The Little Art Colony and US Modernism Geneva M

Modern American Literature and the New Twentieth Century

and US Modernism and The Little Art Colony Colony Art Little The Geneva M. Gano M. Geneva Carmel, Provincetown, Taos Carmel, Provincetown,

The Little Art Colony and US Modernism Geneva M. Gano

ISBN 978-1-4744-5550-3 The first major book-length study of Carver’s of study book-length major first The cultural influence cultural examines the Carver The Literary Afterlife of Raymond short story writers. renowned most America’s of legacy of one Carver’s contextualises amongst contemporary legacy Pountney in the neoliberal era, debates about authenticity and craftsmanship Carver’sbetween connections socioeconomic drawing new work study presents new explorations of and American neoliberalism. This Carver’s with other contemporary writers, filmmakers relationships Iñárritu, shedding fresh light on and artists such as Murakami and Carver’s influence. specialising is an Independent Scholar, Jonathan Pountney and economic cultures in the in American fiction and political neoliberal era. offers us a way to read a way to read Carver offers us Afterlife‘The Literary of Raymond historical it in its art while understanding appreciates his Carver that to trace Carver’sbecomes a way which then itself context, aesthetic to a significant contribution later artists. It is influence on and political art.’ Carver and contemporary studies of of Missouri Samuel Cohen, University Cover image: iStockphoto.com Cover design: www.hayesdesign.co.uk edinburghuniversitypress.com The Little Art Colony and US Modernism Modern American Literature and the New Twentieth Century Series Editors: Martin Halliwell and Mark Whalan

Published Titles Writing Nature in Cold War American Literature Sarah Daw F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Short Fiction and American Popular Culture: From Ragtime to Swing Time Jade Broughton Adams The Labour of Laziness in Twentieth-Century American Literature Zuzanna Ladyga The Literature of Suburban Change: Narrating Spatial Complexity in Metropolitan America Martin Dines The Literary Afterlife of Raymond Carver: Influence and Craftsmanship in the Neoliberal Era Jonathan Pountney Living Jim Crow: The Segregated Town in Mid-Century Southern Fiction Gavan Lennon The Little Art Colony and US Modernism: Carmel, Provincetown, Taos Geneva M. Gano

Forthcoming Titles The Big Red Little Magazine: New Masses, 1926–1948 Susan Currell The Reproductive Politics of American Literature and Film, 1959–1973 Sophie Jones Ordinary Pursuits in American Writing after Modernism Rachel Malkin Sensing Willa Cather: The Writer and the Body in Transition Guy Reynolds The Plastic Theatre of Tennessee Williams: Expressionist Drama and the Visual Arts Henry I. Schvey Class, Culture and the Making of US Modernism Michael Collins Black Childhood in Modern African American Fiction Nicole King

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Carmel, Provincetown, Taos

GENEVA M. GANO Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com

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ISBN 978 1 4744 3975 6 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 3977 0 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 3978 7 (epub)

The right of Geneva M. Gano to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). CONTENTS

List of Illustrations vi Acknowledgements viii

Introduction: Modernism beyond the Metropolis 1

Part I: Carmel 1. Race, Place and Cultural Production in Carmel-by-the-Sea 31 2. Robinson Jeffers, the Art Worker and the ‘Carmel Idea’ 58

Part II: Provincetown 3. Building the Beloved Community in Provincetown 89 4. Eugene O’Neill: Superpersonalisation and Racial Spectacularism 128

Part III: Taos 5. Cultivating the Taos Mystique 167 6. ‘Something Stood Up in my Soul’: D. H. Lawrence in Taos 204

Epilogue: The Afterlife of the Little Arts Colony: Institutionalising Creative Collectivities 239

Notes 245 Index 288 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

1.1 William Adam, ‘Chinese Fishing Village. Monterey’, c. 1890s. (Courtesy of Harold A. Miller Marine Biology Library, Hopkins Marine Station, Stanford University.) 43 1.2 Edmund Waller Gale, ‘The Carmelites Picnic on Point Lobos’, 1910. 46 2.1 ‘Robinson Jeffers’, TIME magazine cover, 4 April 1932. Photo by Edward Weston. (Courtesy of Occidental College Special Collections and College Archives, Robinson Jeffers Collection.) 63 2.2 Postcard, ‘Point Joe on 17 Mile Drive, Monterey Peninsula, California’. (Personal collection of the author.) 65 3.1 Charles Webster Hawthorne demonstrating technique on Provincetown wharf to students and onlookers. (Charles Webster and Marion Campbell Hawthorne Papers, 1870–1983. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.) 94 3.2 Summer Art School Advertisements in International Studio, April 1914. (Courtesy of Texas State University Libraries.) 98 3.3 B. J. O. Nordfeldt, ‘Figures on the Beach’, c. 1916. (Courtesy of High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA.) 107 4.1 Eugene O’Neill and Charles Demuth lounging in Provincetown, 1916. (MS Am 1091 (1390), Houghton Library, Harvard University.) 134 List of Illustrations / vii

4.2 Francis Bruguiere, ‘Slaves auction. Charles S. Gilpin as Jones (scene 5)’, Provincetown Playhouse, 1920. (Photo by Vandamm Studio © Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.) 155 5.1 Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad, ‘Indian Detours: Roundabout Old Santa Fe New Mexico’. (Courtesy of DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University, US West Photographs, Manuscripts and Imprints.) 169 5.2 E. L. Blumenschein, ‘The Advance of Civilization in New Mexico: The Merry-Go-Round Comes to Taos’, 1899. (Courtesy of New Mexico History Museum/Fray Angélico Chavez History Library Graphics Collection 1–12.) 175 5.3 John Sloan, ‘Indian Detour’, 1927. (Courtesy of Cleveland Museum of Art © 2020 Delaware Art Museum / Artists Rights Society (ARS) New York.) 188 6.1 Andrew Dasburg, ‘Rolling Landscapes’, 1924. (Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution (1991.205.7).) 213 6.2 D. H. Lawrence, ‘Pueblo Indian Dancers’, c. 1925–6. (Courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin.) 217 6.3 Awa Tsireh, ‘Tablita (Corn) Dance’, c. 1920–1. (Courtesy of the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution (13/1608).) 218 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This long research project took years of vision, revision and reformation that involved visits to a number of archives and conversations with many brilliant and generous people. It began as a dissertation project at UCLA, where Michael North, Blake Allmendinger, Jennifer Fleissner and Steve Aron guided me through its first stages, but I think it also bears the indelible traces of the notorious Barbara L. Packer and the generous Karen Rowe. The support of Chris Looby and UCLA’s Americanist Research Group was instrumental in moving this project forward, as were the comments of many of my peers in the graduate programme there. At Stanford and Indiana University, Richard White, Paula Moya, Ramón Saldívar and Matthew Guterl offered me early support and congenial atmospheres in which to develop my ideas. Robert S. Fogarty of Antioch College listened to me talk on about little art colonies. John Swift’s patience and encour- agement gave me confidence in the project and kept me going. Jennifer Marshall shared my enthusiasm for all things artsy and modern, and Melissa Homestead was a constant supporter of my writing process. James Karman, Dale Stieber, Rob Kafka, Tim Hunt and Robert Zaller of the Robinson Jeffers Association provided important insights regarding all things Carmel. Don Kohrs freely shared his knowledge about the Pacific Grove Chautauqua with me. Gail R. Scott helped me with deciphering Marsden Hartley’s manuscript hand, and I owe much of my understanding of Provincetown’s early colony to Stephen Burkowski’s wonderful Acknowledgements / ix collections, which are archived with the Provincetown Historical Preservation Project. At Texas State University, I thank my colleagues in the English Department, the History Department, and the Center for the Study of the Southwest for their unflagging support. In particular, Provost Gene Bourgeois, English Department Chairs Dan Lochman and Victoria Smith, and Director of the Center for the Study of the Southwest John Mckiernan-González, who helped connect me to material supports within the university that were essential to this book’s completion. I also am thankful for Texas State’s excellent interlibrary loan team, the tireless staff at the Wittliff Collections, Copyright Officer Stephanie Towery and Digital Media Specialists Erin Mazzei and Harrison Walker of the University Libraries, who helped me access and acquire the rights and images for materials included here. At Edinburgh University Press, Michelle Houston and Ersev Ersoy were a dream to work with. I especially want to thank Mark Whalan, co-editor of the ‘Modern American Literature and the New Twentieth Century’ series for Edinburgh University Press: his patience and kindness have been much appreciated. This project was supported by a number of fellowships and grants that made its completion possible, including the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; Antioch College Faculty Fund; the Autry Museum of the American West; the Bill Lane Center for the Study of the American West at Stanford University; the Center for the Study of the Southwest at Texas State University; the College of Liberal Arts at Texas State University; the Evan Frankel Fellowship in the Humanities at UCLA; the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas; the Huntington Library; the James Woodress Research Fellowship at the University of Nebraska; the UCLA Chancellor’s Fellowship; and the UCLA Department of English. I want to thank the archivists and staff at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas; the Huntington Library; Occidental College Special Collections; the Monterey Public Library Special Collections; the School of American Research; the High Museum of Art; the Cleveland Art Museum; the New York Public Library; Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station; the Provincetown History Preservation Project; the National Museum of the American Indian; the Provincetown Art Association and Museum Archives; the New x / The Little Art Colony and US Modernism

