Modernist salon culture: the contributions of the Stettheimer sisters in 1920s New York

During the 1920s, the Stettheimer sisters Ettie, Florine and Carrie opened the doors of their home in tlie Alwyn Court on West 58th Street, New York, to numerous guests, celebrities, poets and artists including Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Gaston Lachaise, Elie Nadelm~; and Paul Thevenaz, dancer Adolph Bolm, playwright Avery Hopwood, writer Sherwood Anderson, as well as critics Carl Van Vechten, Henry McBride and Paul Rosenfeld. Rivaling the era's famous salons of Gertrude Stein and Nathalie Barney in Paris, collectively the sisters created a literary and artistic salon in which art making flourished. The distinctly feminine decor served as a backdrop for Florine's paintings on display in the salon; Ettie would describe the vibrant salon culture in her autobiographical and fictional writings; and Carrie's role as sartorial experimenter would be inscribed in the sisters' paintings and writings.

Modernist salon culture: the contributions of the Stettheimer sisters in 1920s New York

During the 1920s, the Stettheimer sisters Ettie, Florine and Carrie opened the doors of their home in tlie Alwyn Court on West 58th Street, New York, to numerous guests, celebrities, poets and artists including Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Gaston Lachaise, Elie Nadelm~; and Paul Thevenaz, dancer Adolph Bolm, playwright Avery Hopwood, writer Sherwood Anderson, as well as critics Carl Van Vechten, Henry McBride and Paul Rosenfeld. Rivaling the era's famous salons of Gertrude Stein and Nathalie Barney in Paris, collectively the sisters created a literary and artistic salon in which art making flourished. The distinctly feminine decor served as a backdrop for Florine's paintings on display in the salon; Ettie would describe the vibrant salon culture in her autobiographical and fictional writings; and Carrie's role as sartorial experimenter would be inscribed in the sisters' paintings and writings.

“What is 291?”

“What is 291?” The results of this survey, issued in 1914 by the photographer Alfred Stieglitz to artists, writers, and patrons of his gallery, known by its address at 291 Fifth Avenue, were published in his magazine Camera Work (1903–1917). However, just as Stieglitz was issuing the questionnaire, his associates—Marius de Zayas, Paul Haviland, Agnes Ernst Meyer, and Francis Picabia—were already planning a magazine called 291 (1915–1916), thereby transforming the question even as it was being asked. Read as a response to the questionnaire, the publication 291 destabilizes and amplifies the community Stieglitz had established, while visually embedding its history into the pages of the new magazine. Taking 291 as a case study of the avant-garde and its legacies, this essay traces the origins of the magazine from its predecessors—that is, the periodical Camera Work and the gallery 291—to consider “What is 291?” and its afterlife. Emerging from the intersection of a magazine and gallery as a new iteration of print culture, 291 worked to expand the American avant-garde and to reimagine the magazine as a medium.

Automatism

Both Dada and Surrealist writers and artists experimented with "automatic" creative production. Dadaists including Francis Picabia, Tristan Tzara, Hans Arp, and Kurt Schwitters wrote "automatic" poems from 1918, so called because they were transcribed without delay, serious consideration, or revision. Dada visual artists, including Arp, Sophie Tauber, and Marcel Duchamp also relinquished creative control of their works by employing chance. At the same time a group of writers in France around André Breton experimented with automatic writing as a new method of exploring the unconscious. In 1919 Breton and Philippe Soupault published Les Champs magnétiques, the result of their first experiments with automatic writing that tried to tap new poetic imagery through uncontrolled outbursts of imagination. In the period 1922–4 dream accounts were added to automatism. In the First Manifesto of Surrealism (1924) the movement is defined by Breton as "pure psychic automatism by which it is intended to express, either verbally or in writing, the true function of thought." Surrealist visual artists also explored automatism. Surrealist automatism was influential in the development of modernist visual art. Robert Matta’s (1911–2002) concerns with psychological states in the late 1930s set a precedent for American abstraction. CoBrA (1948–51), an avant-garde collective established in Europe, favored automatic techniques and influenced developments in European abstraction.

