CultureAmerica

Primitivism and Place at Mabel Dodge Luhan's

Flannery Burke

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780700622375
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Ralph Emerson Twitchell Award They all came to Taos: Georgia O'Keefe, 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 Dodge's orbit. From this kaleidoscope of places emerges a vision of what place meant to modernist artists—as 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 York's dominance, she shows that these newcomers believed Taos was the place they had set out to find—and that when Taos failed to meet their expectations, they changed Taos.Throughout, Burke examines the ways notions of primitivism unfolded as Dodge's 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 Mexico's arts communities over land issues and of the ways in which Pueblo Indians spoke on their own behalf.Burke's book offers a portrait of a place as it took shape both aesthetically in the imaginations of Dodge's visitors and materially in the lives of everyday New Mexicans. It clearly shows that no people or places stand outside the modern world—and that when we pretend otherwise, those people and places inevitably suffer.

CHAPTER ONE

Mabel Dodge’s Place

In 1913, Mabel Dodge’s living room in Greenwich Village was hopping. On Wednesday evenings Dodge gathered just about everybody who was anybody. Radical journalists, anarchist activists, gallery owners, artists, and writers rubbed shoulders as they argued over the ties between art and politics and jostled for food at Dodge’s well-stocked table. John Reed, the romantic journalist who later covered the Russian Revolution in Ten Days That Shook the World, was Dodge’s lover. Max Eastman, the editor of the radical journal the Masses, visited regularly. Emma Goldman, Big Bill Haywood, Alfred Stieglitz, and Georgia O’Keeffe were just a few of the activists and artists who wandered through Dodge’s door and later found widespread fame. Dodge herself was not an artist or a writer or an activist. At thirty-four years old, Dodge was wealthy, twice-married, familiar with the principles of free love, and well-connected, having hosted Gertrude Stein and prominent European cultural figures when she lived in a villa in Florence. A background of wealth, bohemian inclinations, and cultural connections made her the person to know in Greenwich Village.

Dodge’s salon nurtured three experiments in the years preceding World War I that would have a significant influence on how she viewed Taos: the Armory Show of modern art; a theatrical representation of a Paterson, New Jersey, textile strike; and Reed’s coverage of the Mexican Revolution for the Metropolitan, a New York newspaper. These activities were, for several months, the central focus of conversation for Dodge’s guests, particularly when they met for salon evenings. When Dodge and her friends argued over the Armory Show, they ruminated over whether Americans could produce original modern art. When they interviewed Big Bill Haywood about the strikes in the New Jersey textile mills, they asked if Americans could unite despite class divisions. When they set on stage at Madison Square Garden the events Haywood and others described to them, they broadcast their hope for a union of art and political action. When they welcomed Reed back after reading his dispatches from his travels with the revolutionary Pancho Villa, they asked how he had managed to penetrate to the inner circle of Villa’s intimates. In all three efforts, they expressed their desire for art to have material impact, their passion for authentic experience, and their faith that such authenticity could be found in “primitive” expression.

Mabel Dodge Luhan, 1938. (Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.)

World War I shattered their efforts. The members of Dodge’s salon scattered. Some abandoned political activity. Some abandoned art. Still others tried to find political and artistic expression that did not run afoul of federal officials involved with the Red Scare. Dodge herself moved to a country retreat at Croton-on-Hudson. There she continued to host artists, but she dedicated most of her time to appreciating the countryside. She hoped for a greater connection to the natural world and to find the sense of satisfaction that had eluded her even in the headiest days of her salon. As she cast about for a stronger purpose, she sent her third husband, Maurice Sterne, on a one-man honeymoon to New Mexico.

Dodge soon joined him, and there, finally, she found what she had been seeking. Although she would always claim that she had been empty until she arrived in Taos, she brought much of what she had always wanted along with her. Dodge had sought a place for herself first in Italy, then in New York City, then in Croton, and finally, in Taos. In her efforts to claim Taos as her own, she would bring elements of every previous place she had called her home to New Mexico. It is not surprising, then, that she found what she came for.