Mexico State Library; the Fray Angélico Chávez History Library; the Smithsonian Institution; Harvard University’s Houghton Library; Southern Methodist University’s DeGolyer Library; Princeton University Special Collections; UCLA’s Young Research Library. The support of my friends and family also helped me to see this project through. Grace Yeh, Courtney Marshall, Linda Greenberg and Christina Nagao have been cheerleaders from the start. Jessica Pliley, Ana Romo and Victoria Smith came in at the exhaustion point and offered crucial guidance on individual chapters. Joshua Paddison has been there all along with extended conversations, edits and a kitten in the home stretch.

Permission has been granted to cite the following material:

‘Pueblo Cosmopolitanism: Modernism and Tribal Ceremonial Dance’, by Geneva M. Gano, in Modernist Communities Across Cultures and Media, edited by Caroline Pollentier and Sarah Wilson (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2019), pp. 159–76, selected excerpts. Reprinted with permission of the University Press of Florida.

‘Violence on the Home Front in Robinson Jeffers’ “Tamar”’, by Geneva M. Gano. Adapted from Phantom Past, Indigenous Presence: Native Ghosts in North American Culture and History, edited by Colleen E. Boyd and Coll Thrush, by permission of the University of Nebraska Press. Copyright 2011 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska Press. In memory of my friend, Sam See (1979–2013)

Introduction: Modernism beyond the Metropolis

In 1921, not long after her move to New York City, poet Marianne Moore published a poem of that title in the distinguished, New York-based little magazine, The Dial.1 Over the course of her long career, she became closely associated with both the magazine and the city: she contributed to and then edited The Dial during the twenties and lived in the city throughout her long career. ‘New York’ would become one of her most widely read and reprinted poems, serving for many of her readers as a literary emblem of the poet, her corpus, and of a New York-centred American modernism writ large. The poem, in its entirety, reads:

the savage’s romance, accreted where we need the space for commerce – the centre of the wholesale fur trade, starred with tepees of ermine and peopled with foxes, the long guard-hairs waving two inches beyond the body of the pelt; the ground dotted with deer-skins – white with white spots, “as satin needlework in a single colour may carry a varied pattern,” and wilting eagle’s-down compacted by the wind; and picardels of beaver-skin; white ones alert with snow. It is a far cry from the “queen full of jewels” and the beau with the muff, from the gilt coach shaped like a perfume-bottle, to the conjunction of the Monongahela and the Allegheny, and the scholastic philosophy of the wilderness. 2 / The Little Art Colony and US Modernism

It is not the dime-novel exterior, Niagara Falls, the calico horses and the war-canoe; it is not that “if the fur is not finer than such as one sees others wear, one would rather be without it–” that estimated in raw meat and berries, we could feed the universe; it is not the atmosphere of ingenuity, the otter, the beaver, the puma skins without shooting-irons or dogs; it is not the plunder, it is “accessibility to experience.”

