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.

‘Puppet of skeletal escapade’: Dance Dialogues in Mina Loy and Carl Van Vechten

In an undated letter, likely composed in late 1914, Mina Loy reflected on the recent aesthetic experiences that had greatly affected her, writing that the ‘things that have made [her] gasp were a few Picassos, Windham [ sic] Lewis, Nijinski dancing – perfection is infrequent’. The letter was addressed to her American agent Carl Van Vechten, a dance and music critic at the New York Times, who played a highly influential role in shaping discourses around ballet and modern dance both in the US and internationally. This article conjoins Loy and Van Vechten's modernist oeuvres – crossing genres including poetry, novels, newspaper reviews, and photography – in order to reveal the importance of dance to their shifting aesthetic commitments and shared interest in the expressive capacities of the human form. Dancing bodies, moving fluently across the work of this modernist pair, variously transcribe Futurist satires, Decadent revivals, and a primitivist fascination with the erotic aspects of dance, crystallising in Loy and Van Vechten's responses to the Harlem Renaissance.

The Objects of Poetry and the Economics of Art

This chapter focuses on Loy's ambivalent and subtle understanding of the processes underpinning the creation of the economic and symbolic value of artworks, or the economic and cultural processes validating and sustaining their privileged status. Drawing on modernist aesthetics, critical theory and thing theory, the chapter examines early and later texts in dialogue with works by Marianne Moore, Gertrude Stein, Carl Van Vechten, Marcel Duchamp, Ezra Pound and Walter Benjamin, and shows how Loy proposes a dialogic version of the art work as encounter, collaboration, or event, rather than as a self-contained masterpiece. In this chapter the author analyses the notion of artistic creation as labor, investigates the status of Loy’s poetic objects in relation to the world of commerce and of commodities, and explores Loy’s critical assessment of the author’s signature within the “culture industry”.

The “Most Distinctive and Biggest Benefit that Broadway Has Ever Known”

Decker examines how the “color line” in the twentieth century crucially impacted Broadway up to the onset of the Great Depression. He finds a “surprising group portrait” of participants--including such figures as Walter White, an early African American leader of the NAACP, and Carl Van Vechten, a popular white novelist and cultural gadfly--who “together [meet] at a site where questions of musical style, race relations, and cultural and social history intersect in provocative ways” and offers a case study of how popular entertainment across the racial spectrum could work to enhance interracial understanding in the penumbral days of the Jazz Age.

Reproducing Carmen in the United States

Chapter 9 explains that Carmen proved an ideal vehicle for the new technologies of the twentieth century, embraced by the new recording artists whose prestige was borrowed from the operatic world. The young American opera star Geraldine Farrar, building on the legacies of Emma Calvé and Maria Gay, enjoyed an unprecedented and unmistakably modern celebrity as Carmen, born of her ability to exploit the confluence of operatic performance, recordings, and the silent film industry. In this context, the Metropolitan Opera’s attempt to stage a genuine Spanish opera in the guise of Enrique Granados’s Goyescas was undermined by comparison with the vibrant New York traditions of Carmen in the winter of 1915–16, when the fashion for all things Spanish was so intense that Carl Van Vechten dubbed it “the Spanish blaze.”