Dodge had first made her presence felt not in New York City, but in Italy. She was a wealthy woman; she came from a wealthy family and in her second husband, Edwin Dodge, she had found a wealthy husband. She had rushed into an early marriage to escape the oppressive neglect she felt from her parents, a prosperous Buffalo, New York, couple living off the spoils of Dodge’s grandfather’s success in banking. After her first husband, Karl Evans, died in a hunting accident, Dodge and her young son, John, sailed to Europe. Along the way, they met Edwin Dodge, and soon thereafter, Mabel and Edwin married. Edwin Dodge was trained as an architect, and his new wife had a flair for decoration and ostentatious living. The two established themselves in a villa in Florence called the Villa Curonia. They soon put their wealth to work decorating and redesigning their villa according to an elaborate Renaissance theme. They also collected artists, writers, and other creative people who pleased them and who were pleased to stay for a while in the Villa Curonia. Major cultural actors like Gertrude and Leo Stein, the British tenor Paul Draper and his wife, salon hostess Muriel Draper, and the sculptors Jo Davidson and Janet Scudder all joined the Dodges in their Renaissance dining room and participated in the celebration of art and beauty to which Mabel Dodge had dedicated herself.

Despite the activity in their home, the Dodges were not happy. Mabel Dodge chafed against the constraints of marriage, engaged in more than one affair, at one point even attempted suicide, and withdrew even deeper into the fantasy life of the Villa.¹ When the couple concluded that John should return to the United States for his education, Edwin Dodge jumped at the opportunity to return as well. Although Mabel had done little to place her relationship with Edwin on steady ground, she was unwilling to end her marriage or to separate from her family. She agreed to return with her husband, and the family arrived in New York City in November of 1912.

In Greenwich Village Dodge found an alternative to the fantasy life she had led in Italy. By 1910, “the Village” meant the area blocked by Tenth Street to the north, Houston Street to the south, Washington Square and Fifth Avenue to the east, and the Hudson River to the west. Unlike other areas of New York, the Village looked shabby and incoherent. Crooked streets, narrow alleys, unexpected courtyards, and small buildings made the Village seem like a place apart, especially to those looking for an antidote to the city’s bustle. Artists and writers and those who liked to call themselves “bohemians” liked the Village’s cozy feel and its cheap rents. Usually from more prosperous backgrounds than their tenement-dwelling neighbors, these Villagers were sometimes guilty of hypocrisy. Though many of them decried the inequalities plaguing the nation, they were more inclined to dwell on the picturesque appeal of laundry in tenement courtyards than they were the inadequate living conditions of the tenements themselves. These bohemian Villagers were a high-spirited, talkative bunch eager to make their mark on modern culture.²

As soon as the Dodges arrived at their new home at 23 Fifth Avenue, Mabel Dodge fell into a deep depression, but her spirits were not low for long. Her doctor advised that her husband give her time and space alone, and Edwin Dodge soon left to live in his own place at the Brevoort Hotel across the street. Edwin Dodge would figure into the stories that followed hardly at all, but for one important exception. One day, in an effort to raise his wife’s spirits, Edwin Dodge brought the sculptor Jo Davidson, their old friend from Florence, to visit. Davidson introduced Mabel Dodge to a man named Hutchins Hapgood, and Dodge’s salon was under way.

