New York City's crowded streets and energetic people, its vast population and enormous extremes of wealth and poverty, its towering buildings and technological marvels have marked it as the quintessential modern city since the turn of the century. Artists in particular identified with New York's newness, believing that it embodied the future and celebrated the excitement of the modern urban lives they both witnessed and led. In New York Modern, William B. Scott and Peter M. Rutkoff explore how the varied features of the urban experience in New York inspired the works of artists such as Isadora Duncan, Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O'Keeffe, Eugene O'Neill, Duke Ellington, Clifford Odets, Elia Kazan, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Jackson Pollock, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Allen Ginsberg, Arthur Miller, James Baldwin, and Diane Arbus, who together shaped twentieth-century American culture. In painting, sculpture, photography, film, music, dance, theater, and architecture, New York artists redefined what it meant to be ''modern.'' Rooted in the urban realism of Walt Whitman, Thomas Eakins, and Edith Wharton, New York artists combined the revolutionary ideas and styles of European modernism with vernacular images drawn from American commercial, folk, and popular culture in their attempts to respond to the cacophony of voices and blur of images drawn from the city's bars and cafes, tenements and townhouses, skyscrapers and docks. Handsomely illustrated and engagingly written, New York Modern documents the impressive collective legacy of New York's artists in capturing the energy and emotions of the urban experience.
Contents:
List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction Prologue: Before the Modern: The New York Renaissance 1. Times Square: Urban Realism for a New New York 2. Paris and New York: From Cubism to Dada 3. Bohemian Ecstasy: Modern Art and Culture 4. New York Modern: Art in the Jazz Age 5. Rhapsody in Black: New York Modern in Harlem 6. Modernism versus New York Modern: MoMA and the Whitney 7. True Believers on Union Square: Politics and Art in the 1930s 8. Behind the American Scene: Music, Dance, and the Second Harlem Renaissance 9. New York Blues: The Bebop Revolution 10. Homage to the Spanish Republic: Abstract Expressionism and the New York Avant-Garde 11. Life without Father: Postwar New York Drama 12. Renovating the Modern: Monuments and Insurgents Notes Index
""In their exceptionally well-researched study, William Scott and Peter Rutkoff explore the centrality of New York City in the development of a vibrant, modern American culture... Their's is a rich and satisfying chronicle of the seemingly impossible, a thorough account of New York cultural life between 1876 and 1976... Scott and Rutkoff capture the vitality of the city as well as the individuals and institutions that made possible a modern, democratic American culture by focusing on the multiple roles that New York City played in the lives of the artists and institutions they investigate.""