Picabia, Francis (1879–1953)

A cavalier individualist, Francis Picabia became an internationally renowned avant-garde artist, spearheading Paris and New York Dada with his friend Marcel Duchamp and also contributing to Dada in Zurich and Barcelona. Picabia was a car enthusiast who embraced modernity, viewing the machine as a form expressive of the modern spirit from which he drew a new and revolutionary artistic idiom. Picabia also drew upon the tenets of the Puteaux Group and, upon arriving in New York to exhibit at the Armory Show in 1913, was lauded as a leading Cubist. He worked for a time in Orphic Cubism, a blend of Cubist, Futurist, and Fauvist themes and techniques to which he added ‘‘abstracted’’ industrial and biomorphic forms. Although he maintained an interest in the figure, Picabia is known primarily for his early dialogue with abstraction and his development of a quasi-machine aesthetic. He looked to industrial diagrams for artistic inspiration and, upon returning to New York in 1915, during a period of involvement with photographer and modern arts patron Alfred Stieglitz’s famous 291 Gallery and journal, produced the famous Mechanomorph series. Depicting Stieglitz and his entourage as bizarre, seemingly dysfunctional, industrial forms, Picabia’s Mechanomorphs shaped the visual vocabulary of New York, and later Paris, Dada. Picabia’s ironic stance in relation to art and culture has prompted scholars to interpret his conflation of human and machine parts as also playful punning of morality, sexuality, and blind faith in technology.

Cravan, Arthur (1887–1918)

Born Fabian Avernius Lloyd in Lausanne, Switzerland to expatriate English parents, Arthur Cravan was a self-styled ‘poet-pugilist,’ nephew of Oscar Wilde, and husband of British poet Mina Loy. Cravan’s literary legacy is largely constituted by his connection to avant-garde circles in both Paris and New York, and the way that his anti-art position offered an aesthetic model for Dada and surrealism. Cravan published the journal Maintenant in Paris from 1912–1915, which in its indiscriminate combativeness toward other artists and writers represents what Roger Shattuck called ‘a literary transposition of boxing technique.’ Cravan’s pugnacious persona drew on his formal training as a boxer, exalting viscerality and violence against the putative effeteness of artistic convention: ‘if you have the good fortune to be a brute you’ve got to keep being one’. In this regard, Cravan was particularly influenced by contemporaneous African-American heavyweight Jack Johnson, a recurrent figure in his writing often portrayed as ‘primitive’ or ‘brutal.’ In 1915, Cravan and Johnson staged a boxing match in Barcelona attended by avant-gardists such as Francis Picabia and Blaise Cendrars, which Johnson won. By 1916, Cravan had moved to New York, where he met Loy, and had taken up with members of the Arensberg Circle. His combination of an anti-art stance and penchant for spectacle made him an important precursor for Dada and surrealism; Cendrars once wrote that ‘Dada is Dada and Arthur Cravan is its prophet.’ In 1918, Cravan vanished off the coast of Salina Cruz, Mexico in a boat of his own repair.

Satie, Erik Alfred Leslie (1866–1925)

Erik Satie’s compositions, writings, and humor played an important role in many modernist movements of the twentieth century. Experimenting with simple forms, neoclassicism, mysticism, satire, and Dadaism, Satie collaborated with prominent artists, musicians, and institutions including Vincent Hypsa, Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso, Rene Clair, Francis Picabia, Claude Debussy, Man Ray, the Ballets Russe, the Ballets Suédois. Most recognized today for early his modal, pseudo-antique dances, the Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes, Satie also composed popular tunes, humorous piano works that mocked musical conventions, avant-garde ballets, as well as numerous mystical, irreverent, and nonsensical writings and drawings. His works and persona, sometimes whimsical, arcane, gothic, mystical, or Dadaistic inspired later generations of modernist artists and composers such as Les Six, Virgil Thomson, and John Cage.