in its title, and a thing created by using a collection of material fragments as medium. Dove’s thing and its vulgar title, drawing on specific ideas of regional culture, of raced actions and objects, and established southern

African American types, began to articulate how composite modernism and the struggles to represent difference continued to animate the later Stieglitz circle.

O’Keeffe’s Flair for Collecting Dove's Goin’ Fishin’ suggests the importance of things in establishing a national art from the diverse regional cultures of the United States during the 1920s and 1930s. In addition to Dove’s use of them in his collage, things and ideas about them played a heretofore unacknowledged role in O’Keeffe’s paintings of southwestern subjects— famous compositions that she created by collecting in New Mexico objects to paint from in New York. Although O’Keeffe’s direct connection with the Southwest and its things differs markedly from Dove’s mediated relation to the South through stories in regional dialect and stereotypes of African Americans, their links to regions have important similarities. Scholars have noted that Dove’s influence on O’ Keeffe’s abstraction originated about 1914, when she discovered his abstract pastels in Arthur Jerome Eddy’s book Cubism and Post-Impressionism.'°* O’ Keeffe’s shift back to representation during the 1920s has frequently been attributed to the artist’s desire to distance herself from the Freudian sexualized readings of her abstractions that envisioned her as the receptive feminine foil to Dove’s virile and penetrating masculine painting,'°* In addition to her wellknown admiration of Dove’s abstractions, O’Keefte, decades after his death, remarked,

THE SENSE OF THINGS 173

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Georgia O'Keeffe, Clam and Mussel, | 4

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“His things are very special. I always wish I’d bought more of them.”'” Although O’Keeffe’s phrasing does not make clear whether she used the term “things” to refer only to Dove’s collages, she did purchase Dove’s thing Rain in 1925 and his collage Hand

Sewing Machine in 1928; forty years after her purchase, she noted of the first work, “I still own it and it has been hanging where I live most of the time since I bought it— ’ rape Lay »106 : P -and 4 appreciatP wap longerBerm) than any Mppeyronng painting I have hadAnnes around.”'"° Beyond simply hanging ing Dove’s thing, O’Keefte learned from his work; she began to make the act of collecting things central to her own artistic practice soon after first seeing Dove's things and purchasing Rain. In late August 1926, O’Keeffe traveled from the Stieglitz family’s summerhouse on Lake George, in New York, to York Beach, in Maine. There she collected clam and mussel shells, subsequently creating a new series in oil and pastel from the same objects that Dove had used in his Long Island, a 1924 thing O’Keeffe would have seen at the Seven Americans exhibition (Figure 86; see Figure 80). Collecting quickly became a distinguishing aspect of O’Keeffe’s art. A 1938 article in Life magazine noted that “her talent for painting flowers with great sexy involutions and her flair for collecting ordi-

nary objects and turning them into extraordinary compositions have made her famous.”!°” O’Keeffe’s sexy flowers have been a topic of great scholarly interest, but what

of her flair for collecting objects?!

174 THE SENSE OF THINGS

BUR LED CULTURE O’Keeffe’s collection of southwestern objects was also informed by ongoing discussions in the Stieglitz circle of regional American art. In his book Our America, Waldo Frank

argued that both the Mexican and Indian “buried culture” of the Southwest should be rediscovered and integrated into the national culture. (Frank believed, however, that both were doomed as independent cultures in modern society.)'°? Many of the artists whose works made up Stieglitz’s Seven Americans exhibition followed up on Frank’s celebration of the region by traveling to New Mexico during the 1920s and 1930s. (Dove and Stieglitz did not.) Marsden Hartley, one of the first of the circle to visit, argued that Native American culture offered resources superior to those of African American culture for developing a unique indigenous national art: “Other nations of the world have long since accepted Congo originality. The world has yet to learn of the originality of the redman.”!'° In this racial hierarchy, European artists’ appropriation of African art, and indeed Africa's history of colonization and enslavement by European powers, disqualified African American culture from being uniquely American. Perhaps Hartley’s argument begins to suggest why the later Stieglitz circle’s self-conscious national portraits drew on cultures associated with the Southwest more frequently than the South that Dove looked to in Goin’ Fishin’. Hartley’s own paintings of New Mexico avoided depicting Native American people directly, instead focusing on still-life compositions of objects identified with southwestern culture by anthropologists and tourists alike, including the Anasazi-style objects of Hartley’s Pitcher and Dipper, circa 1920. A retablo and a blackware jar formed the subject of E/ Santo, the painting that became Hartley’s first to enter a museum collection; it was acquired by the Museum of New Mexico in 1919 (Figure 87).!!? When Paul Strand visited New Mexico briefly in 1926 and summered there from 1930 to 1932,

