Film and Modern American Art: The Dialogue Between Cinema and Painting 1351187317, 9781351187312

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Visual Literacy
Notes
PART I: Two American Artists and Silent Cinema
Chapter 1: Lust for Looking: John Sloan’s Moving Picture Eye
New York City Life
Art from Life – Movie Pictures
Conventions of Silent Cinema
Critical Reaction
The Spirit of Saint-Gaudens’ Diana
How the Nickelodeon-era Movies Tell a Story, ca. 1908
Sloan’s Movies, Five Cents
The Engaged Spectator
Thinking in Pictures
Sloan’s Signature Style ca. 1908 and its Relation to Moving Pictures
John Sloan and “Mr. Griffith”: A Parallel Reading
The Proto-Cinematic Environment of Henri’s Studio
Critiquing the Social Aspect of Film
Epilogue
Notes
Chapter 2: Transforming Moving Pictures into Art: Everett Shinn, Artist on the Set
Art Direction
Polly of the Circus, 1917
Mural to Stage to Screen
The Audience and Bodily Engagement with Early Cinema
Rex Ingram, Conflating Movie Set and Art Studio
The Bright Shawl, 1923
Reception
Janice Meredith, 1924
William Randolph Hearst: America’s First Multimedia Mogul
Legacy
Notes
PART II: New Woman, New Negro
Chapter 3: Leading Ladies: Dance, Reform, Liberation
Introduction
Loie Fuller
Dancing Women: Harriet Frishmuth, Desha Delteil and the Bubble Dance
Reforming Women
Working Women
American Art, ca. 1916
Bathing Beauties
Women in the 1920s: Flappers and Lesbians
Josephine Baker: Harlem on the Champs-Élysées!
Notes
Chapter 4: Seeing in Black and White: Resistance, Rhythm, Renaissance
Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin Goes to the Movies
Resisting Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915)
Documenting African Americans in Non-Racist and Non-Stereotyped Roles
Oscar Micheaux
Norman Films
Serving Home and Country
Spanish American War
Madame E. Touissant Welcome and Harlem’s Hellfighters
Making Music: Jazz and Blues
Creating a Distinct Visual Language for Self-Expression
Notes
Timeline
1893
1894
1895
1896
1897
1898
1900
1901
1903
1905
1907
1908
1909
1910
1911
1912
1913
1914
1915
1916
1917
1918
1919
1920
1921
1922
1923
1924
1925
1926
1927
1928
1929
1930
1934
Select Bibliography
List of Figures
Index

Citation preview

Film and Modern American Art

Between the 1890s and the 1930s, movie going became an established feature of everyday life across America. Movies constituted an enormous visual data bank and changed the way artist and public alike interpreted images. This book explores modern painting as a response to, and an appropriation of, the aesthetic possibilities pried open by cinema from its invention until the outbreak of World War II, when both the art world and the film industry changed substantially. Artists were watching movies, filmmakers studied fine arts; the membrane between media was porous, allowing for fluid exchange. Each chapter focuses on a suite of films and paintings, broken down into facets and then reassembled to elucidate the distinctive art–film nexus at successive historic moments. Katherine Manthorne is Professor of Art History at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center, USA. Cover image: John Sloan (American, 1871–1951), Movies, 1913, oil on canvas, 19 7/8 × 24 in. (50.5 × 61 cm), Toledo Museum of Art (Toledo, Ohio), Museum Purchase Fund, 1940.16

Routledge Advances in Art and Visual Studies

This series is our home for innovative research in the fields of art and visual studies. It includes monographs and targeted edited collections that provide new insights into visual culture and art practice, theory, and research. For a full list of titles in this series, please visit https://www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Advances-in-Art-and-Visual-Studies/book-series/RAVS The Artist-Philosopher and New Philosophy George Smith Photography and the Contemporary Cultural Condition Commemorating the Present Peter D. Osborne Digital Art, Aesthetic Creation The Birth of a Medium Paul Crowther Geneses of Postmodern Art Technology as Iconology Paul Crowther Art, Cybernetics and Pedagogy in Post-War Britain Kate Sloan Film and Modern American Art The Dialogue between Cinema and painting Katherine Manthorne Play and the Artist’s Creative Process The Work of Philip Guston and Eduardo Paolozzi Elly Thomas

Film and Modern American Art The Dialogue Between Cinema and Painting Katherine Manthorne

First published 2019 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business  2019 Taylor & Francis The right of Katherine Manthorne to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Manthorne, Katherine, author. Title: Film and modern American art : the dialogue between cinema and painting / Katherine Manthorne. Description: New York : Routledge, 2019. | Series: Routledge advances in art and visual studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018047280| ISBN 9780815374190 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781351187312 (e-book : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Art and motion pictures—United States. | Painting, American—19th century—Themes, motives. | Painting, American—20th century—Themes, motives. | Motion pictures—United States—History and criticism. Classification: LCC N72.M6 M36 2019 | DDC 791.43/657—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018047280 ISBN: 978-0-8153-7419-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-18731-2 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon, UK

To the Memory of My mother, Katherine My father, Joseph My nephew, Jason & For James

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

viii 1

PART I

Two American Artists and Silent Cinema

9

1 Lust for Looking: John Sloan’s Moving Picture Eye

11

2 Transforming Moving Pictures into Art: Everett Shinn, Artist on the Set

41

PART II

New Woman, New Negro

71

3 Leading Ladies: Dance, Reform, Liberation

73

4 Seeing in Black and White: Resistance, Rhythm, Renaissance Timeline Select Bibliography List of Figures Index

105 133 142 144 147

Acknowledgments

This project started long ago, was put on the back burner numerous times for other initiatives, and received the push it needed to complete it when I spent a semester as a Tyson Scholar of American Art at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. During my residency in Bentonville, Arkansas I was able to immerse myself in its amazing library and collection of American modernism together with the Alfred Stieglitz Collection that had only recently arrived as a result of an Art-Sharing Agreement between Fisk University and Crystal Bridges. Everyone at the museum was incredibly helpful facilitating my research, but I want to express my appreciation especially to founder Alice Walton, Don Bacigalupi, Rod Bigelow, Sandy Edwards, Chad Aligood and Alison Demorotski, as well as to my benefactor John Tyson. Colleagues at the Smithsonian American Art Museum also helped pave the way for this work. The late Cynthia Mills was a great supporter, as is Amelia Goerlitz. Virginia Mecklenburg’s Telling Stories: Norman Rockwell from the Collections of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg (2010) dovetailed with my interests, and I was happy to participate in the related symposium. I benefitted from conversations with Percy North on Max Weber’s interest in film. No one can investigate John Sloan and Everett Shinn without access to the Delaware Art Museum and its Archives, where I received assistance and enthusiastic feedback from Heather Coyle, Rachael DiEleuterio and the late Joyce Schiller, who had extended to me an invitation to contribute to John Sloan’s New York (2007). A fellow pioneer exploring the interface between movies and fine art, Nancy Mowll Mathews offered me the opportunity to participate in her exhibition and publication Moving Pictures: American Art and Early Film, 1880–1910 (2005) at a strategic time in my research. The chance to attend the symposium related to Patricia McDonnell’s exhibition The Edge of Your Seat: Popular Theater and Film in Early Twentieth Century American Art (2002) stimulated my thinking on the topic. I received useful feedback on various presentations from generous and knowledgeable colleagues including Julia Rosenbaum, Maura Lyons, Janice Simon and Sarah Burns as well as Philipp Freytag and Ralf Fischer at the University of Tübingen, to whom a special thank you is due for publishing the proceedings of our conference “Nature’s Nation Revisited.” President Chase Robinson and Provost Joy Connolly at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York are incredibly supportive of faculty research and encourage us to teach related courses, as are our Executive Officer Rachel Kousser and Administrative Officer Marilyn Mercado. I therefore had the opportunity to test out my ideas in graduate courses where students grappled with me about inter-medial

Acknowledgments ix exchanges and presented thoughtful papers on art and film. Edward J. Sullivan and Amy Werbel read a book proposal draft and offered insightful comments that helped shape the final version. It’s a great moment in time to enjoy and learn more about early cinema. New footage is still being rediscovered and restored; the Library of Congress and the Museum of Modern Art have been pioneers in preserving surviving films and helping to establish serious study of them. Companies like Kino Lorber and Grapevine Video are making silent movies more readily available for home viewing, and silent film festivals and organizations such as Silent Clowns regularly screen silent movies as they were meant to be seen, accompanied by live music. More and more information on silent films is available on the worldwide web. My thinking about the medium has benefitted greatly from the many authors who so generously share their work, with specific debts acknowledged in my notes. Two sites in particular were central to my research: Women Film Pioneers Project (Columbia University) provides a wealth of carefully documented information (https://wfpp.cdrs.columbia.edu/) and the San Francisco Silent Film Festival shares a great deal of thought-provoking material (www.silentfilm. org/). Museums too are sponsoring more cross-media efforts. The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles (projected opening 2022), led by its Founding President Don Bacigalupi, intends to explore the power of visual storytelling, displaying fine and popular arts alongside filmmaking. Movie going and museum going were both part of family life growing up with my siblings Jay, Patricia and Mark, attending Saturday matinees and listening to my father regale us with tales of Boston’s legendary Old Howard Theatre. Trips to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, were regular family outings. Donald Clark made sure that I attended the entire Silent Film festival one summer in Bucksport, Maine and gave me a tin movie container for added inspiration. Although the technology has changed, my husband James Lancel McElhinney and I continue the tradition of watching – probably far too many – movies and viewing exhibitions together. For me, movies and art have always gone hand in hand. To everyone who contributed to this book, thank you!

Introduction

Archibald Willard’s familiar chromolithograph of ca. 1875 The Spirit of ’76 (Yankee Doodle) enjoyed an extended film engagement, beginning with the 1905 black and white silent movie of the same name. In a single minute of footage G[ottfried]. W[ilhelm]. “Billy” Bitzer shot the three Revolutionary war militia men coming alive and marching in and out of the film frame playing their fife and drums and accompanied during the screening by live music playing the familiar tune. Nearly 40 years later it was recreated in the finale of the sound movie Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), a biopic of songwriter George M. Cohan starring James Cagney singing and strutting in a similar scene. Made during World War II (shooting started the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor), Cagney’s reference to the print stirs the nostalgic patriotism of the nation’s founding. In A Corner in Wheat (1909) D.W. Griffith structured his social message film around a few key images: the greedy tycoon who tries to corner the world market in wheat, the hungry urban poor who can’t buy bread because the rising wheat prices doubled the cost of a loaf, and the farmer who sows the grain, referencing unmistakably the agrarian imagery of Barbizon painter Jean-François Millet. Bitzer, now Griffith’s cameraman, recalled that a reproduction of Millet’s Angelus hung in his family parlor when he was a boy, and that he did “study closely the lights and shadows of reverse-light pictures, like The Gleaners with the foreshadows on the field of stubble.”1 Bitzer’s adoption of Millet’s high horizon line and figural silhouette cast over the earth links the film’s formal elements to the socialist and agrarian reform message intended by the original images. Not surprisingly for someone who grew up in Portland, Maine and claimed to have observed Winslow Homer painting, director John Ford’s knowledge of fine art informed his entire cinematic oeuvre. He opens his silent western Hell Bent (1918; Universal Pictures) with one of the characters admiring Frederic Remington’s grisaille painting A Misdeal (ca. 1896; Private Collection), which then comes alive and opens onto the movie action of a man shooting his companions he suspects cheated at cards. Chosen as a link to the nineteenth century visual culture of the West, Remington continued to inspire Ford 30 years later in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949). “I tried to copy the Remington style there – you can’t copy him one hundred percent – but at least I tried to get in his color and movement, and I think I succeeded partly.”2 In between – in 1924 – he told the story of the Transcontinental Railroad in The Iron Horse (Figure I.1) with its uncannily direct quotation from A.J. Russell’s celebratory photograph East and West Shaking Hands at the Laying of the Last Rail (1869).

2 Introduction

Figure I.1  Iron Horse directed by John Ford, Fox Film Corporation, 1924, Screenshot.

The pictorial reference here bolstered Ford’s claim to an accurate pictorial history announced by the film’s opening intertitle card. Alternatively, filmmakers might reference a drawing or painting to establish necessary information succinctly at the outset. Based on Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1912 novel, The Lost World (1925) used the stopmotion technology of Willis O’Brien to tell the tale of an expedition to the Amazon.3 Explorer Maple White had discovered a rocky plateau where dinosaurs still roamed in the depths of the tropical forest, but he never returned. In possession of her father’s notebook (it somehow made it back, although he didn’t), Paula White and her party then set off to find this South American location, led there by the sketches he made of the place and its survivors from prehistoric times. Juxtaposing these creatures with human figures, his drawings establish scale and confirm at a glance Paula’s statement that they are “tremendous in size and ferocity.”4 In each of these cases, movies set the still image’s compositions into motion, establishing a visible link in the dialogue between cinema and the fine arts. The conversation also went in the other direction, as modern American artists became fascinated by the vast visual database movies provided, beginning with their debut in New York in Spring 1896. John Sloan was in the audience reviewing a moving picture show later that year, and continued to relish what was then low class entertainment through the teens.5 In its shimmering surface and repetition of limbs, Manierre Dawson’s Lucrece (1911; The Ringling) creates a distinct sense of slow-motion that mimics the look of early movies, an observation reinforced by the fact that during

Introduction 3 the run of the Armory Show in Chicago the painter purchased one of Duchamp’s more cinematic works.6 Man Ray’s great fascination with the new medium took many forms, from his watercolor Admiration of the Orchestrelle for the Cinematograph (1919; Museum of Modern Art) and collaboration with Marcel Duchamp on their experimental film Anémic Cinéma (1924–1926) to his Emak Bakia (1926). Following a youthful stint as a silent movie extra Thomas Hart Benton painted his ten-part mural cycle America Today (1930–1931, Metropolitan Museum of Art) in which a cinematic love scene is positioned in the compositional center of the City Activities panel.7 Painter and photographer Charles Sheeler collaborated with Paul Strand in 1920 on one of America’s earliest art films, Manhatta. Edward Hopper’s New York Movie (1939) reminds us that throughout his career he inspired and was inspired by film, and confessed that when he had painter’s block he went on “movie binges.” Joseph Cornell has become notorious for his unrequited loves of movie cashiers and stars such as Lauren Bacall, whose image he incorporated into his box constructions. Renowned as a painter of macabre subjects, Ivan Albright painted his lurid Picture of Dorian Gray (1943–1944; Art Institute of Chicago) for the movie adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s 1891 novel. It tells the tale of a man’s pact with the devil insuring that he never aged while his painted portrait turned increasingly hideous as the years passed. Although the movie was shot in black and white, director Albert Lewis filmed the painted portrait in color to emphasize Dorian Gray’s shocking transformation.8 This list of images that footnote artists’ diverse engagement with cinema is only the tip of the art historical iceberg. Movies and modern art occupied a common historical ground in the United States.9 The careers of early American modernists – artists born in the 1870s and 1880s – paralleled the invention and silent era of cinema; they went to the movies, and created art that in diverse ways responded to the pictures they saw flickering on the screen. Neither art nor film historians, however, have evolved a satisfactory model to account for this dynamic. Given that American modernist art grew up in tandem with this new technological medium, it seems only logical that its history is enriched when read through and against the emergence of film. Cutting across media boundaries, we establish this engagement with film as seminal for the generation of artists who witnessed the evolution of movies from a sideshow curiosity to a major art form. Our focus here is the silent era beginning in 1896 and extending until 1927, when talkies were born. Placing fine art and mainstream movies in dialogue, I am not always trying to demonstrate a direct linkage but rather to expand the boundaries of visual modernism, to create a broader spectrum in which the artists were embedded. To do so I identify key historic markers when movies changed radically and demonstrate a concomitant shift in thinking about art making, including not only what a picture means but also how it means. These key dates are enumerated in the timeline at the book’s end. These inter-medial exchanges that contributed substantially to the visual literacy we now identify as central to our culture are the focus of Film and Modern American Art: The Dialogue Between Cinema and Painting.

Visual Literacy Americans from the first embraced the new medium. The Vitascope, an early technology to cast images via film and electric light onto a wall or screen, debuted triumphantly on April 23, 1896 at Koster and Bial’s Music Hall, New York (Figure I.2).

4 Introduction

Figure I.2  Metropolitan Print Company, New York. Edison’s Greatest Marvel the Vitascope, ca. 1896. Color lithograph, 30 1/8 × 40 in. The Library of Congress.

Derived from the Latin meaning life, the Vitascope captured just that. At the Edison laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey, in a darkened studio nicknamed the Black Maria, the great inventor and his cameramen made short moving pictures of people sneezing, kissing or dancing that amazed audiences with the sheer novelty of motion. A reviewer at Koster and Bial’s raved: The first picture shown was the Leigh Sisters in their umbrella dance. The effect was the same as if the girls were there on the stage; all of their smiles and kicks and bows were seen. The second picture represented the breaking of waves on the seashore. Wave after wave came tumbling on the sand, and as they struck, broke into tiny floods just like the real thing. Some of the people in the front rows seemed to be afraid they were going to get wet, and looked about to see where they could run to, in case the waves came too close . . . The Vitascope is a big success, and Mr. Edison is to be congratulated for his splendid contribution to the people’s pleasure.10 They were projected on a scrim, surrounded by a gold frame, resembling a work of fine art. Movies soon became a habit. By the teens Americans were attending moving picture shows as a preferred form of leisure, and by the end of the twenties it was estimated

Introduction 5 that three out of four Americans went to the movies at least once a week. During the years covered in this study (1896–1929), movies like the mass media in general became an integral part of everyday life. Here the interest lies in what Charlie Chaplin called high lowbrow, leaving aside art films (which have their own diverse origins and legacy) and investigating commercial productions that are firmly rooted in popular culture. In his Still Life with “Dial” (1922) Stuart Davis references the vanguard journal The Dial of the 1920s edited by Gilbert Seldes that celebrated this democratization of culture in its many forms, especially movies. Conceived as entertainment, moving pictures were pleasurably consumed. For that very reason, the Revolution they fomented ran its course largely unopposed. Their very ubiquity rendered their powers invisible. But powerful they were. They constituted an enormous visual data bank and changed the way artist and public alike interpreted images. “An artist who lives in a world of the motion picture, electricity, and synthetic chemistry,” as Davis explained, “doesn’t feel the same way about light and color as one who has not.” He is reinforcing the notion that art changed as a result of these new stimuli, which were found in specific configurations in America.11 Another potential area of overlap would seem to be biopics or biographical movies based on the lives of visual artists.12 Although they are not so common in the silent era, one notable exception is The Dragon Painter (1919) starring Japanese-born Sessue Hayakawa and his wife Tsuru Aoki and directed by William Worthington.13 In an era when white actors regularly portrayed Asian characters in offensive stereotypes working as laundrymen, worshipping Buddhas and smoking opium, Hayakawa had formed his own production company to bring the “real Japan” to American audiences.14 This movie was based on the 1909 novel of the same name by Mary McNeil Fenollosa who had lived in Japan and was married to Ernest Fenollosa, one of the most acclaimed authorities on Asian art who had been appointed official arts commissioner by the Emperor of Japan. It tells the story of Tatsu, an artist who paints and draws dragons in the mountains of Japan, in search of his beloved princess who was turned into a dragon. The absence of his princess drives his creativity until he meets the Ume-Ko, who has been dressed as a princess. Once Tatsu marries her, he has found his princess and can no longer paint. Ume-Ko feels she has destroyed a divine gift, and sacrifices herself, leaving Tatsu once more without his princess. Visually arresting, The Dragon Painter constituted a defense of art, not only of the painter but also of the maker of silent movies. This pioneering silent era of moving pictures provides an especially dynamic moment to explore this art–film dialogue, when the moving picture medium was still finding its way, borrowing from other fields and experimenting with multiple forms and technologies. Before D.W. Griffith decamped to California and helped establish a nascent Hollywood, New York City and Chicago were major sites of moviemaking. Given that these cities were also meccas for visual artists, it is not surprising that cross-media professional and personal relationships blossomed. Painters and sculptors worked as film extras, designed sets, frequently socialized with the movie cameramen they encountered on the urban streets, and of course went to the movies. Still photographers tried their hands at movie production and moviemakers took instruction in fine art. Artists unveiled the secrets of their profession on film, making movies that showed them drawing or sculpting. As movies became increasingly lucrative, those in the industry used their newfound wealth to commission artworks and cultivate collections. These inter-media interactions enriched both sides, only to be curtailed as

6 Introduction the studio system and industry professionalization became increasingly dominant in the 1930s. It is useful therefore to analyze the development of fine art painting as a response to, and an appropriation of, the aesthetic possibilities pried open by cinema from its invention until the birth of talkies, when both the art world and the film industry changed substantially. This book excavates artists who from the very “invention” of cinema in the 1890s engaged seriously with the medium, and breathed new life into American modern art. From the birth of cinema in the 1890s to the beginning of talkies in the late 1920s, the path to filmmaking was uncharted. It was wide open to practitioners of many art forms and modes of interaction. It was so new that it lacked a firm vocabulary to describe it, with the result that new terms arose as the technology evolved, sometimes differing in Europe and America. Film is a technological medium that conveys time and space and an unstable form within modernity, evolving and changing its look, sound, and narrative potential rapidly over the course of the 30-odd years under consideration. Painting is a two-dimensional, mimetic form. Since their joint story resists standard linear narratives, Film and Modern American Art: The Dialogue Between Cinema and Painting adopts a dual approach to portray these dynamics. Part I “Two American Artists and Silent Cinema” explores the formal side of the American art/ cinema dialogue through the careers of the two American visual artists most deeply engaged with movies in the silent era. Chapter 1 focuses on John Sloan, whose work demonstrates distinct references to cinema from 1896 to about 1913. Chapter 2 then picks up where Sloan left off and surveys the years from the mid-teens to 1927 through the work of Everett Shinn. Linked through their association with Robert Henri and their participation in the legendary exhibition of “The Eight” at Macbeth Gallery in 1908, they came to moving pictures from diverse perspectives. Sloan arguably filtered his visual interpretation of the city through the medium of film, developing what I call his “Cinematic Eye.” Shinn, by contrast, harnessed his skill set as an easel painter, illustrator, muralist and decorator to the service of movies, working as an art director to enhance the visual look and concomitantly the cultural status of moving pictures in the teens and twenties. Part II “New Woman, New Negro” looks at the ways in which creative individuals marginalized for reasons of gender or race were able to leverage the new medium of moving pictures as a means of liberation and creative expression not possible in the more traditional and conservative art forms. They found in movies a vehicle to express their sociopolitical concerns and through which they experienced a (brief) moment of possibility and liberation in the silent era, before the studio system became consolidated in the sound era, regularizing and effectively shutting out women and people of color from the opportunities they had just begun to enjoy. Not until the 1980s would things open up again in the United States. We must remember however that this was also the Jim Crow era when movie theaters were among the segregated public spaces. On a visit to Charleston, South Carolina George Biddle painted the patrons of the King Street Movie House, including a black man who would be required – once he bought his ticket – to sit in the balcony (Figure I.3). While Part I focuses on formal questions via individual artists whose relation to movies is explored in some depth, Part II investigates the exchanges across media through a sociopolitical lens that allowing us to look at two select themes from a variety of angles. Chapter 3 studies gender politics in the work of those I call “Leading Ladies” – women involved in movies and the fine arts. We identify key issues shared by the many women who momentarily found openness in the burgeoning movie business

Introduction 7

Figure I.3  George Biddle, King Street Movie, Charleston, South Carolina, 1931. Oil on canvas, 40 1/2 × 30 in. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Bennett, 1999.011. Image courtesy of the Gibbes Museum of Art/Carolina Art Association.

and their sisters who faced greater obstacles in the fine arts. Their work found overlap in treatments of dancers, shopgirls, suffragists and flappers. Chapter 4 analyzes African Americans who found in painting and moviemaking a means of resistance against the racial stereotypes prevalent in popular culture, epitomized in Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915). Driven by a lively jazz and blues music scene and the cultural work achieved by the Harlem Renaissance, blacks found the means to articulate their identity and find alternative vehicles to express their creativity. These two chapters in Part II focus on a suite of movies and paintings, broken down into facets and then reassembled to elucidate the distinctive art–film nexus as it evolved over three decades within the contexts of gender and race. Going against the prevailing practice in American visual studies that generally silos the Ashcan School from the Harlem Renaissance and Women artists, I interweave them into my broad fabric. When Pablo Picasso met Charlie Chaplin in 1952, he expressed the opinion that they were both masters of the silent gesture – “no description, no analysis, no words.”15 The lack of sound forced silent filmmakers to devise innovative ways of telling their stories through purely visual means. This kinship Picasso intuited between his easel painting and Chaplin’s mastery of the silent film genre was equally palpable among artists in the United States.

8 Introduction

Notes 1 Bitzer quoted in Tom Gunning, D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film: The Early Years at Biograph (Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1991), pp. 242–250; Bitzer quoted page 250. 2 Peter Bogdanovich, John Ford (London: Studio Vista, 1967), 87. 3 Steve Archer, Willis O’Brien. Special Effects Genius (Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland & Co., 1993) provides background. 4 Chris Edwards, Blog on “The Lost World,” Silent Volume (October 25, 2009), consulted March 7, 2017. http://silent-volume.blogspot.com/2009/10/lost-world-1925.html. 5 John Sloan is discussed in depth in Chapter 1. 6 Edward Anslem Aiken, “Studies in the Motion Picture and 20th Century Art, 1909–1930” (Ph.D. dissertation, Northwestern University, 1981). 7 For an extensive discussion of the relationship between Benton’s art and film see Austin Barron Bailly, ed. American Epics: Thomas Hart Benton and Hollywood (Salem, MA: Peabody Essex Museum, 2015). 8 Information from Art Institute of Chicago website, consulted June 5, 2015. www.artic.edu/ aic/collections/artwork/93798. 9 Film, technically speaking, refers to the physical celluloid material on which images are registered and movie refers to the stream of images that are projected, but following general practice they are used interchangeably here. 10 Dramatic Mirror April 30, 1896, quoted in Kenneth W. Leish, Cinema (New York: Newsweek Books, 1974), p. 7. 11 Stuart Davis, “Is There a Revolution in the Arts?” Bulletin of America’s Town Meeting of the Air 5 (February 19, 1940), p. 12. 12 George F. Custen, Bio/Pics: How Hollywood Constructed Public History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992) provides an excellent analysis of the general phenomenon. 13 I was unable to identify significant art–film overlaps in relation to Asian Americans to include in my discussion, but Anna May Wong would be among the potential figures for future study. 14 Karla Rae Fuller, Hollywood Goes Oriental: CaucAsian Performance in American Film (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2010) covers this topic. 15 David Caute, Doubles (London: Totterdown Books, 2016) excavates this event.

Part I

Two American Artists and Silent Cinema

1 Lust for Looking John Sloan’s Moving Picture Eye

Marilyn Monroe was standing atop a subway grate when an updraft sent her diaphanous dress flaring, and became an icon of movie glamour in 1954. A quarter of a century earlier John Sloan created the prototype when he etched the figure of a woman descending the steps from the elevated train, her skirt caught by the wind to expose an immodest extent of leg (Figure 1.1). Its title Subway Stairs looks forward to Marilyn as well as backward to his old hero Thomas Rowlandson, whose watercolor Exhibition, Stare-Case (1811 (?), Courtauld Institute, London) featured the lively interaction of voyeurs and exhibitionists at London’s Royal Academy. Together the artists are poking fun at the viewer who is, of

Figure 1.1  John Sloan, Subway Stairs, 1926, etching, plate 6 7/8 × 5 in. Private Collection.

12  Two American Artists and Silent Cinema course, caught in the act of staring up at a suddenly revealed bit of female anatomy. As was his habit, Sloan nods to the art of the past while simultaneously looking to modern sources – in this case to cinema. The subject was an old standby of the movies, captured in an Edison film of 1901 entitled What Happened on Twenty-third Street, New York City. This privileged venue for Peeping Toms was at the bottom of the street where Sloan lived; “a high wind this morning and the pranks of the gusts about the Flatiron Building at Fifth Avenue and 23rd St. was interesting to watch,” the artist confided to his diary.1 So we know he was among male spectators who gathered there and were routinely chased away by the police – a ritual that gave rise to the phrase “Twenty-three Skidoo.” Sloan’s series of etchings entitled New York City Life was created in dialogue with early film. The series was his first major project after relocating from Philadelphia to New York in 1904. New York City Life consists of ten prints – each measuring approximately 5 x 7 inches – that allowed the viewer equal access to his neighborhood’s public streets and private dwellings at intimate moments. There was nothing much like this series in American art at the time. Realizing that that was over 100 years ago, we feel renewed admiration for Sloan’s ability to capture his urban environment in this etching sequence. This achievement was related to what might be called Sloan’s moving picture eye. Sloan, at age 25, had been in the audience when the earliest silent films were shown in Philadelphia and became a regular moviegoer after settling in New York.2 His art evolved in tandem with the new medium.

