Washington`s National Portrait Gallery has turned America`s cultural scrapbook back to what is perhaps its most important and exciting page.
In a new exhibition called ”Group Portrait: The First American Avant-Garde,” it has refocused our attention on a brief but furiously active period during and after the first World War, in which a relative handful of brilliant and frequently outrageous artists, writers, musicians, thinkers and salonistes wrenched American creative and intellectual life from its conservative slumbers and brought it into the modern age.
The names are now legendary: Gertrude Stein, Alfred Stieglitz, Ezra Pound, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Edward Steichen, Eugene O`Neill, Mabel Dodge, T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, Georgia O`Keeffe, Harriet Monroe, John Sloan, John Marin, William Carlos Williams, Joseph Stella, Maxwell Bodenheim, Amy Lowell and Mina Loy.
New York`s Greenwich Village was their capital, but their outposts included Chicago`s 57th Street, Cape Cod`s Provincetown and the bohemian enclaves of Paris, London and Florence.
Their art extended from post-Impressionism to Modernism, Cubism, Futurism and an idiosyncratic array of ”isms” of their individual devise.
Their publications bore titles as provocative as Blast, The Ridgefield Gazook, The Masses, Rongwrong and New York Dada, and as sublime as The Little Review and Poetry.
Their photography was ingenious, revolutionary and brilliant; their films bizarre and outrageous. One memorable bit of avant-garde cinema featured the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, a wealthy groupie, cavorting in the nude as she shaved off her pubic hair.
Their ideas included free love, free speech, free art, anarchy, Socialism, Communism, Syndicalism, Dadism, Mysticism and Paganism.
Their motto, coined by Pound, was simple but all encompassing: ”Make It New!”
Though many of their revolutionary ideas and discoveries had already taken root in Europe, they burst on an American cultural scene that, in the words of one, ”was ripe for the taking.”
The nation was still in a musty Victorian ideal. Art, which had largely stopped at Impressionism, was valued only insofar as it beautified and edified. Ditto poetry. Theater ran mostly to melodrama and frivolous comedy. Paintings like Duchamp`s ”Nude Descending a Staircase” (condemned by no less a figure than Teddy Roosevelt), poetry as revolutionary as Eliot`s ”The Vast Wasteland” and drama on the order of O`Neill`s ”The Emperor Jones” shook America`s conservative sensibilities.
Because they were revolutionaries, experimenters, tearers-down and shakers-up-”avant garde” in military terms means the troops that lead an assault-they founded no epoch of their own. As the exhibition`s guest curator, Steven Watson, noted: ”The avant-gardes` aspiration to live in perpetual revolution inevitably created the conditions for its rapid overthrow, both by popularizers and by succeeding avant-gardes.”
The most epochal event of their revolution was the 1913 ”Armory Show,”
the international art exhibition that rather explosively introduced modern art to New York and Chicago.
The Portrait Gallery`s exhibit of 70 photographs, paintings, drawings, sculptures and literary artifacts is highly focused: largely on the years spanning 1913 and 1917 and on the four most consequential leaders of the American avant-garde: Stein, Stieglitz, Duchamp and Pound, each of whom is accorded a separate display chamber.
But despite its size and focus, the show encompasses much. The avant-garde functioned not as a movement but as circles-indeed, circles within circles-which were inextricably linked through romance, friendship, money
(patronage), geography and ideas.
The most important circle, centering on his famous gallery/studio at 291 Fifth Avenue in New York, was that of Stieglitz, who is best known as a pioneering photographer and husband of Georgia O`Keeffe but who also served as the George Washington of modern art in America.
In his chamber, we find Stieglitz drawn by Marius de Zayas, painted by Man Ray and photographed by Steichen and Francis Picabia. In turn, there`s a photograph of De Zayas by Stieglitz, as well as Stieglitz`s pictures of O`Keeffe and artist John Marin. The wealthy and beautiful Agnes Ernst Meyer, the ”sunshine girl” of the 291 circle, appears in three works: a portrait by Steichen, a nude by Picabia and an abstraction by de Zayas.
Gertrude Stein`s circle was the most famous of the four, and she dominates her chamber as egocentrically as she did in the famous ”Saturday evenings” of her Paris salon (as one artist of the time put it: ”She would pull up a chair and sit on your life”). Among her many looming likenesses are two photographs by Man Ray, an oil portrait by Picabia and a rather awesome nude sculpture by Elie Nadelman.
A Picasso sketch of Stein`s collector/brother Leo is included, as are portraits of Stein`s companion Alice B. Toklas, patronness and bon vivant Mabel Dodge, artists Marsden Hartley and Carl Van Vecheten and art critic Henry McBride, who said of his frequent hostess: ”What differentiated her from all other collectors was the fact that she collected geniuses rather than masterpieces.”
The most daring circle was the New York ensemble gathered around French expatriate Marcel Duchamp, who in an androgynous reincarnation also became Rrose Selavy.
Duchamp, who introduced Dadism to New York, is depicted as himself and as Rrose in photographs by Ray, Steichen and Stieglitz and artwork by Stella and the celebrated Florine Stettheimer, who with her two sisters conducted one of the most stimulating salons in New York.
The most literary circle, and the one with the closest ties to Chicago, is that of Ezra Pound, which was centered largely in London.
Pound, who would end up being tried as a pro-fascist war criminal following World War II, was an iconoclast who in 1912 founded the Imagism school of poetry, a blow struck against flowery rhetorical excess in verse and the precursor of modern poetry.
Among his adherents were poets Harriet Monroe, the Chicago founder of Poetry magazine; Marianne Moore; Mina Loy and H.D. (Hilda Doolittle).
The last two, eerily photographed by Ray, inspired much art and verse with their bewitching beauty and famous love affairs.
One of the most delightful pieces in the show is a huge, humorously posed group photograph of four principals of the Paris-based Transatlantic Review:
Pound, Joyce, the writer Ford Madox Ford and lawyer/patron John Quinn.
Another is the enormous doll house created by Carrie Stettheimer. Its remarkably ornate and detailed miniature chambers include figures representing various members of the Stettheimer`s salon, including Duchamp and composer Virgil Thompson. The rooms are decorated with miniatures of famous art works, including a three-inch representation of ”Nude Descending a Staircase.”
There is a fault to find with this show. For all its charm, it is almost antiseptically sedate. These were a ribald, raffish, rambunctious crew, these painters of fractionated nudes and publishers of Molly Bloom`s notorious soliloquy. The Portrait Gallery has so cleansed them that they almost seem guests at one of Henry James` tea parties.
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”Group Portrait: The First American Avant-Garde” show will be on view through Oct. 27 at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., when it will move to New York`s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