Against the inevitable expectations that the title evokes, ‘New York’ is structured by representations and affirmations of ‘wilderness’, not a sophisticated, modern civilisation that critic Pascale Casanova might have recognised as a crucial ‘meridian’ of modernity within a world-system of letters.2 In line after line, the poem gathers together a menagerie of wild, indigenous crea- tures including ‘the otter, the beaver, the puma’, calls forth images of teepees and war canoes, and juxtaposes the ‘gilt’ language of Western civilisation (intrusively incorporated as quotes that seem to have been gleaned from department store advertisements) with the Monongahela and the Allegheny, indigenous place names that are – by contrast – fluidly worked into the poem. Those familiar with Moore’s wit might suspect that some sort of irony is at work here, and indeed the cryptic burden of the poem seems to point to the unexpected situation of ‘the savage’s romance’ in the modern metropolis: that is, the romantic aura of exotic ‘experience’ the poem attaches to the piles of animal pelts imported for New York’s luxury fur trade. Ironic, too, because these signs of vital, native ‘experience’ have been transformed into commodities that have been extracted from their origins – killed, and deformed en masse in the process – and exported to the ‘center of the [world’s] wholesale fur trade’. It is true that, even as saleable ‘furs’, the animal skins retain their stunning, sensuous beauty: Moore describes ‘long guard-hairs waving two inches beyond the body of the pelt’ and deer-skins that are ‘white with white spots/ “as satin needlework in a single colour may carry a varied pattern” ’. But then again – further Introduction / 3 irony – ‘accessibility to experience’ by way of the deadening process of commercial exchange is most certainly not the same thing as the lived experience itself. ‘New York’ is intriguingly enigmatic – characteristically so, for Moore – and much more remains to be said of it.3 However, even this brief account shows that the poem insistently directs the reader’s imagination away from the titular city, forcing a shift in their attention to those ‘uncivilised’ spaces and places that have been characterised (and largely dismissed) as minor and arguably peripheral to modernism and the modern world-system at large. This book follows Moore’s lead and makes a parallel, critical move by focusing on modernist activity and production beyond the metropolis but within an expanded world-system. The Little Art Colony and US Modernism examines the emergence of three distinctive modernist communities in the United States: the little art colonies at Carmel, Provincetown and Taos. The case studies collected here demonstrate how the diffuse constellation of ideas, attitudes and practices associated with modernism articulates in and through particular place. They also show the converse: how localised expressions of modernism intersect with, revise, reshape and redeploy versions of the modern across international networks. The little art colonists considered in this book were full participants in and contributors to an international, emergent and shifting debate about the nature of modernism across the arts in the early decades of the twentieth century; they did not simply, passively reproduce metropolitan modernism in deriv- ative, diminished forms. The communities examined here were complex, dynamic and mobile; their aesthetic and social practices reveal what Laura Winkiel and Laura Doyle have identified as ‘multidirectional channels of influences’ across geopolitical locations and scales.4 By decentring the metropolis from an account of modernist activity and production, The Little Art Colony and US Modernism pushes against a pervasive – virtually reflexive – association of the two that has distorted and impoverished our understanding of the spatial character of modernist networks. This study puts pressure on the largely unchallenged position that the ‘deprived 4 / The Little Art Colony and US Modernism hinterlands’ – those places located, in critic Raymond Williams’s influential formulation, ‘outside’ of the Western metropolis – were removed both physically and metaphysically from international modernist currents.5 For Williams and his Marxist predecessors, these ‘hinterlands’ were understood as being fundamentally dis- crete from the workings of an exclusively inter-urban modernism and largely dismissed as places where a set of unspecified but definitely ‘different [that is, not-modern] forces are moving’.6 This study, in contrast, shows that the little art colony was critically embedded within a complexly networked world-system that operated not only at global and national scales, but at regional and local ones as well. Its case studies propose to trace the material and immaterial routes by which it was linked vertically to especially important hubs of international economic activity like the metropolises of New York, San Francisco, Mexico City and Paris; horizontally to other little art colonies both within the United States and outside of its borders; and unevenly to peripheral and semi-peripheral sites of modernism across the world.7 The modern little art colony was an important node within a mobile modernist network that was overlaid on that of modern capital; it originated, transformed and transmitted ideas, people, practices and things from country to city and back again. This active social and territorial circuitry facilitated the contestation, negotiation and renegotiation of the emergent idea of the modern across place and time. Like Moore’s ‘New York’, this study is simultaneously particular and expansive. Its central interest in the relationship of modernism’s minor, semi-peripheral sites to the wider world opens up to a consideration of related questions about fashion and social distinction, the dynamic, spatial circuits of capital (as well as its sticky accumulations in specific place), the modern artist’s relationship to the ‘savage’ or ‘primitive’, and the philosophical and aesthetic value of ‘experience’. It also queries how a material text or artwork – such as a poem – can serve as a heavily mediated, formal site of collection and redistribution of local ‘material’, not so unlike the city Moore describes: a function that would position the art colonist, sometimes reluctantly, as an active conductor in the flow Introduction / 5 of modern commerce. These issues will no doubt be familiar to those interested in modernist studies; they are among the major concerns that have preoccupied scholars of modernist culture since its inchoate formulations more than a century ago. In this book, these unwieldy and fairly abstract issues are closely examined as particularised expressions of the modern that respond simultaneously to localised pressures and internationally circulating concepts and concerns. Throughout this study, formal and topical literary analysis is considered alongside – or, better, as part of – the realm of the sociological.8 The Little Art Colony and US Modernism situates the literary arts of writing poetry, drama and fiction within a set of social practices that helped to constitute the provisional communities that formed in Carmel, Provincetown and Taos as distinctively modern ones. In addition to artmaking, these activities included those that have typically been associated with the modern metropolis such as editing and reading little magazines, hosting boozy all-night parties, fundraising, petition-circulating, gathering for home-cooked meals of spaghetti and making free and queer love. Like these other social practices, the literary texts examined here are understood as being informed topically, sty- listically and formally by their particular geohistorical context of production. This study shows how the social practices of creating modern artworks and doing the modern work of art served as signal routes – even for those living and working in the hinterlands – toward becoming ‘modern’ across the world-system.

Downsizing Modernism: From the City to the Country Writing at the turn of the century, German sociologist Georg Simmel observed that the Western metropolis had ‘always’ been the centre of a money economy, government, and intellectual and cultural life; its material and psychic accretions posed serious obsta- cles to the development of new and better ways – modern ways – of creating, living and dreaming.9 Simmel’s contemporary, Scottish sociologist Patrick Geddes, concurred that the present constricted and unhealthy quality of collective and individual life in the 6 / The Little Art Colony and US Modernism metropolis was produced by its pre-modern infrastructural strata.10 The economic processes that sustained the long imperial project, including ever-globalising trade, mass industrialisation and international finance, had moved through the Western metropolises of Berlin, London and Paris for centuries; they had been, and would continue to be, important ‘global cities’.11 Simmel and Geddes saw these urban sites as long-established hubs within what Immanuel Wallerstein would later identify as the modern world-system: one defined by the movement of capital across the world through its major Western metropolises.12 The metropolis’s gross agglomera- tion of wealth and power was materially manifested in its revered institutions of culture and learning such as universities, libraries, museums and performing arts centres; these served to perpetuate the accumulated knowledge and values of the elite – those who comprised the majority of their students and patrons – and align the field of cultural production with the interests of these dominant, moneyed classes.13 Although bursts of revolutionary activity across the world occasionally disrupted the smooth operations of capital through the nineteenth-century imperial metropolis and introduced lingering doubts about its viability as a space for fos- tering human life, liberty and happiness (the Paris Commune of 1871 is a well-known instance of this), it was regularly recuperated as the critical juggernaut of economic modernity: that is, as a necessary evil.14 The metropolis’s readily apparent problems made it a powerful symbol of modern ambivalence: it represented outworn structures that were both too big to fail and too big to be meaning- fully transformed. This précis of the modern metropolis runs counter to how it has generally been positioned within the field of modernist studies: that is, as the singularly privileged – virtually exclusive – site of modernist experimentation and practice. The most forceful articulation of the association of modernism with the metropolis can be found in Raymond Williams’s late, influential essay, ‘Metropolitan Perceptions and the Emergence of Modernism’. Building on Marshall Berman and Perry Anderson’s influential formulations of the necessary conditions for the emergence of modernist art and culture, Williams argued that the metropolis had accumulated vast Introduction / 7 amounts of wealth and power; it was socially complex and sophisticated; it was an established centre for the arts and the intellect; and its increasing cultural, linguistic and social diversity allowed it to absorb the new perspectives that the modernists would celebrate.15 Conclusively, Williams declared that ‘it is the new and specific location of the artists and intellectuals of this movement within the changing cultural milieu of the metropolis’ that prompted modernism’s emergence.16 Williams’s metropolitan perceptions have been shared by a number of major theorists of modernism and modernity – including Fredric Jameson, David Harvey, Doreen Massey and Andreas Huyssen – who have likewise identified, if not championed, the urban metropolis as the privileged site of liberation, freedom from convention, and exhilarating possibility. Nonetheless, when the modern, Western metropolis is repositioned as the critical geopolitical unit within a broader world-system and a longer durée of capitalist accumulation, it may be easier to see how Simmel and Geddes understood it: as a bloated representative of the entrenched elite establishment.17 For a number of moderns, metropolitan institutions and forms expressed a fundamentally conservative mode of being and doing: they were old news, not new news. The almost unassailable dominance of the modern metropolis as a social formation arguably peaked during the ‘boom period’ of massive and rapid expansion of the capitalist world-system between the long depression of 1873–96 and the Great Depression of 1929–40s. Stephen Shapiro and Philip Barnard, following Jürgen Osterhammel, have traced a number of technological and political transformations within the world-system to this period that had the effect of renewing inter-imperial tensions, destabilising political and social orders, and prompting anticolonial and anticapitalist protest and resistance.18 Not only did these upheavals coincide with the emergence of many of the social and aesthetic practices of modernism, they also coincided with the desire to find a spatial alternative to the dominance of the Western metropolis. What was new, emergent in this period – and particularly evident in the Americas, where modernisation seemed to be happening at an astonishingly rapid pace – was that the active lives of a broad, 8 / The Little Art Colony and US Modernism creative class of intellectuals and artists were suddenly released from the formidable, metropolitan bastions of Western cultural and economic power.19 Thanks to fairly new but already ubiquitous technological innovations in communications and transportation, by the time of the First World War – an event often associated with the beginnings of US modernism – artists and writers could physically disperse themselves widely across geographical space and geographical scales, into economically and culturally underdeveloped areas, while remaining connected to an expanded, mobile network of creatives.20 Newly able to break from the city yet still grow and maintain careers and friendships, a creative class of artists and writers could cultivate fabulous careers that might have once only been available to the Parisian or Manhattanite.21 In the remote hinterlands of the modern world-system, they could collectively form brave new worlds and worldviews on a smaller scale that seemed to have more radical, utopian potential than the glutted metropolis. As the modern city and the institutions it fostered went big, expanding aggressively and exponentially in place and across the world, the modernist imaginary, in many notable cases, went small. Little magazines, the little theatre, the modernist salon and the buffet flat party offered alternative platforms for cultural production and consumption to those aesthetically and politically conservative ones that dominated the metropolitan scene like the Broadway Show and the juried, academic Salon de Paris.22 Like these other ‘little’ social and cultural formations, the little art colony was part of a quintessentially modernist experiment in downsizing that pushed against capital’s general momentum towards accumulation and enlargement. Scaling down helped to facilitate the moderns’ provisional, experimental and sometimes unlikely collaborations by freeing them from national – and nationalist – political imperatives or a big corporation’s minimum profit margin. The flexibility and nimbleness of smaller institutions, organisations, and groups also allowed for the characteristically unsettled and shifting persua- sions and styles of modernist activity, whether aesthetic, political, economic or more broadly social in nature. It was from these little institutions – the little art colony among them – that a variety of distinctively ‘modern’ social and aesthetic practices emerged and Introduction / 9 became established, if not quite institutionalised.23 Seen from this perspective, the metropolis appears to have been more incidental than fundamental to the innovative, transdisciplinary spatial and social practices of collaboration and exchange that fostered the production of modernist art. The little art colonists, no less than the little theatre’s players, little magazine contributors, or others who participated in the modernist act of scaling down did not – and indeed, could not – separate themselves from or ‘escape’ the modern world-system in which they were embedded. As this study makes clear, the modern little art colony emerged where and when it did because the key technological and economic infrastructures of the emergent global corporate economy (notably, the transnational railroad and land development corporations) that undergirded it had preceded it in networked space as well as in particular places; the modern little art colony depended on them for its viability within the complexly – but unevenly – integrated, modern world-system.24 Ultimately, the compressed size of the little art colony, along with its constantly shifting composition, made it a crucible of modernist activity and especially generative ‘incubator of revolutionary ideas, ideals, and movements’, across a broadly conceived field of modern culture: a feature that geographer David Harvey has emphatically associated with urban – not suburban or rural – spaces and places.25 Certainly, sheer size alone makes the metropolis a likely place to discover a wide range of aesthetic and social practices, including those that have become thought of as modernist. But this study shows that the little art colony, person for person, had an out- sized influence on the development of modernism globally and locally; it appears here as an especially representative community formation within a networked but decentred, mobile and highly mutable US modernism.