New York City Life Sloan opened his series with the finely executed etching Connoisseurs of Prints (Figure 1.2) depicting a print show at the old American Art Galleries on Twenty-third Street. He arranges the attendees according to states of attention and expertise, from the undifferentiated group at the back of the room to the model connoisseur with gallery guide and magnifying glass in the foreground. Sloan is holding these characters up to mild ridicule – including the taller, baldheaded connoisseur at the center who surreptitiously directs his gaze at the backside of the woman bent forward for optimal viewing. Right from the first print in his New York debut series, the artist is challenging the public: critiquing the concept of the specialist’s eye as well as institutionalized modes of perception. In the remaining nine prints, Sloan leads us out the door of the gallery and through the nearby streets, where frame-by-frame he creates a dynamic portrayal of his neighborhood. The next etching humorously calls attention to a pair of Fifth Avenue Critics, identified by the pince-nez one elder woman fingers at her chest, ready to raise them for closer inspection. She and her companion are ensconced in their open carriage, feeling superior to the attractive younger woman who is about to alight from the opposite conveyance, its closed cabin indicative of her more clandestine – and, they judge, disreputable – purpose. Sloan does not let them get the better of her, though, for he slyly inserted the sign “Antiques” over the critic’s head, branding her notions Victorian but also reminding us of rapidly changing modes of vision. Sloan initially titled this etching Connoisseurs of Virtue, indicating his original intent to create a series of connoisseurs. It is generally assumed in the scholarly literature that he abandoned the connoisseurs project after this.3 I maintain, however, that it merely metamorphosed into a more ambitious project. Broadly defined, the

Lust for Looking 13

Figure 1.2  John Sloan, Connoisseurs of Prints from the series New York City Life, 1905. Etching plate 4 15/16 × 6 7/8 in. Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR.

“connoisseur” is one who knows – more specifically in this case, a person competent to appreciate art. In 1905 the connoisseur would have been respected for her or his ability to judge by looking, for the cultivation of a “good eye.” Spectatorship in the modern city, Sloan was realizing, required equal expertise. So this first New York project grew into an extended meditation on the act of seeing in that city, on looking and being looked at: connoisseurs of urban vision. In the early years of the twentieth century, Sixth Avenue northeast of Greenwich Village acquired a reputation that rivaled that of the Bowery. When the notoriously corrupt Police Captain Alexander “Clubber” Williams was transferred to the West Thirtieth Street Station in 1876, he was supposed to have said, “I’ve been living on chuck steak for a long time, and now I’m going to get a little of the tenderloin.” And so it was christened the Tenderloin – the area west of Sixth Avenue from Forty-second to Twenty-third Street, more or less. In its heyday from 1876 to 1915, it was home to gambling establishments, sexual services, drinking saloons and opium dens – but more upscale than the Bowery versions, and not quite so dangerous.4 This locale, curiously, is where Sloan settled with his new bride, Dolly. In September 1904 they moved into a fifth-floor walkup at 165 West Twenty-third Street, where they remained for almost seven years, until May 1911. Artists then as now gravitate to low-rent districts, but in 1904 there were other, more respectable areas where Sloan could have set up housekeeping just as cheaply. Why here? Aside from the obvious “attractions” just enumerated, it was also part of the city’s – and the country’s – entertainment district. Kinetoscope parlors and storefront movie

14  Two American Artists and Silent Cinema houses dotted the blocks while cameramen filmed movies on its rooftops and streets (as etched by Sloan in The “Movey” Troupe of 1920). Let us imagine Sloan exiting the door of his building and heading down the street. He would pass the Eden Musée, the former waxworks that became the city’s first location for continuous movie exhibition, and Koster and Bial’s, a glorified concert saloon turned movie house, as well as Proctor’s Theater.5 He made numerous circuits on foot around the neighborhood and into those theaters as he kept an eye out for promising subjects. Not surprisingly, Sloan became one of the first American artists to engage with film in a serious and sustained way. That engagement had begun in 1896 in Philadelphia with an opinion piece he published following the screening of the Edison film The May Irwin Kiss.6 After that, he was hooked, witness to each stage of film’s development. This spanned everything from the short projected movies in between live acts in vaudeville theaters to the makeshift storefronts where movies were shown one after another and where Sloan frequently dropped in. After 1906 nickelodeons sprang up, featuring movie shows all day long and adding more fictional films, and Sloan documented this phenomenon in his 1907 canvas Movies, 5 Cents (see Figure 1.9). Scholars have recognized the relationship between Sloan’s art and film, particularly with respect to what they identify as his interest in popular entertainment, spectatorship and objectification of the female body.7 I aim to steer the discussion in other directions, toward the evolution of his urban looking and its overlap with modern American picture making and film. The general trend in the literature has been to discuss a few of these prints together with paintings that were done several years later. But in my view the original ten etchings must be treated as an indivisible unit, for Sloan refused to exhibit or sell the prints singly. The modern city, film practice and Sloan’s art were all rapidly evolving in the early twentieth century; beyond Sloan’s protestations about the integrity of his series, we need to zero in on visual practice specific to 1905 and early 1906. The City Life series maps the complexities of visual attention that immediately confronted the artist when he moved to Manhattan. The prints delivered a real jolt to the public when they were exhibited together in 1906, and we should try to recapture some of the excitement they stimulated.

Art from Life – Movie Pictures Georges Méliès in France and Edwin S. Porter in New York were making the most popular movies at the time. Coming to cinema from a background in magic and the theater, Méliès created movies like the renowned A Trip to the Moon (Le Voyage dans la lune) of 1902. Scrutiny of his work reveals that he showed objects and actors first in one position, then in another; he filmed one frame, stopped the camera, and then set up the next frame. Porter, by contrast, perfected a unique moving picture style by closely following his characters as they moved about. In How They Do Things on the Bowery, Porter for the first time applied the mobile camera associated with actuality production to fiction filmmaking. Headquartered at the Edison Studios on West Twenty-first Street, he frequently followed his characters and filmed in surrounding areas – the very streets where Sloan sketched ideas for pictures.8 Much has been written recently about the ways in which the individual is bombarded with stimuli of every sort in the modern city, his or her attention tugged in a variety of directions.9 Today we have our own ways of dealing with these competing

Lust for Looking 15 forces, but around 1900 – as skyscrapers rose, electric signs appeared and traffic sped up – people demonstrated a response specific to that moment. Sloan thought long and hard about matters of vision, about looking at the life of the city around him, about looking at pictures – both still and moving. He discovered in cinema a means of structuring his experiences of the city. This cinematic mode of vision, if you will, operated on a variety of levels. First, he developed a moving-picture eye. As he perambulated the city streets his eye was arrested by what he called “bits of human drama.” Second, there are recognizable analogies between his prints and contemporary movie shorts, not only in subject matter but also in psychology and visual strategies. Third, Sloan’s prints Man Monkey (1905) and The Little Bride (1906) embody the play between attention and inattention that the modern city dweller must master to negotiate her environment, replicated in early film. On February 22, 1908 – a holiday – Sloan paid some bills and then headed out for a walk before settling down to paint. He noted in his diary: Walked up Broadway. A beautiful day, Washington’s Birthday – and everyone seemed to be out, crowds going to the matinees at the theatres. Watching a moving picture photographer set up his camera. He waited and I did also, to see what he was after. Soon around 34th Street, into Broadway, turned a little parade – Volunteer Firemen of the old days of New York.10 Like the cameraman, Sloan spied a little parade of his own – made up of a street musician with drums, cymbals and a hand-organ accompanist – while strolling down a side street in the Tenderloin. His fascination with the one-man band who plays to the crowd, seemingly unaware that his performance is disrupting traffic, gave rise to the print Man Monkey. Passersby stepped aside to provide a stage for the impromptu entertainment, while a horse-drawn truck and the group at the right pull back to avoid a collision. The image reminds us that focusing on a primary action can cause us to overlook another action, a real danger to the city dweller. Similarly, in The Little Bride the crowd parts around the central action, a bride and groom exiting the neighborhood Church of St. Vincent de Paul. Here the artist paused momentarily to watch this happy couple. His image briefly arrests our journey before the spell is broken and we move on. Notice too that Sloan has advanced his treatment of time and motion in another way. By constructing a second focal point in the crowd of attendees in a doorway, he suggests that the couple has moved from there to the current position, thus establishing a temporal dimension. The groom is ducking, the bride descending the steps precariously on high heels, raising her skirt while dodging rice and airborne shoes, the pair’s instability contributing to the impression that the artist has caught a moment of the briefest duration. We apprehend the kinetic body, reenacting the paradox of vision embodied in early cinema viewing. Sloan prowled the streets or watched activities of other households through his apartment’s rear window, often with the aid of binoculars. He stalked strangers, following them from place to place, when he found their actions compelling. A passage from the artist’s diary described how he: shadowed a poor wretch of a woman on 14th St. Watched her stop to look at billboards, go into Five Cent Stores, take candy, nearly run over at Fifth Avenue, dazed and always trying to arrange her hair and hairpins.11

16  Two American Artists and Silent Cinema While so far as we know this pursuit did not result in a finished painting, it does underscore the artist’s tendency to tail unaware subjects as they went about their urban rounds. In Fun, One Cent (Figure 1.3) two groups of girls crowd around pennyin-the-slot machines. In the central cluster, one girl turns the crank, which flipped photographs to create the illusion of movement, while her companions clamor for a peek. They peer into the viewer to glimpse – as the text on the wall posters promise – “Girls in their Nightgowns – Spicy” and “Naughty Girls!” This image also carries the most extensive textual descriptions of the series, which call attention to the sometimes-spicy content of the moving picture shorts. What’s going on here? Why is Sloan referencing movies via a kinetograph parlor when – as he well knew – movies had been shown projected onto a screen for the past decade? The early movie theaters were filled with distractions, such as audiences moving around and guffawing, as Sloan depicted in Movies, 5 Cents. The kinetoscope device, by contrast, required the spectator to address the machine, hunching over and putting her face to the viewer, thus blocking ambient distractions, at least momentarily. The girl’s friends press her for their turns and for details of what titillating scenes await them, but for that brief moment the individual customer’s perception is suspended and her attention has but a single focus. This is the lesson of Sloan’s stroll in and around Twenty-third Street, and of his art: the city dweller, constantly assaulted with new objects vying for attention, must train herself in this new skill of urban viewing. Sloan manifests the link between city viewing and cinema when he shows what appear to be the same girls from the kinetograph parlor who have wandered out onto the street, whereupon Sloan “shoots” another scene.

Figure 1.3  John Sloan, Fun, One Cent from the series New York City Life, 1905. Etching plate 4 15/16 × 6 7/8 in. Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR.

Lust for Looking 17 Display windows are another temptation for anyone walking down a city street. The Show Case features Madam Ryanne’s vitrine in which a half-figure mannequin displays a corset, around which the girls have gathered. As we are constantly reminded in our tour of the neighborhood, no single attraction can hold the sidewalk spectator’s attention for long. Several girls have already lost interest and begin to move away, following the well-endowed older woman and her male companion who exit stage right. But two girls linger before the curious garment, one of them exploring her own breast as she awakens to her sexuality amid the surrounding commotion. Here as elsewhere in the series we can identify direct parallels with contemporary movies.12 Corset and undergarment displays were featured in several American Mutoscope and Biograph productions of 1904 including The Shocking Stockings, Four Beautiful Pairs, A Busy Day for Corset Models, and The Way to Sell Corsets, where they provide a variation on the theme of the male observer objectifying the near-naked woman, only to be punished for his transgressions by the movie’s end. A Busy Day for Corset Models departs from the norm by showing one woman looking at another, demonstrating the impulse to learn the secrets of one’s own body and the desire for the acquisition of femininity through observations of another.13 These crossovers between the etchings and early cinema can be drawn throughout the series, not only in the increasing use of women’s bodies to relay narratives but also even more specifically in their manner of presentation.

Conventions of Silent Cinema As the New York City Life series evolved, Sloan moved from public to private scenes and derived material from what he called his “night vigils.” With the aid of binoculars (fellow painter Robert Henri dubbed them “spy glasses”) he looked into neighbors’ apartments, the windowpanes framing the action in the manner of a movie screen. The figures, viewed in the evening hours, were illuminated from behind, again suggesting the analogy to the viewing of moving pictures from a darkened interior. In successive days in early June 1906 Sloan jotted down observations from a dust storm on Fifth Avenue and a visit to Coney Island, and on June 11 noted the following: Started to paint from memory of the Wind and Dust Storm that we saw and felt Sunday. Across the backyards in a room on the second floor I saw a baby die in its mother’s arms. The men of the house powerless, helpless, stupid. She held it in her arms after it had started to pale and stiffen. Hope tried to fight off Fact, then Fact killed hope in her. They took it from her. The men smoked their pipes – sympathetic with her anguish and trying to reason her back to calmness. A bottle of whiskey, and a drink for her. I could hear nothing – but the acting was perfect.14 While Sloan apparently did not attempt to portray this specific scene on paper or canvas, his description does shed light on prints such as Man, Wife and Child (Figure 1.4). For both these family dramas – the written and the visual – had their origins in window vigils. Alternatively, titled Wrestling Bout, the etched scene is certainly less tragic than that of the dying baby, but it too reenacts a domestic drama that was meant to be private. Today we are well indoctrinated into movie spectatorship, but in film’s first decade these conventions were yet to be established. Psychologists and physiologists were just beginning to study the mechanism behind the magic; Horace Kallen, for

18  Two American Artists and Silent Cinema

Figure 1.4  John Sloan, Man, Wife and Child, from the series New York City Life, 1905. Etching plate 4 15/16 × 6 15/16 in. Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR.

example, argued in 1910 that pantomime on the screen evoked a more vivid response than pantomime on stage, hypnotizing the audience to fill in the missing details.15 Sloan’s pictures and text confirm that he absorbed the cinematic conventions of 1905 to such an extent that he interpreted and perhaps embellished the scenario in the manner of a silent movie. He admits in his June diary entry that he could hear nothing; one wonders how much detail he could see from his stated vantage point across the backyards and into the second floor, and whether he could actually discern the baby’s body paling, stiffening. But by watching moving pictures, he had become conditioned to interpret a dramatic narrative from a limited number of movements and gestures. He even refers to the family’s life as having been carried out with perfect “acting.” The phrasing of the diary text begins to sound like the intertitles from contemporary melodramas: “Hope tried to fight off Fact” and “then Fact killed hope in her.” Even his capitalization of “Hope” and “Fact” remind us of the way nouns in the intertitles were frequently printed with the first letter in upper case, suggesting a universal concept. Binoculars were necessary but not sufficient to piece together the events in the surrounding tenements; pre-dialogue movies already began to shape the way in which Sloan viewed and interpreted the world. The Woman’s Page intrudes on a disheveled woman still in her nightgown. When it was shown in 1906 the New York Herald critic praised the artist’s humor in showing “a slatternly woman seated in an untidy room, with an unkempt child creeping about and a bed that is still unmade. The woman is eagerly devouring the woman’s page of a

Lust for Looking 19 magazine containing hints for beautifying the home.” This comment hints at the underlying theme that connects the print to others in the series. With laundry washboard, child, unmade bed and tormented cat all competing for her attention, the woman focuses intently on the printed page, succumbing to the power of mass media and demonstrating one way in which modern city dwellers cope with multilayered stimuli. The remaining two prints – Turning Out the Light and Roofs, Summer Night – were the most transgressive of Sloan’s New York series and, not surprisingly, the most censored. To me, these images are inconceivable without the background of cinema. Here too we could draw superficial analogies to specific film scenes, but my interest instead lies in the visual plots Sloan sets up, strategies of desire he establishes through the force of the erotic gaze. Turning Out the Light (Figure 1.5) frames a woman kneeling in the center of a double bed in a small, bare room with stockings dangling from the bed frame and recently removed clothes piled on a nearby chair (it could also double for the set of The Woman’s Page, pictured from a different angle). We follow the line of her arm to the light and then crisscross to follow the direction of her glance. Only then do we perceive the man recumbent at the other end of the bed, appearing in the lower register. After this moment, the other four senses will be called into play; this is the last point in time when vision is the prime vehicle for conveying information and emotion. Sloan has portrayed the man and woman gazing at each other with lust and anticipation; his use of the viewing angles and frames enhances the expression of their desires. Of course, artists pictured people exchanging looks before the modern era. But by 16

Figure 1.5  John Sloan, Turning Out the Light, from the series New York City Life, 1905. Etching plate 4 7/8 × 6 3/4 in. Private Collection.

20  Two American Artists and Silent Cinema 1900 – as cinema both echoed and shaped modern vision – there was more dependence on ricocheting glances to knit compositions together, and the eye as a filter of attention and distraction. About Roofs, Summer Night (Figure 1.6 here) Sloan later recalled “I have always liked to watch the people in the summer, especially the way they live on the roofs.”17 He might well have added that he shared this locale with movie companies, which often used rooftops as outdoor studios. Here Sloan created an amazing image. In the immediate left foreground lies a female figure, somewhat foreshortened, sandwiched between a man and a child. Another couple reclines nearby; that woman too is asleep, but the man by her side is awake, looking over at the wife of his neighbor. His facial expression is accented by a mustache and framed by his shoulders and arms as he raises himself up for a better view. Diagrammed glances and linear perspective convey the expression of male desire for a woman – in this case, one he cannot possess. In this image the artist is further evolving the strategies he will carry over into some of his key paintings of the next several years. Eschewing traditional one-point perspective, he develops primary, secondary, and even tertiary foci in the figural groups that cause our eye to jump from rooftop to rooftop until its travel is halted by the string of laundry at rear (for some critics clotheslines function as symbols of filmstrips).18 Then the impeccably structured unity of the foreground group pulls our eye back to linger there.

Figure 1.6  John Sloan, Roofs, Summer Night; from the series New York City Life, 1906. Etching plate 5 1/4 × 7 in. Private Collection.

Lust for Looking 21

Critical Reaction Hot off the printing press, the New York City Life prints were displayed at a group show in February 1906 at a midtown Manhattan gallery. Initially, critic Charles FitzGerald praised them but when Sloan was invited to show them at the American Watercolor Society in March 1906 he was astounded to discover that only six of the series were hung. When he demanded an explanation, he was told that Turning Out the Light was one of four prints rejected as too “vulgar” for public display. Insisting to no avail that the ten images had to remain together as an ensemble, Sloan displayed them in the window of a bookshop on Twenty-third Street with a placard indicating that “an incomplete set was shown at the American Watercolor Society.”19 He responded not only to the censorship but also more specifically to the violation of the integrity of the series. Given the artist’s insistence that the prints be exhibited as an integrated unit, the next question that arises is: in what sequence were they intended to appear? From the etchings that are dated, diary entries and other evidence we can piece together the order in which they were created, beginning with Connoisseurship of Prints and Connoisseurs of Virtue in February 1905 and concluding with Roofs, Summer Night and The Little Bride in February 1906. But Sloan seems not to have insisted on particular numbering. It may have been his unwillingness to put the images in the service of a specific narrative that annoyed the critics and contributed to the excising of four of the prints at the 1906 show. Audiences accustomed to print cycles ranging from William Hogarth’s Marriage-A-la-Mode (1745) to Max Klinger’s Glove cycle (1881) expected a story line with a moral or dramatic conclusion.20 Art historians have tended to look at the images individually, but we need to think more about their order and interrelations. Many years after their creation, Sloan was asked to provide commentary on them and offered a tongue-in-cheek response, insisting that he hoped the little bride lived happily ever after and that the men and women caught in private moments in his interiors were taken for respectable married couples. In truth, Sloan refused to edit his material into a familiar narrative structure. Instead, the images appear on the etched pages as they did to him on the streets, at random and without reason. They collide and drift as they would on the sidewalks of the modern city and in the cinema of that day. Between 1902 and 1904 actuality movies – filmed as events occurred or with the intent of looking that way – declined in popularity and narrative films began to be made in the studio. This trend coincided with Edwin Porter’s arrival at Thomas Edison’s studio, where he made some of its best-known dramas, including Jack and the Beanstalk (1902), Life of an American Fireman (1902–1903) and The Great Train Robbery (1903). Initially, movies were limited to stories contained on a single reel of film, but these quickly expanded to require multiple reels. Exhibitors would order films from catalogues, which would identify the scenes on each reel and allow for the possibility of shuffling the sequence. This is why, in the most famous example, the bandit who raises his pistol in The Great Train Robbery sometimes appears at the end of the show and at other times at the opening. After 1907, as movies became more popular, a tighter system of control would arise, but in these pioneering days there was a sense of a fluid narrative, of variations on a theme.21 On view in theaters immediately after its completion in the fall of 1905 was Porter’s Life of an American Policeman – a day in the life of an average “beat cop.” It opens

22  Two American Artists and Silent Cinema with the patrolman at home with his wife and family; then he is shown helping a lost child, chasing a wealthy motorist who speeds and almost runs over a child, rescuing a would-be suicide from the river, and trying to apprehend a burglar.22 Like Sloan, Porter worked with multiple narrative threads, refusing to limit the sequence to a single story line. Reading Sloan’s New York City Life against Porter’s moving picture Life of an American Policeman demonstrates important confluences in their working method. Sloan’s surveillance of his neighborhood for people and incidents that caught his eye can be compared to the policeman’s surveillance of his beat. Both were inspired by actual events and share a focus on common people. These are not heroic characters or historic events, just everyday city life, told in open, reversible texts. Sloan’s series, too, is loosely tied together by place and by the artist-observer’s movement through the streets. The incidents were dictated by chance, causing him to happen upon one incident while missing another. Did Sloan’s contemporaries, we wonder, understand what he was up to? Just after finishing his tenth etching, on February 27, 1906, Sloan noted in his diary: “Sadakichi Hartmann, the weird art critic and poet, whom I have known now and then during the past twelve years, came in, accompanied by [artist] A.L. Groll . . . Groll seemed interested in my etchings and Hartmann also.”23 Hartmann’s reaction was perhaps not so difficult to predict, given that the etchings filled the goals he had laid out in 1900 in his Camera Notes article “A Plea for the Picturesqueness of New York.” There the critic had urged artists and especially photographers to look long and hard at the actualities of their urban environment. His receptiveness to Sloan’s images was enhanced by a mutual fascination with the potential of moving pictures. In 1899 Hartmann published the essay “Portrait Painting and Portrait Photography,” which concluded his survey of portraits with a provocative suggestion: Only when color photography has been made possible, and kinetoscope photo­ graphy in the hands of artists has developed to that extent that full justice can be done to the spontaneity of actual movement . . . will artistic portrait photography fulfill its highest vocation. Any hope for adequately portraying human life, in other words, lay with cinematography.24 His History of American Art praised Sloan as one of “the most personal, the most gifted and at the same time most modern painters” of the period 1903–1917. Hartmann’s recognition that Sloan’s “knowledge began on the sidewalks and ended on the roof tops” was another demonstration of his gift for seeing “aesthetic possibilities where none had been seen before, for analyzing subterranean influences and inter-connections between the arts.”25 The closing years of Hartmann’s public career logically extended his filmic interests. In 1923 he moved to Hollywood, where he tried his hand at movie scripts and supported himself by writing reviews and gossip columns. Douglas Fairbanks became a friend and cast him in the role of Court Magician in the 1924 film The Thief of Bagdad. Although uncontrolled drinking put a quick stop to what seemed to be a promising second career, this brief interlude suggests that as movies evolved in the silent era, Hartmann progressed from contemplating the artistic potential of film to writing and acting for the screen. Hartmann had been tempted to dismiss moving pictures for what he called their “crude esthetic” but decided he could not do so and succumbed to the powers of

Lust for Looking 23 “this kind of pictorialism.” Early movies generated not only a new lust for looking but also a license for lust. They were often risqué, even erotic. Quick peeks at the female body were commonly shown, as in The Gay Shoe Clerk (Edison, 1903). Others including Trapeze Disrobing Act (Edison, 1901) were more explicit. “This kind of pictorialism” empowered Sloan to turn observations that others would have recorded merely as private sketches into public pictures. Let’s return briefly to this element of voyeurism, which can still cause today’s viewers discomfort with Sloan’s art. In several works Sloan shows the spectator – a surrogate self – obscured in shadow or leaning out a window with a telescope, engaged in his self-confessed viewing practices. He defended his actions, claiming artistic privilege; discretion, he insisted, distinguished him from the common “peeper”: 26

I am in the habit of watching every bit of human life I can see about my windows, but I do it so that I am not observed. I “peep” through real interest, not being observed myself. I feel that it is no insult to the people you are watching to do so unseen, but that to do it openly and with great expressions of amusement is an evidence of real vulgarity.27 Sloan saw the artist as an expert, a professional looker, like the x-ray technician or medical doctor who had the right to look where others do not. For the artist in America then, the empirical component of film held great critical appeal – its potential for analyzing movement, the essence of life. Remember that in the early days, films went by the names of projecting mechanisms: Vitascope, Cinematograph, Biograph, literally the probing and graphing of life. Sloan, Henri and their circle greatly admired painter Thomas Eakins, the Philadelphia realist whose insistence on the use of nude models in his classes at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts contributed to his dismissal. Film provided an invaluable source of carnal knowledge, one that was necessarily acquired through the lens. A frame from The Story the Biograph Told shows the ubiquitous camera eye. Immersed in the same environment of spectatorship, display and projection, artists and cameramen grappled with similar subjects and strategies. By 1905 the city was conceived not only as a place but also as a process. Sloan’s mentor Henri had emphasized the importance of depicting the dynamism of the city. Although Henri was incapable of fully realizing that in paint, he passed his credo on to Sloan: art should approximate life, not merely as a visual but as a bodily, mobile experience. This operated as neither a claim of influence of one practitioner over another nor an example of high-low dynamics. The metaphor of the stereopticon provides a means of presenting two interrelated productions – Sloan’s New York City Life series and the urban films made by Porter and others – and illuminating these parallel developments and exchanges.

The Spirit of Saint-Gaudens’ Diana From his apartment at 165 West 23rd St., Sloan was in proximity not only to be corner made famous by the “Twenty-three Skidoo” but also to a sculptural monument by Augustus Saint-Gaudens: his Diana perched high atop Madison Square Garden (Figure 1.7). The associations with pleasure gardens and the mix of patrician and plebian tastes were manifest in Stanford White’s design for the building, one of the

24  Two American Artists and Silent Cinema world’s largest public entertainment halls. Its tower, more than 300 feet tall, became the city’s emblem: when the 20-foot high Diana, wielding a bow and arrow, was unveiled amidst fireworks, her nudity shocked the crowd. But with J.P. Morgan as one of her defenders, she stayed, twirling in the wind and crowned with lights, as if to defy her detractors. A description from 1910 helps us to envision her appearance: She was a hollow copper shell and, thanks to her ball bearings, responded to the least puff of the breeze. By day she seemed a golden girl poised easily with a wisp of drapery billowing from her shoulders; at night the crescent moon on her head glowed with lights inside the prism, and hidden floodlights outlined her nakedness against the sky.28 Frequently passing Madison Square Garden, Sloan was invigorated by the spirit this bold female figure embodied. He was fascinated by the down-to-earth, open sexuality of the young working-class women residing nearby, and painted them with gusto. Rejecting the Victorian taste represented by the sculptor’s earlier figure of William Tecumseh Sherman’s Victory, he embraced the New Woman epitomized by Diana. This shift helped usher in modern America and was propelled in part by the mass media, especially by movies.

Figure 1.7  Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Diana, 1893–1894, cast 1894 or after. Bronze, 28 1/4 × 16 1/4 × 14 in. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY.

Lust for Looking 25 One day in June 1907, Sloan departed from his apartment in search of diversion and stopped at a storefront, recently converted into a nickelodeon theater. Later he recorded in his diary: “Went into a five cent show of Kinematograph pictures on 6th Avenue. Think it might be a good thing to paint.”29 The result was Movies, Five Cents, a pioneering canvas of the theater’s interior, complete with the audience watching a film in progress. So what was it about the scene that prompted Sloan to recognize it as “a good thing to paint”? In his earlier etching Fun, One Cent he depicted a group of girls gathered around a kinetoscope, an apparatus that allowed only one individual at a time to peer through the viewer at the moving image. The print depicts the early and more limited stage of moving picture viewing, while the painting provides a more paradigmatic image of the subsequent nickelodeon era, when audiences together watched the images projected on the screen. The artist looks at the crowd watching a film at this extraordinary moment when moving pictures still possessed the aura of newness.30 Sloan’s picture shares constitutive strategies with the movies: first, similar issues of audience and attention; second, the spatial configuration; and finally, the treatment of the screen image. Examination of this picture serves as a springboard for a discussion of key urban images by Sloan from this period in which the movie screen is absent, but many of the same strategies are employed. The artist’s frequent movie attendance is well documented in the diary he kept beginning on January 1, 1906. A random sampling provides an idea of Sloan’s habits, showing that he interspersed movie attendance with nocturnal work in his studio. It also reminds us of the viewing habits of the day when people “went to the pictures” – as the phrase went – enjoying whatever was being shown rather than seeking out specific titles: On our way back to Sixth Avenue, we stopped in the “Manhattan Theatre” which is soon to be torn down for some of the underground next store. Went across the street and took another five cents worth of moving pictures, then came home and started another Puzzle for the Press. Went in moving picture shown on 23rd St. and saw a most interesting series of films taken in France, of the motor races. Dieppe Circuit. Several cars upset, men carried away on stretchers. At 14th St. we followed the crowd into the Dewey Theatre moving picture show. Saw some right good films and one very amusing “yeller gal” buck and wing dancer, a very interesting type. I’d like to try to paint her as I saw her then. After dinner at home. Dolly and I went out and priced things at a couple of theatres but did not buy seats. We went finally to the moving pictures.31 Watching especially the short films of pioneer Edwin S. Porter, John Sloan developed a moving picture eye, which first manifested itself in his New York City Life series and continued to evolve. Nickelodeon theaters, like the one in Movies, Five Cents, thrived on the block where he lived, in the heart of the Tenderloin entertainment district. Attending moving picture shows, Sloan became fascinated with cinema’s apparatus – its methods for focusing the audience’s attention toward the screen – which he adopted as the infrastructure for an important group of paintings he produced in 1907 and 1908. After 1910, he entered into a revised dialogue with the increasingly popular and socially influential medium of film, resulting in yet another group of pictures in which he studied the movie house as part of the urban fabric. Sloan became a New Yorker

26  Two American Artists and Silent Cinema

Figure 1.8  H.C. Leighton Co., Portland, ME, Manufacturers of Postal Cards, Gem Theater, Peaks Island, Portland Maine, ca. 1908. Colored postcard, 3 1/2 × 5 1/2 in. (As a young man, future director John Ford worked here as an usher during the summer.)

in the process of completing his print series, in which he spread his neighborhood out before the viewer and announced his role as its interpreter. He further secured his metropolitan citizenship through a subsequent sequence of paintings that were mediated through the new urban entertainment of moving pictures.

