Engendering Culture: Manhood and Womanhood in New Deal Public Art and Theater. - book reviews

These two titles justifiably are reviewed in tandem, for both are interdisciplinary studies addressing gender issues, art, and theater in America. Their authors and editors, all three of them women, are to be commended for their attempts to revitalize three decades of American cultural and intellectual history, despite some flaws in their presentations.

Adele Heller and Lois Rudnick have focused their collection of essays on the first decades of the twentieth century, arguing persuasively that this period provided the cornerstone for later political and cultural developments. Contributors to this volume suggest that, for all the limitations of the Progressive Era, precedents were established for the social legislation enacted during the Great Depression and later in the Great Society of Lyndon Johnson. And assertions of cultural pride and political rights for the New Negro led to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Unfortunately, women seemed to have lost ground after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1919, but the New Woman can be viewed as a model for feminists after 1970.

Barbara Melosh takes a revisionist approach to New Deal art, which already has a substantial bibliography.(1) Acknowledging feminist theory, reception theory, and the construction of gender, she demonstrates that economic hardship and changing political agendas undermined the progressive ideals of an earlier generation. The New Woman of the previous era was swept aside by the need for woman-as-helpmate in reconstructing society after World War I. Using for her examples murals produced under the Treasury Section of Fine Arts (known as the Section) and plays produced by the Federal Theatre Project, Melosh addresses the ideological, social, and cultural context for the creation of works of art during the 1930s.

Heller and Rudnick have assembled an informative collection of essays around a "cultural moment": the year 1915 is when the Provincetown Players produced their first productions at the Wharf Theatre in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Indeed, the book developed from a conference held in June 1987 in Provincetown to commemorate the Players, a group that launched a revolution in American theater. Four plays written by the Players were staged, and lectures were presented on the political and intellectual context of the Progressive Era. The idea of organizing a collection of papers around a particular date is interesting, and many contributions are appropriate to the revisionist project intended by the editors.

1915, The Cultural Moment provides an overview of the political interests and the cultural history of the early twentieth century with some admirable new insights. For instance, in a chapter titled "The New Negro," Ernest Allen, Jr., gives deserved recognition to the African American socialist and nationalist Hubert Harrison, and Neith Boyce joins Mabel Dodge Luhan as prominent New Women in Ellen Kay Trimberger's "The New Woman and the New Sexuality." Contemporary fiction by women is considered, and Sui Sin Far, the first Chinese American woman to publish serious fiction in the United States, is featured in Elizabeth Ammons's "The New Woman as Cultural Symbol and Social Reality." Women are among the authors of the first four Provincetown plays, published here, including one by Boyce and another co-authored by Susan Glaspell.

Certain areas of consideration are seriously compromised by the choice of contributors to Heller and Rudnick's volume. The most egregious problem with this collection for an art historian is in the tradition-bound assessment of early American modernism. Martin Green's introduction to the section on the New Art foregrounds the basic premise of rebellion against academicism as the motivation for avant-garde art by Americans. Although he mentions Dodge's departure from New York in 1917 as one of the "centrifugal forces of dispersal at work in the art world", Green fails to recognize other seminal figures and events. Marcel Duchamp and the Arensberg circle are given only a mention, and the founding of the Society of Independent Artists, which also took place in 1917, might have been given more attention than Dodge's move to New Mexico. A few artists may have settled around Mabel Dodge Luhan in Taos, but many others remained on the East Coast, there forming the core of American modernism. And what about the Societe Anonyme, the first museum of modern art, founded in 1920 by Katherine Dreier, Duchamp, and Man Ray? In his chapter "Alfred Stieglitz's Faith and Vision," Edward Abrahams highlights the efforts of Stieglitz in promoting modernism through his journal Camera Work and the Photo-Secession Gallery (later known as 291). Throughout this book, discourse on the visual arts marginalizes the achievements of women, with the sole exception of Dodge.

Milton Brown's "The Armory Show and Its Aftermath" shows little revision from his pioneering contribution to the study of American art, The Story of the Armory Show, dating back to 1963.(2) He documents the planning of the show, claims that "most of American involvement in Modernism dates from the Armory Show", and details the stimulation of the American market for modern art as a result of the exhibition. Georgia O'Keeffe's work is illustrated and she is discussed, but no other woman receives more than a mention in Brown's essay or in Green's "The New Art." The most glaring omission in a book dedicated in part to the New Woman is the failure to discuss the achievements of women artists of the Progressive Era. The art historical canon remains intact in all of these essays. Artist and patron Katherine Dreier, founding member of the Society of Independent Artists as well as the Societe Anonyme, surely deserves more than a few sentences. Artists Marguerite Thompson Zorach, Beatrice Wood, Blanche Lazzell, Adelhyde Roosevelt, and Alice Morgan Wright warrant a place among the New Women. Women illustrators, particularly those who contributed to The Masses, are not presented.