The Modern Little Art Colony in the United States Although the little art colony was vital to the development and articulation of the aesthetic and social practice of modernism, within the field of modernist studies it has been largely overlooked as an important geosocial formation. Before proceeding further, 10 / The Little Art Colony and US Modernism then, we will need to establish a working definition of the little art colony, sketch its material and immaterial genealogy as it appeared in the United States, and offer an overview of its modern con- tours. Working primarily from the seminal, comparative studies of European art colonies by Nina Lübbren and Michael Jacobs, the little art colony (or artist colony) can be briefly defined as a small, rural community known for its dedication to the arts and its con- centration of artists and creatives who work and live in close association with one another.26 In the United States, little art colonies began to develop as recognisable geosocial formations on or about the turn of the twentieth century and quickly became identified as hotbeds of dynamic social, intellectual and artistic exchange on a par with distinguished, urban-based sites of modernist activity, such as the enclaves in Bloomsbury, Greenwich Village and Paris’s Left Bank. The little art colony first emerged in early nineteenth-century France, where it appeared as a small-scale and seasonal alternative to the Paris-based Académie des Beaux-Arts, the most dominant arts institution in Europe and the West. Beginning in the 1830s, and prompted by lingering, post-Revolutionary rumblings in favour of a broad democratisation of the arts, painters and other creative types increasingly sought out alternatives to the conservative and rigidly hierarchical programmes of master and student to which the state-sponsored French Academy adhered.27 These artists spent their summers in rural villages such as Barbizon, Pont- Aven, Giverny and Étaples learning new aesthetic techniques from their peers, finding new aesthetic subjects in nature and among the peasantry, and participating in the enjoyable leisure activities of group life such as picnics, pageants, sports and performances. These collective social practices helped to establish or solidify their professional and personal relationships with one another. Few artists stayed on year-round at a colony, although many returned annually to the same one, and a number were ‘colony-hoppers’ who made the rounds.28 The extension of faster, more reliable, and less expensive communications and transportations systems – the railway, the postal service, and a vibrant, modern print culture – across national lines and into less developed, rural areas over the course of the century facilitated the little art colony’s expansion into Introduction / 11 the United Kingdom and across Europe. As Lübbren has shown, by their heyday between 1870 and 1910, thousands of artists representing thirty-seven nationalities had worked and lived in at least one of these little art colonies either seasonally or year-round, making it an important institution within an increasingly mobile and internationally connected artists’ network.29 In the compressed space of the little art colony, the technical, topical, professional and personal aspects of creative life came together dynamically, actively redefining what it meant, both practically and ideally, to live and work as a modern artist. American artists had participated in the life of little art colonies abroad since their inception, but it was not until the concentrated infrastructural expansion of the railways after the Mexican-American and Civil Wars that these colonies began to develop in the United States. Initially, they were formed by artists who had themselves worked and lived in one of the European art colonies and hoped to reproduce at home the energy, excitement and camaraderie they experienced abroad. The first of the American colonies were clus- tered along the Atlantic seaboard near New York City, home to the National Academy of Design and the Art Students’ League, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and other museums and galleries, and the nation’s most important private and commercial arts markets. As in Europe, physical proximity to an important, metropolitan arts centre was essential to the success of the earliest colonies; this was less crucial as modern technological systems improved and expanded. By the early twentieth century, little art colonies were proliferating in many of the nation’s most picturesque locales, typically alongside the rapidly growing tourism and real estate industry. While the European art colonies provided the most direct inspiration for those that formed in the US, a longer genealogical investigation connects their development to a long-standing, domestic debate about the role of the arts in community development within the modernising capitalist economy. This was a particular concern of the American transcendentalists, who not only wrote extensively on the topic but deliberately put their alternative vision into action at what might be considered the United States’ first little art colony: the rural, utopian community of artists, writers, dancers and singers at Brook Farm (1841–7). Like many other nineteenth-century utopi- 12 / The Little Art Colony and US Modernism anists, the Brook Farmers associated conventional social organisation and thought with the socially stratified city and its soulless, bourgeois society.30 In their protests against slavery, the class system and rapidly industrialising capitalism, they literally enacted William Lloyd Garrison’s exhortation to ‘come out’ of the urban den of iniquity and resituated themselves in the rural countryside, where they hoped to cultivate an explicitly forward-thinking, nurturing community.31 Brook Farm, located in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, a short train ride from Boston, was to be these radicals’ exemplary village on a hill. Brook Farm’s founding members, including the young writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, were drawn from Boston’s creative class and, in addition to doing work on the farm, many taught their craft at its elite boarding school.32 While the community’s founders considered milking cows, shovelling dung, and teaching college-age students to be equally enjoyable, intrinsically rewarding and spirit- ually elevating endeavours, it was by taking part in the informal, community-wide arts activities and events that the colony’s members and visitors truly experienced the ‘leisure to live in all the faculties of the soul’.33 Almost every evening, Brook Farm hosted rational recreations such as learned lectures on ancient poetry or recitals on the pianoforte or more plebeian entertainments like picnicking, masquerades, singing in glee clubs, playing charades and social dancing. These arts-based social practices supported the colony’s moral and ideological goals by improving individual well-being and promoting community feeling. Their variety and quality were widely remarked upon by members and visitors alike and attracted thousands upon thousands of art-loving visitors from the city to the country to take part in their legendary ‘happy hours of recreation’ (this, even though the colony never counted more than 150 members).34 Even more than farming or formal education, the practice and appreciation of the arts was at the heart of the colony’s main ‘traffic with the world at large’, and helped to establish a precedent for a socially, intellectually and aesthetically radical ruralism in the United States that would be crucial to the development of the modern little art colony.35 Although the Brook Farm experiment was a pecuniary failure, its founder, George Ripley, correctly predicted that its immaterial ‘good influences’ would reverberate powerfully across time and Introduction / 13 space.36 With Brook Farm’s collapse in 1847, Ripley and some of the colony’s other core members moved to the major metropolises of Boston and New York. A larger contingent of at least twenty of its members (including four of its ten original shareholders), though, moved laterally to the nearby village of Concord, where Emerson, Hawthorne and Thoreau lived. There, the former Brook Farmers practised a less organised, neighbourly form of association based on their general political, spiritual and intellectual affinities that allowed them to reap many of the social benefits that they had valued the most at Brook Farm but which left its participants more explicitly uncommitted to one another, financially and otherwise. The Farmers themselves became ‘civilizees’ of a decidedly radical and rural sort, whose appreciation for arts and education was matched by their love for recreation and leisure. Across the nation, Brook Farm’s distinctive combination of education and leisure activities were taken up in the Chautauqua movement, which offered adult education to all, typically combining enriching seminars on subjects such as the natural sciences, American literature (Thoreau and Emerson were favourites) and the fine arts with healthful, out-of-doors activities in rural locales.37 The colony’s radical ruralism and its distinctively artistic social practices were also broadcast internationally, inspiring the communal experiments of William Morris, Edward Carpenter and other socialists and anarchists associated with the English Arts and Crafts movement.38 Their political, aesthetic and social examples were later re-exported to the US and taken up, in turn, by the American little art colonists in Carmel, Provincetown and Taos. The little art colonies romantically appealed to a sizeable contingent of moderns as places where they could, like Thoreau, strip down to the essentials, make authentic contact with the soil, and live more independently and fully than they could in the metropolis. However, this desire was decidedly more symbolic than actual; their minimising turn to the ‘little’ did not preclude their engagement with the big. Even though their spatial practice of distancing themselves from the metropolis held a certain cachet amongst at least some moderns, the art colonists nonetheless remained well integrated within the core economic, aesthetic and social activities of the international modernist network and the modern world- system. 14 / The Little Art Colony and US Modernism