he also concentrated on objects identified with the Southwest, such as retablos and santos, rather than on Native American culture, access to which he found more difficult.

Strand wrote to Stieglitz, “I must admit that the Indians are not very much a part of the summer for me—I know I can’t do anything for them, nor can I live with them and possibly in time get to know something about them—to penetrate that barrier that D.H. Lawrence so quickly sensed.”''* Strand produced only one photograph of the region’s Native Americans, Apache Fiesta, a composition in which the subjects stand with their backs to the camera (Figure 88).''° Both Strand and Hartley marked their distance from the region’s inhabitants by presenting southwestern culture through things. O'Keeffe first traveled to New Mexico in the summer of 1929 with Strand’s wife, Beck. Overwhelmed, like many visitors to the Southwest, by the expansive landscape, O’Keeffe also turned to things, depicting her growing collection of Zuni and Hopi kachina dolls in oil, charcoal, and watercolor (Figure 89).''* Two-thirds of the new

THE SENSE OF THINGS 175

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paintings O’Keeffe showed in her annual exhibition in February 1930—the first following her southwestern summer—were of New Mexican subjects, including a carved wooden Mexican Virgin and monumental wooden crosses.'” The next year O’ Keeffe extended her collection beyond typical souvenir objects. Leaving New Mexico at the end of her second trip, in August 1930, she shipped to the Stieglitz family’s home at Lake George a barrel of cow and horse skulls, a Native American ceremonial blanket, and several of the calico cloth flowers traditionally made by Hispanic women. After her shipment reached New York, she transported it to the hotel apartment she and Stieglitz shared in Manhattan.

176 THE SENSE OF THINGS

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Figure 88 Paul Strand, Apache Fiesta, Colorado, 1930. Gelatin silver print, 8°/4 x 11! inches. Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Paul Strand Retrospective Collection, 1915-1975, gift of the estate of Paul Strand, 1980, 1980-21-93. Photograph: Philadelphia Museum of Art/ Art Resource, N.Y. © Aperture Foundation, Inc., Paul Strand Archive.

Although skulls like those O’Keeffe collected are now sold as decorative accents, such themes in home decor did not exist at the time when O’Keeffe began to gather them. As she put it ina letter to a friend describing the moment her barrel arrived: “My bones cause much comment.”!!° Stieglitz protested the shipping bill of sixteen dollars, but by the end of 1930 he had started photographing her draped in the ceremonial

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blanket and holding the bones (Figures 90 and 91).''” O’Keeffe later explained her thought process in creating this novel collection: “I had to go home—what could I take with me of the country to keep me working on it? I had collected many bones and finally

decided that the best thing I could take with me was a barrel of bones—so I took a barrel of bones.”"!® She called these “bleached bones” her “symbols of the desert,” objects

that would teach her how to paint the region while she was physically distant from itt? Whereas Dove’s relationship with the South in Goin’ Fishin’ had been mediated by stories in dialect and his own illustration before being instantiated in the work with objects he had found in New York, O’Keeffe and her objects had a direct physical relationship with New Mexico. Oil paintings of the skulls were received with great enthusiasm when O'Keeffe first