How the Nickelodeon-era Movies Tell a Story, ca. 1908 In the first ten years after their invention, moving pictures depended on familiar stories and linear plots for audience comprehension. But as the nickelodeon boomed (Figure 1.8), production companies had to reach for less familiar subjects and increasingly complex narratives to feed a public hungry for novelty. Moviegoers were left figuratively, as well as literally, in the dark, unable to follow the action on the screen. “I guess they have exhausted all of the old subjects and have nothing else to show us than pictures we cannot understand,” one observed. “Yes, they are at the end of their rope,” her friend concurred.32 This dialogue underscores a common complaint at this transitional moment. A writer for the magazine Variety summarized the problem: This reel offends the most important elements of motion photography – following it involves a decided mental strain. Moving picture subjects, we take it, should be selected first of all for their directness, simplicity and ease of adequate expression. As little as possible should be left to the unaided imagination of the spectator.

Lust for Looking 27 The story, the whole story, and nothing but the story should appear on the illuminated sheet. In this subject an effort has been made to tell a complicated and intricate allegory . . . When it is all over the spectator asks himself what it’s all about. That’s enough to mark the best picture, mechanically, ever made a failure.33 Moving Picture World cautioned that people “do not want to sit in a dark room yawning and asking their neighbors, ‘What do these pictures mean?’”34 Veteran moviemakers like Porter refused to alter their techniques and relied on external devices including lectures or behind-the-screen narrators to guide viewers through the plot. The fact that both these aids, which had been around since the earliest days of projected images in the 1890s, were revived around 1908 is indicative of the dilemma of that moment. “Why do so many people remain in the moving picture theater,” one observer queried, “and look at the same picture two and even three times?”35 Like the novice struggling to learn a foreign language, they repeated the exercise over and over. Newcomers to moviemaking took heed and evolved internal methods of achieving clarity. At this juncture, when Sloan was most engaged in painting the city, the cinema was in crisis. It forced the moviegoing painter to become more conscious of its pictorial communication strategies and to rethink his own pictorial structures and their legibility to his viewers (who themselves attended movies regularly).

Figure 1.9  John Sloan, Movies, Five Cents, 1907. Oil on canvas, 23 1/2 × 31 1/2 in. Private Collection. Photograph, Rowland Elzea Catalogue Raisonne File on John Sloan, Delaware Art Museum.

28  Two American Artists and Silent Cinema

Sloan’s Movies, Five Cents Movies, Five Cents (Figure 1.9) presents the interior of a nickelodeon, an unpretentious storefront where movies were shown for a nickel admission. Sloan’s diary tells us that it was located near his studio/residence on West 23rd Street. Showing us the first eight rows of seats, most of which are occupied, he maps the dynamics of looking as informed by moving pictures. In the left middle ground, we see the screen, partially cut off but sufficiently intact to read the projected image. On the wall to the right of the screen is suspended an electric fan, a necessary accessory in these crowded, poorly ventilated spaces. Beside the fan is the illuminated exit sign – so ubiquitous in modern buildings that we barely note its presence, but a new and controversial feature of movie theater architecture in Sloan’s day when there were so many fires. (More recently Ed Ruscha has explored the same ghostly presence within the theater, one that endures after the movie fades to black.)36 Here the artist is playing with problems in illumination, as he forces us to discern details in the penumbra of the darkened interior, where we have only the emanations from the screen, exit sign and bare bulb over the entrance at right to guide us. Sloan positions the viewer of his painting in the side aisle, looking diagonally over the heads of the attendees, to catch a glimpse of what they are watching: “The Clinch,” as the extended kiss came to be known in movie parlance. Providing titillation through hyperrealism, the moving picture zooms in close and studies their actions: the couple groping at each other, knees converging, and most of all, the gesticulating of the facial muscles and lips. Capturing this moment, the painting references the technology behind the movie magic, the close-up that becomes so integral to cinematic language. An undated drawing, probably a preparatory study for the painting, suggests that initially the artist intended a conventional orientation, in which screen image is parallel to the picture plane and equated with picture surface, centered and visible in its entirety. We the viewers of the drawing are situated behind and continuous with the movie audience, and peer over their heads to see the screen. In the painted version, by contrast, the screen is no longer centered but pushed far to the left, and with it the theater’s axis shifted 90 degrees. Directly in front of us, punctuated only by the red glow of the exit sign and the fan, is the blank sidewall. This configuration emblematizes the spectator’s new relationship to images in the movies after 1907, when the increasingly complicated plots and sequence of scenes required an active and engaged process, rather than a passive consumption of simplistic, linear story lines. The empty wall doubles as the mental apparatus of the spectator, who must assemble her or his own sensations from the sequence of projected images. Absorbing the increasingly sophisticated language of cinema, Sloan complicates the conception of his scene in ways that anticipate both Sergei Eisenstein’s theory of montage and the opening scene in Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941), in which the shot pans from the newsreel to the empty wall. A remarkable canvas for 1907, Movies, Five Cents charts the gazes of those assembled, not only at the screen but also around the nickelodeon and at each other.37 The painter is thinking deeply about the conditions of human perception that were being reconceptualized as a result of the invention of cinema. First, we the viewer of the canvas look at the figures on the painted movie screen, who are engaged in their kiss. Some in the audience are absorbed in their actions, including the fellow at the composition’s center whose bucktoothed grin signals his satisfaction. The gentleman with

Lust for Looking 29 the white collar and his female companion direct their attention forward. The woman on the left aisle, by contrast, appears to be distracted while the woman next to her – sporting the hat with the white streamers – has turned her head to make eye contact with us, the viewers of the painting. Still others grope their way to their seats, and, barely visible in the shadows at the left, a man is bent over in sleep. In his depiction of an early movie house, Sloan offers a study in the dynamics of attention.

The Engaged Spectator The years between 1908 and 1913 that D.W. Griffith spent at the Biograph Studios, prior to his infamous movie The Birth of a Nation (1915), comprised his apprenticeship. During that time, he continually refined his cinematic techniques that stimulated viewer involvement in his movies. These years coincided with key developments in the broader history of modernism, during which other means for engaging audiences were being sought across the arts. In Cubism the relationship of the painted image to reality required a special commitment that was foreign to spectators viewing nineteenth century realist art. In early twentieth century literature, James Joyce’s fictional innovation of stream-of-consciousness writing similarly required a major investment on the reader’s part. Theater, like painting and literature, was undergoing a revolution. In the late nineteenth century Richard Wagner transformed the nature of opera to make the audience’s experience more visually focused and immediate. He changed not only the musical composition and performance style for greater dramatic effect, but he also physically altered the stage lighting and theater design, all with the aim of controlling the audience’s involvement. Viewers no longer sat in long, rectangular halls where their gaze could wander, but in a space shaped to direct their attention to where he wanted them to look. In these theaters for seeing the dimming of the house lights before the movie began was essential. Each movie performance duplicates Wagner’s cosmic sunrise, situating the viewer in the primordial darkness that is only relieved when the luminous images emerge on the screen. Writing in The Harvard Monthly in 1910, the philosopher Horace Kallen noted that “pantomime on the screen evoked a more vivid response [than pantomime on the stage], hypnotizing the audience to breathlessly fill in the missing details.”38 His words hint at the growing awareness of the active role a viewer played in movie appreciation. In the wake of the sensation surrounding The Birth of a Nation, Harvard psychologist Hugo Münsterberg pondered its constructed reality and impact on the mind of the viewer. In his book The Photoplay: A Psychological Study, he considered persistence of vision, the optical process that knits a series of still pictures into one continuous action. What’s especially interesting is that he confers a new importance on the viewer: the acknowledgment that she is an active participant in the film event.39

Thinking in Pictures “The grammar of art,” Sloan mused in his book Gist of Art (1939), “the use of graphic symbols to make visual images, has been lost on the general public and even the artists during the past hundred years or so.”40 His words underscore the frustrations artists experience trying to communicate with their audiences. He sets up analogies between the artist’s “tools of expression” and “everyday speech” that help us to fathom how

30  Two American Artists and Silent Cinema pre-dialogue movies served his needs.41 For in its early years cinema was proclaimed “a language that is universal. No matter what may be the tongue spoken by the spectator, he can understand the pictures and enjoy them.”42 This language was founded in pantomime: the actor’s gestures, poses and movements that rendered the narrative comprehensible. As Lillian Gish mused: Intolerance recalls Mr. Griffith’s words: “We have gone beyond Babel, beyond words. We have found a new universal language, a power that can make men brothers and end war forever. Remember that! Remember that when you stand in front of the camera.”43 That universality of silent film syntax has since been refuted by film historian including Miriam Hansen, who rightly points to the reliance of Griffith’s Intolerance (1916) on historical tradition and texts to support its images and convey its meaning.44 Contemporary audiences, however, consistently fell back on the metaphor of cinema as a primitive form of language. In his 1915 book Vachel Lindsay – a poet who had studied art with Sloan’s mentor Robert Henri – used the term hieroglyphics to describe the movie medium, implying that, in its means of expression, it was closer to a “primitive” epistemology than a civilized one. “The invention of the photoplay,” he declared, “is as great a step as was the beginning of picture-writing in the Stone Age.” The apparently illiterate movies represented a new form of literacy, and with their aid, he noted, America, long a “word-civilization,” had begun to “think in pictures.”45 Pondering this transition to thinking in pictures, Sloan made studies of pre-cinematic image projection: the song illustrator and the billboard painter. His interest in these unusual pictorial subjects underscores his ongoing fascination with problems of visual literacy. In 1910 Sloan attended a moving picture show at Proctor’s that sandwiched Pathé Frère’s new picture Carmen in between “two hours entertainment of various sorts.” After a brief hiatus during which he did not paint an explicit movie subject, a hitherto unexplored dimension of the cinematic experience suggested itself to him: “I have an idea that the stout woman in blue silk standing at one side of the curtain and singing as the illustrations for her song are cast on the screen would be a good thing to paint.”46 Although he does not seem to have completed such a picture, he did at least consider painting what Richard Abel has described as “that most American of attractions, the illustrated song.”47 It indicates his attention to every aspect of the moving picture experience, especially how visual data are processed by the audience. Two years earlier Sloan executed a drawing of a billboard artist that parallels the format of his Movies, Five Cents. There is a picture within a picture: this time it is not the image on the silver screen but the underdrawing being applying to the wall as the audience watches. The image itself consists of a male figure with his hands around the woman’s throat choking her. It is elemental, easy to read, and a commonplace of film melodrama.48 Nineteenth century posted notices had been largely textual, intended for pedestrians who could pause to read the copy. In the early twentieth century, by contrast, billboards were more likely viewed by the spectator in motion: a passenger on a bicycle, omnibus, elevated train, or automobile. Then too there were the immigrants speaking a variety of tongues who could interpret these large graphics. And they reached a third demographic: those who, “if not actually illiterate . . . are of the

Lust for Looking 31 generally unthinking class and who are caught by a bold and glaring appeal to their senses rather than to their intelligence.” The nickelodeon addressed these same concerns, attracting these same groups of people.49 Sloan captured the billboard painter in the act of creating this modern public art, which was destined to reach far more people than any work of fine art. Defending outdoor advertising against those who condemned posters as detracting from the beauty of the city, the ad men argued that the billboard was a democratic art form: Posters, [painted] Bulletins, and flashing electronic signs were not primarily devised to purvey “free art” to people; nevertheless, one feels that this aspect cannot be overlooked. We have our beautiful museums and Art Galleries, but the people will not go to them – at least, not in great numbers. The attendance at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is small when compared to the ten million souls who live in greater New York. While the Posters and Bulletins cannot rightly be called an Art Gallery, they do provide a means of bringing Art to the people . . . Most of the “80%” who read little and derive their amusement and recreation from the radio and “movies” obtain more genuine joy and satisfaction from a first rate Poster than they could from an old masterpiece.50 In the new age of mass media, even Rembrandt could not hope to compete with a billboard artist for public attention.

Sloan’s Signature Style ca. 1908 and its Relation to Moving Pictures In the work of Sloan’s fellow artists in The Eight including George Bellows, Everett Shinn and Robert Henri, the city panorama dominates the figures. In Sloan’s paintings the urban setting is reduced to a human scale; the figures are embedded in their surroundings, but not overwhelmed by them. In this Sloan shared something with Hopper, but unlike even him Sloan expressed life via motion. Charles Caffin articulated Sloan’s aesthetic project for his popular survey The Story of American Painting (1907) in terms that emphasize change and motion: For it is what the Japanese call the “Ukiyoye” that attracts him – the “passing show” of shops and streets, overhead and surface traffic, and the moving throngs of people, smart and squalid, sad and merry – a phantasmagoria of changing colour, form and action. Out of the multiplied features of the scene, by eliminating some and emphasizing others, he produced a synthesis of effect, in which confusion has disappeared, but the suggestion of vivid actuality remains.51 For this critic, Sloan’s art was about creating a picture out of the moving spectacle of metropolitan life, where there is human incident and specific narrative. He constructed his scenes with a primary focus of attention in the foreground, as is the convention, but complicates it with a secondary focus behind, which destabilizes the composition and duplicates the competing sites of attention one encounters in daily life. There is always a prominent vector – a prominent form like a city street or elevated train – that directs the eye into space and moves it among the figures. William Glackens, George Luks and Bellows create crowd scenes that purposely lack a focus of attention. But someone always stands out in Sloan’s throngs; there is always someone we want to follow. He

32  Two American Artists and Silent Cinema accomplishes this by manipulating the formal elements in his pictures. He learned to do this by watching movies. This is what movies do. They isolate us at the threshold of the picture screen. The room is dark; the screen is in shadow. We, the audience, sit in isolation. Then the action appears on the screen and compels us to follow it with our eyes or be left alone in the dark. We pursue the figures the camera pursues; we follow the cameraman into the story. This happens subconsciously, without our active complicity. Sloan absorbed these technical means; they allowed him to single out figures within the endless parade of humanity he witnessed along the city sidewalks. Around the same time he painted Movies, Five Cents Sloan produced other paintings that did not incorporate movies as a subject, but which are aptly termed cinematic including Easter Eve, Picture Shop Window, Hairdresser’s Window and Election Night (1907). Each is composed so that we identify and follow one of the urban characters into the scene, and each play with the conflation of picture plane, window and moving picture screen. As he roamed the city in search of subjects and angles of vision, he repeatedly returned to the shop window that scholar Anne Friedberg links to movies: A tableau is framed and is placed behind glass and made inaccessible. From the middle of the nineteenth century as if in a historical relay of looks, the shop window succeeded the mirror as the site of identity construction, and then – gradually – the shop window was displaced and incorporated by the cinema screen. Cinematic separation, a further instrumentalization of this consumer gaze, produced paradoxical effects of newfound social mobility of the flâneuse.52 Sloan’s canvases can be located at this nexus between the commercial vehicle of the display window and cinematic practice. Easter Eve spotlights a display of flowers and plays its light against the dark of the spectator’s foreground space. Window is equated with screen, screen with canvas. The analogy is taken further in Picture Shop Window in which the darkened surroundings are pierced at left by a shimmering area of bluish-silver – the illuminated window of the shop – as spectators inspect the pictures displayed there. Sloan established the strong tunnel perspective of the street with people strolling along it, directing the viewer’s eye into the distance. This is countermanded by the dark silhouette of the woman crouched over to peer at the window’s contents, which prompts us to want to do the same. Light reflected from the window illuminate the faces of several onlookers who are in various states of absorption, emulating the theater audience. Cinema served to structure the viewing experiences of the city dweller and the artist’s construction of those experiences. Here passersby in the dark of night peer into the shop windows brightened with electric lights, just as movie attendees sit in the dark and gaze at the illuminated screen. Hairdresser’s Window takes this a step further, indicating interaction between the members of the “audience” standing on the street looking up at the second story window, where a woman is having her hair colored. The crowd tries to follow the action without being able to hear the dialogue, just as in a silent movie. Then too there was a trend in movies of the day to employ an open window to convey concurrent actions. By 1907 the idea of simultaneity was in the air. Many artists were exploring ways to convey it, most famously in Pablo Picasso’s proto-Cubist painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Less formally radical, Sloan relied on narrative cinema for the means to convey ongoing events from a single vantage point.

Lust for Looking 33 The link between moving pictures, news reporting and urban celebration is given physical form in Election Night depicting the confusion that ensued when hordes of people congregated at Herald Square to await voting returns. Sloan observed “noisy trumpet blowers, confetti throwers and . . . A good humorous crowd, so dense in places that it was impossible to control one’s movements.”53 He communicates this raucous mood by positioning the viewer in the midst of the crowd, between the woman in the red dress and the trumpeter wearing a false nose. Light from street lamps and shop windows produces a dramatic light/dark flicker. Again, the primary compositional element is the strong diagonal established by the elevated train line. Our eye follows the overhead tracks plunging toward the distance, which culminate in the outdoor projection on the side of the New York Herald’s building at the far end of the square. Here Sloan references his source in moving pictures. For in turn-of-the-century New York, election results were often projected onto the sides of buildings, shown along with moving picture shorts. In the 1896 election publisher William Randolph Hearst backed William Jennings Bryan against William McKinley and screened movies outside his newspaper headquarters to generate voter excitement. Sloan’s picture commemorates that urban tradition combining political reportage with entertainment.54

John Sloan and “Mr. Griffith”: A Parallel Reading The name D.W. Griffith or “Mr. Griffith,” as he was known, conjures up images of the pseudo-Babylonian tower from his film masterpiece Intolerance (1916) or disgust over the racism of The Birth of a Nation (1915). With his pictures of tenement apartments and working class New Yorkers, Sloan hardly seems his match. And yet Sloan painted and etched pictures that demonstrate commonality with the approximately 450 short moving pictures Griffith made for the Biograph Company between 1908 and 1913, including their interest in ordinary city dwellers and their use of women as the primary vehicle for their social explorations. Each expanded the visual realm of his individual art form, audience membership and spectator participation. If the pioneering movies of Edwin S. Porter provide counterpoints for Sloan’s art up until 1906, then D.W. Griffith subsequently played a parallel role. Both men immersed themselves in the urban drama that swirled around them and contributed to a new visual language for twentieth century America. In October 1908, only a few months into his directorial career, Griffith filmed the sad metropolitan tale The Song of the Shirt. It opens with a young woman (played by Florence Lawrence) caring for her bedridden sister, whose labored breathing suggests tuberculosis, all too common in the squalid tenements in which they lived. The healthy sister gets home-assembling work from the Acme Waist Company, but when her supervisor (Mack Sennett) comes to collect her garments, he finds them inferior and refuses to pay her. She heads to the company headquarters to plead her case, and when she fails she returns home in time to witness her sister’s death and collapses across her corpse. The harshness of urban life was not uncommon on stage, in realist novels such as Upton Sinclair’s The Moneychangers, and in muckraking journalism such as Lincoln Steffens’ The Shame of the Cities (1904). What makes Griffith’s The Song of the Shirt a more compelling counterpoint to Sloan’s art is that both use pictorial means to move beyond reductive condemnation of corporate greed to create complex human narratives. Compare

34  Two American Artists and Silent Cinema Griffith’s treatment of the sisters’ cramped dwelling with Sloan’s interior in Three A.M. Stained walls, curtainless windows and plain, unupholstered furniture situate the subjects at a glance in what we might call the material culture of the tenement. The movie’s title references a familiar nineteenth century poem by Thomas Hardy, transferring the cultural cache of British poetry to what was then regarded as lowbrow American entertainment. A perusal of Moving Picture World – the industry’s first trade publication – reveals that between March and December 1908 only eight out of 1,056 American productions were “specifically concerned with the immigrant or the poor.”55 Griffith’s Biograph shorts made up that small minority. Not only The Song of the Shirt but also A Corner in Wheat (1909), A Child of the Ghetto (1910) and others dramatized their plight by cutting back and forth between the upper and lower classes, just as Sloan often compared them in his still pictures. While Griffith’s social and political positions are still debated, visually these movies establish complicity between the viewer and the worker, while the wealthy are treated as a distant spectacle. In Sloan’s pictures similarly, we are swept into the heart of the working class crowd who peer with distain at a wealthy passerby. Although it may be easy to dismiss Sloan and Griffith for creating social critiques of only the mildest sort, their achievement lies in the fact that their city life pictures briefly opened up a hidden segment of American life, as Griffith scholar Scott Simmon explains: The turn-of-the-century American city was notable for overpopulation, bad housing, disease and corruption – as well as a dearth of public discussion of the problems. If journalistic muckraking was the advance guard in bringing attention to these scandals, Griffith’s urban dramas can be credited with bringing them to a new mass audience. Whatever his evasions, he made an invisible city visible.56 It was a goal to which Sloan too aspired. Did Griffith ever have occasion to meet Sloan or other artists? Griffith enjoyed a high public profile. He was called to the White House to confer with President Woodrow Wilson while the Ashcan artists’ brush with politics came in the person of Leon Trotsky, who studied briefly with Henri. They traveled in very different social circles, but worked only 15 blocks apart: the Biograph studio was located at 1 East 14th St. and Sloan lived on West 23rd St. So it’s tempting to imagine that they crossed paths.

The Proto-Cinematic Environment of Henri’s Studio Association with Robert Henri conditioned Sloan’s receptivity to the lessons of the movies. Best known for their openness to the realities of the urban environment and especially the working class, members of the Henri circle intersected with moving pictures in a variety of ways. Vachel Lindsay had come from the Midwest to study art with Henri and authored one of the earliest books on film aesthetics; Webb B. Raum, who would later become known as the movie actor Clifton Webb, was another. Even during his early art studies with Henri, Raum/Webb revealed a screen persona, as described by Bennard Perlman:

Lust for Looking 35 One of Bellows’ early portraits in the life class, which demonstrated his true ability, was of a fellow student named Webb P. Raum, a fifteen year old who posed dressed to kill, in a black coat with scarf and gloves. The young dandy would retain this image throughout his life, abandoning art for opera, theater, and movies, and changing his name to Clifton Webb.57 Among the younger denizens of the atelier, Stuart Davis epitomized the modern artist who embraced movie, radio and later television. Edward Hopper too counted himself among Henri’s pupils who were intensely engaged with cinema. Among Sloan’s immediate cohorts who comprised The Eight, George Luks had dual roots in art and popular entertainment. After a brief stint at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, he spent a decade touring with his brother as a comedy team on the vaudeville circuit, where early movies debuted between live acts. Luks then moved to New York where he made his name as a delineator of the popular comic strip Hogan’s Alley for media mogul Joseph Pulitzer. Between 1917 and 1924 Everett Shinn worked as an art director on several commercial movies including a stint with William R. Hearst. And the boxing pictures of George Bellows were in dialogue with popular fight films.

Critiquing the Social Aspect of Film By the second decade of the twentieth century, movies began to achieve a cross-class appeal that ensured their immense impact on American culture. The taste for movies had so expanded that by 1910 there were more than 5,000 nickelodeons in the United States. Thomas Lamb’s Strand Theater, the first Broadway house especially built for moving pictures, went up in 1913, the year that the Armory Show shocked the public with its panorama of modern art. To meet the demand for new films, the industry expanded. In 1912 Warner Brothers and Fox Studios were founded. Hollywood was beginning to establish itself as the film capital of the world. By 1918, 80 percent of all American movies were made there. During World War I, movie production in Europe slowed to almost a standstill. American studios, with an infusion of émigré film professionals, increased production to fill the void and gained dominance in the world market they never relinquished. In June 1911 Sloan changed his residence from West 23rd St. to East 22nd St. Although it involved moving only a few blocks, for the artist it marked a significant change. After that his walks in search of motifs focused on this new East Side neighborhood. And after struggling to draw and paint under gas lamps for so many years, he could now work by electric lights. Having settled in by November of that year he painted Tammany Hall, followed by The Carmine Theater in 1912 and Movies in 1913. Spread out over this three-year period, they can be interpreted as a conceptual if not literal triptych thematizing the social impact of cinema: the good and evil of the urban entertainment district. He noted in his diary his impulse to cruise the “pleasure zone” along 14th Street between Third Avenue and Union Square on November 1, 1911: “Took a look at 14th St. opposite Tammany Hall. All sorts of shows, moving picture and vaudeville, diseases of men museums. Social ills walk the street and old Tammany Hall, red brick, glares at it all.”58

36  Two American Artists and Silent Cinema From the time the Tammany Society moved to its new headquarters at 141 East 14th Street in 1868, it kept only one room for itself and leased most of its space to entertainment impresarios. By 1881 Tony Pastor’s New Fourteenth Street Theater opened there. Regarded as heir to P.T. Barnum, Pastor aimed to transform his theater from the domain of male entertainment to a site where unescorted ladies could enjoy a variety of performances. He helped develop a broad and profitable audience for these variety acts – what came to be known as vaudeville – and subsequently for movies. Commencing work on the canvas the day after his stroll by Tammany Hall, Sloan described the scene: “a picture of Night, Fourteenth Street – Tammany Hall lit by glare from moving picture theatres.”59 The movie house figures strongly in his verbal scenario yet in his canvas the vertical sign that reads “Olympic” – marking the location of the theater within the Tammany Society Building – is barely visible.60 The impression that he retained in his mind’s eye, derived from the first night he came upon the scene and the next day when he started painting, was the glare. Contemporary observers frequently emphasized the assault that movie houses now waged on the senses. There could be blaring music, a barker with a megaphone beckoning passersby to enter and a hodgepodge array of posters and signboards across the entranceway and worn by sandwich board men who roamed the streets nearby. Bringing all this into stark focus was the harsh lighting, the glare that turned night into day. Now the spectacle of the theater exterior preoccupies the artist, and especially the unnatural illumination. At the intersection of Bleecker and Carmine Streets in Greenwich Village Sloan found further inspiration. The Carmine Street Theater shows the exterior of the movie house with gates shut, and a group of children on the sidewalk waiting for it to open. A dog ferrets in a curbside garbage bin while a nun strolls past, its facade – ghost-white, with little signs of life – appears unwelcoming, abandoned. In 1913 Sloan returned to the same theater, as he tells us, and painted it as the site of lively community interaction in the 1913 Movies (Figure 1.10) The return to the same subject is unusual in Sloan’s oeuvre, a deliberate attempt to highlight the contrast between its quiescent state when closed and its animated state when open, with lights glaring, posters luridly beckoning customers to enter and see “A Romance in the Harem,” while couples and groups gather around the entrance ready to file in. Like a stage actor before the performance, the lit theater is decked out and glamorous, but ultimately artificial. Economist and social critic Simon N. Patten took a walk down Main Street USA on a summer evening. One side of the street, he noted, was dark: the forsaken side, he called it – where “the very institutions of Civilization itself,” the library, high school and church, were all locked up tight. The opposite side, by contrast, was brightly lit, filled with people and activity centered on soda fountains and nickelodeons. These circumstances spelled a clear message: If the institutions of civilization cease to be vital, then working people look elsewhere for their stimulation. Patten’s Main Street, as Robert Sklar has discussed, was a microcosm of American society, a marketplace of intangible commodities. No longer competing effectively, traditional institutions needed to reform if they were to continue engaging the populous.61 A one-time member of the Socialist party, Sloan was sympathetic to such ideas. In 1913 he depicted the glow of the garishly illuminated marquee of the movie theater

Lust for Looking 37

Figure 1.10  John Sloan, Movies, 1913. Oil on canvas, 19 7/8 × 24 in. Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, OH.

with some trepidation about its impact on laboring men, women and the three young children standing frieze-like before the spectacle.

Epilogue After 1915 Sloan’s art underwent metamorphosis, along with his political and social ideals. He spent more time away from the city in Santa Fe and his urban themes – when he addressed them – had lost their edge. In The “Movey” Troupe from 1920 we see a director and his entourage proceeding along a street in Greenwich Village in a fancy motorcar. Gone are the days when Sloan followed a moviemaker prowling the streets with his big box camera. Movies had become big business, and the artist now responded to the mechanics of moviemaking, to the production and personnel, rather than to cinematic language or audience response that had so captivated him earlier. Movies, of course, continue to be made in New York to this day, but by 1920 the heart of the industry had moved to the West Coast where Hollywood could earn its reputation as “Tinseltown.” Sloan’s print has an air of nostalgia about it, a nod to a bygone time when New York City was the “star” of the movie business, as it had been of Ashcan art, with Sloan a bridge between the two.

