DESCRIPTION
With a cast of charismatic characters ranging from Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and Marcel Duchamp to Alfred
Stieglitz, Amy Lowell, and the Stettheimer sisters, Strange Bedfellows tells the compelling story of
the first American avant-garde in art, poetry, and the theater.
Art, like politics, makes for strange bedfellows indeed, and the emergence of an avant-garde in the United States
depended as much on social intercourse as on aesthetics. This lively chronicle recounts the struggles and amours of
America's first generation of modern artists, starting with the "cradles of modernism" in Chicago, Harvard, Paris, London,
New York, and Florence. By the ime of the 1913 Armory Show, bohemia had made a home for itself in New York's Greenwich Village,
and much of the book's action takes place there—at the Liberal Club, in Polly's Restaurant, in Mabel Dodge's salon.
There are side trips to the "poetry wars" being fought in Chicago and London, and to the first productions of the Provincetown
Players, casually staged in a candlelit living room. With the outbreak of World War I in Europe, tout le monde moved to
New York, and the arts started to speak with a French accent. By the time America entered the war just a few years later, the pioneering modern
era was over; the avant-garde disbanded and their aesthetic experiments were absorbed into the larger culture.
By tracing the intertwining circles of the avant-garde—poets and painters, Americans and Europeans, homosexuals and heterosexuals—Steven
Watson entertainingly elucidates the exchange of ideas and patronage that made possible the art,
publications, and performances that radically transformed modern culture. Visual and verbal portraits of the major characters—both straitlaced
and strange—plus many of the odd minor ones are complemented by extensive marginal quotations from letters and diaries,
bringing to life the uninhibited spirit of that crucial moment. Diagrams of the convoluted personal relationships, two Greenwich Village maps, menus from
memorable meals, a detailed chronology, an annotated cast of characters, and a glossary of Village slang add concreteness and immediacy to this tale of an
immensely appealing period. This is history spoken with a human voice, a lively conversation with the past as amusing and informative as one of Mabel Dodge's fabled Evenings.
REVIEWS
From Publishers Weekly:
This sweeping cultural history is a marvelous group portrait of a band of cultural renegades who, from 1913 to 1917, pioneered free verse, imagist poetry, cubism and abstract art, and brought modernism to music, drama and fiction. Hopping around geographically from New York City's Greenwich Village to Chicago's bohemia to Gertrude Stein's flat in Paris, Watson devises a framework encompassing such disparate figures as Ezra Pound, Vachel Lindsay, Harriet Monroe, Man Ray, Alfred Stieglitz, the Provincetown Players, Wallace Stevens, Marsden Hartley and Marcel Duchamp. His intimate chronicle tracks the avant-garde's evolution from rebellion to commercial co-optation as a new elite. Included are some 200 photographs and art reproductions (20 in color), memorabilia and charts mapping the interconnections of the principals. Watson, a Manhattan psychologist, organized a traveling exhibition relating to the book.
From Library Journal:
This book chronicles the rise of American modernism through a "group portrait of a small band of cultural renegades" who comprised avant-garde circles from 1913 to 1917 in New York, Cambridge, Chicago, London, Paris, and Florence. The result is an excellent, concise, highly readable overview of the literary alliances, social networks, and unconventional lifestyles that characterized the era when artists, poets, writers, and intellectuals were "struggling to develop an American voice." Watson effectively conveys the bohemian spirit of the age and does much to make this period comprehensible for today's reader. A unique feature of the book is its "Cast of Characters," an annotated alphabetical index of key figures including Gertrude and Leo Stein, the Arensbergs, Alfred Stieglitz, Ezra Pound, Eugene O'Neill, Amy Lowell, John Reed, and others featured in the book. Also noteworthy is the 44-page "Modern Chronology" of significant events, professional and social.