THE SENSE OF THINGS 177

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showed them at her 1931 annual show (Plates 8 and 9). Images of bones had various symbolic meanings tied to the landscape of the Southwest; they recalled nineteenthcentury romantic western painters and evoked twentieth-century scenes of the Dust Bowl.!”° In 1909, a reviewer of Frederic Remington’s paintings of the Old West identified the “dry skull reposing on the desert’s breast” as the region’s “jewel and symbol.”!7! Wanda Corn has pointed out that O’Keeffe’s contribution was to recover the skull from its clichés even as she relied on existing meanings “to help her convey what she took to be New Mexico’s special sense of place.”'** Physically removing the jewel from the desert thus constituted O’Keeffe’s innovation. Isolating her skulls formally from the landscape in her paintings, she created a new type of abstraction, transforming the object into a thing by removing it from its context. Anne Wagner argues that O’Keeffe painted such “fragments and ephemera’ to affiliate herself strategically with nature (the “woman’s sphere”) in pursuing “a modernist protocol—the calculated destabilization of the visual field—without too much opposition.”!*° Yet O'Keeffe, in addition to innovating by authorizing radical formal effects, made cultural claims by her use of fragmentary, ephemeral things. O'Keeffe explained her modernist isolation of the object by noting, “Nothing is less real than realism... . It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis that we get at

178 THE SENSE OF THINGS

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the real meaning of things.”!** The meaning of the things O’ Keeffe shipped from the Southwest seems at first to fit squarely within the category of souvenirs, especially given O’Keeffe’s nostalgic desire to have access to something material from the region even after leaving it (which she would do repeatedly until she relocated there after Stieglitz’s death). According to the poet and critic Susan Stewart, the souvenir signifies by its “material relation to location,” because it belongs to the category of objects that function only when they are removed from an original context and reinscribed in a new one.'* Stewart also argues that “souvenirs of death,” a category that would include relics, hunting trophies, and O’Keeffe’s skulls, “are at the same time the most intensely potential souvenirs and the most potent anti-souvenirs. They mark the horrible transformation of meaning into materiality more than they mark, as most souvenirs do, the transformation of materiality into meaning.” Instead of functioning to establish “a continuous and personal narrative of the past,” as a souvenir would, souvenirs of death also disrupt any continuity.!?° Always also dead things, such anti-souvenirs have the potential to transform meaning into materiality, much as O’Keeftfe herself did when dismissing critics who attributed larger meanings of death and crucifixion to her skulls, by assuring viewers there was “no symbolism intended” by her in the use of things.'”’ The extreme ever-present materiality of O’Keeffe’s skulls that makes them antisouvenirs is driven home in the gruesome 1938 spread in Life magazine that asserted

THE SENSE OF THINGS 179

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the importance of O’Keeffe’s collection of ordinary objects (Figure 92). Ina photograph, O'Keeffe, dressed in dark work clothes, her face obscured by a wide-brimmed hat and her hands covered by gloves, holds a bright white bovine rib cage and spine with her

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right hand and, with her left, the horn of a fully fleshed bull’s head. In this image, taken by Ansel Adams, the cow parts appear almost larger than O’Keefte. The decomposing furry face looks out at the reader even as O’Keefte looks away. Life explained the scene’s

180 THE SENSE OF THINGS

Page 28

GEORGIA O'KEEFFE TURNS

DEAD BONES TO LIVE ART ott or.

{ horse’s skull and pink pictured in color on the opposite page mayrose strike some people as strangely curious art. Yet because it was painted by Georgia O'Keeffe, whom they consider a master of de-

sign and color,will American experts, collectors .\ noisseurs vehemently assureand thecondoubters

that it is a thing of real beauty and rare worth. . Mi ” ;

O’Keeffe’s magnificent sense of composition and Wu | PY} Aw

subtle gradations of color on suchhave ordinarily . } ye_— b he subjects as leaves and bones made simple her the%best-

known woman her painter in At America such psee-—, she commands price. an art today. sale O’As Keeffe’s . = Horse's Head with Pink Rose would bring approxi/."% mately $5,000. A collector once paid $25,000 for a of 7a ae “feoe. ®

series of five small O'Keeffe lilies. Elizabeth Arden, » She in Virginia, attended schoolHungarian, in Chi- "> «iy : » ~—cago and New York, gave up painting in 1906 to Ln e. a Se ll aay. ie spend the next ten years working for advertising ™ 79% ‘! ra me - >) _ Cee agencies and teaching art. Her first show occurred in a : or: ? ee * a j : : fore New York in 1916. Since then her talent for paint- age se Wee x “ Be ae. - alta Pace:;

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