38  Two American Artists and Silent Cinema

Notes 1 Bruce St. John, ed. John Sloan’s New York Scene, 1906–1913 (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), entry for April 17, 1907, 122–123. The diary originals are located at the Delaware Art Museum in Wilmington; for the convenience of the reader, all citations are taken from published sources unless otherwise indicated. Earlier versions of portions of this chapter appeared in my “John Sloan’s Cinematic Eye,” American Art 20 (Fall 2005): 30–45; and “John Sloan, Moving Pictures, and Celtic Spirits.” In Seeing the City: John Sloan’s New York (Delaware Art Museum, in conjunction with Yale University Press, 2007), 150–179. 2 [John Sloan], “Notes,” Chap-Book July 15, 1896, 239–240, was based on his experience. His New York diaries from 1906 to 1913 document his many visits to vaudeville, where movies were initially shown between live acts, and movie houses. See, for example, St. John, John Sloan’s New York Scene, 1906–1913, 66, 75, 111, 121–167, passim, 216–217, 239, 248, 290–329, passim. 3 For two instances see Laural Weintraub, “Woman as Urban Spectators in John Sloan’s Early Work,” American Art 15 (Summer 2001): 74, and John Loughery, John Sloan: Painter and Rebel (New York: Holt, 1995), 85–86. 4 See Luc Sante, Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York (New York: Vintage, 1991), 17. 5 On the move see Loughery, 73; on The “Movey” Troupe see Peter Morse, John Sloan’s Prints: A Catalogue Raisonné of the Etchings, Lithographs and Posters (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1969), 222, no. 196. See also Charles Musser, Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991), 116–119 on the Eden Musée. 6 This is the subject of Sloan’s “Notes,” Chap-Book July 15, 1896. Although initially he vehemently expressed his disgust, he later attended movies regularly. 7 Among the few who have gone beyond acknowledging movie-viewing as subject are Lauren Rabinovitz, For the Love of Pleasure: Women, Movies, and Culture in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998) and Weintraub, “Woman as Urban Spectators,” 72–83, who provides additional sources. 8 Musser, 209–211. 9 The most useful is Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001) upon which I broadly draw on here. 10 St. John, 200, entry for February 22, 1908. 11 St. John, 131, entry for May 24, 1907. 12 In her “Re-viewing John Sloan’s Images of Women,” Oxford Art Journal 21 (1998): 79–97, Janice Coco interprets The Show Case and Fun, Once Cent in the light of what she sees as his fear of women. 13 Rabinovitz, 94–96. 14 St. John, 40, entry for June 11, 1906. 15 Horace Kallen, “The Dramatic Picture versus the Pictorial Drama: A Study in the Influence of the Cinematograph on the Stage,” The Harvard Monthly 50 (March 1910): 29. 16 Quoted in Virginia Mecklenburg, “Manufacturing Rebellion,” in Metropolitan Lives: The Ashcan Artists and Their New York (Washington, DC: National Museum of American Art, 1995), 204. 17 Quoted in Roland Elzea and Elizabeth Hawkes, John Sloan, Spectator of Life (Wilmington: Delaware Art Museum, 1988), 70. 18 Scott MacDonald, The Garden in the Machine (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001): 42–43. 19 Loughery, 102. 20 Christiane Hertel, “Irony, Dream and Kitsch: Max Klinger’s Paraphrase of the Finding of the Glove and German Modernism,” Art Bulletin 74 (March 1992): 91–114. 21 Musser, 235–290. 22 The subject was first shown at two vaudeville benefits for the Police Relief Fund in early December 1905. Musser, 307–308. 23 St. John, 17, entry for February 27, 1906.

Lust for Looking 39 24 Sadakichi Hartmann, The Valiant Knights of Daguerre: Selected Critical Essays on Photography and Profiles of Photographic Pioneers, ed. Harry Lawton and George Knox (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978), 54–55, editor’s introduction, 5. 25 Sadakichi Hartmann, The Valiant Knights of Daguerre, 26. Hartmann, A History of American Art, rev. ed. (New York: L.C. Page, 1932), 299, 301. 26 Sadakichi Hartmann, “The Esthetic Significance of the Motion Picture,” Camera Work 38 (April 1912): 19. 27 St. John, 549, entry for July 6, 1911. 28 Quoted in William B. Scott and Peter M. Rutkoff, New York Modern: The Arts and the City (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 49. 29 St. John, 138, entry for June 29, 1907. 30 For alternative discussions of this painting see Robert W. Snyder, Rebecca Zurier and Virginia M. Mecklenburg, Metropolitan Lives: The Ashcan Artists and Their New York (Washington, DC: National Museum of American Art, in association with W.W. Norton, 1995), 167, 172; H. Barbara Weinberg, Doreen Bolger and David Park Curry, American Impressionism and Realism: The Painting of Modern Life, 1885–1915 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994), 218. 31 St. John, 217, entry for April 30, 1908; 239, entry for August 19, 1908; 283, January 19, 1909; 308, entry for April 26, 1909. 32 Dialogue quoted in Musser, 394. 33 Variety quoted in Musser, 399. 34 Quoted in Musser, 394. 35 Quoted in Musser, 395. 36 In Sloan’s day the danger of fire at the movies – from the continually overheating projectors that could ignite the volatile nitrate film – was a constant threat, making the exit signs an early safety feature of movie architecture. 37 Postmodern philosophy and the writings of Michel Foucault gave it wide currency, further extended in feminist theory. 38 Kallen, 29. 39 Hugo Münsterberg, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1916). 40 John Sloan, Gist of Art (New York: American Artists Group, 1939), 156. 41 John Sloan, 156. 42 Quoted in Musser, 402. 43 Lillian Gish with Ann Pinchot, The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1969), 39. 44 Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991): 188–190. 45 Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture (1915; reprint, New York: Liveright, 1970), 99. 46 St. John, 388–389, entry for February 17, 1910. 47 Richard Abel and Rick Altman, ed. The Sounds of Early Cinema (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001), 143. 48 The precise source of the billboard subject is difficult to determine. 49 Michele Bogart, Artists, Advertising, and the Borders of Art (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995): 98–99. 50 Outdoor Advertising Association, Outdoor Advertising Association, 1891–1941 (Chicago, IL: Outdoor Advertising Association, 1941), 196. Quoted in Bogart, 114. 51 Charles H. Caffin, The Story of American Painting: The Evolution of Painting in America from Colonial Times to the Present (1907; reprint New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1970), 373. 52 Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), 66. 53 St. John, 164, entry for November 5, 1907. 54 Louis Pizzitola, Hearst over Hollywood: Power, Passion and Propaganda in the Movies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 56.

40  Two American Artists and Silent Cinema 55 For the analysis of Moving Picture World see Russell Merritt, “Nickelodeon Theaters, 1905–1914: Building an Audience for Movies,” in Tino Bailo, ed. The American Film Industry rev. ed. (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 94. 56 Scott Simmon, The Films of D.W. Griffith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 63. 57 Bennard B. Perlman, Robert Henri: His Life and Art (New York: Dover Publications, 1991), 64. 58 St. John, 574, entry for November 1, 1911. 59 St. John, 574, entry for November 2, 1911. 60 The merger of politics and entertainment that defined Tammany Hall had special appeal for Sloan, who did at least four versions of this subject: (1) the painting of 1911 (destroyed in 1930 in a railroad freight car fire); (2) an etching of 1928; (3) a painting of 1934 based on the etching (no. 982 in Elzea Catalogue Raisonné); (4) replica he began in 1946 of the 1911 work, which has been illustrated in black and white in Sloan, Gist of Art. See Rowland Elzea, John Sloan’s Oil Paintings: A Catalogue Raisonné (Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 1991). 61 Simon N. Patten, Product and Climax (New York: B.W. Huebsch, 1909), 13. Quoted in Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America: A Social History of American Movies (New York: Random House, 1975), 122.

2 Transforming Moving Pictures into Art Everett Shinn, Artist on the Set

Art Direction On a hot summer night in July 1912 New York’s social and cultural elite flocked to the Lyceum Theater – a legitimate stage house at the time – to attend the premiere of the movie Queen Elizabeth starring acclaimed French actress Sarah Bernhardt. “The Divine Sarah” – as she was called – came to the screen after a half century on the stage. The event was the brainchild of Adolph Zukor, who later became president of Paramount Pictures and so-called “Architect of Hollywood” but between 1904 and 1912 he controlled a chain of movie theaters with his partner Marcus Loew. A Hungarian Jewish immigrant involved in what was regarded at the time as low class entertainment, he felt socially ostracized. While riding the subway, as legend has it, he scribbled a note to himself: “Famous Players in Famous Plays,” intending to elevate the status of his movie business by bringing stage luminaries like Bernhardt to the screen. So he bought the rights to the British-French motion picture Les Amours de la Reine Élisabeth and made a fortune as the film’s exclusive distributor. In 45 minutes this mini-masterpiece presented episodes from the life of Elizabeth I, Queen of England, focusing on her ill-fated love affair with Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex.1 Bernhardt had toured the United States beginning in the 1880s, but cinema’s substitution of translated title cards for her spoken French made her more accessible to Anglo-American audiences and she enjoyed something of a revival.2 Queen Elizabeth was an historic event, and provided the foundation for future feature-length films. Although the actress’s exaggerated dramatic gestures were a bit old-fashioned compared to the more streamlined body language encouraged by movie directors like Griffith after 1910, her aura was irresistible. Bernhardt enhanced the aesthetic standing of film, just as Zukor had gambled she would. He then formulated a plan to make films featuring Broadway stage actors in their current successes including The Count of Monte Cristo (1913) starring James O’Neill (father of playwright Eugene O’Neill) and The Prisoner of Zenda (1913). His plan to “take the library shelves and open them up to the world, visually” linked the dignity of literature and the dramatic arts to movies, attracting new middle class audiences in droves.3 By 1916 Samuel Goldfish, then Chairman of the board of the Lasky studios in California, was primed to strike out on his own and push the aesthetic standing of the 20-year-old movie business even further. Having sold his interest in that company for a reported one million dollars, he co-founded Goldwyn Picture Corporation with Broadway producers Edgar and Archibald Selwyn. He headed east to Fort Lee, New

42  Two American Artists and Silent Cinema Jersey, where he leased the Universal Studio with its huge stage, recently abandoned by Carl Laemmle. To elevate the look and content of movies he hired famous actors, writers and – most significantly – fine artists to make movies on a radically different production schedule that allowed several months for each picture rather the brief week or two previously the norm. Goldfish even formed an association with Professor Victor Freeburg’s Photoplay Writing Class at Columbia University to augment further the respectability of his company. On September 9, 1917 Polly of the Circus was the first of his films to be released, based on the successful play by Edgar Selwyn’s wife Margaret Mayo and starring Mae Marsh with a cast of thousands (Figure 2.1).4 To ensure authenticity Goldfish hired an entire circus from stake men to sideshow performers, supported by every available resident of Fort Lee to work as extras. It generated so much excitement that New Yorkers crossed the Hudson to view its production. At times there were 3,000 people working on the set, all of which was being orchestrated into a visually arresting spectacle by the newly minted art director, Everett Shinn. At this moment the question of whether motion pictures were an art form or a corruption of classical literature was being widely debated, from industry periodicals to op-ed newspaper columns and respected journals like Harper’s Weekly. The question was complicated by the fact that the legitimate stage was approximating cinema in

Figure 2.1  Photographer unidentified, advertisement: “Polly of the Circus,” 1917, 8 1/2 × 11 in. Private Collection.

Transforming Moving Pictures into Art  43 its “photographic realism” made possible by new mechanical and electrical effects. The key theatrical figure associated with spectacular settings and aesthetic lighting effects was David Belasco, with whom Shinn had worked closely, having completed 18 decorative panels in rococo revival style for his Stuyvesant (now Belasco) Theater in 1907.5 He often attended performances put on by the “Bishop of Broadway,” and had ample opportunity to observe his light and set strategies, which he made the subject of several painted studies. Eager to link their efforts to Belasco’s prestige and success, Lasky, Goldfish and others sought Shinn and other artists to advise on matters of mise en scène (i.e., pictorial composition) and chiaroscuro lighting (what in movie lingo came to be called “Rembrandt lighting”) since he had credentials in both stage and studio. Throughout the silent era job descriptions were in flux: boundaries between acting, producing, screenwriting, set designing and directing were blurred, a holdover from the pioneers when small crews had to work collaboratively. Art directors were a new breed in the mid-1910s, recruited from among individuals with a fine arts background and a substantial reputation. Goldfish and others looked to them to provide a creative vision for movie sets and locations and brand their productions with a unique pictorial identity. S/he was responsible for designing the physical setting in which the action of the photoplay takes place. Such a setting should not only create an atmosphere, but it should also help the players to tell their stories to the audience. To accomplish this, the artist must possess the ability to think visually, and have knowledge of interior design and architecture, a good eye for decoration and detail, and practical understanding of building and construction. More specifically, an art director (also called a production designer) could be involved with the following: set design, painting, decoration, construction and budgeting; the incorporation of locations into the overall “look” of the movie; decisions about the tone and color of a work’s cinematography; costumes and special effects. In the early days when cameras were fixed and sets relatively flat, art directors were called upon to counteract these effects by adding texture and depth of field. Threedimensional chairs, tables and sculptures now replaced the painted props incorporated into painted backdrops. Sets were constructed with actual door moldings, staircases and windows, all of which created more complex architectural presence that reflected light to various degrees, creating a greater sense of depth. On-screen artifice was being given a more realistic look.6 In 1917 Shinn’s work on the set of the silent movie Polly of the Circus involved recreating both a contemporary big top where Polly performed and the New England village where she recuperated from an injury. By 1924 William Randolph Hearst hired Shinn as art director for Janice Meredith, a film vehicle for his mistress Marion Davies, where Shinn reconstructed the eighteenth century world of George Washington and Paul Revere on the brink of Revolution. These efforts bracketed the era of silent film when studios, eager to lure the middle class into movie houses, recruited fine artists to enhance the aesthetic appeal and thus the status of moving pictures. We can see too how Shinn’s personality was a good fit for the movie business. “Everett Shinn was called Eve by his oldest friends, none of whom could hold a candle to him for the diverse, protean, mercurial character of his talent,” as Ira Glackens observed. “Our artist was stagestruck, dazzled by the glamour of the footlights and a showy fashionableness . . . He had the energy of a dynamo, a lithe little figure in a checked suit, with whom nobody tried to keep up.”7 Drawing upon

44  Two American Artists and Silent Cinema existing film footage, movie reviews, drawings, paintings and screenplays, I aim to resurrect this virtually unexplored dimension of Shinn’s oeuvre. Situating him on the cusp between Ashcan Realist painting and the Golden Age of American silent film, this chapter posits a three-pronged argument. First, alternating throughout his career between stage performances and painting or between illustration and interior design, he learned to navigate between two-dimensional and three-dimensional matrices that animated his movie set designs. His art direction on Polly of the Circus, The Bright Shawl, Janice Meredith and other lost films represent the culmination of his art.8 Second, at a moment painters and sculptors were called upon to refine the visual effects in movies, Shinn was in the advanced guard. Working with leading figures in the industry at the time, he made a distinct contribution to the look and staging that set the standard for films of these years. Third, I reject the often-expressed opinion that Shinn’s career was in decline after the Macbeth show of 1908. Commentators from Ira Glackens to Edith DeShazo descried his “versatility” in different modes and media, attributing it to a lack of focus or passion. I see it instead as an adherence to an expanded definition of the artist he embraced. While his colleagues often railed against commercial assignments, Shinn insisted that “art belongs everywhere in life,”9 reinventing himself and refreshing his practice with new challenges and modes of expression. In this he aligned himself with editor and writer Gilbert Seldes whose book Seven Lively Arts (1924) – published simultaneously with Shinn’s work on Janice Meredith – espoused the democratization of culture. While Shinn’s artistic output could hardly be described as “modernist,” his take on American culture was decidedly modern. To understand why movie executives were eager to recruit Shinn, we need to put aside his early twenty-first century reputation and see him instead through the historic lens of ca. 1915. Known to art history as one of eight artists who exhibited with Robert Henri’s cohort of urban realists at the Macbeth Gallery in 1908, Shinn by the mid-teens had a far wider skill set and greater visibility in New York circles than the other members of “The Eight.” He had created two major mural cycles: the 18 decorative panels in rococo revival style for Belasco in 1907 and the two large paintings he created four years later for the Council Chamber of City Hall in Trenton, NJ (1911). There, switching from decorative to realist mode, he rendered full scale figures working in two of Trenton’s major industries – the Roebling steel mills and Harry Mattock’s pottery works. He also wrote, directed and acted in his own theatrical productions that became a favorite component of vaudeville programs; and via his association with Elsie de Wolfe he created decorative schemes for the homes of the rich and famous including Clyde Fitch and J.P. Morgan. Reports of these professional achievements were sometimes overshadowed by the ups and downs of his personal life – including his womanizing, divorces and remarriages – that often appeared in the news. During the decade of the 1910s he was best known for the hundreds of drawings he produced for books and a wide spectrum of magazines including Ainslee’s, The Bookman, Century, Collier’s Weekly, The Critic, Everybody’s Magazine, Gil Blas, Harper’s, Metropolitan, Scribner’s, Truth and Vanity Fair, ensuring that his distinctive pictorial style was constantly before the public.10 A writer for Moving Picture World assumed that “because of his fame as an American illustrator,” Shinn “probably is well known to the readers of these pages,” and proceeded to detail his credentials for work in photoplays:

Transforming Moving Pictures into Art  45 Mr. Shinn’s clever drawings have made such a place for themselves in the pages of American magazines that the “Shinn type” of illustration has become a standard. Quaintly charming in their details, his drawings are packed with human interest and peopled with figures whose richly humorous characteristics have revealed the artist as the Dickens of the pen and brush.11 Skills were taken for granted in the movie business, which demanded name recognition and even star quality. Shinn in 1917 was primed to step onto the movie set and make his mark. To head his new initiatives Goldwyn hired innovative Broadway producer Arthur Hopkins as director general. A friend of Shinn’s, Hopkins had arranged for some of his burlesque melodramas to appear in vaudeville and now brought him on board at Goldwyn Pictures along with mural painter Hugo Ballin (1879–1956). Together they oversaw settings and costumes and advised in the composition and direction of the pictures. Shinn was assigned to movies dealing with American subjects best suited to his distinctive evocation of street scenes and interiors. “In beginning the production of a Goldwyn Picture,” as one contemporary describes, “the first and primary service to be rendered by the particular artist in charge of it is to design the sets:” Actually, physically, these men design the physical setting in which the action of the photoplay takes place and this means not only scenes, but in most instances the entire minutae [sic] and details of all fixed and movable accessories, including furniture, furnishings, draperies, all species of properties, and costumes, working of course, in harmony with the star for the last named. Working in “the spirit of architecture,” Hugo Ballin “thinks in plans” and “for each set he prepares a plan drawing to scale.” Shinn, by contrast, “draws in perspective:” His drawings are usually a visualization of some key episode or situation of the photoplay the action of which takes place in the set shown. His drawings are executed with all the care and wealth of elaboration which the artist puts in a magazine illustration, and, as may be seen by the example reproduced in this article, these set drawings are illustrations in all but name. Mr. Shinn’s art is impressionistic, but it suggests every detail in a room or scene; and the figures of characters are shown in correct costume and in some characteristic or actual situation. For dimensions, Mr. Shinn hands a note to his collaborators or confers with them in the production of his sets.12 Ballin started out as a painter of portraits and mythological scenes such as The Sibylla Europa Prophesying the Massacre of the Innocents (1906, Smithsonian American Art Museum) and The Lesson (1907, Smithsonian American Art Museum). This was the height of the American Renaissance led by Ballin’s idol Augustus Saint-Gaudens when murals were covering interiors of buildings all over the country with allegorical symbols combined with historic figures. In 1917 Ballin’s 26 murals for the Executive Chamber of the Wisconsin State Capitol (1917) were unveiled. Recognition there brought him to the attention of Samuel Goldfish, who hired him along with Shinn as one of his new art directors, working first in New Jersey and New York, then in Los Angeles.13

46  Two American Artists and Silent Cinema Like Shinn, he chafed at the control of the studio heads, but unlike Shinn he decided to form his own company and make more artistic productions. He was assisted in this by his wife Mabel Ballin, an actress of famed on-screen beauty. When his movie career started to wane, he returned to mural painting. The contacts he had made in the film industry served him well, for it was Warner Brothers who arranged for him to produce the murals in the Wiltshire Boulevard Temple that made his name on the West Coast and led to other commissions including his best-known work in L.A.’s Griffith Observatory in 1934.14

Polly of the Circus, 191715 Among Shinn’s papers are documents and artifacts that allow us to follow the technical method he evolved for his work as art director, including a movie scenario prepared by the playwright herself.16 Subtitled “The classic of the ‘Big Top,’” it is a single volume of 135 pages stamped at the bottom of the title page “Return to Scenario Department, Goldwyn Pictures Corporation 16 E. 42nd Street, New York City.” A note on the cover in Shinn’s hand reads: “Script No. 2 from which the play is to be built.” The first six pages consist of the “Scene Plot,” divided into “Exteriors” followed by “Interiors,” (p. 7 on), breaking the story down into spatial elements. The bulk of the document (pp. 11–134) is the segment headed “Picturized by the Author.” Here the location of the scene noted on the left – “Church Belfry,” “Barn or Woodshed or Parsonage” – is accompanied at right by a brief description of what takes place there, indicating close-ups and camera shifts. In the teens the terminology of cinema was still evolving and would eventually replace “picturization” with “adaptation,” but Shinn’s use of “picturized” better conveyed the intent to translate precisely the work of literature into images.17 The picturized script was Shinn’s bible, his working blueprint: all the on-screen action is broken down into a sequence of discrete components in which one by one he arranged the space, props, lighting and placement of the actors. The plot follows Polly, a horseback rider in a small traveling circus. One night when Polly is thrown from her horse and injured she is brought to the home of Parson Douglas to recuperate while the circus leaves town without her. The parson is smitten with Polly, but his congregation objects to her presence and forces her to leave. She rejoins the circus, which returns to town the following year. During a performance the tents catch fire and amidst the chaos the minister carries Polly to safety, and they live happily ever after. This relatively simple story line intersected well with Shinn’s interests and experiences on multiple levels. Centering on the public outrage over the alliance between the female equestrian and the minister, it narrates the age-old struggle between the bohemianism of artists (in this case, circus performers) versus the conservatism of small town America. Shinn likely experienced a similar tug of war, born and raised in Woodstown, New Jersey, and heading off to the big city at a young age to pursue art. His identification with the movie’s theme is reinforced by the fact that he patterned the movie town after his actual hometown. Some surviving carefully rendered pencil drawings document Shinn’s refashioning of its familiar buildings into the movie set. A key site of action was Deacon Strong’s house, which he rendered as a two-story colonial style building with clean, simple lines and multi-paned windows (Figure 2.2), modeled it after a late seventeenth century structure located at 68 North Main Street.18 It was the home of General Isaiah Shinn, the artist’s great-great-grandfather and one of

Transforming Moving Pictures into Art  47

Figure 2.2  Everett Shinn, Deacon Strong’s House. Sketch for the Set of “Polly of the Circus,” 1917. Pencil on paper, Delaware Art Museum.

Woodstown’s founders who operated a store on this site.19 A second drawing labeled “Back porch Parsonage” shows the trellis-enclosed porch adorned with leafy vegetation, conveying a sense of protected domesticity. “Study in the Parsonage” reinforces that atmosphere with a desk placed before the hearth, and the upright figure of the minister in his knee-length frockcoat dominating the scene. Threedimensional models were also made to further assist technicians in organizing the space. Shinn’s modus operandi produced the desired results for critics praised him for his “simple, beautiful stage settings, reflecting the import of the play and the personality of the dominant players”20 that happily replaced “the luxurious extravagance of the conventional set” (p. 31). The orderly town and respectable residence of Deacon Strong contrasted with the motley crew who animated the big top, the other principal site of action. Given Shinn’s lifelong fascination with popular entertainment and childhood love of the circus, he must have jumped at the chance to work on a movie of the subject. Family tradition has it that as a boy he enjoyed attending the circus where he delighted in acrobats “gyrating through the air under the big tents,” laughed at the comedy acts and managed “to be the first on hand . . . to water the elephants.”21 Trapeze artists, tightrope performers and circus clowns populate his paintings, pastels and graphics. Whenever he had the chance, he mingled with the performers of all kinds and portrayed them in

48  Two American Artists and Silent Cinema character and at rest. His Tightrope Walker (1904) revels in an unusual vantage point later repeated in the movie. In this pastel he provides the viewer of his picture with the same vantage point as the audience, looking up at the female performer holding parasols in each hand and balancing a chair on her chin. Polly’s mother had been a tightrope walker who perhaps performed a similar feat before she died in a fatal accident, leaving the young girl to be cared for by Toby the Clown and Big Jim. Shinn’s small, gritty picture Strongman, Clown and Dancer (Figure 2.3) similarly anticipates the spirit of Polly of the Circus, as demonstrated by comparison with a studio promotional photograph (Figure 2.4). Unlike many of his theatrical subjects that portray attractive women on stage bathed in the spotlight, in this case Shinn positions these figures in shadow, and hints at the incongruities between their pedestrian existence and the tutus and animal skins in which they dress up to give them an air of circus exoticism. These folks seem to belong to a sideshow or small traveling circus struggling to make ends meet, like Polly and her company. The name Mae Marsh may not spark instant recognition today, but when Shinn was working with her not only on Polly of the Circus but also Sunshine Alley – originally titled The Bird Doctor – she was at the height of her fame. That year poet and early film theorist Vachel Lindsay sang her praises in “Mae Marsh, Motion Picture Actress:”

Figure 2.3  Everett Shinn, Strongman, Clown and Dancer, ca. 1906. Oil on canvas board, 9 15/16 × 7 7/8 in. Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA.

Transforming Moving Pictures into Art  49

Figure 2.4  Photographer unidentified, promotional photograph: Mae Marsh with cast members of “Polly of the Circus,” 1917, 8 1/2 × 11 in. Private Collection.

Despite raw lights and gloating mobs She is not seared: a picture still: Raw silk the fine directors hand May weave for magic if he will.22 Lindsay may well have had Polly of the Circus in mind when he wrote these words in 1917, for certainly Shinn’s work helped elicit some of Marsh’s best “magic.” In the end Goldwyn’s gamble to bring artists on the set paid off. Newspaper and magazine articles featured pictures of this “Celluloid Circus” including the townscape, the circus big top and interior shots of the minister’s house, and there was a flurry of positive reviews: Shinn was brought in upon “Polly of the Circus” to give the exteriors as well as the interiors that authentic small-town atmosphere for which his richly detailed illustrations were famous. Shinn drew typical black and white sketches, with some scene in the process of enactment and the characters all in place. It would easily have passed for a magazine illustration, but the technical director made a room or even a whole street out of it. The village of half a dozen rambling houses, besides a lazy street down which the circus in Polly passes, was first designed in this

50  Two American Artists and Silent Cinema fashion, then built in its entirety and carefully knocked to pieces and stained with the proper marks of time. Effective lighting of the Lasky-Ince variety made these Shinn conceptions entirely convincing.23 By Spring 1917, as Goldwyn Picture Corporation was well into production in its Fort Lee studios, events elsewhere forever altered the face of global politics and the visual arts. In March the Bolshevik (or Russian) Revolution was underway, and on April 6 the United States entered World War I with its declaration of war with Germany. A few days earlier the Society of Independent Artists opened its inaugural exhibition in New York, where controversy over Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain challenged the definition of a work of art. Although less publicized, the SIA organizers projected the moving pictures Daughter of the Gods starring Annette Kellerman and Raoul Walsh’s The Honor System high on the wall of Grand Central Palace, signaling closer affinities between fine art and moving pictures. These inter-medial relations were further strengthened when not only Everett Shinn but also visual artists Helena Smith Dayton, Thomas Hart Benton, Rex Ingram, Hugo Ballin and others entered the movie business, helping to transform what had been regarded as lowbrow entertainment into high art.

Mural to Stage to Screen Several factors eased Shinn’s transition to art direction, for which there was no established course of training at the time. He was to delineate images quickly and with a minimum economy of line that made fictive space appear entirely convincing. More relevant to movie work, he possessed a heightened ability to traffic between twodimensional and three-dimensional thinking, as demonstrated by his entry for the Trenton’s City Hall Council Chamber mural commission in 1910, as he later recalled: I took the architect’s plans for the building and constructed a room precisely like the council chamber was to be. I studied the view and the buildings which could be seen from the windows of the council room. Then I painted . . . a screen to go around the back of the model so that the same view which was viewed from the windows of the original could be seen from the windows of the model. The committee came over to look at the designs for the murals but one member looked and said, “My word, there’s mill No. 271” and another exclaimed “Why there’s my block outside there.” They were so surprised and entertained they didn’t even look at the murals. Finally after they identified every object on the backdrop, one of them said, “Your job . . .”24 This exercise anticipates the work of a movie set designer and demonstrate his ability to think like a scene painter. Likely his training as a mechanical engineer, prior to his studies at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, grounded him in a practical knowledge of construction that guided his design of such architectural models and subsequently the multiple sets that a single film required. It probably did not hurt either that he had worked for a time at a light fixture company.25 Theater also paved the way for Shinn’s entrée into film studios. Like many of the early moviemakers, Shinn was deeply immersed in live theater. This began with amateur theatricals of the Henri circle in Philadelphia. Contributing to the success

Transforming Moving Pictures into Art  51 of these comedies were the engaging sets designed by Shinn who had previously built “miniature stage-settings in which rocks, cliffs, lighthouses, drawbridges and moats were placed in a proscenium with various lighting effects.”26 These activities then continued following his move to New York City. Polly of the Circus began life as a play by Margaret Mayo that ran on Broadway starring Mabel Taliaferro from December 1907 until May 1908 at the Liberty Theater on W. 41st Street. Painting murals around this time at Belasco’s nearby theater, Shinn may well have attended a show. His paintings of the time reflect his intense engagement with theater in a work such as A French Music Hall (Figure 2.5), often likened to pictures by Edgar Degas, in which he situates himself in the audience and looks over the orchestra to the female dancers on the stage. But he also sought the perspective from backstage. One pencil and gouache study is inscribed “Sketch made by Everett Shinn/ back stage at David Belasco’s / Majestic Theater. West 42nd Street N.Y. City. The play “The Rose of the Rancho / Date.”27 Another oil entitled Backstage Scene (1900; Delaware Art Museum) studies the intricacies of stage apparatus, from the changing props to the apparatus for raising and lowering the curtain.