Hutchins Hapgood seemed to embody every current of prewar bohemia in his slight frame. A Chicago-born Harvard graduate, he worked in the 1890s as a reporter for the Commercial Advertiser under muckraker Lincoln Steffens. Steffens encouraged his staff to find common ground between the subjects of the Commercial human interest stories and its readers. Hapgood leapt to the challenge, publishing a series of articles about Jewish immigrant life on the Lower East Side. Though an Ivy League graduate, he identified with the people he wrote about in his articles and books, and by the time Dodge arrived in New York City, he called himself an anarchist.³ Hapgood found a companion in his adventures in fellow Commercial staff member Neith Boyce. A delicate beauty with a steely dedication to her career as a writer, Boyce had joined the Commercial staff after working for her father’s newspaper in Boston. When she and Hapgood embarked on a tumultuous open marriage, she kept her name and her right to engage in extramarital affairs. Hapgood, as a Midwesterner who found his calling as a writer in the East, a privileged man who championed the poor, and a free-love advocate who jealously guarded his wife’s attentions, could open his arms widely enough to embrace almost every cause that filled the streets of Greenwich Village in the years before World War I.

It was Hapgood, according to Dodge’s memoirs, who introduced Dodge to Lincoln Steffens. Steffens had participated even earlier in activism than Hapgood had. A muckraker of the Progressive era, he had more experience with reform movements than with the radical interests that would soon occupy Dodge’s salon. Nonetheless, Steffens looked to younger generations for the cutting edge of politics. He had recruited Hapgood from Harvard to work at the Commercial, and continued to make a project of transforming Harvard men into the eyes and ears of New York. His recruits would have a major influence on Dodge’s days in Manhattan, but Steffens himself would leave the most significant mark. It was his idea, according to Dodge’s memoirs, to start a salon in the first place. “You have a certain faculty,” she much later remembered him saying, “‘a centralizing, magnetic, social faculty. You attract, stimulate, and soothe people, and men like to sit with you and talk to themselves! You make them think more fluently and they feel enhanced…. Now why don’t you see what you can do with this gift of yours? Why not organize all this accidental, unplanned activity around you? This coming and going of visitors, and see these people at certain hours? Have Evenings!’”⁴

Dodge’s evenings rapidly became a success in large part because of the Armory Show of 1913. The show was the inspiration of three members of the Association of American Painters and Sculptors. Arthur Davies, Walt Kuhn, and Walter Pach endeavored to stage a comprehensive show of the modern art that had been sweeping art communities in Europe. They began their preparations in May of 1912, and by February of 1913, they opened a massive show at the Armory of the Sixty-Ninth New York Regiment at Lexington Avenue between Twenty-Fifth and Twenty-Sixth Streets. The show’s locale lent its name for posterity and, because it was not in a museum or traditional gallery, suggested the antiestablishment goals of its creators. The Armory Show was not another museum exhibition designed to instruct young artists interested in the academy’s mores. It was, instead, a dramatic statement on the potential for modern art to transform the meaning of artistic creation altogether. Although modernism had ample precedent in the United States by the time of the show, it generated extraordinary excitement.⁵ Indeed, even a brief overview of the works in the show reads like a survey of the foundations of modern art: more than a hundred works by Vincent Van Gogh, tens of paintings by Cézanne and Gauguin, and startling, stimulating, and terrifying pieces like Wassily Kandinsky’s painting The Garden of Love, Pablo Picasso’s charcoal Standing Female Nude, and the most shocking of all, Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase. Even before the show began Dodge told Stein that it would be “a scream! … I am all for it. I think it is splendid…. There will be a riot & a revolution & things will never be quite the same afterwards.”⁶