Increasingly accessible modern transportation systems enabled these artists and writers – and their editors, patrons and admir- ers – to circulate and commune physically across space, even in physically remote locales that had at one time been dismissed as hinterlands. There, they could establish not just ‘communities of the medium’ by way of an invigorated print culture but physical, territorial sites of social, intellectual and artistic exchange.39 Instead of witnessing and bewailing the ‘demise of the knowable community’, as European modernists of the period seemed to be doing, moderns in the US found that creating and sustaining knowable communities of thinkers, creators and doers had become, in the modern age, a tangible possibility.40 Although rural or ‘regional’ locales are commonly figured as static sites of tradition, the modern little art colony was neither fixed nor stable. Rather, it was an extraordinarily dynamic community that was provisionally constituted, at any given time, by a fluctuating coterie of participants; it was continuously formed and reformed in geographical place. Like the modern metropolis, it attracted a broad swathe of creatives, including ambitious artists who worked in various media, from all over the world. Their involvement in the life of the art colony varied from an occasional weekend visit to a few weeks’ residence during the season to the maintenance of a home or business throughout the year. Almost without exception, the colonists’ recognised artists were not native-born townies but trans- plants or, in historian Hal Rothman’s evocative term, ‘neonatives’.41 In the little art colony, the production of art and the production of place were particularly inseparable activities.42 Because they attracted tourists and potential vacation home buyers to the area, the arts and culture industries were particularly dominant in the local economy. This significantly impacted the townies’ daily lives by conscripting a sizeable proportion of them, more and less directly, as ‘art workers’ whose labour contributed to the support of the colony’s arts scene in ways that were explicitly ‘effortful, productive, and managed by economic constraints imposed by subju- gating, ruling-class interests’.43 The development and sustenance of the art colony rested on many shoulders other than those of its affiliated actors, dancers, painters and poets whose work within this creative community extended well beyond artistic production.44 Introduction / 15

These contributors also included real estate developers, gallery owners, local newspaper editors, city councilmen, shopkeepers and service providers. The characteristically small size of the little art colony threw together a fairly heterogenous group of people with differing relationships to the practice of modernism and the experience of modernity who may or may not have had the opportunity to make meaningful contact with one another in the modern metropolis. Its constituency included not just the same type of people who convened for an evening at Mabel Dodge’s Greenwich Village salon – ‘Socialists, Trade-Unionists, Anarchists, Suffragists, Poets, Relations, Lawyers, Murderers, “Old Friends,” Psychoanalysts, IWWs, Single Taxers, Birth Controlists, Newspapermen, Artists, Modern-Artists, Club Women, Woman’s-place-is-in-the-home Women, Clergymen, and just plain men’ – it in fact included many of those very same individuals who were making the rounds in the international modernist social circuit that circulated between country and city.45 Arguably, the electric, eclectic mixture of individuals who sociably convened in a specific place was crucial in signalling the colony’s ‘modern’ character. Mabel Dodge herself can be considered an exemplary art colonist because of her wide-ranging aesthetic and political interests, extensive social networks and active physical circulation in this international circuit. While she is best known for her efforts to catalyse modernist activity in Taos, New Mexico, Dodge had also hosted modernist salons in New York City and abroad and was integrally affiliated, at different times, with the arts colonies in Provincetown and Carmel.46 The little art colony, as a geosocial formation, brought a creative class together in a compressed space over a period of days, weeks, a season or years. The sustained proximity to one another that it offered to creatives helped to foster fruitful collaborations and inspirational exchanges across the arts and between different stylistic adher- ents. The little art colony thus held out a utopian potential – one it shared with the even more ephemeral but more deliberately curated modernist salon – of smoothing out or suspending class barriers, racial and ethnic tensions, and gender distinctions.47 Of course, the village-scale social environment could also mag- nify social prejudices and exacerbate interpersonal tensions that 16 / The Little Art Colony and US Modernism might not have surfaced in the much more dispersed metropolis or among its masses of people. This fact also materially contributed to the dynamism of the modern little art colony: just as the prospect of new collaborations attracted individuals to the colony, the outbreak of various conflicts pushed them away. Unlike representative Progressive Era institutions that aimed to rationalise and organise (and thus improve) daily life, the little art colony was structurally disorganised and designedly unpro- grammatic. Modern little art colonies had no applications, fees or membership rosters; they were emphatically de-institutionalised associations. As Hal Garrott, editor of the Carmel Pine Cone, snarkily (and publicly) corrected one out-of-town petitioner who wished to ‘join’ the village’s club of bohemians, the little art colony had neither a ‘Director’ nor ‘rules’. Instead, he assured the ‘Miss from Minneapolis’, ‘[o]ur artists are units in the citizenship of an ordinary community’.48 Even expressing a desire to sign up for such a group, Garrott maintained, indicated how totally unfit the young lady was for life in Carmel-by-the-Sea. The signal independence of the Carmelites (and of the modern little art colonists in general) marked a significant break with most nineteenth-century utopian colonies, which for the most part had been constituted and operated according to highly regimented, rationalist schemes. Even Brook Farm, which Emerson recalled as a colony of ‘happy, hapless anarchists’ with ‘no head, no one to answer to’, succumbed, under finan- cial pressures, to a restructuring and reorganisation as a Fourierist phalanx in 1844.49 Although the modern little art colonists shared elements of the utopian communalists’ broad idealism, they considered themselves – at best – voluntary affiliates of an adamantly pri- vatised collectivity. The destabilised structure of the little art colony encouraged a certain spontaneity of association among a mix of creatives that had uneven aesthetic and social results. Sometimes the connections made in the colony produced extended relationships and sometimes they resulted in a single, exuberant fling.

