From Greenwich Village to Taos (eBook)

Primitivism and Place at Mabel Dodge Luhan's

Flannery Burke (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2016
260 Seiten
University Press of Kansas (Verlag)
978-0-7006-2237-5 (ISBN)

Infos

Winner: Ralph Emerson Twitchell AwardThey all came to Taos: Georgia OKeefe, D. H. Lawrence, Carl Van Vechten, and other expatriates of New York City. Fleeing urban ugliness, they moved west between 1917 and 1929 to join the community that art patron Mabel Dodge created in her Taos salon and to draw inspiration from New Mexico's mountain desert and primitive peoples. As they settled, their quest for the primitive forged a link between authentic places and those who called them home.In this first book to consider Dodge and her visitors from a New Mexican perspective, Flannery Burke shows how these cultural mavens drew on modernist concepts of primitivism to construct their personal visions and cultural agendas. In each chapter she presents a place as it took shape for a different individual within Dodges orbit. From this kaleidoscope of places emerges a vision of what place meant to modernist artistsas well as a narrative of what happened in the real place of New Mexico when visitors decided it was where they belonged. Expanding the picture of early American modernism beyond New Yorks dominance, she shows that these newcomers believed Taos was the place they had set out to findand that when Taos failed to meet their expectations, they changed Taos.Throughout, Burke examines the ways notions of primitivism unfolded as Dodges salon attracted artists of varying ethnicities and the ways that patronage was perceived-by African American writers seeking publication, Anglos seeking authentic material, Native American artists seeking patronage, or Nuevomexicanos simply seeking respect. She considers the notion of competitive primitivism, especially regarding Carl Van Vechten, and offers nuanced analyses of divisions within northern New Mexicos arts communities over land issues and of the ways in which Pueblo Indians spoke on their own behalf.Burkes book offers a portrait of a place as it took shape both aesthetically in the imaginations of Dodges visitors and materially in the lives of everyday New Mexicans. It clearly shows that no people or places stand outside the modern worldand that when we pretend otherwise, those people and places inevitably suffer.

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 15.2.2016
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Kunstgeschichte / Kunststile
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Kulturgeschichte
• ISBN-10: 0-7006-2237-3 / 0700622373
• ISBN-13: 978-0-7006-2237-5 / 9780700622375