Dodge’s enthusiasm for the show sprang in part from her dedication to a subset of modern art: primitivism. Her primitivism was nothing new. As early as 1775 Rousseau had suggested that humanity’s authentic expression existed only in “natural man,” and implied that vestiges of authenticity could be found only in those races Rousseau and his contemporaries viewed as primitive.⁷ Closer to Dodge’s frame of reference, many European modern painters had turned to nonwhite groups they considered primitive for artistic inspiration. The work of Picasso and Matisse was probably familiar to Dodge from her visits with Gertrude and Leo Stein in Paris. She probably also had seen similar works at Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery, 291. Stieglitz sometimes frequented Dodge’s salon and considered himself to be in the vanguard of modern art, so much so that he passed up an opportunity to contribute to the Armory Show because he believed his gallery already beyond the show’s message. Picasso had shown work at 291 in 1911, and critics had remarked on the similarities they saw between his work and that of “primitive” carvings from West Africa. Indeed, a year after the Armory Show, Stieglitz opened an entire show of African art titled, tellingly, “Statuary in Wood by African Savages—The Root of Modern Art.” Because Stieglitz, Picasso, and Matisse considered themselves civilized contemporaries of the modern developments they saw around them, they felt they had lost touch with authentic expression. Because they believed Africans were not civilized, because they saw them as “savages,” they believed Africans were suspended in a primitive era.⁸ Contrary to the opinions of most of their parents’ generation, celebrants of African art believed that being primitive was good. If Africans were primitive, they were also authentic, and in emulating and celebrating African art, many of Dodge’s friends were striving to bring the same authenticity into their own lives.

Primitivism would again play a role when Dodge and several members of her salon became involved in a Paterson, New Jersey, silk workers’ strike. In January 1913, while Dodge was busily writing Stein of her new enthusiasm for the International Exhibition at the Armory, a group of silk workers in Paterson, New Jersey, walked away from their looms and began a six-month strike. Mill owners had demanded what strike organizers called a speed-up. Owners had introduced new looms that allowed workers to tend four looms when they had previously tended only two. Fearing the new system would lead to layoffs, the workers chose to strike. They found ready allies in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), who had been trying to organize in Paterson for years.

The Paterson silk workers had chosen a propitious time for cooperation with the IWW. The IWW had formed in Chicago in 1905 from a coalition of radical leaders including William “Big Bill” Haywood of the Western Miners Association and Eugene V. Debs of the American Socialist Party. The nascent labor organization cut its teeth on mining strikes in Cripple Creek and Telluride, Colorado, and in free speech fights in the Pacific Northwest, where, in the course of battling employment agencies, they successfully challenged municipal ordinances restricting public speeches. At some point, followers and critics started calling the organization the Wobblies. Just a year before the Paterson silk workers walked away from their factories, the Wobblies had successfully led a textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts. The American Federation of Labor had long held that it could not successfully organize unskilled immigrant laborers. The IWW believed otherwise. Its leaders barreled out of the West to prove that the tactics they had honed in mines and lumber mills west of the Mississippi would work just as well in the industrial centers of the East. Two of their more picturesque leaders, Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, joined existing organizers and made headlines as Paterson’s strikers engaged in strategies the Wobblies had mastered: picketing, holding rallies, parading, and packing local jails. By the time the Lawrence strikers finally won, Flynn and Haywood’s names were well known in New York, particularly to people like Hapgood who were sympathetic to the radical elements of the labor movement.⁹

In May, Dodge accompanied Hapgood to see Big Bill Haywood speak at the house of a friend elsewhere in Greenwich Village. Haywood used the event to publicize the strike in Paterson. A news blackout had prevented word of the strike from reaching New York, and even many radicals in the Village had not heard of it. Haywood was angry and frustrated, and Dodge’s memoirs suggest that she found him intimidating. An enormous man with only one eye, Haywood intimidated a lot of people. Dodge, however, was also witnessing his indignation at the events in Paterson. Twenty-five thousand workers, most of them immigrants who did not speak English as their first language, were striking in Paterson. Their demands were an eight-hour day, minimum wages in certain job categories, and an end to the four-loom system. They had been met with violent repression from the mill owners and Paterson police, and Haywood was desperate for some sym...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: A World Apart
• 1 Mabel Dodge’s Place
• 2 John Collier’s Place
• 3 Nina Otero-Warren’s Place
• 4 Carl Van Vechten’s Place
• 5 Tony Lujan’s Place
• 6 Mary Austin’s Place
• 7 D. H. Lawrence’s Place
• Epilogue: Georgia O’Keeffe’s Place
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• Photo Gallery
• Back Cover