Little Modernisms in Space and Place The little art colony can be considered one of modernism’s representative geosocial ‘nodal points’ due to its formation at a significant Introduction / 17 juncture between an emergent cultural modernism and an unevenly articulated capitalist modernity.50 As a territorially grounded place in the spatialised production of what Andreas Huyssen has called ‘modernism at large’, it not only facilitated the circulation of those cultural practices and products that transformed and developed ‘under the pressure of transnational processes and exchanges’ during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it also helped to formulate and shape them.51 To take note of this is to not only attend to the specific historical conditions that informed modernist activity in the little art colony’s particular locations, but to recall that each place developed within the broad compass of a capitalist world-system: a singular system in which social, political and economic power are unevenly expressed in and through geographical space. Observations of this sort have become increasingly routine in critical discussions of diverse ‘peripheral’ modernisms that emerged in the Global South and East and beyond capitalism’s dominant core in the metropolises of Western European and North America.52 However, sub-national and non-metropolitan sites of modernist activity and production continue to be positioned within modernist studies as ‘geographic curiosities removed from larger global impulses’ – as Scott Herring has observed – and in isolation from one another.53 In order to address the general neglect of these minor peripheral and semiperipheral sites within modernist studies and situate the little art colony within a complex world-system, it may be useful to distinguish between the geographical terms place and space. According to geographer John Agnew, places can be defined as particular and locatable sites that are embedded within space and time; their natural and cultural characteristics can be distinguished from one another.54 From a materialist perspective, places are produced at the intersections of many human and non-human encounters; their meanings are constructed, contested and shift over time.55 They are not isolated from non-local processes and events that originate across the world-system but are informed by them to greater and lesser degrees. Moreover, places can and do impact and shape these events and processes as they are expressed at different geographical scales. The more abstract and categorial term ‘space’, by contrast, can be thought of as ‘the articulation 18 / The Little Art Colony and US Modernism of distance within a particularly spatialized system of social relations’.56 This practical definition, offered by literary critic Nirvana Tanoukhi, helps to conceptualise and frame space, like time, as a matter of relationality. Geographer Noel Castree emphasises this point, noting that ‘the necessary properties of space are realized in and through contingent conditions’ that can only be discovered through concrete research.57 Thinking spatially highlights connections between and differences among specific places or types of places and helps to bring forward the dynamic, ongoing production of place in sites such as the rural villages in which the little art colonies formed. Space and place are mutually imbricated within the modern world-system, which structures virtually all socio-spatial relations across the globe according to the economic imperatives of capital. As it has been conceptualised by Immanuel Wallerstein and others, this system is characterised by the ongoing, extensive division of labour under an ever-expanding, international capitalism.58 Nonetheless, it is distinguished by marked, internal political and cultural discrepancies across geographical space. Its asymmetrical heteronomy is essential to its sustenance and continuous growth; as described by Franco Moretti (following Frederic Jameson), it is fundamentally ‘one, and unequal’.59 The structural inequality of the modern world-system thus produces a myriad of particular, ter- ritorialised responses – each conditioned by its unique geographical and historical location within the system – to the totalising pressures of world capitalism on the move. Indeed, as Jameson has observed, at specific points in space and time we can observe the ‘irreducibly specific’ articulations of those processes which can take the form of social practices, aesthetic productions and economic transactions.60 The nation state, especially prominent in Wallerstein’s formulation of the world-system, is without doubt a compelling unit of analysis for certain macro-level approaches to understanding modernity. However, the analytical strengths of academic human- istic studies lie in the deeply textured accounts they can offer of those ‘irreducibly specific’ moments, objects and attitudes that are mostly unreachable by way of other methodologies.61 The laboured production of ‘American literature’ during its ‘national phase’ Introduction / 19

(to make use of Paul Giles’s formulation) is a case in point: if a national literature is a usable unit of scholarly analysis, it is mostly as a conglomerate of multiplicities that could only provisionally cohere and has always been threatening to fracture and fall apart.62 In contradistinction to the imagined community of the nation, particularly grounded social formations offer more concrete analytical opportunities for materialist humanists. Within modernist studies, the world-system’s metropolitan cores – Berlin, Paris, London, New York City and others – have long attracted the lion’s share of scholarly attention, even if these cities have sometimes been deployed synecdochally as representative examples of putatively national modernisms. As a massive collection and redistribution hub for people, ideas and things from the far-flung peripheries, the modern Western metropolis has been especially legible to scholars interested in the cultural response to capitalist modernity and its products offer a virtually inexhaustible set of fascinating examples for study. Over the past two decades, modernist studies has expanded its purview well beyond these core metropolitan sites to take into consideration social and aesthetic responses to modernisation in the world-system’s peripheries and semiperipheries. In Wallerstein’s formulation, these include those developing and industrialising nations located primarily in the Global South and East. This explo- sive expansion has proven to be both challenging and productive, necessitating re-evaluations and reformulations of many of the field’s basic assumptions about its object of study, even if it has not quite fulfilled Susan Stanford Friedman’s call to ‘provincialize’ a long-dominant, European modernism.63 Yet even as studies of so-called ‘alternative modernisms’ in Havana, Bombay, Buenos Aires, Hong Kong and elsewhere across the globe have proliferated, they have tended to reproduce the strong bias toward position- ing metropolitan social formations as singularly representative of modernity and the exclusive sites of modernist activity and production.64 This scholarship thus represents, as Stephen Shapiro and Barnard Phillip have argued, only a partial or ‘one-sided’ investigation of how modernist activity and production is informed by the combined and uneven development that characterises the modern world-system.65 Modernist studies still has only a sketchy, rather 20 / The Little Art Colony and US Modernism piecemeal understanding of what modernisms look like when we contract, rather than expand, our field of study: that is when scaling down and back to closely and comparatively examine subnational or regional (sometimes simply referred to as ‘local’) iterations of modernism within relatively developed nation-states.66 The chal- lenge that this book takes up, then, involves offering nuanced, particularised descriptions and close analyses yet avoiding a ‘small- scale tale’ by situating the local within the global.67 Analysis of the emergence and evolution of the little art colony as a geosocial formation in place indicates how the modern, capitalist world-system extends not only internationally, but also, as Paul Giles has tracked, within the nation-state.68 The little art colony’s situation in relatively underdeveloped, rural villages within otherwise highly – though unevenly – developed nations makes it fit awkwardly into the categories of peripheral or semiperipheral, which are typically used to designate nation-states. Here, the little art colony will be treated as a semiperipheral space within the nation: what Christopher Chase-Dunn has described as an inter- mediary and mediating locale situated between developed core and undeveloped periphery and exhibiting activities and features common to both.69 The little art colony’s social, aesthetic, political and economic practices indicate its significant and simultaneous exposure to those exhibited across the world-system’s core, sem- iperiphery and periphery. It can be no surprise to encounter this sort of overlapping and intermingling within a singular system. Indeed, the sense of the ‘simultaneity of the non-simultaneous’ – derived from Ernst Bloch and articulated most forcefully by Fredric Jameson – is widely considered one of the key hallmarks of a metropolitan-based modernism.70 But it is not a specifically metropolitan feature. This study’s discovery of these overlapping practices in non-metropolitan places puts pressure on the presump- tion of metropolitan exceptionalism within the world-system and restores to the critical imaginary the possibility that even outside of the metropolis we can observe what Doreen Massey affirmed were ‘the multiplicities, the contemporaneous heterogeneities of space’.71 Introduction / 21