Figure 2.5  Everett Shinn, A French Music Hall, 1906. Oil on canvas, 24 × 29 1/2 in. Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR.

52  Two American Artists and Silent Cinema During Shinn’s marriage to Florence (Flossie) Scovel – from 1898 to 1912 – they resided in a townhouse in Greenwich Village at 112 Waverly Place. In the backyard studio fitted out as a theater, a group calling themselves “The Waverly Place Players” staged plays written, designed and directed by Shinn. Along with Everett and Flossie, this group consisted of the artist William Glackens and his wife Edith, Jimmy Preston (an acquaintance from Philadelphia) and Wilfred Buckland, an assistant of David Belasco who would be associated with Shinn during his time as a movie art director. When his marriage to Flossie ended in 1912 so did his access to the backyard theater where they mounted their amateur productions. Thereafter three of his plays were performed repeatedly on the vaudeville circuit: Ethel Clayton, or Wronged from the Start; Hazel Weston, or More Sinned Against than Usual; and Lucy More, or the Prune Hater’s Daughter. Two Shinn burlesques, “Wronged from the Start,” and “More Sinned Against than Usual” especially enjoyed longevity and became the basis for the Charles Withers’ act in a popular edition of Hitchy Koo. “In one form or another they have played for years in this country and in England,” as one reviewer noted, “and were the beginning of the managerial career of the now all-important Arthur Hopkins.” When Hopkins moved from stage to movies he brought Shinn along with him. Interestingly, “More Sinned Against than Usual” had sources in the theatrical drama Way Down East upon which D.W. Griffith based one of his finest movies (1920): Everyone remembers the big scene in Lottie Blair Parker’s sterling drama, Way Down East. If not he can refresh his memory by seeing D.W. Griffith’s production of the same story in the movies. Anna Moore is serving the guests in the house of Squire Bartlett and the raging Squire refuses food: “I want no supper of her cooking!” He has found out that Anna has a past! Out she goes and now! His son David, who loves Anna, protests. But Anna will go. Before she goes, however, she has her say for once. Why not turn out the man? “There he sits, an honored guest at your table!” Lennox Sanderson, city man and villain, jumps up quickly, but not so quickly that he escapes the blow from the righteous fist of David. It was this scene that inspired Everett Shinn in his amusing burlesque, “Hazel Weston; or, More Sinned Against than Usual.”28

The Audience and Bodily Engagement with Early Cinema All these experiences fine-tuned the artist’s awareness of the relationship between audience and actors that became the subject of some of his most celebrated pictures. Keith’s Union Square (Figure 2.6) featured a single female performer against a scenic backdrop while Magician with the Shears (ca. 1907, Gustavus Adolphus College), has been tentatively identified as “The Great Albini,” born Abraham Laski, a great presence on vaudeville stage.29 They feature live performers rather than movie actors, but it must be remembered that movies traced their beginnings to and continued to be shown in vaudeville shows. At Keith’s Theater on Union Square when Shinn could very well have been in the audience in 1905 a typical program featured screenings of the Kinetograph sandwiched between the live acts of “Howard’s Ponies & Dogs” and vocalists Harry Dudley and Alice Cheslyn. Alternatively viewing comic acts, singers and movies, the artist was also studying the physical responses of the men and women watching the show. His greatest asset as an art director was, arguably, his sensitivity to their bodily engagement with early cinema.

Transforming Moving Pictures into Art  53

Figure 2.6  Everett Shinn, Keith’s Union Square, ca. 1902–1906. Oil on canvas, 20 5/16 × 24 1/4 in. Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY.

Film viewing has largely been analyzed with the emphasis on one specific sense, that of sight. Within this framework spectatorship represents a version of scopophilia, a term used by Laura Mulvey to reference the pleasure involved in looking at other people’s bodies as objects without being seen either by those on the screen or other members of the audience.30 Christian Metz even speaks of a spectator-fish, “taking in everything with their eyes, nothing with their bodies: the institution of the cinema requires a silent, motionless spectator . . . a self filtered out into pure vision.” In thinking about silent cinema Anne Rutherford contends that we need to foreground a capacity for embodied effect.31 An aesthetic of cinematic embodiment might take a variety of forms but in our consideration of Shinn, it is the relationship between the embodied spectator and the performing body on the screen that seems most relevant. In December 1895 in Paris moving images that were projected onto a screen for the first time. There the Lumière brothers – Auguste and Louis – showed their rudimentary 50-second film of a train pulling in to the station at La Ciotat. Viewers seated at their tables in the Grand Café waited in anticipation and when the locomotive streamed down the track into the station, they reportedly rose from their seats and rushed to the back of the room. So realistic was the effect that they feared a train had

54  Two American Artists and Silent Cinema crashed through the wall of the building, and responded as if in danger of bodily harm. Although never corroborated, this story has been passed down as “cinema’s founding myth,” linking the cinematic and the somatic. Records tell us that from the birth of cinema artists were in the audience. Early in 1896 movies were being projected for the first time before Americans including John Sloan, who subsequently wrote a review of these pioneering short pantomimes. In 1907 cheap storefront nickelodeons became a prime venue for working class men and women to gather. By the early 1910s purpose-built theaters afforded a more organized setting for the evolving pictures that began to attract a middle class clientele. The years between 1906 and 1916, what might be considered Shinn’s apprenticeship to work in the movie industry, witnessed remarkable fluidity and experimentation in the medium of film.32 Newspapers and the new movie fan magazines provided all kinds of insights into the stories and stars, attracting ever-growing numbers each week. Theresa Bernstein, Andre de Takacs and Norman Rockwell all headed for moving theaters and drew what they saw. Partly they regarded moving pictures as competition, and were curious about viewer attention to projected images. Some of the artists who took up the subject were social activists, or at least populists. They were interested in how art – moving or still – could function as a pedagogical tool or a social weapon. Less interested in political messages, Shinn wanted to compare cinema to theater, and penetrate the power of cinema to move people emotionally. Demographic studies have been made of working class audiences who appropriate the nickelodeons as one of the few public spaces in which they could gather. Relatively few analyses, by contrast, exist about the behavior of early moviegoers, who had neither time nor money to attend theatrical or musical performances and were therefore unschooled in how to comport themselves physically in this new environment. Since going to the pictures was a new experience, people appropriated it into familiar recreations and continued talking, laughing and getting up from their seats at will. To train their boisterous new customers, vendors projected cue cards before the start of the features to instruct attendees in the etiquette of the movie house. “Loud Talking or Whistling Not Allowed” read one card. Women’s practice of wearing hats in public posed a distinct problem in the early storefront theaters where seating was makeshift and visibility limited. Theater owners employed comic imagery to cajole the ladies to remove their oversized plumed and flowered hats. Humor aside, however, these audiences had to be instructed in how to conduct themselves physically in these modern urban spaces. In 1913 Shinn’s female contemporary Theresa Bernstein positioned herself in front of the screen and painted those clustered in the first two rows (Bernstein, At the Movies, 1913). Although anyone who has attended a movie knows that there is close proximity between seats, the intimate nature of these gatherings hits home via her canvas. Shoulders touch and overlap, one woman whispers into the ear of another, men and women seated next to one another share armrests. By 1913 statistics show that Americans were attending movies on average once a week, assuring us that these folks are versed in reading slight nuances in an actor’s facial expression or bodily gesture in order to comprehend the narrative. A new level of visual scrutiny was needed to watch movies in the absence of spoken dialogue. Viewers were being conditioned to participate physically, which contributed to their experience of emotional suspense: the physical action of the eye muscles and the tension of expectation involved the moviegoer directly in the unfolding of the story. Although Bernstein caught her subjects in

Transforming Moving Pictures into Art  55 a moment of calm contemplation, at any moment their physiological state could shift and with it their demeanor. An action sequence could make the viewer’s breathing and heart rates increase. The sudden appearance of a villain or wielding of a weapon could cause the audience to move to the edge of their seats. There was much more to movie viewing than just looking. This movie/body confluence came into better focus ca. 1916, when a number of visual artists created images that juxtapose screen image and audience to diverse ends. That year Norman Rockwell began working for the Saturday Evening Post and drew for the cover on October 14, 1916 a scene of an audience responding to a performance that remains tantalizingly out of our sight. Along with the varied expressions of laughter and delight on the faces of the multigenerational audience, Rockwell’s treatment of the flickering silver screen reflecting on the faces of the audience identified this as a movie and not a stage production. Grandfather has taken his young charges to the movies for a treat and we see them clustered in the balcony, holding souvenir programs depicting Charlie Chaplin. We don’t know exactly what movie they are viewing, since Chaplin released a number of films in 1916 including The Pawnshop, The Vagabond, The Rink and Behind the Screen. But they all featured Chaplin’s signature persona as the Tramp. In 1914 that little man with a bristled mustache, dressed in baggy pants, tight cutaway coat, oversized shoes and carrying a cane walked onto the screen of Kid Auto Races at Venice in his wobbling gait, and immediately etched himself into the visual imaginations and hearts of audiences worldwide. The secret to Chaplin’s comic genius, instant popularity and status as a serious artist was his reliance on the figure of the Tramp. He became one of the most beloved screen characters of the silent age, appearing in dozens of shorts and all of Chaplin’s feature films until 1936. The Tramp was a vagrant and a bumbler whose humor derived in part from a consistent desire to better himself. With Chaplin the boundary between audience and screen – between the body of the actor and that of the viewer – is further blurred. “This becomes possible,” as Sonia Ghalian explains, “because the Tramp does not lie outside the audience but is one of them.”33 With a strong appeal for the working class and immigrants, the Tramp was a populist figure who by the 1920s paradoxically became an icon of modernity. “Such inventiveness in Chaplin, whose body was a symbolic amalgamation of human and machine simultaneously, was seen by many filmmakers and critics . . . as an embodiment of modernity itself.”34 Fernand Leger was among his great admirers, who created a cubist portrait of him that circulated widely via periodicals and the avantgarde film Ballet Mécanique he created with Dudley Murphy. As Tom Gunning states: The natural body has a modernist dimension, one closely related to the modern preoccupation of portraying the physical body in its grotesque, rather than ideal forms, an impulse evident in key modern works by Degas, Schiele and Picasso, among others.35 Did Grandfather and his family portrayed by Rockwell recognize these elements in the movie that kept them laughing all evening? Probably not. But they would have identified with the displaced individual played by the Tramp, and with his struggles to make meaning out of the modern world that confused and alienated him. They laughed as he used movement and silence to convince his mass public that they could physically face the challenges of the new technological age.

56  Two American Artists and Silent Cinema Also released in 1916, director Lois Weber’s Idle Wives tells the story of two sets of families in parallel, using the structure of a film within a film. No less daring than Griffith’s movie Intolerance shown the same year, Idle Wives is decidedly more modern. The central story tells the plights of three women while the enclosed story focuses on another trio of women, all of whom end up watching a movie featuring people just like them. Weber and her husband appear in the film-within-a-film entitled Life’s Mirror directed by none other than Lois Weber, which stars Weber and her husband Phillips Smalley. In the teens Lois Weber was one of the leading American moving directors. She acted, wrote, directed and edited films and was especially admired for her stories about women. Idle Wives was one of ten features she directed in 1916. Only two reels of this complex film survive, so it is difficult to unravel completely but in the surviving first reel people assemble at the theater. What’s noteworthy is the fact that she provides fascinating representations of movie-going culture at the time, including exterior views of the theater with marquee and sandwich board poster featuring Weber’s husband Phillips Smalley. Shots show people in the audience reacting to the fictional world, a confrontation between the body on screen and that in the audience. In Weber’s hands this trope goes further. Encouraging the members of the audience to recognize continuity between their world and that on the screen, she links viewers with their filmic counterparts, who instruct them in how to improve their behavior. This form of cinema in which Weber was a pioneer helped people to understand their own problems, and heal their lives. As was sometimes the case with her movies, Idle Wives becomes a bit didactic, signaled by the fact that the opening titles address the audience directly. It presented “a preachment on the sacredness of the home,” one contemporary reviewer noted, “also on the power of motion pictures.”36 A mother holding a baby in her arms sees her counterpart on the screen; another young woman is on a date: their individual circumstances impacted their responses to the characters in the frame story. While the artist scrutinized the audience, and we scrutinize the painting, we all watch the screen. Shinn, Bernstein, Rockwell and others all capture these dynamics. But what was at stake in this layered vision? Living and working across the transition from Late Victorian to Modern America, artists registered transformations in art and life, including the birth of movies. Interested in the sheer act of looking, they especially observed how people look at pictures. Shinn captured subjects looking not only at vaudeville stages but also shop windows, museum exhibitions, billboards and more. In his Back Row at the Follies (1900, pastel on paper; James W. and Frances Gibson McGlothlin Collection) he depicts the isocephalic row of the audience’s heads from behind, seen against the yellow lights emanating from Loie Fuller’s on-stage performance, frozen in place by rapt attention. The artist looks at the movie spectator who ceases to be the mere a receiver of visual stimuli but becomes her corporeal pictured subject. Looking at the artwork depicting embodied viewer and flickering bodies on the screen, we project our own physical selves into the scene. Here the mirror analogy is inevitable and “Life’s Mirror” – the title of the movie within Lois Weber’s movie Idle Wives – prophetic. This dialogue between art and film is like a hall of mirrors, in which physical bodies double for screened and painted projections, difficult to distinguish. Intrigued by the comingling of reality and illusion that characterized screen practice, Shinn and his cohort attempted to deconstruct its magic on canvas. Mapping the spectator and the structure of movie gazing on canvas informed his future work for the movies.

Transforming Moving Pictures into Art  57

Rex Ingram, Conflating Movie Set and Art Studio In 1920 Shinn parted company with Goldwyn for a position as art director at Inspiration Pictures, all the while maintaining visibility as a fine artist with an exhibition from June to August that year at Knoedler Gallery. Simultaneously, Rex Ingram began to promote himself as “the sculptor of the screen.” Although Shinn and Ballin supported themselves as professional artists before, during and after their film work, it was Ingram’s single academic year 1912–1913 that he spent studying sculpture at Yale that trumped their lifelong efforts. “Ingram’s myths of origin,” as Kaveh Askari observes, “helped frame the labor of art so that it would include cinema.”37 For his early work in front of the camera he played artists (usually sculptors) in The Artist’s Great Madonna (1913), The Spirit and the Clay (1914) and Eve’s Daughter (1914). By the early 20s when he stepped behind the camera to direct Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Metro, 1921) it became de rigueur to interpret his films in relation to his early sculpting, and especially to his mentor Lee Lawrie, best known for his figure of Atlas presiding over Rockefeller Center. Metro even commissioned Lawrie to do a sculpture of the Four Horsemen for lobby display and widely circulating advertisements. For good measure, they had the movie’s lead Rudolph Valentino – whose tango scene made him an overnight superstar – pose beside the director in an art workshop. “Ingram was a sculptor working in film, he featured sculpture in his films, and he exhibited sculptures at his premiers,” Kaveh Askari explains, “all to help convince his audience that he made films with a sculptor’s sense of form in a space that worked like a fine-arts studio.”38 These strategies added to Hollywood’s prestige while Shinn’s art directing evolved back in New York.

The Bright Shawl, 192339 Soon after Shinn joined Inspiration Pictures he began work on a movie entitled The Bright Shawl: an historic romance set in mid-nineteenth century Cuba, based on Joseph Hergesheimer’s 1922 novel of the same name (Figure 2.7).40 The convoluted plot revolves around the conflict between Cuban patriots and the occupying Spanish army and mixes spies and secret messages with dance and romance. It focuses on Charles Abbott (Richard Barthelmess), a wealthy American visiting his college friend Andres Escobar in Cuba, then a colony of Spain. Shocked by the political oppression exerted upon Andres and his countrymen, Charles joins the Cubans in their fight for freedom. Despite his initial attraction to Andres’ sister Narcissa (Mary Astor), Charles becomes involved with the dancer La Clavel (meaning Carnation, played by Dorothy Gish), who passes him information about the enemy. Young Edward G. Robinson plays a soldier in one of his only two silent movie roles he claimed he accepted in order to have the opportunity to go to Cuba.41 One of the most popular novelists of the 1920s, Hergesheimer wrote a number of stories that were made into films. His typical hero was a patrician gentleman like himself facing a crisis in an exotic setting, which is largely irrelevant except for “local color.” The ties between the story, place and historic background are so loose in fact that descriptions of the movie plot by studio writers, critics and Shinn mistakenly date the nationalist uprising against Spain at the core of the story to 1850. Given that the Cuban Independence Movement is traditionally traced to the unsuccessful Ten Years War of 1868–1878, however, they would be more accurate to reference moment of

58  Two American Artists and Silent Cinema

Figure 2.7  Photographer unidentified, promotional photograph: Theater Lobby: The Bright Shawl, 1923, 8 1/2 × 11 in. Private Collection.

ca. 1870. Nor was character development of particular interest to the author, which proved challenging for the director and actors as they tried to convey realistic human interaction on screen. Hergesheimer’s forte was the evocation of interiors, minute details of domestic furnishings, and modes of dress. When Florine Stettheimer painted the celebrated author at the height of his fame, she portrayed him as an aesthete “in typical gaudy raiment” surrounded by the superficial trappings that had become emblematic: a saxophone, lamp of stained glass patterned after a Spanish shawl, and “cool, intoxicating Daiquiris” (1923, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University). He “frequently remarked that he cared more for decors than he did for people,” his friend Carl van Vechten later revealed “and his novels abound in careful descriptions of Chippendale and Sheraton, Lowestoft and Worcester.” But that initial curiosity about “early Americana . . . took a new slant” as he turned to Cuba, Mexico and beyond: “invading the baroque precincts of Victoriana, of bright shawls, of Manchu gentlewomen, and of journeys to Tampico and Cythera.”42 Study of painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts as a young man had undoubtedly nurtured the author’s eye for the details of a scene, but it also provided common ground for his association with other artists including Stettheimer. He collaborated with Shinn, another alumnus of the Pennsylvania Academy, on images for the magazine serialization

Transforming Moving Pictures into Art  59 of The Bright Shawl as well as its movie art direction. And he counted among his associates Stettheimer, whose portrait of Hergesheimer painted in this same year 1922 sheds further light on his celebrity and interest in Cuba at that moment. Across the decade of the 1920s Hergesheimer became increasingly discontent with the democratization of American culture, and traveled to places like Mexico and Cuba where he found colonial architecture and social hierarchies to feed his fiction. Cuba had inspired his most popular novel Cytherea: Goddess of Love (1922) in which the Caribbean island is portrayed as a romantic paradise where the protagonists escape the constraints of middle class life. But it was his autobiographical novel San Cristóbal de la Habana (1920) that had the most lasting impact, for it introduced Americans to the daiquiri that quickly became a popular element of Jazz Age cocktail culture (appearing on the table next to him in Stettheimer’s portrait). His images of crumbling Spanish colonial buildings, Flamenco-dancing senoritas and daiquiris all inspired interest in Cuba and probably convinced Robertson that The Bright Shawl would be popular with audiences. One of the most highly regarded directors of the 1920s, John S. Robertson headed Inspiration Pictures, whose best-known work include Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde starring John Barrymore (1920) and Tess of the Storm Country (1922), which Mary Pickford selected him to direct. He began as an actor/director with Vitagraph in 1916 and went on to direct more than 50 features spanning the silent and early sound periods. He and Shinn seemed to make a good team, joining forces after The Bright Shawl to make another historic costume piece entitled The Fighting Blade (1923). By this point in his career Shinn was associating with some of the best-known figures working in movies on the East Coast. He was well acquainted with Rudolph Valentino’s one-time partner and stage dancer Bonnie Glass, whom he portrayed (Private Collection) elegantly clad in velvet and fur, hinting at her flamboyant persona that found expression on the vaudeville stage in the 1910s. And a frequent visitor to his home in the Catskills was Valentino himself.43 On November 29, 1922 Film Daily reported that the cast and crew of The Bright Shawl had sailed to Cuba to begin three weeks of principal photography, following Robertson and Shinn who had left the day before. Work was completed within a month. Shinn wrote of their naiveté about shooting on location there: Robertson and myself shipped joyously to Havana, thinking that the home of the Escobars was any place we chose to put the camera. True that, everything was there, but every house and street was scratched with trolley wires and marked with poles, high tension wires, light wires and telephone wires strung to such jangled stiches as to suggest the net that safeguards the acrobat leaping from the top of a circus tent. Any picture taken in present-day Havana but dating back to 1850 would come upon the screen like scenes riddled with black lightning. They therefore returned to New York where they recreated needed locations at Tilford Studio, a studio for hire at 344 W. 44th St, New York City. By now Shinn’s working method was finely tuned. He made numerous drawings of full sets and individual details, among them a watercolor of a Havana street at night. Focusing on a single facade, he delights in the architectural detail of the enclosed balcony in the Spanish colonial style, with light emanating from within.44 He was able to hit the ground

60  Two American Artists and Silent Cinema running when production started since he had already produced 13 illustrations for the novel when it was serialized in The Red Book Magazine in four parts from June to September 1922 (followed by its publication in book form in October). These provided the foundation for his filmic visualization of the story.45 Attention was paid to every detail to ensure authenticity. Motion Picture reported that a fencing coach had been engaged for Barthelmess so that he could execute his own fencing in the picture. The dance sequences were equally critical. Shinn explained his efforts to recreate Havana’s elegant Tacón Theater in which La Clavel would appear: An incident occurred in the Tilford Studios in the completion of the Tacon Theatre that made all my efforts in set construction worthwhile. This was a duplicate of a popular theater in Matanzas with tiers of boxes with open grills, mourners boxes set on the stage where, behind drawn blinds, the bereaved were allowed respite from grief unobserved by the public. The stage, in plan, is directly opposite to what we are accustomed as it curves into the prompter’s box in a perfect semicircle. There is a severity in design throughout the auditorium, lifted here and there with a slight tracery of brilliant [roco?] – enough said as to the accuracy of this studio set. When Dorothy Gish was cast as La Clavel, she had little experience with traditional Hispanic dance. To help her hone her skills Robertson hired the celebrated Spanish dancer María Montero to coach her on what Shinn called “tantalizing and fiery steps of the Garrotín,” a festive dance set to a lively rhythm that gained popularity in the early twentieth century.46 Shinn described Montero’s dramatic arrival on his recently constructed set of the Cuban theater: She pointed a black-gloved hand out toward the curtained stage. “I have danced many times, many, many, many times on that stage.” She was working madly at a clasp on her fur coat. It dropped to the studio floor. “It is Matanzas. It is Cuba, my stage.” After removing her coat (it was winter) she was ready to dance: A crimson shawl seemed to enmesh her, sparking earrings clinked at her ears, and somehow over a smart street gown there blazed a flood of whirling yellow silk. She darted up the aisle through showers of hats up the steps to the stage, and turned as she passed the orchestra leader. A quick order: “Vamos la musica.” Around the prompter’s box to the curtain line. Where ever it came from, there was a red rose in her mouth, castanets clicked, the big curtain rolled above. Then came the color – color of darting shawl – abandon, flexible, rigid, at once impulsive, soothing, swaying. Yes, we are back in Cuba, back in the Tacon Theater. It is 1850. To the intricate movement of her feet she added outstretched arms, flung back head and fringed shawl swirling about her figure. Shinn captured just such a moment in a drawing (Figure 2.8) and in paint that echoed Gish on film. Only later, with the advent of sound and the rise of musicals, did Hollywood begin to feature the screen image

Transforming Moving Pictures into Art  61

Figure 2.8  Everett Shinn, La Clavel [Dorothy Gish in The Bright Shawl], ca. 1922–1923. Pencil on paper, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia, Richmond, VA.

of Cuba as a romantic paradise, so this offered a rare opportunity in the silent era for audiences to be seduced by historic detail into believing they had been transported to the Caribbean. “There is plenty of interesting local color in the production, as the exterior scenes were all made in Havana,” the press reported. “The picture is an elaborate one, with fascinating costumes.” The movie contained many visually striking scenes arranged by Shinn from exteriors shot in Old Havana and theatrical performances to lovemaking and sword fighting. But the signature image of the movie became the figure of La Clavel. “She fairly exudes color and magnetism,” wrote Laurence Reid “suggesting always the highly sexed dancer which the author painted.” One of Shinn’s pencil sketches of Gish in character was laid into a presentation copy of the book.47 He also did a more complete painted version for the sitter, for whom it became a cherished possession that reporters who interviewed her commented upon: In a prominent spot in the room hung a lovely portrait of Dorothy by Everett Shinn, who designed the sets for The Bright Shawl. “Don’t you love that picture?” asked Dorothy. “I always have it with me ever since Mr. Shinn gave it to me. It

62  Two American Artists and Silent Cinema travels with me. Not – oh please don’t think it is because I am vain about it, but I just think it’s a lovely picture.” And it must be said that nobody could deny that the charming, black-haired damsel, wrapped in a brilliant Spanish shawl, looked very fascinating as she looked out at you from the frame. The colorful shawl – symbol of Spanish America – became for artist and actress a memento of tender regard.

Reception “Into the making of the moving picture sets I have tried to coax the drowsy pulse beats of the tropics,” Shinn explained, “to recreate an atmosphere of languor, of torpid glare sifting through grilled archways and the scorch of an overhead sun smearing heat even into the shadows.”48 His immersion in Hergesheimer’s novel, travels to Cuba, study of fabrics and architecture all informed his fabrication of the movie scenery. Problems arose, however, when they were forced to return to New York City and try to construct their torrid Caribbean vision during a bitterly cold January. The situation was compounded by the fact that a nationwide coal strike had created a serious fuel shortage: This has been a problem inside the chilled walls of a New York moving picture studio under a national administration that has made a bucket of coal as furtive as a bottle of Scotch – I speak for the carpenter’s fingers, not for the artist’s fancy. For a blazing furnace fire would not raise by one degree the atmospheric heat in the patios, prison courtyards and streets in the Tilford studios, nor does the Edison mock sun do more than vitalize a portion of a set where it is bidden. A moving picture set should live before an actor enters or a Klieg light is turned on. Before artificial sun streamed on one of the streets made for The Bright Shawl one felt that a chill had passed over Cuba and the sun been shadowed by the approach of a tornado.49 We don’t always think about the physical conditions of studios in relation to the making of a movie, but New York weather was one of the reasons movie production had already headed to California. Shinn, however, seemed to triumph over this adversity. When the movie premiered at New York’s Strand Theater on April 22, 1923 his sets received high marks: “The painstaking attention to detail marks every setting, and these backgrounds help wonderfully in emphasizing the romantic glamour,” critic Laurence Reid rhapsodized. “Everett Shinn, the art director, has created genuine reproductions of Spanish atmosphere – and these are complete down to the most unimportant detail.”50 Another writer seconded Reid’s appreciation: The Bright Shawl comes to us with plenty of pictorial richness and directorial finish. Old Havana, in the days when Cuba was first agitating her rebellion against Spain, is opened up by the camera and entrancing bits are shown – flower-hung grilled gateways, crannied street and portico, and cool Castilian rooms. In these settings, smoothly, tellingly, move the actors in a good romantic story.51

Transforming Moving Pictures into Art  63 Overall The Bright Shawl received mixed reviews, the consensus being that the story it told did not live up to the high quality of the cast and set designs.

Janice Meredith, 1924 “Everett Shinn, one of America’s foremost artists, has been engaged by the Cosmopolitan Corporation as art director of Janice Meredith,” a press notice read, “the new special film production in which Marion Davies will star, following her appearance in Yolanda (1924, Cosmopolitan Pictures).”52 Davies was a decent actress with a comic flair but she deferred on movie choices to her paramour William Randolph Hearst, who insisted that she play in epic dramas over comedies for enhanced prestige. Janice Meredith is a silent film released in December 1924 based on the book by Paul Leicester Ford (1899), and introduced W.C. Fields – Davies’ friend from the Ziegfeld Follies – in his first feature film as a drunken British sergeant.53 It is 1774, the eve of the American War of Independence. Raised in a Tory household, Janice Meredith becomes romantically involved with patriot Charles Fownes and provides aid to George Washington and Paul Revere. Impressed with Shinn’s work on The Bright Shawl as well as his delineations for many of his publications, Hearst handpicked him as art director for the picture. Shinn accepted the offer, motivated as he said by opportunity to work on his favorite period of American history, though the exorbitantly high salary he was offered could not have hurt either. Shinn pictured in his mind’s eye pared down sets of saltbox houses, pewter tankards and homespun uniforms. But when his new boss announced his intention to provide a million-dollar budget and insisted that every penny of it be spent on sumptuous sets, the artist feared his vision of colonial simplicity would be sacrificed to Hearst’s preference for Gilded Age opulence.54 The Battle of Lexington and Concord with its “shot heard around the world,” as every schoolchild in the United States learns, marked the first official engagement between Britain and its colonies in the American Revolutionary War. Shinn and the movie crew went to great lengths to give credibility to this key scene, beginning with research to locate antique prints and maps to guide their reconstruction of the small Massachusetts village, now relocated to Mt. Kisco, New York: A long line of lumber laden trucks and a weaving trail of motor cars filled with carpenters, masons, mechanics and their helpers from the Cosmopolitan Studios in New York drew in on 1,000 acres of pastureland in Mount Kisco and deployed to dump their cargoes of building material at designated positions for houses that had been checked from a ground plan taken from ancient maps and old prints of the little hamlet of Lexington.55 Shinn painted a series of watercolors of Revolutionary War Scenes in preparation for laying out the action on the battlefields (Figure 2.9). Each one indicates placement of the soldiers, both colonial and British, in relation to key buildings and landmarks on the ground. One bears the inscription “Cosmo #51,” suggesting that there were at least 51 or more of these landscape scenes done for this Cosmopolitan picture. Earlier projects contributed to his visualization of this eighteenth century time and place, for he had recreated his ancestral colonial home in New Jersey for Polly of the Circus

64  Two American Artists and Silent Cinema

Figure 2.9  Everett Shinn, Revolutionary War Scene, ca. 1924. Watercolor on paper, 11 × 15 in. Inscribed lower left “Cosmo #51.” Private Collection.

and must have contemplated scenes like Washington Crossing the Delaware for the murals in the Council Chamber of City Hall of Trenton, NJ (1911) before settling on contemporary themes. Additionally, he specialized in Rococo Revival for his work in interior decoration, referencing the period of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century that just preceded the Revolutionary War period. He certainly had knowledge of the decorative arts that would have given the sets an authentic feel, and he mentions borrowing period objects from museums to provide further touches of authenticity. Not only was he knowledgeable, he also was filled patriotic enthusiasm watching the actors film the battle scene: “All this had been an act,” he observed, “yet, so vividly realistic that an observer felt irresistibly drawn to flank the British and beat the hell out of them. It was magnificent and carried a message of noble purpose.” When you watch the movie today, however, there is little trace of this stirring event. This omission could, of course, be attributed to the damage that occurred to the film over time, as is the case with so many of the old nitrate movies. But in this case Shinn explains otherwise: After it had run the gauntlet of snapping scissors in the cutting room where was the battle of Lexington? Where? . . . In the ash can. What was shown when the

Transforming Moving Pictures into Art  65 battle had been sheered down could have been a few Lexington bucko’s on a squirrel hunt.56 Since it did not feature Janice Meredith/Marion Davies it was deemed unimportant to American history told according to Hearst.

