Freytag-Loringhoven, Baroness Elsa von (1874 –1927)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caroline Knighton
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
World War I ◽  
York City ◽  
Department Stores ◽  
World War ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Public ◽  
New York Dada ◽  
Visual Artist ◽  
Naked Body

Born Else Hildegard Plötz in the German Baltic seaport town of Swinmünde in 1874, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven was an avant-garde poet, performer, visual artist, model, and autobiographer associated with the retrospectively named New York Dada movement. Arrested in Pittsburg for wearing men’s clothes and publicly smoking in 1910, the Baroness became an increasingly notorious figure in New York city as World War I took hold in Europe. Head shaved and lacquered in high vermilion, her often naked body decorated with the tin cans, ice cream spoons, and gilded vegetables that she collected from the city’s gutters or stole from its department stores, the Baroness both embodied and challenged the limits of established avant-garde gestures through a radical lived-Dada practice performed on and through her body. Well-suited to The Little Review’s tagline "Making no Compromise with the Public Taste," the Baroness was, as editor Jane Heap put it, "the only one living anywhere who dresses Dada, loves Dada, is Dada" (1922: 46).

Black Song, Dance, and Theater in pre-World War I New York City

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Gilbert
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
World War I ◽  
York City ◽  
Musical Theater ◽  
Labor Union ◽  
Symphony Orchestra ◽  
Development Stage ◽  
World War ◽  
Performance Space

Between 1896 and 1915, Black professional entertainers transformed New York City’s most established culture industries—musical theater and popular song publishing—and helped create two new ones: social dancing and music recording. While Black culture workers’ full impact on popular entertainment and Black modernism would not be felt until after World War I, the Harlem Renaissance and the Jazz Age were decades in the making. Stage performers Williams and Walker and their musical director Will Marion Cook introduced full-scale Black musical theater to Broadway between 1902 and 1909; songwriters-turned-performers Cole and Johnson expanded the style and substance of ragtime songs along Tin Pan Alley; James Reese Europe created a labor union for Black musicians that got hundreds of players out of Black nightclubs into high-paying White elites’ homes, eventually bringing a 200-person all-Black symphony orchestra to Carnegie Hall for the first concert of its kind at the august performance space. James Europe’s Clef Club Inc. also caught the ears of Manhattan’s leading social dancers, the White Irene and Vernon Castle, in ways that helped disseminate Europe’s ragtime dance bands across America and, by 1913, became the first Black band to record phonographs, setting important precedents for the hit jazz and blues records of the postwar era. While James Europe would go on to win renown as the musical director of the Harlem Hell Fighters—the most-decorated infantry unit to fight in World War I—his prewar community of professional entertainers had already successfully entered into New York City’s burgeoning, and increasingly national, commercial culture markets. By studying some of the key figures in this story it becomes possible to get a fuller sense of the true cultural ferment that marked this era of Black musical development. Stage performers Williams and Walker and Cole and Johnson, behind-the-scenes songwriters Will Marion Cook and James Weldon Johnson, and musicians such as James Reese Europe’s artistic and entrepreneurial interventions made African Americans central players in creating the Manhattan musical marketplace and helped make New York City the capital of U.S. performance and entertainment.

Activism from the Start

2021 ◽  
pp. 9-26
Author(s):  
Daniel R. Garodnick
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
World War I ◽  
York City ◽  
Housing Crisis ◽  
World War ◽  
City Life ◽  
East Village ◽  
The Town ◽  
New Yorkers

This chapter begins by describing the redbrick buildings that emerge out of the East Village on Manhattan's East Side, the plain and unenticing facades of Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village that disguise the unique slice of city life that takes place within. It talks about Stuy Town's idyllic quality that contradicts the tumultuous history that produced this middle-class enclave tucked in the midst of Manhattan. It also explains Stuy Town's roots that are planted in bitter soil as the town was born of government-backed, and subsidized, racist policies and displaced with poor New Yorkers. The chapter tells Stuy Town's story of activism, where elected officials, civil rights leaders, and tenants joined together to fight against corporate greed and unjust policies, and for the rights of New Yorkers. It recounts how Stuy Town emerged from a housing crisis in New York City that began during World War I.

Wood, Beatrice (1893–1998)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thelma Rohrer
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
York City ◽  
Smithsonian Institution ◽  
Native State ◽  
Marcel Duchamp ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
American Artist ◽  
New York Dada

An American potter known for luster-glaze chalices and whimsical ceramic figures, Beatrice Wood was once named the "Mama of Dada." Born on 3 March 1893 into a wealthy family in San Francisco, California, raised in New York City, and a student at the Académie Julian in Paris, Wood rebelled from her traditional upbringing by 1912. Seeking a more bohemian life, she joined avant-garde art circles, became friends with Marcel Duchamp and Henri-Pierre Roché, and was influential in the New York Dada movement. During the 1930s, her early successes in ceramics provided independent income and, by 1948, she settled in Ojai, California, to continue her interest in theosophy. She established a studio developing embedded luster glazes with radiant colors and continued this work for over thirty years. Wood was recognized as a "California Living Treasure" by her native state, named an "Esteemed American Artist" by the Smithsonian Institution, and partly inspired the character "Rose" in the 1997 film Titanic. She died on 12 March 1998 at the age of 105.