Carmel, Provincetown, Taos: Situating Modernist Activity The Little Art Colony and US Modernism emphasises the historical contingency and geographical specificity of modernist praxis as it emerged in place. It proceeds from a long-standing and generally accepted view that modernism, writ large, was broadly motivated and shaped by a vigorous, internationally circulating debate about its constitutive grounds and proper modes of expression. At the same time, it posits that actually-existing modernism was fundamentally articulated on the ground, in and through particular communities.72 The sheer variety of ‘modernisms’ across the world-system that have been uncovered in scholarly studies over the past twenty years implicitly underscore this point; the studies here reveal the basic site-specificity of modernist practices, showing how they shifted in place according to local conditions.73 Considered together, these studies expose modernism’s ‘irreducibly specific’ nature, even if the long-standing association of modernism with a free-ranging cosmopolitanism has continued to reinforce the perception that it was unrooted and universal in character. By examining these local iterations of modernism, some of its most unwieldy concepts – here, we might think of primitivism, cosmopolitanism, community and aesthetics (not to mention ‘the modern’ itself) – gain purchase in place. The site-specific modernist praxes that the following case studies discover indicate both continuities with and differences from those that have become associated with the modern metropolis. The major reason for this is that, like the physical commodities that are extracted from the peripheries of the modern world-system, the practices that emerge and constellate at the peripheries and semiperipheries are imported to the metropolitan core for processing and standardisation. The modernisms that appear in London, New York, Paris and Berlin may be distinguishable from one another insofar as their practices are distilled from those sources in different locales, but the process of metropolitanisation is ultimately one of commodification for further circulation across the world-system. At the peripheries and semiperipheries we can discern the materials of the modern – for instance, not only unrefined goods and raw 22 / The Little Art Colony and US Modernism materials (such as the ermine, puma and beaver pelts that appear in Moore’s ‘New York’) but also ‘primitive’ peoples and indigenous practices – at a different point in circulation across the world-system. We can also examine what happens outside of the metropolitan core when those regularised goods and practices re-emerge across the network. To use a recurring concern throughout this study as an example, when an abstract and utopian modernist primitivism ‘arrives at the primitive’ in place, its expressive forms necessarily shift according to the concrete, localised conditions on the ground.74 Because the art colonies examined in this study developed almost simultaneously, in the early years of the twentieth century, the chapters that follow are arranged spatially rather than chronologically. Together, they propose to offer a comparative juxtaposition of these communities and products without drawing out an overly determined historical trajectory. This study’s depiction of the daily lives and concerns of the arts colonists draws on the historian’s tools, making use of a range of primary sources, such as newspaper articles, census records, cartoons and correspondence. Literary texts, too, are treated as historically and geographically particular works. This book’s key individual figures, Robinson Jeffers, Eugene O’Neill and D. H. Lawrence, are no longer widely considered to be titans of modern literature (as they had been in their own time). Indeed, it seems likely that many scholars of modernism have come upon them in passing only, mostly in the guise of a convenient foil to a more properly recognisable (and legitimate) urban-based modernism. However, Jeffers, O’Neill and Lawrence continue to be positioned in critical and popular memory as the representative, major figures of the art colonies with which they were closely affiliated, and it is as representatives of these places that their lives and work are examined here. This book thus necessarily extends its analysis of local expressions of the modern beyond literary and cultural texts to include social practices: political, sexual, spiritual and economic activities.75 The unique portability of literary texts within the modern world-system – by way of new transportation and communications systems that could span long distances – gives them an especially important role in this study. Ultimately, though, Introduction / 23