William Randolph Hearst: America’s First Multimedia Mogul Movie fans will forever imagine Hearst as Charles Foster Kane in Citizen Kane (1941), although for obvious legal reasons director Orson Welles always denied the reference to America’s first multimedia mogul, who built an empire that combined newspapers, national magazines, news films, serials, cartoons and feature movies. By the time Shinn started working for him, the media king already had considerable experience with movies. It began in 1898, when the pioneering moving pictures that initially featured people sneezing, dancing and kissing began to falter as the novelty factor wore off. After helping to incite the Spanish–American War, Hearst sent Thomas Edison’s cameramen to Cuba on his own yacht to capture footage. Then as now war was good box office, and new audiences began to flock to the movies to follow the battles at San Juan Hill and beyond. Soon newsreels became a staple of movie programs, and Hearst became the first print journalist to transition to the screen with his International News Service that partnered with Pathé, Universal, MGM and others. While most newsreels made at least an attempt at objective reportage, Hearst’s were editorials, taking strong and often unpopular stands on issues like immigration. In 1915 he made George La Cava head of his new animation unit, where he supervised a steady output of Krazy Kat and Katzenjammer Kids cartoons that were distributed nationwide. Masterminding cross-promotional efforts within his growing empire, Hearst invested in movie serials starring Pearl White including The Perils of Pauline, that simultaneously appeared in successive episodes in his periodicals and then as hardcover books he published. Everywhere his hand was evident. In 1916 the San Francisco journal The Lantern pointed to Hearst’s practice of using cinema to shape public opinion. This was the year before Hearst took virtual control of the Committee on Public Information, the film unit of the government’s World War I propaganda machine. He saw film not only as a form of storytelling and a passing entertainment, but also a powerful shaper of public opinion.57 The villains Pauline faced were often dark-skinned or foreign, subtly reinforcing his xenophobic message. In 1922 Shinn’s associate Sloan was enlisted to draw a derelict drunk in a barroom to contrast with another of the same man, now sober, taking his family to see a (presumably Hearst) movie to accompany an article for Hearst International endorsing prohibition. Hearst’s efforts to advertise and promote his company’s films and books extended to reviews that consisted of barely camouflaged puff pieces. And then he met Marion Davies.58 Already considering an entrée into feature films, his new love interest sealed his decision to form Cosmopolitan Pictures, where together they could combine work and play. Altogether Davies appeared in 29 silent movies and 17 talkies for him. Initially renting space at various locations around New York, by 1920 he acquired the enormous Cosmopolitan-International Studios uptown at 127th Street and 2nd Avenue, where he could make movies according to his own dictates, turning out as many as ten pictures a year. When an enormous fire destroyed the complex in February 1923,

66  Two American Artists and Silent Cinema Janice Meredith was made on locations from Saranac Lake to Plattsburgh, and in studio spaces all over New York City. After that he moved to the West Coast, where he and Davies set up household at his enormous mansion San Simeon and resumed his movie activities on the MGM lot. With money no object, Hearst was in a position to hire the best talent in the movie business. But given his yellow journalism, antiimmigration stance and intrusive approach, directors often tried to avoid working with him. One exception was the Viennese architect and designer Joseph Urban, who was a master at creating sets for the Hearst-endorsed historical epics, often filling them with antiques from the tycoon’s vast holdings. In fact he was supposed to work his magic for Janice Meredith but when conflicting production schedules apparently prevented it, Hearst hired Shinn. In 1948 Shinn wrote a 28-page memoir of his experiences on Janice Meredith. In spite of its tongue-in-cheek tone, it still resonates with bitterness over 20 years later: How could Janice Meredith stand up under the smothering glamor that a million dollars would buy and appear anything other than something that Florenz Ziegfeld might have contrived to glorify American feminine pulchritude. Her home, on the outskirts of Trenton, was a simple clapboard structure, with, perhaps a better front door than most of her neighbors. Possibly a fan light, yet, the voice of opulent wealth, Mr. Hearst, who’s life had always been wedged in with priceless rarities might demand a mote about the heroine’s homestead, a draw bridge and port-cullis and archers walk. Being the star I knew that her birthplace would be featured and was prepared to copy Charles Schwab’s Francois Premier chateau on Riverside drive to fit Mr. Hearst’s hunger for glamorous settings.59 So colonial American architecture remained in the film, embellished for the sake of Hearst’s taste. The lavish set constructed for Benjamin Franklin’s meeting with King Louis XVI however, did not fare so well. It had to be entirely eliminated from the film when Hearst discovered that Janice Meredith had not accompanied Franklin to France, and Marion Davis therefore would be absent from this incident: And Doctor Benjamin Franklin in audience with the French King beseeching aid for the cause of American liberty. This scene had been in preparation for some time and was a close copy of the glass gallery at Versailles. Thousands of dollars were spent on it. It was set for action only to find that Janice did not travel with the Doctor as companion. Of what use was this scene, the only one where the lavishment of money could help even if it couldn’t twist history to include the beautiful American at the French court. The artist’s efforts had been plagued from the outset by artistic differences with his intrusive employer. Unable to bear any longer what he regarded as the travesty that was being made of the picture, he left the set one day and never returned. In the credits the only art director listed is Joseph Urban, who must have stepped in to complete the project. “Every scene in the course of filming the picture was a strong welded link of historic voices save one, that of Mr. Hearst,” Shinn concluded, “who let it be known that he was making history, not copying it.”60

Transforming Moving Pictures into Art  67 Shinn apparently was responsible for designing the sets for at least one more movie: Soul Fire (1925) starring Richard Barthelmess, with whom he worked on The Bright Shawl and The Fighting Blade. Ostensibly about a young composer’s attempt to realize a musical concerto, told in flashbacks, it illuminates broader issues of creativity that must have appealed to the visual artist.61 Certainly the movie’s juxtapositions between audience members sitting in rapt attention and the performers who enthralled them recall Shinn’s earlier renderings of scenes in cafés and concert halls. He had returned to comfortable, favorite subject matter.62

Legacy Making a movie requires intricate collaboration and Shinn was willing to accommodate himself within reason to the needs of the production as a whole, without being insistent on his personal artistic sensibility. He enjoyed good, long-term working relationships with Robertson – head of Inspiration Pictures – and with the actors on a number of films. His employment with Hearst was different; there came up against the roadblock of an autocrat. The mogul dictated his desire to make a movie set during the American Revolution, but with complete disregard for the events as they occurred. Shinn was not demanding adherence to some abstract vision, but rather to some semblance of the historical record. Hearst’s insistence on retelling history with such a blatant corruption of canonical events in the birth of the new nation, merely to ensure the constant on-screen presence of his mistress Davies, was something Shinn could not abide. The artist was deeply troubled by these circumstances, which he tried to explain in a letter to E. Mason Hopper – director on Janice Meredith – but it’s clear that he was trying to come to terms with them himself, something he had not achieved two decades later when he wrote another, much longer account.63 He did engage in some additional movie work, but it was a last gasp. Shinn has not received much attention from film historians in part because his film work was limited to the East Coast, but press notices consistently referred to his status as a visual artist working in moving pictures. He along with Ballin, Ingram and others provided important links in the exchange between cinema and the fine arts. Their legacy comprised not only the movies they worked on directly, but also their influence on the next generation who had worked under them. The legendary production designer Cedric Gibbons, to name one example, had gotten his start apprenticing under Ballin. Working on opposite coasts and under diverse production circumstances, Shinn, Ballin and Ingram all terminated their movie art direction at this same moment. They all had participated in that brief flurry of experimentation to create aesthetically ambitious cinema before the Hollywood Studio system exerted its standardizing control. In those years 1917–1925, it is fair to say, they were instrumental in transforming moving pictures into art.

Notes 1 Queen Elizabeth (Les Amours de la Reine Elisabeth), Directed by Henri Desfontaines and Louis Mercanton. France: Le Film d’Art, 1912. 2 Victoria Duckett, Seeing Sarah Bernhardt: Performance and Silent Film (Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015) provides background.

68  Two American Artists and Silent Cinema 3 Neal Gabler, An Empire of their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (New York: Crown, 1988), pp. 28–29. 4 Polly of the Circus. Directed by Edwin L. Hollywood and Charles Horan. Fort Lee, NJ: Goldwyn Picture Corporation, 1917. 5 Tom Paulus, “If You Can Call It an Art . . .,” in Kevin L. Stoehr and Michael C. Connolly, ed. John Ford in Focus. Essays on the Filmmaker’s Life and Work (Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland, 2008), p. 131. 6 Merry Ovnick’s provides analysis of the sets of Goldwyn Studio’s Mad Money (1918), with Hugo Ballin as art director. Referenced by Caroline Luce, “Hugo Ballin’s Los Angeles,” online resource, http://scalar.usc.edu/hc/hugo-ballins-los-angeles/hollywood-scene-master. Consulted April 2, 2017. 7 Ira Glackens, “Introduction,” in Edith DeShazo, Everett Shinn, 1876–1953. A Figure in His Time (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1974), pp. xv–xvii. 8 I focused on these three films that are available for viewing. 9 Barbara C. Rand, The Art of Everett Shinn (doctoral dissertation, University of California, 1992), p. 157, fn. 44. 10 Edith DeShazo, “Appendix 7 Book and Magazine Illustrations by Everett Shinn,” pp. 219–226. 11 Vivian B. Moses, “With Art as her Handmaiden,” Moving Picture World July 21, 1917, pp. 383–387; quoted in Richard Koszarski, Fort Lee, The Film Town (1904–2004) (Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press, 2004), p. 293. 12 Vivian B. Moses quoted in Koszarski, p. 293, see note 11. 13 “Perfect sets have never made a drama,” Ballin wrote in 1921. “The audience follows story. The story can be explained by settings . . . When settings receive uncommon notice the drama is defective.” Advocating for unobtrusive sets, he was articulating the prevailing position that action should proceed uninterrupted to allow audiences to follow that action without distraction from attractive backgrounds competing for their attention. Sets, he advised, should be subservient to the story and provide “dramatic rhetoric.” Even the novice filmgoer should be able to detect the actor easily on screen and follow his activities. For Ballin subdued backgrounds and minimal furniture to avoid clutter were essential to achieve narrative clarity. See Kristin Thompson, Herr Lubitsch Goes to Hollywood (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005), p. 56. 14 Caroline Luce, “Hugo Ballin’s Los Angeles,” online essay, consulted April 9, 2017, http://scalar. usc.edu/hc/hugo-ballins-los-angeles/about-hugo-ballin. 15 Directed by Edwin L. Hollywood and Charles Horan, Produced by Samuel Goldwyn, Released September 16, 1917. 16 Shinn Papers can be found at the Delaware Art Museum and the Archives of American Art – Smithsonian Institution. 17 We know that Goldwyn Studios at this point was insisting that Mayo and her fellow authors were on set to ensure proper representation of the texts. 18 Illustrated DeShazo, p. 4. 19 DeShazo, p. 113. 20 Harold P. Quicksall, “Motion Picture News,” Book News: An Illustrated Magazine of Literature and Books 36 (September 1917–August 1918): 31. 21 Rand, p. 162, fn. 9. 22 “Mae Marsh, Motion Picture Actress,” in Vachel Lindsay, Chinese Nightingale and Other Poems (New York: MacMillan Co., 1917), pp. 64–65. 23 “What Painters and Sculptors are Doing for the Movies,” Current Opinion 64 (January 1918): 31. 24 Rand, p. 147, fn. 26. 25 Shinn’s fascination with artificial illumination – especially the new gas and electric lighting – has been discussed by Margarita Karasoulas in The Glamour of the Footlights: Everett Shinn in the City of Light (20 page catalogue available online). 26 Rand, p. 165, fn. 18. 27 A pencil and gouache drawing I found online (www.invaluable.com, so its commercial referencing a work for sale from Childs Gallery, Boston) of “Sketch for Rose of the Rancho,” ca. 1907 with the following blurb (see movShinn PowerPoint): “Description: Number

Transforming Moving Pictures into Art  69

28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

41 42 43 44 45

46 47 48 49 50 51

67 in 1973–74 Munson Williams Proctor Institute exhibition catalogue; illustrated on p. 52. Inscribed in ink lower left recto: “Sketch made by Everett Shinn/ back stage at David Belasco’s/ Majestic Theater. West 42nd Street N.Y. City. The play ‘The Rose of the Rancho / Date.’ Blue pencil and gouache on 2 joined sheets of paper, 12 ¾ x 7 ¼.” Karl Schmidt, “Farm Plays in America, With Special Reference to the Present Production of Way Down East,” Arts & Decoration v. 13–14 (1920): 126. Essay, Gustavus Adolphus College, painting is undated, they suggest ca. 1907, online: https:// gustavus.edu/quarterly/focus/shinn/shinn.pdf, consulted May 4, 2017. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16 (October 1975), 6–18. Anne Rutherford, “Cinema and Embodied Affect,” Senses Of Cinema 25 (March 2003) Online journal consulted June 5, 2017: http://sensesofcinema.com/2003/feature-articles/ embodied_affect/. With World War I, the rise of Hollywood, the solidification of studio system and U.S. dominance of the global market film changed radically, and with it the viewer’s mode of engagement. Sonia Ghalian, “Tramping it out: Charlie Chaplin & the Modern,” Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities v. 9 (2017), 190–191. Sonia Ghalian, “Tramping it out: Charlie Chaplin & the Modern,” 190–191. Tom Gunning, “Chaplin and the Body of Modernity,” Early Popular Visual Culture 8:3 (2010), 237–245. Bordwell Blog: www.davidborwell.net/blog/category/tableau-staging. Kaveh Askari, “Art School Cinema: Rex Ingram and the Lessons of the Studio,” Film History 26 (2014): 118. Askari, “Art School Cinema,” p. 122. For a fuller discussion see Kaveh Askari, Picture Craft from the Magic Lantern to Early Hollywood: Making Movies into Art (London: British Film Institute, 2014). Directed by John S. Robertson. New York: Inspiration Pictures, 1923. (A copy exists at the UCLA Film & Television Museum.) Shinn’s burlesques and scenarios for movies and skits were spoofs on existing plays or movies he was working on including The Crimson Mantle (movie scenario) [among his papers], that took its point of departure The Bright Shawl. Box 11, Everett Shinn Papers, Delaware Art Museum. NY Times (quoted in Beck, Edward G. Robinson Encyclopedia, p. 58). Carl van Vechten, “How I Remember Joseph Hergesheimer,” in Yale University Library Gazette, pp. 87–93, undated clipping in Stettheimer papers, Beinecke, quoted in Bloemink, pp. 137–138, where the portrait is illustrated. DeShazo, pp. 177–178. Sale, Christies, for image see American Art (New York: Christies, February 27, 2013), Sale 2681, Lot 95. Joseph Hergesheimer, “The Bright Shawl” in The Red Book Magazine v. 39 part 1/4 (June 1922): 39–45; part 2/4 (July 1922): 73–77; part 3/4 (August 1922): 66–70; and part 4/4 (September 1922): 87–91, with 13 illustrations by Everett Shinn. It was published in book form in October 1922. www.flamencasporderecho.com/tag/maria-montero/ consulted July 29, 2018. Joseph Hergesheimer’s Pencil Sketch of La Clavel, 1922, Barrett PS3515.E62B87, 1922. University of Virginia Special Collections – Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library Accession no. 7702-e. “Everett Shinn describes settings of Bright Shawl,” Evening Telegram, New York 1924 – among Shinn papers at the Delaware Art Museum. “Everett Shinn describes settings of Bright Shawl,” Evening Telegram. Shinn’s remark – “a bucket of coal as furtive as a bottle of Scotch” – references both the coal strike and Prohibition (1920–1933), when liquor was illegal. Laurence Reid, Review of The Bright Shawl, Clipping in Everett Shinn Papers, Delaware Art Museum, no publication identification provided. “The Bright Shawl,” Exceptional Photoplays 3 (April 1923): 2.

70  Two American Artists and Silent Cinema 52 Engaged by Cosmopolitan Corp. as art director for Special Feature, Janice Meredith [lacked full citation]; Shinn Papers, Scrapbooks, Archives of American Art 53 Janice Meredith. Directed by E. Mason Hopper. New York: Cosmopolitan Productions, 1924. 54 James L. Neibaur, The W.C. Fields Films (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2017), pp. 14–16. 55 Shinn, typescript, 1948, p. 14, Delaware Art Museum. 56 Shinn, typescript, 1948, p. 21, Delaware Art Museum. 57 Louis Pizzitola, Hearst over Hollywood: Power, Passion and Propaganda in Movies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), pp. 148–161. 58 Pizzitola provides excellent background on his career. 59 Shinn, typescript, 1948, p. 9, Delaware Art Museum. 60 Shinn typescript, 1948, p. 23, Delaware Art Museum. 61 Soul-Fire. Directed by John S. Robertson. New York: Inspiration Pictures, 1925. 62 Richard Koszarski, Hollywood on the Hudson: Film and Television in New York from Griffith to Sarnoff (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008), p. 87. 63 Letter dated February 23, 1924, from Shinn to [E. Mason] Hopper, Shinn Papers, Delaware Art Museum.

Part II

New Woman, New Negro

3 Leading Ladies Dance, Reform, Liberation

Introduction Women were cinematic pioneers. There were more women involved in Hollywood in its first two decades than there have been at any time since. The first woman to direct a film was almost certainly Alice Guy-Blaché, who had a successful career at Gaumont in Paris, from her one-minute La Fée aux Choux (The Cabbage Fairy) of 1896 to her La Vie Du Christ, a 30-minute biblical extravaganza for 1906. She then moved to the United States where she founded Solax, her own production company and continued to make films into the 1920s. In 1912 Helen Gardner starred in her own company’s six-reel film Cleopatra, a story she selected to highlight the figure of a powerful woman that had inspired female artists before her including Edmonia Lewis’s life-sized marble sculpture Death of Cleopatra (1876; Smithsonian American Art Museum). After getting her start with Guy-Blaché, Lois Weber made a series of remarkable and original movies that are only beginning to be appreciated. In 1916 Mary Pickford set up her own company, taking full control of all her films thereafter, and in 1919 was instrumental in founding United Artists. Between 1912 and 1919 Universal Pictures had 11 female directors on its books who collectively made over 170 films; after 1927 it did not credit a single female director until 1982, when Amy Heckering made Fast Times at Ridgemont High. By 1915 women in the movie business were far outperforming their sisters in the fine arts, as they were in most other professions, as proclaimed by Motion Picture Supplement’s article “Women’s Conquest in Filmdom:” One may not name a single vocation in either the artistic or business side of its progress in which women are not conspicuously engaged. In the theatres, in the studios and even in the exchanges where film productions are marketed and released to exhibitors, the fair sex is presented as in no other calling.1 With so much publicity about movies circulating in the general press and later in dedicated movie magazines, women in the movie industry were highly visible. Not only Pickford, Weber and Guy-Blaché but also Pearl White, Annette Kellerman, Alla Nazimova, Lillian and Dorothy Gish, and countless others became household names, as details of their personal lives, homes and beauty regimes were covered with regularity in the press. Their biographical profiles provided American women with role models to pursue their careers as independent creative workers. Much is made of the escapism movies offered, the chance to leave your cares behind and enter the fictive world on screen. During the silent era, from 1896 to 1927, women also found in

74  New Woman, New Negro movies a source of advice, possibility, openness and liberation. Those who sought careers as painters, sculptors and printmakers were on the fringes of the art world, a position that put them at a professional disadvantage in many ways but also meant that they were free from its conventions and open to experimentation. One of the areas that they fruitfully explored was the imagery and potential of moving pictures. Margaret Foster Richardson’s A Motion Picture (Self-Portrait), (Figure 3.1) provides an early if quirky demonstration of this linkage. She portrays herself in threequarter length, moving across the canvas, engaged in direct address with the viewer through her wire-rimmed glasses. She wears a shapeless gray-blue work smock, with her hair pulled back, and no make-up (her forehead and nose are shiny). To show themselves in the act of painting artists traditionally sit or stand at the easel, with palette, brushes and often a work-in-progress for us to see, as in the case of Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun Self Portrait (1790; Metropolitan Museum of Art). Richardson instead is a woman on the move, striding across the space of the canvas, as indicated by the diagonal tilt of her body within the frame and the active position of her arms. In her left hand she holds a paintbrush and in the right her mahlstick, a baton with a soft leather or padded head (cut off by the canvas edge) used by painters to support the hand holding the paintbrush. A student of Edmund Tarbell in Boston, she’s technically skilled, ready to get to work. Although Richardson shies away from strict adherence to the black and white of silent film, she uses a muted palette in a relatively

Figure 3.1  Margaret Foster Richardson, A Motion Picture (Self-Portrait), 1912. Oil on canvas, 40 3/8 × 23 1/8 in. Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA.

Leading Ladies 75 narrow tonal range with a spotlight bringing her face and upper right torso into focus and pulling her forward. Subtitling her self-portrait “a motion picture” obviously references her interest in film. Her self-deprecating, half smile tells us she knows she bears little resemblance to “Biograph Girl” Florence Lawrence, Lillian Gish or Mary Pickford, all of whom were on screen when she painted this picture in 1912, but still she’s ready for her close-up.2 Skirting along what was in those years a porous interface between fine art and popular culture, not only Margaret Foster Richardson but also Mary MacMonnies, Theresa Bernstein, Harriet Frishmuth, Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones, Helena Smith Dayton, Florine Stettheimer and others created stylistically diverse works that addressed the shared multimedia arena in which they lived and worked. Male artists make their appearance in this chapter in supporting roles only; the focus is on the leading ladies: female artists whose careers involved dialogues between art and film.

Loie Fuller Founding French filmmakers Louis and Auguste Lumière produced more than a thousand short films beginning in the late nineteenth century, the majority of which are “actualities” less than 45 seconds long. Reveling in the novelty of the medium, they captured anything that moved – workers leaving their factory, a baby being fed, a train entering a station. Among the most compelling and beautiful of their work is the 1896 Serpentine Dance of a woman performing a popular vaudeville act, a variation on the skirt dance invented and patented by Illinois-born Loie Fuller. Remaining relatively stationary, the unknown dancer (often misidentified as Fuller) whirled shimmering cloth around her, while lights of various tints reflected off the material, suggesting butterflies, flowers and other natural forms in her mesmerizing solo. Thomas Edison, Georges Méliès and others tried their hand at recording the many copycats of her dance that were being re-enacted across Europe and America. But they were no matches for the Lumière brothers’ camerawork or color tinting (all hand painted frame by frame) that mimicked the constantly shifting rainbow of colors that delighted audiences beginning with Fuller’s debut in 1892 at the Folies-Bergère. The moving picture still dazzles today, conveying second-hand the kaleidoscope of color, light, form and movement that so entranced artists from Frenchmen Auguste Rodin and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec to Americans James McNeill Whistler, Mary MacMonnies and Theresa Bernstein. More concerned with the luminous spectacle than her corporeal reality, Lautrec made his lithograph Miss Loie Fuller (1893) in 60 impressions, each one in a different color combination and some dusted with metallic pigments. In Paris in 1895 Connecticut-born Mary MacMonnies painted The Breeze (Figure 3.2) often associated with Fuller. In contrast to Lautrec’s abstracted shape, hers depicts in life-size a female figure floating against a floral patterned background. The highly active swirls of her white, diaphanous dress and the lack of references to three-dimensional space evoke the spectator’s disorientation watching her ethereal, otherworldly motion. Often described as a dancer, Fuller fused light, color and her voluminous costume through the motion of her body into a complex visual image. Better understood as a pioneering multimedia performance artist, Fuller provides the ideal starting point of our investigation of “leading ladies”: those women who created art by crossing boundaries traditionally dividing fine art from moving pictures. Her presentation is abstract, with no scenery, narrative or historical references. Deploying the fabric of her white

76  New Woman, New Negro

Figure 3.2  Mary MacMonnies, The Breeze, 1895. Oil on canvas, 69 × 52 in. Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection.

costume as her canvas, she experimented with colored lights, chemical dyes, iridescent salts, glass floors and mirrors (fortunately she stopped short of donning a proposed radium-infused costume) to manipulate her visual impact of onstage. Constantly improvising, she went back and forth between studio lab and theater, making manual adjustments as she worked out her ideas. She invented – and patented – a variety of tools to maximize the play of light on the cloth and privileged the moment of her dress over the movement of her body (which was relatively uninspired). Symbolist writer Joris-Karl Huysmans was one of the many who acknowledged that distinction when in 1892 he observed: “Loie Fuller – strange. Mediocre dancing.” For him the praise went to the projectionist whom he credited with creating her translucent specter: “After all, the glory goes to the electrician. It’s American.”3 She consulted with Thomas Edison on developments in electric lighting and talked with Marie and Pierre Curie about radioactivity. Not surprisingly, her research extended to filmmaking. A story by her friend Queen Marie of Romania provided the basis for the 1920 feature film Le Lys de la Vie (The Lily of Life), advertised in a poster by Bernard Becan. Co-directed with Gabrielle Sorere and starring René Clair, Margery Meadows, and Jean-Paul Le Tarare, it is one of a handful of experimental films she made, and the only one for which we have even a segment. That single surviving reel offers a glimpse of her use of special

Leading Ladies 77 effects innovative for the time: negative images and slow motion to convey the effect of the fairy tale narrative. Rodin and the Nobel Prize winning Anatole France lauded her “instinctive” and “natural gifts,” predicting: “Her effects, light and mise-en-scene are all things which will be studied.” Blending her work as a live performer with film confirms Fuller’s willingness to crossover and collaborate with dancers, choreographers, moviemakers and fine artists, forging an inter-medial career that inspired other women.4 A good 20 years after MacMonnies painted The Breeze, American realist Theresa Bernstein created a more forthright portrayal of Loie Fuller as the New Woman standing confidently on the stage.

Dancing Women: Harriet Frishmuth, Desha Delteil and the Bubble Dance From their inception moving pictures were wedded to rhythmic movement and dance, particularly in the early days when silent pantomimes relied upon exaggerated gestures and expressive movements to convey meaning. Sculptors and painters, in turn, found a supreme muse in the dancer, not only on stage but also in film. Harriet Frishmuth was one of the leading female sculptors of the early twentieth century. Her initial output consisted of sundials and static figures to ornament gardens, for which she had relied on various studio models – including children – to pose for her. Then in 1916 she encountered modern dance through the intervention of a young Yugoslavian dancer named Desha Podgorska (later Delteil). Thereafter her art was transformed, becoming vital, energized, and expressive of a new freedom found through movement. Frishmuth’s bronze nude The Bubble is her consummate expression of the female form in liberated and energetic poses. My initial encounter with The Bubble occurred in the galleries of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, where ties to film immediately suggested themselves (Figure 3.3). Its precarious sense of balance, joyful motion and play of light striking the greenish-brown of the metal figure and the iridescent glass bubble brought the figure to life and identified it as quintessentially cinematic. Observing this life-sized bronze one can’t help imagining the living model balanced on one leg, standing on tiptoe, with her back arched and her arms over her head holding the “bubble.” This elegant work presents a “freeze frame” from a solo Desha choreographed and performed. It was born of a process that Delteil and Frishmuth evolved, where the model would move around the studio, striking multiple and unique ways of posing during their sessions that the artist would eagerly sketch. These facts are documented in the exhibition catalogue entitled Captured Motion: The Sculpture of Harriet Whitney Frishmuth (2006) with The Bubble featured on the front. Given its title and presence on the cover, I anticipated some mention of moving pictures, but no such references were made.5 My research soon revealed that Desha Delteil was in a number of movies including those in which she performed what became her signature Bubble Dance: The Bubble (1920), a documentary (presumed lost); Isn’t Life Wonderful (1926) directed by D.W. Griffith and Florenz Ziegfeld’s Glorifying the American Girl (1929). It was not enough that Frishmuth watched Delteil dance on stage and worked with her intensely in the studio. Films rounded out and enhanced live observation. In using dancers as models she was following example of others including her neighbor Malvina Hoffman, who developed a close relationship with internationally renowned ballerina Anna Pavlova. Like Delteil, Pavlova too appeared in movies including a starring role in the feature film The Dumb Girl of

78  New Woman, New Negro

Figure 3.3  Harriet Whitney Frishmuth, The Bubble, 1928. Bronze and glass, 94 × 38 3/4 × 26 in. Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR, Fractional Gift of Frank L. Hohmann, III and Museum Purchase.