Grosz, George (1893–1959)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara McCloskey
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
World War I ◽  
Social Order ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
World War ◽  
New Objectivity ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
George Grosz

George Grosz was a leading artist of Germany’s early 20th-century expressionist, Dada, and New Objectivity movements. His works from this period remain celebrated examples of the modernist avant-garde. Grosz began his career as a student at the Dresden Academy of Art in 1909. In 1912, he moved to Berlin, abandoned the academic rigor of his earlier work, and became part of the Expressionist avant-garde. His paintings and drawings soon adopted the fractured planes, vivid color, and psychologically troubled content of Expressionist art. Grosz became politically radicalized by the outbreak of World War I in 1914. He helped to found Berlin Dada during the war years. His irreverent cut and paste Dada collages of this period assailed not only the concept of ‘‘art,’’ but also the vaunted notions of culture, militarism, and national pride that were part of a German social order Grosz had come to despise. At the end of World War I, Grosz joined the German Communist Party and became its leading artist. He fled to the United States in order to escape persecution after Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor in 1933. Grosz settled in New York, where he pursued his art under the utterly changed circumstances of exile.

Martha Dickinson Bianchi: War Poet

2007 ◽  
Vol 80 (2) ◽  
pp. 317-321
Author(s):  
Marcy L. Tanter
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
World War I ◽  
York City ◽  
Emily Dickinson ◽  
Red Cross ◽  
World War

The article recovers poet Martha Dickinson Bianchi, niece of Emily Dickinson, who served in the Amherst, Massachusetts, branch of the Red Cross and tended wounded soldiers in New York City at the end of World War I. Two previously unpublished poems reflect American despair in the aftermath of the war.

scholarly journals Fractals of art and life: the Arensberg Salon as a Cubist space

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin Joelle McCurdy
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
World War I ◽  
Decorative Arts ◽  
World War ◽  
Exhibition Space ◽  
Art Objects ◽  
The Arts ◽  
New York Dada ◽  
The World

Table of Contents Introduction: The Art Revolution in Walter's Room, Or Where Lou Held Court Part 1: Fractals of Art: Cubism and the Arensberg Collection Part 2: Fractals of Life: The Modern Exhibition Space from the Arensberg Salon to the MoMA Conclusion: From Cubist Wunderkammer to Open House "Hosted during the World War I and postwar era, from 1915-1921, the Arensberg salon served a generative function, welcoming bohemians and intellectuals from different nations and economic standings to convene and engage in conversation, chess, revelry, and collaborative projects. In addition to acting as the physical nucleus of New York Dada, the Arensberg residence, with its"super pictures" adorning the walls, served as an impressive domestic exhibition site incorporating art objects, decorative arts, and artefacts from disparate origins. Its hosts were Walter Arensberg, a poet,journalist, and literary scholar, and his wife Louise, a musician who came from equally wealthy stock. Together the Arensbergs used their sizeable inheritances to become influential collectors and patrons of the arts" -- Page 7.

scholarly journals Fractals of art and life: the Arensberg Salon as a Cubist space

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin Joelle McCurdy
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
World War I ◽  
Decorative Arts ◽  
World War ◽  
Exhibition Space ◽  
Art Objects ◽  
The Arts ◽  
New York Dada ◽  
The World

Table of Contents Introduction: The Art Revolution in Walter's Room, Or Where Lou Held Court Part 1: Fractals of Art: Cubism and the Arensberg Collection Part 2: Fractals of Life: The Modern Exhibition Space from the Arensberg Salon to the MoMA Conclusion: From Cubist Wunderkammer to Open House "Hosted during the World War I and postwar era, from 1915-1921, the Arensberg salon served a generative function, welcoming bohemians and intellectuals from different nations and economic standings to convene and engage in conversation, chess, revelry, and collaborative projects. In addition to acting as the physical nucleus of New York Dada, the Arensberg residence, with its"super pictures" adorning the walls, served as an impressive domestic exhibition site incorporating art objects, decorative arts, and artefacts from disparate origins. Its hosts were Walter Arensberg, a poet,journalist, and literary scholar, and his wife Louise, a musician who came from equally wealthy stock. Together the Arensbergs used their sizeable inheritances to become influential collectors and patrons of the arts" -- Page 7.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document