The Little Art Colony and US Modernism is less concerned with the analysis of singular objects than with exploring modernism’s collective articulations. The three sections that follow focus on modernist activity in three representative sites. Each of these sections is comprised of two chapters, which allows for a deliberate oscillation between the close examination of a particular author and text and a broader consideration of its conditioning local and global contexts. This methodology is intended to bring forward the simultaneous imbrication of modernism’s wide-flung, cosmopolitan networks with the local conditions that give it expression in place. The first chapter of each section offers a geohistorical portrait of the community’s emergence as a little art colony and a community-level analysis of some of its characteristic modernist practices. The second chapter in each section examines one of that colony’s representative authors and texts in order to illustrate how it topically and formally draws from and shapes modernism at local and global levels. Here, my investigation follows the protocol sug- gested by Susan Stanford Friedman in Planetary Modernisms to ‘first turn to the specificities of a given modernity and then ask what creative forms it produced’.76 But where the scope of Friedman’s investigation is gigantic – ‘planetary’ – this one finds productive relations at much smaller scales. The Little Art Colony and US Modernism’s first extended case study is situated almost as far away from the long-recognised capital of US modernism – New York City – as possible. Carmel-by-the-Sea, a newly developed artist’s village located on the central California coast, claimed for itself the title of the first year-round little art colony in the nation: one that would boast an elaborate infra- structure including an experimental community theatre, commu- nist study groups, dada-inspired balls, music festivals and literary publications of various stripes. This chapter describes the strange blend of intellectuals, bohemians, socialists and businessmen that made the Carmel colony exemplary, and in the process excavates the history of land development for the high-end tourism and real estate economy on the Monterey Bay Peninsula at the end of the nineteenth century. As local newspaper articles, real estate bro- chures and guidebooks reveal, this small village used emergent real 24 / The Little Art Colony and US Modernism estate marketing and development techniques to position itself as what Richard Florida might call a ‘creative city’.77 These helped to promote the area to a predominantly white middle and upper class with the time and money to spend on tourism and leisure activities. This chapter fleshes out this economic and social history – one that importantly includes the racially targeted displacements of Chinese fishermen to make way for the artists and tourists – and connects it to a remarkable scene of modernist primitivism in Jack London’s 1913 novel, The Valley of the Moon. Poet Robinson Jeffers’s conflicted relationship with Carmel’s tourist economy and his own role within it, as its widely recognised poet laureate, provides provides the focus of the second chapter in this section. Concentrating on the early, notorious narrative, ‘Tamar’ (1924), this chapter extends a discussion of modernist primitivism in Carmel to show how Jeffers reformulates what might otherwise be understood as an exotic and entertaining spectacle of local colour as a scathing political commentary that is aimed both locally and globally. This terrifying poem, which centres on a dissolute young man who fantasises about going off to war as a pilot in order to escape problems at home, indicates how the experience of international war profoundly affects the lives of a pastoral farming community on the West Coast. As ‘Tamar’ shows, being far from the national capitals of government and culture does not isolate and insulate the family. Further, the poem presents the tragedy of the First World War as divine retribution for the long and violent history of Western colonialism and imperialism, material and spiritual traces of which have collected on Carmel’s gorgeous beachfront property. The second case study focuses on the ‘beloved community’ that formed in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in tandem with the high period of Greenwich Village’s bohemian ‘little renaissance’. Once a prosperous whaling port, the village of Provincetown had been undergoing economic decline and a marked ethnic shift in the decades preceding its development as an art colony and, later, as a gay resort. By the turn of the century, its Catholic, Portuguese population overtook its ‘native’ Yankee one; at this time, the village made deliberate moves to amplify its reputation as home to two successful summer art schools and boost its image within Introduction / 25 a booming regional tourist economy as a quaint, Cape Cod fishing village. A coterie of moderns from Greenwich Village discovered the relatively underdeveloped beaches and wharves of Provincetown at this time, and by the teens had made it their home base, at least during the summer season. The core of this coterie lived out their bohemian identities by drinking copiously, dressing wildly, bathing naked and forming the performing group that would come to be known as the Provincetown Players. This endeavour brought together individuals with a wide range of talents (as well as those with very little talent but a desire to par- ticipate in the fun) for theatrical events that served to consolidate – physically, in the space of the theatre, as well as ideologically, through the content of their plays – a distinctly modern and modernist ‘beloved community’ of friends, lovers and associates at a distance from the metropolis. It was in and from Provincetown, not New York City, that play- wright Eugene O’Neill jump-started his career and had his first major successes, including a string of Broadway hits and two Pulitzer Prizes. The second chapter on Provincetown’s little art colony focuses on O’Neill, the Provincetown Players’ most prominent member, who lived and worked there between 1916 and 1922. The chapter shows how the compressed scale and distinctive mobil- ity of Provincetown’s creative community was crucial to O’Neill’s success. Professionally, relocating from the city to the village facilitated O’Neill’s access to willing collaborators and colleagues; his exposure to grassroots organisational strategies in Provincetown taught him how to cultivate the support of important cultural arbi- ters and a ‘special’ audience. The move to Provincetown exposed O’Neill to the art colony’s distinctive amalgamation of modern and experimental theatre practices, including those dealing with writing, staging and promotion. His own work built upon these: he was especially adept at harvesting, adapting and exporting these practices from the rural outpost to the metropolitan hub of modernist activity in New York. This chapter focuses especially on the play that arguably made O’Neill’s career, the cross-audience sensation, The Emperor Jones. While the play is set in the West Indies and was initially produced in Greenwich Village, its conception and writing in Provincetown was essential to its success. As this chapter 26 / The Little Art Colony and US Modernism shows, the play benefited from O’Neill’s targeted cultivation of and marketing to a ‘special audience’: modern promotional strategies that he had honed during his association with Provincetown’s little art colony. Topically, The Emperor Jones drew inspiration from the long-simmering racial tensions in the region. Formally, it critically expanded upon the Provincetown Players’ key theatrical practice of superpersonalisation: a writing and staging strategy that amplifies the bleed between character and actor in order to heighten the audience’s engagement in the play. O’Neill’s deliberate implemen- tation of this strategy in The Emperor Jones successfully engaged his predominantly white, metropolitan audience by kindling their ‘racial feelings’: a move that brought the relatively unknown O’Neill into the national and international public consciousness and created a sensation about his work that continues to resonate a full century later. The last of the little art colonies that this book examines is the one at Taos, New Mexico. Unlike the new development at Carmel and the recently revitalised fishing village of Provincetown, the old frontier trading post of Taos was experiencing slow and steady growth at the turn of the twentieth century. Over centuries, it had garnered a wide reputation as a mostly tolerant borderlands site of economic, cultural and political exchange that had allowed for the gradual, though not imperceptible, adaptation and absorption of the social practices of a wide variety of residents and visitors. After New Mexican statehood (1912) and the end of the First World War (1918), however, the rapid, regional expansion of a modern, automobile-based tourism into Taos and a broadly articulated fascination with experiencing the ways of the primitive ‘other’ attracted a distinctively modernist coterie to the region. These newcomers shifted the local power structures from the Native Puebloans and established Hispanic residents toward the relative newcomers: Anglo business and land owners. This chapter considers the local vogue for witnessing, appreciating and representing Native American ceremonial dance ceremonials as distinctively modernist practices: ones that painter and poet Marsden Hartley understood to serve, for each other and the larger world, as ‘a sign of modernism in us’.78 D. H. Lawrence’s writings in and from the little art colony at Taos form the focus of the final full-length chapter of this book. Introduction / 27

Lawrence, like many of the artists affiliated with Taos’s modern little art colony, was invited there by Mabel Dodge Luhan to ‘see and feel and wonder’ the ‘essence’ of Taos and ultimately put it ‘between the covers of a book’.79 Although Lawrence was leery of the highbrows’ fascination with Taos’s indigenous peoples, he nonetheless formally incorporated elements of the ‘Taos mystique’ into the work he produced while living there. The key text examined here is the novella St. Mawr, which sympathetically portrays the wanderings of a cosmopolitan American woman who flees the ghastly modern metropolis of London and discovers ‘something else’ in New Mexico’s vital and otherworldly landscapes. Her possessive obsession with the region’s wild lands – not the indigenous peoples who had previously enthralled Taos’s little art colonists – marks a shift towards a much more easily commodifiable component of its local colour. It was a shift that other Anglo modernists would make as well. Lawrence’s ambivalent conclusion to the novel offers a critical take on his protagonist’s rapturous encounter with the gorgeous landscape, however, suggesting that it was prompted by a false epiphany and intimating that even at the far peripheries of the modern world-system, one can’t and won’t escape its soul-sucking reaches. As these case studies suggest, the characteristic social practices of the modern little art colony substantially informed artmaking over the course of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. After an initial peek into the current development of the very rural little art colony at Marfa, Texas, this book concludes by extending a consideration of the fate of the little art colony in the latter half of the twentieth century. During the post-war economic boom, the places examined in this study were largely overwhelmed by the broad growth of the modern tourist industry. As local economies expanded and diversified beyond arts tourism and became physically and financially accessible to the masses, their reputations as little art colonies became diluted and faltered. All three still operate today as artsy towns, but their heydays are decidedly over. As a model of possibility, however, the little art colony has spawned two significant iterations that have thrived: the widespread, not- for-profit, artist residency programme that fosters cross-pollination across the arts and the ubiquitous ‘arts district’ of cities eager to attract and capitalise on the creative class as part of a development 28 / The Little Art Colony and US Modernism and investment plan. This brief epilogue sketches out the salient features of each that draw from the model of the modern little arts community and considers the effects of institutionalisation in each instance.