Portici (1916) by the distinguished female movie director Lois Weber. This triad of art-dance-movies together animated her sculptors.6 Born in Philadelphia, Frishmuth spent most of her youth in Europe. At age 19 she moved to Paris where she studied with Auguste Rodin, who frequently attended performances by Loie Fuller, Isadora Duncan and exotic Balinese dancers. She was in his studio for only three months in 1900 but during that relatively short time he impressed upon her several lessons: strong silhouette, expressive modeling and implied movement. Frishmuth remained with her mother in Paris for three more years of study, which she considered a happy time in spite of their strained finances. Then she went on to Berlin for an additional year. Returning to the U.S., she worked as assistant for Karl Bitter and trained at the Art Students League of New York with sculptors Hermon Atkins MacNeil and Gutzon Borglum, gaining experience in modeling human anatomy that she augmented with dissecting classes at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. She always acknowledged the importance of her studies with Borglum, an ardent disciple of Rodin. Their teaching conditioned her openness to hiring professional dancers as models, whom she came to favor for their athletic grace and ability to hold a pose.

Leading Ladies 79 In 1914 Delteil fled Europe and the war for the United States, where she became a ballerina in Michel Fokine’s company. His roots were in classical ballet, but his choreography stressed freedom and dramatic movement. Her athletic form was the ideal for Frishmuth, whose single figures sometimes referenced dance specifically but at other times were intended as celebrations of ebullience, motion and lithe form.7 The sculptor later recalled that Delteil was remarkable for her ability to strike a position one day, and be able to resume the same one the next day. She was muse as well as model, posing for 33 figurative works including her highly popular The Vine that is related in spirit to The Bubble, her masterpiece. Frishmuth conceived the arcing, elongated figure when Desha was playing in the studio with a ball, the prop most associated with her from the dance she choreographed and performed solo. Modeled in 1921, it spawned 13 small casts (1921:7) and a unique over life-size cast with a richly textured surface (1927:9) commissioned by Benjamin Belt for his New Jersey garden. Tiffany Studios produced iridescent blown glass globes that balanced on the fingers of the upraised hands on both the statuettes and the larger version, mimicking the transparent beach ball Deshe deployed on stage and screen. In 1929 Ziegfeld’s Glorifying the American Girl captured her magical apparition in an early sound movie. It tells the story of a young woman who leaves home for New York City, where she wants to become a dancer but has to work as a shop clerk to support herself until she gets her big break. In the movie the traditional dance of Mary Eaton provides a foil to the Desha’s more exotic appearance and exciting modern dance style. When dancers appear in movies, a number of factors come into play. It allows an alternative vehicle for the study of movement. A good analogy can be found among male athletes, who in this period increasingly employed movies as a tool to scrutinize their moves on the playing field and improve their plays in future games. The ability to freeze the frame and study one discrete element of a given movement provided an important aid, recalling the photographic motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge.8 Like most artists, Frishmuth wanted to bring attention to her sculpture and was always eager to find ways to promote it. Certainly having an attractive model whose reputation was being spread via the mass media was a boom to sales, and to her career. Finally, and most importantly, a projected image on the screen provides a different perspective on the model than that to be derived from being in the room with a living, breathing human being. It allowed for distance, contemplation. When a dancer is present on stage or in the studio, she cannot help but exert a personal aura. When dance is embedded within the progression of moving images it becomes divorced from her/his physical presence, more abstracted and more easily translatable into a drawing and eventually into the final sculpture. It provides, in a sense, an intermediary between the living form and its bronze surrogate. To underscore this removal from the physical form necessary for Frishmuth’s process, consider her words upon attending a dance performed by Delteil’s teacher: I was in a theater watching Michel Fokine dance. I was making a portrait of Fokine at the time. The big curtain was down and I saw this vision of a figure pass across the great screen and I could hardly wait to get back to the studio to model it. I made a sketch of it and then I got this very lovely English girl, Blanche Ostrehim to pose for it.9 Stage curtain elides with screen, establishing a filter between audience and dancer. Exhibiting before an American public who historically felt discomfort with the nude

80  New Woman, New Negro figure, Frishmuth’s dynamic treatment of the female body was a gesture of freedom, both physical and psychological. Outward gestures expressed inward feelings of empowerment, albeit cautiously. She toned down the overt sexuality of the nude by employing coy, girlish poses. A presumed lesbian who never discussed her sexuality, Frishmuth was expressing the liberation of the female body. Sensual without being erotic, The Bubble spoke to the mood of American women in the 1920s, after the passage of the 19th amendment.

Reforming Women On August 20, 1920 the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution was ratified. Women gained the right to vote, and with it they became increasingly conscious of the challenges they faced negotiating modern society. This outcome was the result of hard work on a number of fronts, including that of the suffragettes. The American suffrage movement was long familiar with the value of visual spectacles, having staged parades, pageants, plays, vaudeville presentations and slide shows. Then on July 29, 1911 Moving Picture News reported: “The suffragettes in this city recently . . . [decided] that motion picture films should be made showing the suffrage cause in the best light,” as this was “the best way in which thousands of people might be instructed who otherwise never would hear of the suffrage cause.” By 1913 these efforts took the form of a well-made movie entitled On to Washington that not only made a case for universal suffrage but also demonstrated how mass action can combat injustice. It commemorated the walk 14 suffragettes undertook from Newark, NJ to Washington, DC. One especially memorable moment in the film occurs when the cameraman moves in for close-ups of the two leaders who look directly into the camera: Rosalie Jones, who would go on to earn a doctorate in law and Elizabeth Freeman, a longtime leader of the movement. The camera captured their heroic stance and engaging smiles that invite others to take up their struggle. Other movies made by men poked fun at the movement and made the women look foolish by portraying them as ugly, old shrews; mannish wives who emasculated their husbands; or young women attired in loose, frumpy attire, wearing glasses and unable to attract men. Serious or comic, however, it all added up to attention for the cause that they eventually won.10 In autumn 1915 – around the same time that the term “Feminism” was coined – the Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture by Women Artists for the Benefit of the Women’s Suffrage Campaign opened at New York’s Macbeth Gallery, but in spite of the socio-political intent of the organizers only a few works addressed the pressing social debate head-on. Deeply involved in the movement, sculptor Helena Smith Dayton lent her works to be shown at rallies and here exhibited Suffrage Girl (presumed lost) and He Can Vote (location unknown, known through an old photograph), a statuette of a single standing male portrayed as “an empty-headed youth of the type whom men despise and woman do not pity,” according to one reviewer.11 Often linked with the Ashcan School via her animated brushstroke and metropolitan subjects, Theresa Bernstein’s two submissions were even more deeply embedded in the debates. Suffrage Meeting (1914, Private Collection) depicts a soapbox orator addressing an outdoor nocturnal gathering, mostly female, multigenerational, and varying in class, from the woman with fur collar to the working class mother who had no one to take care of her children and had to bring them along.12

Leading Ladies 81 In Suffrage Parade the parade participants all wear a white dress with white hat and form a band across the composition just below the horizon line and flanked by the spectators clad in black in the lower register of the painting. Banners, though illegible, animate the scene. Bernstein attended these events not only as an artist-recorder but also as a participant, and reminisced about the enthusiasm she felt when she was able to vote. Suffrage Meeting and Suffrage Parade – she stated in a 1991 interview – were among her most significant pictures because “we’re people who have a right to express ourselves,” insisting on her rights as an artist and as a woman: The speaker would cajole them and tell them why it was important for women to have the same point of expression to be able to make a decision. Maybe it would be good for a woman and it might not be good for men; it might be good for everyone.13 Cinema, significantly, guided her composition of these key pictures. The speaker is visible just to the left of the composition’s center with her head rising above the crowd, presumably because she’s standing on a soapbox. But the artist positions her strategically in front of a movie theater, the glow from its garish marquee illuminating her profile. Its appearance recalls the screen that appears in her more obvious cinema subjects including Open Air Show (1912–13) and Reading the War News (1915), where the screen has a similar shape and color. As we saw with Sloan, moving pictures are helping her to narrate her urban experiences; but pushing beyond his take on the subject, proto-feminist Bernstein uses cinematic structure to make the suffragette the star of her picture.

Working Women Female reformists argued that economic independence was just as important as the ballot box, and worked to improve employment opportunities. In the early twentieth century women joined the public work force in increasing numbers as seamstresses, factory workers and teachers, such as those who populate the audience in Sloan’s Movies, Five Cents. Among his female attendees we see a black woman in a white blouse: a working class African American New Yorker whose more limited employment options probably forced her into domestic service. Her presence here reminds us of the national rise in African American domestics and the related social tensions related to their increased mobility in urban spaces like movie houses. It also raises the question: what can she see on the screen that relates to her own lived experiences? Around the time Sloan was painting his canvas Edwin Porter was making his nineminute movie Laughing Gas (1907; Edison) that treats an exceptional subject for the time: the experiences of Mandy, a black housekeeper played by Bertha Regustus, an African American woman in place of the usual white figure in blackface. The movie opens with an extraordinary close-up of Mandy’s face, encircled in a bandage and grimacing with a toothache. She sets off to a “Painless Dentist,” who administers laughing gas and extracts the tooth. Mandy wakes up laughing hysterically, and is ushered out the door to catch a train home. She has a series of encounters – crossing class and color lines – on her way to work, where her uncontrollable joviality prompts her to dump dinner on her white employer’s head. By nightfall as she heads home (she’s not a live-in servant) she meets a boyfriend in the moonlight and attends a prayer meeting, before

82  New Woman, New Negro she appears once again in close-up, laughing and pain-free. “Mandy is the active agent of the film’s proto-narrative as she movies easily back and forth between public and private spaces, Black and White cultures,” as Lauren Rabinovitz observes: We see her on city streets, riding in an integrated subway car, and on her way to work in a suburban neighborhood. We also see Mandy at an all-Black church service and being courted by a male suitor: she is neither completely assimilated nor so clearly a female “Tom” character. Her mobility across the predominantly White spaces connects the shots of the film and suggests the agency of an independent actor.14 All of this must have allowed Sloan’s black female viewer some delicious moments of pleasure in Mandy’s mild acts of resistance against authority. Bernstein’s painting Waiting Room – Employment Office (Figure 3.4) portrays a group of women waiting their turn to speak to a clerk about their work applications. Shop and department stores workers had traditionally been male, as Porter reminds us in his comic short movie The Gay Shoe Clerk (1903). But male clerks ogling the female customers as he helped them try on their shoes soon gave way to “shop girls” who worked for less pay. Isabel Bishop painted the attendants and customers in department stores on New York City’s Fourteenth Street. The attractive saleswoman became a film staple in the 1920s, played by favored stars. Within the Law (1923) follows

Figure 3.4  Theresa Bernstein, Waiting Room – Employment Office, 1917. Oil on canvas, 29 1/2 × 39 1/2 in. Jewish Museum, New York, NY.

Leading Ladies 83 Norma Talmadge, the shop girl who is unjustly accused of stealing, and then sent to jail. Employing “rich men’s legal tricks,” to seek revenge on her former employer, she manages to stay “within the law.”15 This developed further when in 1927 Clara Bow reached new heights of stardom as the “It Girl” (after the movie’s title, It) as Betty Lou Spence, a clerk who is asked on a date by her manager and heir to the department store fortune. A memorable scene in the movie shows Bow, realizing her meager wardrobe offers nothing fancy for the evening, taking scissors to her dress to make her look more alluring. The movie was about the new sexual mores that carried over into their offscreen lives, as she explained: We had individuality. We did as we pleased. We stayed up late. We dressed the way we wanted to. I used to whiz down Sunset Boulevard in my open Kissel, with several red chow dogs to match my hair. Today some actresses are sensible and end up with better health, but we had more fun. The popularity of the theme in the visual culture of the 1920s had its roots in the pioneering work of the 1910s, when films like those by Lois Weber conversely carried a social reform message. Female artists too took up the theme, including Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones who ca. 1911 painted her canvas Shoe Shop (Figure 3.5), and the

Figure 3.5  Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones, Shoe Shop, ca. 1911. Oil on canvas, 39 × 33 1/4 in. The William Owen Goodman and Emma Sawyer Goodman Collection, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL.

84  New Woman, New Negro following year Shopgirls that called attention to the many young women were confined to low paying jobs in mills, factories and shops. Social reformer Louise De Koven Bowen studied underpaid department store girls “surrounded by, and selling, the luxuries they crave for a wage compensation inadequate for a life of decency and respectability.”16 Simultaneously, Jane Addams published A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil, in which shoes became emblematic of prostitution: When the shoes become too worn to endure a third soling and she possessed but 90 cents toward a new pair, she gave up the struggle; and to use her own contemptuous phrase, she “sold out for a new pair of shoes.” By 1916 Lois Weber directed her movie Shoes, in which Eva Meyer is a poorly paid shoe shop girl supporting her three sisters, mother and unemployed father. With decent clothes or footwear impossible on her meager salary, she felt forced to accept advances of men with dishonorable intentions. Female innovators like Weber in film and Sparhawk-Jones in fine art took these timely problems as subjects for movies and painted canvases while middle class women – struggling in a new social environment – looked to moving and still pictures for guidance. But they also helped make movie going respectable, drawing women into movie theaters in droves. An illustrated song sheet entitled Since Mother Goes to Picture Shows (Figure 3.6) of that same year – 1916 – by graphic artist and movie set designer Andre de Takacs shows a harried housewife who has escaped her daily drudgery to go to the movies. This image tells us something of mother’s story. Attending the movies has led her to domestic neglect: dishes pile up, the icebox leaks and laundry is everywhere. The printed lyrics to the song elaborate further: on the home front “things are getting worse each day,” her son and husband are forced to do “woman’s work” while “Mother’s always on the job getting full of fillum.” The movie that so captivates her needs no identification. It is an episode from the popular serial The Perils of Pauline starring Pearl White. Each week the adventurous heiress Pauline gets herself into one scrape after another as she is pursued by greedy men seeking her inheritance. When she wasn’t tied to railroad tracks or escaping in a hot air balloon she was being dangled by a nefarious villain over a cliffs, which is the episode mother is engrossed in here, filmed at the Palisades near Fort Lee, NJ. How did these films and this scene in particular so captivate audiences, as indicated by mother’s wide-eyed stare and the nervous placement of her hand on the edge of the balcony? In a short essay entitled “The Imp of the Perverse” Edgar Allan Poe identified vertigo as the prototype of all perversions and explained its impact: “We stand upon the brink of a precipice,” he writes. “We peer into the abyss; we grow sick and dizzy. Our first impulse is to shrink from danger. Unaccountably we remain.” Poe then elaborates in spine-tingling detail how we slowly come to desire the sensation of falling, of “rushing annihilation,” even though we know it leads inevitably to death. We perpetrate perverse acts, he contents, “because we feel we should not.”17 This account of peering into the abyss finds correspondences in the responses of viewers to the early silent films that frequently nudge viewers to the brink of rocky cliffs or deep canyons. For silent movie audiences, their sensations of fear, awe and spatial dislocation were enhanced by the accompanying music. Some theaters had only a single piano or more likely an organ; others had small ensembles and the grand movie palaces had full orchestras, but always there was music to provide the emotional underpinning to a scene,

Leading Ladies 85

Figure 3.6  Andre De Takacs, Since Mother Goes to Picture Shows, 1916. Colored lithograph, 8 1/2 × 11 in. Private Collection.

providing the driving force behind a chase or the poignancy of a quiet moment. The reminiscences of one of Pauline’s fans echo Mother’s experiences: It was exciting. They would have “The Perils of Pauline,” ya know. Oh heavens, she’d be tied to the railroad tracks and a train would be coming and then she would be rescued just in time. They would have a music player and she would play music according to what the movie was like. Boy it was exciting music.18 By 1916 the actor herself was becoming a major draw, with Pearl White voted the most popular star of the era for her exploits as Pauline, surpassing Mary Pickford in ticket sales. New movie magazines enhanced rising star power and gave fans glimpses into the lives of these on-screen women. Publicists were always at pains to align the star’s biography with the parts she played, portraying Pickford and White as the epitome of the girl next door. Rags to riches stories were the order of the day. So when Mother went to the movie show she was swayed not only by the image on the screen but also the music playing and insights gained from her movie magazines. Additional lyrics to the song describe her bodily reactions to the movie recur long after the scene ended:

86  New Woman, New Negro When she sees a photo play She comes home and right away She thinks that she can act. Why, in her dreams we hear her screams We never get a rest, The other night with all her might She jumped on father’s chest Closely identifying with her everyday heroine, she dreams of further exploits and in her efforts to fend off assailants she physically attacks her husband sleeping next to her. Although striking a humorous tone, this popular song articulates societal fears that women – who by this time accounted for large percentage of movie audiences – were being swept up into the movie magic to the detriment of home and family.

American Art, ca. 1916 As Weber was creating her visually and socially edgy movies, Robert J. Coady (1916) in the inaugural volume of The Soil: A Magazine of Art included moving picture references in his litany of factors defining the national school of modern art: This is an American Art. Young, robust, energetic, naïve, immature, daring and spirited. Active in every conceivable field. The Panama Canal, the Sky-scraper, and Colonial Architecture. The East River, the Battery and the “Fish Theatre.” The Tug Boat and the Steam-shovel. The Steam Lighter. The Steel Plants, the Washing Plants and the Electrical Shops. The Bridges, the Docks and the Cutouts, the Viaducts, the “Matt M. Shay” and the “3000.” Gary. The Polarine and the Portland Cement Works. Wright’s and Curtiss’s Aeroplanes and the Aeronauts. The Sail Boats, the Ore Cars. Indian Beadwork, Sculptures, Decorations, Music and Dances. Jack Johnson, Charlie Chaplin, and “Spike” in “The Girl in the Game.” Annette Kellerman, “Neptune’s Daughter.” Bert Williams, Rag-time, the Buck and Wing and the Clog. Syncopation and the Cake-Walk . . . This is American Art.19 Around the same time Hugo Münsterberg – member of Harvard University’s Philosophy Department, leader in the field of applied psychology and adviser to Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and Andrew Carnegie – also found Annette Kellerman’s film Neptune’s Daughter (1914) a transformative experience.20 In consequence he became so fascinated by the aesthetic possibilities of moving pictures that he spent the following summer on one long movie binge, including visits to the Vitagraph Studio in Brooklyn. Recognizing commercial value in the attention this distinguished academic and protégé of William James was devoting to movies, Adolph Zukor made him a contributing editor on his magazine Paramount Pictograph. Münsterberg threw himself into the task and wrote extensively about film, an activity that culminated in his book The Photoplay: A Psychological Study.21 All that survives is 19 minutes from Neptune’s Daughter, a water fantasy telling the tale of a mermaid who assumes human form to avenge the death of her sister, who was caught in a fishing net laid by the king of a country above the waves. Soon, however, she falls in love with the king upon whom she plotted revenge. That superficial story was just the excuse for Annette Kellerman’s bold dives and aquatic moves, all executed

Leading Ladies 87 in minimal swimming attire. That this same moving picture exerted its impact on two such divergent enterprises as Coady’s definition of American art and Münsterberg’s pioneering philosophical defense of film as an art form identifies it as a significant nexus of women, movies and art. By late fall 1916 movie goers across Britain, the Continent, the United States and Australia were lining up at theaters to see “the most gorgeous spectacle of the age,” a moving picture called A Daughter of the Gods. Filmed in Jamaica with a cast of extras said to exceed 20,000 “gnomes, fairies, battling warriors and beauties,” it is reputed to be the first movie with a budget of one million dollars to produce its “entrancing scenes of Oriental splendor.” Studio publicists and cinema proprietors alike emphasized its artistry and lavishness, barely hinting at its principal attraction: the tantalizing glimpses it provided of the perfectly formed nude figure of its star, Annette Kellerman. Records were set for movie attendance worldwide (including screenings in Japan and Russian) while thousands of disappointed fans were turned away for lack of space. A Daughter of the Gods was a runaway commercial blockbuster.22 When the Society of Independent Artists opened its doors for its initial exhibition on April 11, 1917, there, projected on a 50 foot square screen hanging in New York City’s Grand Central Palace, was the figure of Annette Kellerman – the famed “Diving Venus” – cavorting with her fellow mermaids clad in little more than her long, artfully arranged dark hair (Figure 3.7). While Münsterberg and Lindsay tried to convince readers that movies should be considered art and studio executives strove to

Figure 3.7  Photographer Unidentified, Annette Kellerman in “A Daughter of the Gods,” 1916. Promotional photograph, 8 1/2 × 11 in. Private Collection.

88  New Woman, New Negro make their movies more artistic, Kellerman successfully bridged the gap between commercial movie houses and avant-garde audiences. Controversies raged over Marcel Duchamp’s now infamous Fountain and the attempts on the part of the judges to censor it from what was supposed to be a “no jury no prizes” event. The insertion of Kellerman’s movie into the exhibition was another ploy on the part of Duchamp, Coady and the Organizing Committee to shock visitors into rethinking the boundaries between high and low art, and among the various media, as the Introduction to Society of Independent Artists 1917 catalogue explained: Conditions of time and the difficulties always attendant on the organization of a great society have been the only factors that have deterred the Directors from including as fully as they would wish all the arts together in the Society’s first exhibition. A beginning is made by the presentation of literature, music, acting, the cinematograph, etc. which are scheduled for the Lecture Hall on the Mezzanine floor. It is the purpose of the Society to become a common ground for the free expression of all the arts.23 The organizers embraced movies as part of the cultural pantheon, screening not only A Daughter of the Gods but also other movies throughout the run of the exposition, symbolizing their entrée into American art. This dynamic, intra-medial approach to modern art was already being adopted by a number of the exhibitors, especially some of the more adventurous women. Beginning in 1917 and running through 1944 the Society of Independent Artists hosted annual exhibitions held in the Grand Center Palace, designed as part of the Grand Central Terminal complex on Lexington Avenue between 46th and 47th Streets. For a modest membership fee, artists were entitled to show their work in the vast multistory atrium on the building’s main floor, which at Duchamp’s suggestion were arranged alphabetically, starting from the randomly selected letter “R.”24 This open door policy meant that artists underrepresented in the mainstream could have access to large audiences, especially emerging and female artists. Throughout its history many women showed their art in SIA events but here we single out two members who participated in that first exhibition presided over by the figure of Kellerman and whose own works demonstrate a cinematic component: Helena Smith Dayton and Florine Stettheimer. On display in the Grand Central Palace were two works by Helena Smith Dayton: Madison Square at Noon and Pat & the Widow (numbers 28 and 29, currently unlocated), examples of the tabletop statues she had begun making about 1915. These three-dimensional clay cartoons or caricatures represented the full range of urban society: flower sellers, scrubwomen, shop girls and lonely women on park benches. “At first she selected for her subjects some of the leaders of the beau monde,” Cartoons Magazine reported, and soon the fashionable Newport colony found itself laughing at these little replicas of the social lights. The artist had caught them at their polo, their dancing, their golf, their yachting, seizing upon their characteristic attitudes with the quaintest mixture of realism and fantasy.25 Her Tango Party consisted of eight figures and couples. It won her the $250 prize offered by Puck magazine for the best cover design in 1915.

Leading Ladies 89

Figure 3.8  “Statues that Run, Dance and Fight,” Popular Science Monthly 90.2 (February 1917): 257–258. Private Collection.

Surveying these figures she hand painted with watercolor lined up on shelf upon shelf in her Greenwich Village home studio, she soon had the idea to make them the stars of her pioneering efforts in stop-motion movies. A month before the SIA exhibition opened, Billboard announced “the latest novelty in motion pictures” debuted at New York’s Strand Theater on March 25, 1917. It featured her collection of shorts entitled Animated Sculpture, including the sculptural play “Battle of the Suds” between scrubwomen Mrs. Murphy and Mrs. Flynn (Figure 3.8). “The feat isn’t as difficult as it seems,” Popular Science Monthly reported, “although the work required is infinitely greater than drawing hundreds of pictures with pen and ink for making an animated cartoon:” The figures are first fashioned in clay, then changed to different poses, photographed one by one, and projected upon the screen without a break so that they jump about on the screen as if they were real. The effect is startlingly realistic and highly amusing. In one of the films only recently completed there are no less than nine figures, all of them moving about as if they were flesh and blood. The rather jerky action serves only to enhance the amusing result.26 Clearly the author thought that its readers would be as fascinated by the technical aspects of her process as he was:

90  New Woman, New Negro To appreciate the amount of labor required in making these new films it must be remembered that each time one of the sculptured figures moves a new one must be made. This means, in other words, that the camera must stop until the sculptor goes over each plastic figure and molds it into the correct position before he can photograph it. There are sixteen different poses to a foot of film. Hence for the ordinary reel of one thousand feet there are sixteen thousand separate poses for each figure. Imagine the work required when three or more figures have to be made for each scene.27 Eight months after her Animated Sculpture so amused audiences, on November 24 Dayton released another one-reeler, this time an animated version of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Writing for Moving Picture World Margaret MacDonald headed her article “Prominent Sculptor in Film,” and proclaimed that “little need be said here of the wonderful talent of Helena Smith Dayton.” Her latest production used fledgling stop-motion animation to tell the story of the star-crossed lovers, with the artist herself opening the film with a demonstration of her technique: In the introduction to the picture we are privileged to watch her deft fingers fashion the form of Juliet from an apparently soulless lump of clay. This mere lump of clay under her magic touch takes on the responsibilities of life, and love, and sorrow which the play requires, and finally grasps in desperation the dagger with which it ends its sorry life, falling in tragic fashion over the already lifeless form of its Romeo.28 Perhaps because she was a woman and an animator – less highly regarded than a conventional moviemaker – whose film footage is presumed lost, Dayton has yet to be properly integrated into the histories of art or film. She did, however, contribute to both. Following a stint as a journalist and creative writer in Hartford, she and her husband Fred Dayton moved to Greenwich Village. Although she had never formally studied sculpture, by her own account “my fingers began to itch for something to mold,” and she started fashioning hundreds of statuettes 8 to 12 inches tall, inspired by “modern city life.” These colored statuettes became the ancestors of claymation figures, from the dinosaurs in Willis O’Brien’s The Lost World (1925) to Wallace and Gromit (1989 on). Dayton’s Shakespearean characters possessed the same elusive appeal common to almost a century of stop-motion figures: the recreation of human movement that veered to fantastic, a blend of the real and the uncanny. Contemporary reviewers tend to confirm this, explaining that while Dayton’s production treated the tragic story in somewhat burlesque fashion, “all the emotions to which human kind are subject are well portrayed in these queer little figures.” Combining her ability at molding the figures in plasticine and her knowledge of the rudimentary stop-motion animation techniques of the 1910s she produced what critics proclaimed “the union of the two greatest arts.” Her Romeo and Juliet was on par with what artists Shinn, Ingram and others were bringing to movies at that moment, and demonstrated the potential for a blurring of the boundaries between fine art with moviemaking to create a new, more compelling hybrid.29 Infused with the open-ended spirit of the SIA and the experimental approach to art and film in the teens, Dayton’s art and life were entirely multi-medial. Her exhibition at the Grand Central Palace coincided with her stage debut, release of her

Leading Ladies 91 movies, suffragist parades, display of her sculpted portrait of George M. Cohan in the lobby of the Strand Theater during the run of his film Broadway Jones (1917), a presence in the periodicals including a recurring series in Puck, and contributions to Pathé movies.30 World War I then drastically cut short her career when she joined the YMCA and headed to France. Traveling in Europe with her mother and two sisters Florine Stettheimer, conversely, headed home to New York in November 1913, “driven hitherward by rumors of war.”31 She had been away, effectively, since the late nineteenth century. During their absence America had evolved from Victorian to Modern, with more conspicuous, lively and vulgar modes of popular culture everywhere in evidence. One of her poems conveys her simultaneous delight and shock with all she beheld: New York At last grown young With noise And colour And light And jazz Dance marathons and poultry shows Soul-savings and rodeos Gabfests and beauty contests Skytowers and bridal showers Speak-easy bars and motor cars Columnists and movie stars.32 The closing reference to “movie stars” confirms that Florine’s immersion in the city’s popular culture included going to the pictures, one of the forces shaping her new narrative painting style. Probably at the urging of her friend Duchamp in April 1917 she submitted her Portrait of Avery Hopwood (1915; University of Michigan) and Jenny and Genevieve (ca. 1915–1916; Columbia University) to the First Annual Exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists, where she continued to show for the next 20 years. For her, Dayton and other women the SIA – with its non-competitive entry policies, openness to a variety of styles, and numerous female exhibitors – provided a safe space to show their art.33 Stettheimer’s two initial entries were transitional, testing ideas of likeness and narrativity that would be more fully realized in what might be regarded as a breakthrough work: Fête à Duchamp (1917; Private Collection) exhibited at the SIA the following year.34 The party for Duchamp was an all-day affair, progressing in several episodes. In the afternoon guests partook of refreshments on the sunlit lawn punctuated by tree trunks, as seen in the foreground. By evening they adjourned to the covered terrace festooned with lanterns in the picture’s background. Additional events are inserted within these horizontal divisions. In the upper left the guest of honor arrives in a car driven by Francis Picabia, and then circulates among the attendees, appearing at the trellis entranceway lower left, then in a covered swing (left center) and rising at the back to accept a celebratory toast. As the eye moves from the front to the back of the fictive space, the colors change from the yellow of day to the black of night, an early attempt on the artist’s part to indicate the passage of time within a single canvas, later dubbed her “multiplication virtuelle” by Duchamp. Many writers, artists and philosophers were investigating notions of

92  New Woman, New Negro reality at this time, conceiving ways to suggest multiple sensations and perceptions. Henri Bergson – with whom Stettheimer had contact in Paris – and Marcel Proust – whose Remembrance of Things Past she read over and over – were at the forefront of these investigations, as were the Futurist and Cubist painters. For Stettheimer no such fragmenting and distorting of reality of the sort advocated by Duchamp and Albert Gleizes (with whom she is paired at one spot in the Fête) was possible, so instead she contrived other compositional strategies that allowed her to convey a succession of events enacted on a two-dimensional canvas. Given that she worked in a figurative style to create pictures that told a story (even her portraits incorporate sequential milestones in the sitter’s career) an obvious, overlooked source for her work is moving pictures. Parker Tyler’s analysis of the color symbolism in the related A Day at West Point (ca. 1917) – inspired by a family outing to the military academy – provides the springboard for further observation of this art–film relationship in her work: The four Stettheimers, appearing several times as a party in this “narrative” picture, are individualized by being dressed entirely in a different color. The mother is all in black while the three daughters are respectively in red-andwhite, yellow and blue. Clearly, Florine preserved within this group-making a row in the nearest image on the ferryboat’s deck – the patriotic series of colors and indicated as well the family capacity to exhaust the primary palette without help; keeping them distinct from one another was likewise an ingenious way of keeping them together.35 Silent moviemakers filming in black and white without benefit of dialogue needed to distinguish the individual characters and make them readable to audiences across the action. They were careful to have actors maintain the same wardrobe throughout the picture, distinguish characters by hair color and hat style, and otherwise differentiate them visually in ways that parallel Florine’s efforts to assign her family members to varied palettes. The artist and her set were deeply immersed in movie culture. At one dinner party, McBride later recalled, Philip Moeller got so animated about James Cagney in Public Enemy (1931) that several guests rushed off early to go and see it.36 Conversations at her salons and soirees from the late teens onward frequently turned to the latest stars, directors and feature films. Movie star Rudolph Valentino was among Stettheimer’s acquaintances, whom she met through her friend the photographer Edward Steichen. He had arranged a shoot for Vogue magazine to take place in her studio in September 1923 with Doris Kenyon, Valentino and his wife Natacha Rambova photographed standing in front of one of the artist’s gilded folding screen. Highly appreciative of Stettheimer’s portraits, Steichen perhaps sensed a cinematic element that made them a good backdrop for the matinee idol. When Disney cartoons came along they too entered her pictures and poetry: My attitude is one of love, Is all adoration for all the fringes And the color, all tinsel creation I like slippers gold,

Leading Ladies 93 I like oysters cold, And my garden of mixed flowers And the sky full of towers And traffic in the streets And Mallards sweets and Bendels clothes And Nat Lewis hose, and Tappe’s window arrays And crystal fixtures and my pictures, And Walt Disney cartoons, And colored balloons.37 Mickey Mouse debuted in 1928, courtesy of the Disney-directed Steamboat Willie, the first cartoon with synchronized sound, whose premiere that November was held at the W. 57th St. Theater, near her Alwyn Court apartment. But Disney’s first character appeared prior to the formation of the Disney Company, when he worked at Universal: Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, released September 1927. After 1920 there was a more direct family link to movies. Though little discussed, her nephew William Wanger began that year as a New York producer and went on to become a Hollywood movie mogul, working with well-known directors like John Ford on highly regarded movies such as his Stagecoach (1939). William was the son of Florine’s oldest sister Stella who in 1890 married Sigmund Feuchtwanger, and then changed their name to Wanger.38 Walter’s older sister Beatrice accompanied her aunts on their European sojourns, and after the patriarch Sigmund died in 1905 Stella moved her family from California back to New York, reuniting with her mother and sisters. Ettie and Carrie apparently found both Walter’s work in what they regarded as the crass movie business and his marriage to silent film actress Justine Johnstone objectionable, but Florine seemed to think otherwise, for she inserted him into her fullest statement of cinema’s centrality in American culture. In 1929 Stettheimer began painting what would become a four-part series entitled Cathedrals of New York (all four paintings belong to the Metropolitan Museum of Art): Cathedrals of Fifth Avenue (1931) features St. Patrick’s Cathedral, America’s version of a Gothic monument; Cathedrals of Wall Street (1939), with the New York Stock Exchange front and center, surrounded by references to capitalism; and Cathedrals of Art (1942–1944), a compilation of the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum. The Cathedrals of Broadway (Figure 3.9), the first panel depicting the gaudy red and gold entertainment district of Broadway, constitutes her most sustained meditation on moving pictures. It captures that transitional moment when “talkies” replaced silent movies. The coming of sound hit Hollywood like an earthquake, and rocked the entire industry. Many stars who had enjoyed long and successful runs without ever speaking a word on camera realized that their voices were ineffective in movies, spelling the end of their careers. Popular Clara Bow found her Brooklyn speech a major deterrent, while Marlene Dietrich turned her heavy foreign accent into an asset. With the onset of the Depression, people lined up at the movies as never before. Although Lights of New York (1928) was technically the first feature in which all the dialogue was recorded, The Jazz Singer (1927) is widely credited as the first “talkie.” Even though its soundtrack included only the musical numbers and less that one quarter of the spoken conversation, Al Jolson’s famous line spoke volumes: “You ain’t heard nothin’ yet.”

94  New Woman, New Negro

Figure 3.9  Florine Stettheimer, The Cathedrals of Broadway, 1929. Oil on canvas, 60 1/8 × 50 1/8 in. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY.

The artist enters her painted scene through glass doors at the lower left, accompanied by her sister Stella and nephew Walter Wanger, who in 1929 was producing the movies The Cocoanuts with the Marx Brothers as well as The Lady Lies and Roadhouse Nights. We the viewers are encouraged to join the spectacle by a yellowsuited usher at lower right, who points us toward the box office where other patrons have queued up. The gilded proscenium arch of the Paramount Theater encircles a black and white newsreel featuring New York Major Jimmy Walker throwing out the first baseball of the season. Below him is a golden statue elevated on a pedestal that is encircled with the letters that spell out “Silence.” Cordoned off and guarded by a small army of ushers, Silence is now a relic of the past. The future is proclaimed above in signs that read “House of Talkies” and “All Talking.” Surrounding the arch are the marquees of the picture palaces around Times Square: Mark Strand Theater (1914), Rialto (1916), Capitol (1919) and Roxy (1927). The scene is awash in light from a variety of sources – illuminated theater facades, searchlights and street reflections – that reinforce the artifice and make-believe of movies. Little by little we take in more detail. On the right support of the arch, below the exit sign, is a picture of a bull by the nineteenth century French artist Rosa Bonheur. On its left support, a darkened niche holds the figure of a nun reclining

Leading Ladies 95 on a bier. This is an image taken from Lillian Gish movie The White Sister (1923) that tells the story of Angela Chiaromonte, daughter of a wealthy prince who is swindled out of her inheritance by a wicked stepsister and decides to become a nun. Filmed on location in Rome and Naples, it depicts the ceremony of Angela’s symbolic marriage to Christ in elaborate details. After an initial run it moved to New York’s lavish Capitol Theater, decorated as a cathedral for the occasion.39 The Capitol Theater itself is part of Stettheimer’s painted scene (just above “Roxy” on the right), labeled with the name along the sides of the building and topped with its signature dome ribbed in strands of yellow lights with a trio of American flags in front of it – echoing the US Capitol. Attending a screening of The White Sister at the Capitol Theater, with its lobby mimicking the space of a cathedral, Stettheimer may have been inspired to create her Cathedrals of Broadway and perhaps the entire series. Placing the references to Rosa Bonheur and Lillian Gish at the eye level of an attendee, the artist called attention to women’s individual contributions to fine art and moving pictures, while her own painted canvas synthesized the two realms. “Those temples of pleasure, the Paramount and Roxy, can no longer complain that art has ignored them,” one critic insisted. “Miss Stettheimer has summed them up in a way to entice all Europe to its shores.”40 Taking his aunt’s lead, Walter Wanger forged a plan to use fine art to promote movies he was producing. Through arrangements with Associated American Artists, nine painters traveled to Hollywood to work for several weeks in May 1940 on the set of The Long Voyage Home, an upcoming film directed John Ford based on four one-act plays by Eugene O’Neill. The group included Thomas Hart Benton, George Biddle, Raphael Soyer and another well-known figure not usually associated with cinema: Grant Wood painted an oil-on-masonite panel entitled Sentimental Ballad (1940, New Britain Museum of American Art). Adopting a low vantage point, he depicted a scene towards the end of the film where John Wayne, Barry Fitzgerald and their cronies gathered in the pub, singing and enjoying a pint. Originally commissioned as advertisement, Wood’s painting caught the attention of critics and was sent on a multi-museum tour.41 The boundaries were blurring between fine art and Hollywood promotional material.

Bathing Beauties Stettheimer’s canvas Lake Placid brings us back to Annette Kellerman and attitudes toward the female body displayed in athletic activities like swimming. Writing in The Masses in 1917 Charles W. Wood attributed social ills like prostitution to Victorian sexual repression and advocated a celebration of the body in a natural way. “When New York girls swim for fun, they have to wear skirts, ridiculous contraptions to take the joy out of swimming,” he wrote. This could all change by following Kellerman’s example: Miss Kellermann [sic.] seems perfectly naked through much of this performance at the Lyric. Nakedly perfect may be a better way to say it. She is so naked and so perfect that I wonder at the film being permitted, even though the so-called drama in which she appears is utterly innocuous and foolish . . . Comparing the women’s bathing costumes in Sloan’s South Beach Bathers (1908; Walker Art Center) to Kellerman reinforces Wood’s argument:

96  New Woman, New Negro In a very few years, I hope, the boys and girls of New York will get accustomed to seeing human shapes in all their divine loveliness, instead of seeing them in gaudy tights under colored spotlights to the accompaniment of fool songs. Everybody goes to the movies. If beautiful girls can swim naked there, they may rebel against bundling up when they take a dip at Coney Island.42 “The experience of swimming is both sexual and spiritual,” Kellerman insisted. “The sensation of water flowing over the body is dynamic, erotic, enlivening and yet it awakens, at every moment, our consciousness of the fragility of our breath.”43 Among her many accomplishments, Kellerman always pointed to her contribution to bathing suit reform, helping women to feel more comfortable in the water and with their bodies, as the one of which she was most proud. In Stettheimer’s Lake Placid (1919), exhibited at the 1920 SIA, she paid particular attention to the swimming apparel of the sort endorsed by Kellerman. “The young lady swimmers all wear costumes from the smartest shops on Fifth Avenue,” as McBride observed.44 Movies increased people’s awareness not only of physical movement, but also of physical body types and the changing standards of female beauty. In the teens American culture was definitely moving towards an increasingly slender female figure, with Kellerman held up as “The Modern Venus,” according to a poll of a group of New York college students: Every one of them repudiated the classic Venus de Milo and voted Annette Kellerman the ideal womanly form. They declared the figure of Miss Kellerman featured in William Fox’s The Daughter of the Gods should be perpetuated to posterity in bronze and marble as the symbol of perfection in feminine development. They insisted that her figure represents and interprets the modern spirit; that is “lithe and triumphant,” whereas the Venus of antiquity is “a thick-waisted Greek” and not a fit pattern to mould the daughters of Britain and America.45 Kellerman herself dismissed the Venus de Milo and claimed that her measurements – which were widely published – more closely resembled the Venus de’ Medici. By 1921 the Miss America pageant was born, with regional spin-offs occurring all over the country, where women put themselves increasingly on display. Again Stettheimer took this as the subject of an oil painting Beauty Contest: To the Memory of P.T. Barnum (1924, Wadsworth Athenaeum) that showcases the female body. Not long after she painted Beauty Contest a silent movie entitled American Venus (1926; copy in Library of Congress) was released in which Louise Brooks plays a supporting role in this comedy about the Miss America pageant held in Atlantic City. Fay Lanphier, a model who won the title Miss California in 1924 and Miss America 1925 plays Miss Alabama in the movie.46 The female body was coming under increasing scrutiny, with the Victorian matron rejected in favor of an increasingly trim female form. Yasou Kuniyoshi’s Bather (1924, Dallas Museum of Art), wearing her formfitting bathing suit and holding a cigarette, expresses that new ideal.

Women in the 1920s: Flappers and Lesbians The ideal female body type had metamorphosed from Kellerman’s Venus in the 1910s into the twenties Flapper, who possessed the body type of a pre-adolescent boy with

Leading Ladies 97 minimal breasts, waist and hips. Flappers were rebellious, a condition blamed on the influence of the media and especially movie stars like Louise Brooks, notorious for her open sexuality and trend-setting bob hairstyle: chin-length with cheek-hugging curls, adopted by Stettheimer. Born in Kansas, Louise Brooks headed for New York City where she began her entertainment career as a dancer in the Ziegfeld Follies. There she was discovered by studio executives and made a number of Hollywood movies featured in fan magazines where to her admirers “she was hot, but looked cool.” When talkies came along she refused to record a voice-over track and left for Europe. Working with director G.W. Pabst in Germany, she created her most renowned character: the doomed flapper Lulu in Pandora’s Box (1929). A spirited showgirl whose beauty and sexual magnetism wreak havoc on men and women alike, she finally falls victim to Jack the Ripper. Working in his New Objectivity style, Pabst created a film that treated modern sexual mores in a frank manner that shocked audiences, including one of the earliest screen portrayals of lesbians, censored in some places. Louise Brooks became a living icon, the Marilyn Monroe of her day, whom fine artists found captivating. Around the time of the release of Pandora’s Box German Bauhaus artist Herbert Bayer was one of many artists who portrayed her in his Profile en Face (Facing Profile) that emphasizes her shiny, helmet-like hairstyle framing her face, dominated by the heavily made up eye resembling the head-on treatment of ancient Egyptian art. British modernist Edward Burra created a collage in which Lon Chaney appears behind her, his large physique emphasizing her slim figure, the female icon of that moment. In 1923 American expatriate painter Romaine Brooks (née Beatrice Romaine Goddard, 1874–1970), living in Paris, painted her Self-Portrait (Figure 3.10) in threequarter length wearing a dark, tailored jacket and a silk top hat shading her eyes. In her life and art of the 1920s she confronted accepted notions of women’s behavior and appearance and rejected men not only as sexual partners but also as pictorial subjects. “I grasped every occasion no matter how small to assert my independence of views,” she wrote in her unpublished memoir. “She was,” according to biographer Cassandra Langer, “one of the first modern artists to depict a woman’s resistance to female representations of the female in art.”47 Simultaneously in Hollywood stage and film actress Alla Nazimova made the silent movie Salomé (1923) that turned the gender stereotypes of the familiar account on their heads.48 In the New Testament Salomé is the daughter of Herodias and stepdaughter of Herod Antipas, ruler of Galilee. She performed a dance that so pleased Herod that he offered to grant her any wish she had. Prompted by her mother, Salomé asked for the head of John the Baptist on a platter, a wish that Herod reluctantly fulfilled. A popular subject in art from Early Christian times onward, Salomé was traditionally depicted as a femme fatale, a symbol of erotic heterosexual love. Then along came Oscar Wilde’s version that portrayed Herod as lusting after his stepdaughter, who in turn desires John the Baptist. Wilde’s play, published with illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley (1894, performed 1896), provided the inspiration for Nazimova to project her own famously androgynous persona onto her film. Moving beyond his subtle suggestion of an androgynous Salomé, she interpreted her gender identity and sexual appeal as completely ambiguous. She struck angular, masculine poses to attract John the Baptist (played by Nigel De Brulier, called Jokaanan in the movie), who is wane and effeminate. Her 62-minute film – said to be made with an all-homosexual cast – undermined the heterosexual significance of the New Testament account and replaced it with overtones of homoeroticism.

98  New Woman, New Negro

Figure 3.10  Romaine Brooks, Self-Portrait, 1923. Oil on canvas, 46 1/4 × 26 7/8 in. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC.

There is no record that Brooks – American expatriate in Paris – and Nazimova – Russian émigré in Hollywood – ever met. Performing a parallel reading of their painted and cinematic self-portraits from 1923, however, demonstrates that working across media they initiated related conversations about fluid sexual and gender identity during the Jazz Age. She, like Nazimova, had been involved in what was called at the time a “lavender marriage” – a legalized union between a man and woman to hide the fact that one or both partners are bisexual or homosexual – that she quickly escaped. Upon her mother’s death Brooks inherited a large fortune that supported the artistic life she shared with Natalie Barney (another wealthy American heiress with whom she resided for 50 years) in Paris. An exhibition at the prestigious Durand-Ruel Gallery in 1910 established her reputation as an artist, and thereafter she painted primarily portraits of the members of their circle: upper class European and Americans, many artistic, bohemian and homosexual, and all women. Usually clad in menswear-inspired fashion and short hair barely covering her ears, she crafted an appearance to emphasize her androgynous body type, typified in her Self-Portrait. Like most of her work, it was painted in a striking, monochromatic palette of blacks, whites and subtle shades of gray that is usually attributed to her

Leading Ladies 99 admiration for Whistler, but that more directly emulates the spectrum of silvery grays characteristic of silent movies. Her friends certainly demonstrated an interest in film, including French writer and filmmaker Jean Cocteau. She must have seen silent movies like Il fuoco (The Fire, 1916) starring Pina Menichelli as a woman with the power to seduce and destroy a young artist. It was based on the novel by Italian writer Gabriele d’Annunzio, with whom she had a fraught relationship. Her most highly regarded pictures, done in muted tones in a Symbolist-inflected style with little reference to contemporary modernism, were products of the twenties. They represent her efforts to develop a visual language to express what it meant to be lesbian in that era.49 In the 1920s Alla Nazimova was one of the most popular movie stars in the US. Moving from Ukraine in 1905, she acted on the Broadway stage with activist Emma Goldman briefly serving as her press agent. She then headed for Hollywood where her movie career began with War Brides (1916), continued through Camille (1921), and culminated in The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1944). A known lesbian (in the days before “The Code”) she was for a while Metro Pictures’ highest paid actress who, in the hopes of gaining greater creative freedom, formed her own movie company. At the time she made Salomé she was 44 years old, slim and flat chested. Her friend Natacha Rambova designed the sets and attired Nazimova in a series of costumes and wigs that contributes to the camp quality of the production. For most of the movie the star wears a strange, sci-fi inspired wig with white pearls bobbing on short antennae and a dark, slim-fitting body slip that further emphasized her boyish physique (Figure 3.11). Not only costumes but also set designs were done in black and white with occasional silver and gold accents. Collaborating together, Nazimova and Rambova drew upon fine art and referenced Aubrey Beardsley’s 1894 popular black and white drawings of Wilde’s Salomé, invoking their ambiguous and even perverse sexuality. Critically acclaimed, her Salomé was rejected by a public who could not abide what they regarded as deviant retelling of a favorite story. A financial

Figure 3.11  Photographer Unidentified, Alla Nazimova in Salomé, 1923. 8 1/2 × 11 in. Private Collection.

100  New Woman, New Negro disaster, it effectively ended Nazimova’s status as a Hollywood power broker, but subsequently became a mainstay at art house cinemas.

Josephine Baker: Harlem on the Champs-Élysées!50 Woman as modern dancer, American Venus, Jazz Age star, liberated new woman, gender-bending cross dresser, social activist, artistic icon and movie actor: all the themes exemplified by individual women explored in this chapter find their embodiment in Josephine Baker. Born in East St. Louis, Baker at age 15 headed for New York, where she got her start playing a chorus girl in blackface in wildly popular revues like Eubie Blake’s Shuffle Along (1921) and The Chocolate Dandies (1924). Her humorous, athletic performances of the Charleston and other steps earned her the position of lead dancer, singer and comic in Le Tumulte Noir heading for Paris, where in 1925 they took the city by storm.51 The following year – at age 20 – she was booked at that venerable French institution the Folies-Bergère. There she appeared as the young savage Fatou, walking backwards on hands and feet onto an African jungle set with a French explorer at the base of a palm tree and half-naked black men nearby, singing and drumming. Laughing and clowning, the movement of her hips and stomach brought to life the only item of clothing she wore: a girdle of bananas that became her signature costume. The shocking nature of her act comes into relief when we recall the popular female artists who had preceded her on that stage in what were essentially tableaux vivant. “The contrast between their collective alabaster immobility and Baker’s dynamic mobility on opening night in April 1926,” as Karen Dalton and Henry Louis Gates explain, “was as dramatic as Picasso’s use of African masks in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon had been exactly twenty years earlier.”52 In 1927 three events coincided to ensure that her gyrating black body encircled by swaying bananas became a pictorial icon of the Roaring Twenties: she wrote the first of her autobiographies, Les Mémoires de Joséphine Baker; Paul Colin created a portfolio of 45 lithographs entitled Le Tumulte Noir as a tribute to her dance; and she made La Sirène des Tropiques, the first of three movies that highlighted her rise from chorus girl to international soloist. The long shadow she cast over the transnational visual culture of the Jazz Age is here explored as an outgrowth of this triad of dance, art and movies. “I shall dance all my life,” Baker proclaimed in her autobiography, “I was born to dance, just for that. To live is to dance.”53 A relatively little known graphic artist in 1925, Paul Colin made his name by capturing that personification of Baker in posters and prints. He created a portfolio of 45 lithographs entitled Le Tumulte Noir divided into two parts: the arrival of La Revue Nègre and its female star in Paris and their wildly enthusiastic reception. By way of a flashback it narrated a night on the town, from society ladies who attended the Folies to the critics who wrote about them, all centered around the figure of La Joséphine. Runs of the prints sold out quickly, as critics declared them “masterful.” Given his barely successful struggle to contain the vivacious figure on the page, it seems likely that he drew her dancing and moving about the stage or studio, in much the same way that Frishmuth drew her dancer-model Desha Delteil. Colin’s published prints are essentially stop-action images, freezing the position of her impossibly flexible arms and legs, caught while she was in motion. In the portfolio’s preface Rip (nom de plume of Georges Thenon) posits that the artist preserved Baker’s unique moves for posterity:

Leading Ladies 101 The piercing art of Paul Colin . . . [with] its incredible sense of movement will make it possible for future ballerinas to reconstruct modern dances, just as we have been able to rediscover steps honoring the Panatheneans on Greek vase painting.54 The same could be said of her silent movie La Sirène des Tropiques in which she plays Papitou, who lives on a Spanish-speaking island somewhere in the West Indies and pursues her love to Paris, where she becomes a famous dancer.55 Directed by Mario Nalpas, it did not incorporate the split screen experiment he employed as assistant director on Abel Gance’s Napoléon, but it did alternate between three spatial zones: the theater auditorium, stage and backstage. The camera switches between a standard dance number performed by chorus girls and the nonplussed audience. Then we read on the intertitle: “Suddenly, dominating the crazy rhythm of the jazz, a cry . . . the latest cry of modern civilization, Here’s Papitou!” Next we see the previously staid audience responding enthusiastically and finally Baker, whose steps render us spellbound. She seems to be simultaneously kicking her legs, swinging her arms, swaying her hips, tilting her head, smiling and rolling her eyes as she runs through the repertory of her signature moves: the shimmy, strut and classic Charleston “monkey knees” in which her hands crisscrossed her splaying knees. Even in a black and white movie that tends to flatten the look of a live performance, her fluidity and kinetics are without parallel. The girdle of bananas may have been her sartorial signifier but more important to a dancer was what Anthea Kraut calls a “corporeal autograph,” a link between dancer and the dance. Immediately recognizable but difficult to describe, Baker’s dancing body conveyed an exuberance that was the equivalent of her signature. Although contemporary copyright laws had refused to protect performance style (recall Loie Fuller’s efforts to patent her apparatus), the fact that a dancer’s signature steps were commonly called her “trademark” underscores a sense of ownership. Baker’s moves might be reproducible, but her charismatic style was her own.56 Commentators strained their vocabularies in their zeal to describe her distinct physicality, but their efforts only proved semantic limitations. Colin’s dynamic lithographs provided evidence of the dancer’s claim to a natural monopoly over her performance style. Extending her presence on the stage, movies further established her corporeal autograph. “You can see why I love – why I adore – the movies,” Baker wrote, “They are the endless play of all shadows, a dream in black and white.”57 They conferred upon her and all our leading ladies a cinematic double through which they impacted society’s concepts of gender far beyond the silent era.

Notes 1 Women Film Pioneers Project (Columbia University) provides a lot of information on the website: https://wfpp.cdrs.columbia.edu/ consulted May 8, 2017. 2 I have observed this painting on visits to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where labels provide minimal information. There are no extensive published references on her. 3 Nancy Mowll Mathews, ed. Moving Pictures: American Art and Early Film, 1880–1910. Manchester, VT: Hudson Hills Press with William College Museum of Art, 2005, p. 82. 4 Michele and Robert Root Bernstein, “Creative Explosion, or Loie in the Laboratory,” Psychology Today September 15, 2008, consulted March 14, 2017. www.psychologytoday. com/us/blog/imagine/200809/creative-explosions-or-lo-e-in-the-laboratory.

102  New Woman, New Negro 5 Janis Conner, Leah Rosenblatt Lehmbeck and Thayer Tolles, Captured Motion: The Sculpture of Harriet Whitney Frishmuth (New York: Hohmann Holdings LLC, 2006). 6 Jane Dini, ed. Dance: American Art, 1830–1960 (Detroit Institute of Arts with Yale University Press, 2016) offers another perspective on the subject. 7 Captured Motion, p. 28. 8 Erin Brannigan, Dance Film: Choreography & the Moving Image (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 9 Quoted in Joseph G. Dreiss, “The Sculpture of Harriet Whitney Frishmuth and New York Dance,” The Courier 29 (1994): 38, consulted March 4, 2014. https://surface.syr.edu/cgi/ viewcontent.cgi?article=1308&context=libassoc. 10 “Suffragists Storm the Screen,” San Francisco Silent Film website, consulted May 12, 2017. http://sfsilentfilmfestival.blogspot.com/2016/08/suffragists-storm-screen.html; Kay Sloan, “Sexual Warfare in the Silent Cinema: Comedies and Melodramas of Woman Suffragism,” American Quarterly 33 (Autumn 1981): Suffragettes in the Silent Cinema: A Film by Kay Sloan, 2003. For the 1913 movie see: www.filmpreservation.org/dvds-and-books/clips/onto-washington-1913#, consulted May 13, 2017. 11 “Women’s Exhibition at Macbeth’s,” Arts & Decoration 1 (November 1915): 37. 12 Victoria Blanche Naden, “The Empathetic Gaze: Theresa Bernstein’s Early Images of Women in New York City,” M.A. Thesis, University of Georgia, pp. 8–20, provides a good analysis of these works. 13 Theresa Bernstein Meyerowitz, Interview by Muriel Meyers, Oral History, American Jewish Committee, Dorot Jewish Division, New York Public Library, July 17, 1991, Tape 2, 56; quoted Naden, p. 14. 14 Lauren Rabinovitz, “Past Imperfect: Feminism and Social Histories of Silent Film,” Cinemas 16 (Autumn 2005): 21–34. 15 Description of Within the Law by Joseph Yranski on Kino Lorber website, www.kinolorber. com/film/kikiwithinthelaw, consulted May 2, 2018. 16 Louise De Koven Bowen, “The Department Store Girl: Based on Interviews with 200 Girls” (Chicago, IL: Juvenile Protection Association, 1911), pamphlet, n.p. 17 Here I follow the interpretation of Poe’s essay in Lesley Stern, The Scorsese Connection (Indiana University Press and British Film Institute, 1995), pp. 72–73. 18 Quoted in Gregg Bachman, “Still in the Dark-Silent Film Audiences,” Film History 9 (1997): 35. 19 Robert J. Coady, “American Art,” The Soil: A Magazine of Art 1(1) (December 1916): 3. 20 The only surviving footage (19 minutes) from Neptune’s Daughter is included on a DVD with her movie Venus of the South Seas (1924), Kellerman’s last film and the only one known to exist in its complete form. 21 Noël Carroll, “Film/Mind Analogies: The Case of Hugo Münsterberg,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 46 (Summer 1988): 489. 22 Emily Gibson with Barbara Firth, The Original Million Dollar Mermaid: The Annette Kellerman Story (New South Wales, Australia: Allen & Unwin, 2005) provides a career overview. 23 Foreword, Catalogue of the First Annual Exhibition of The Society of Independent Artists (New York, 1917), n.p. 24 Elizabeth Milroy, Painters of a New Century: The Eight and American Art (Milwaukee, W.I.: Milwaukee Art Museum, 1991), pp. 95–96. 25 “Caricature Art in Clay: Something about Mrs. Helena Smith-Dayton and Her Interesting Group of New York ‘Types,’” Cartoons Magazine 7 (May 1915): 760. 26 “Statues that Run, Dance and Fight,” Popular Science Monthly 90(2) (February 1917): 257–258. 27 “Statues that Run, Dance and Fight,” Popular Science Monthly, 257–258. 28 Margaret I. MacDonald, “Prominent Sculptor in Film: Helena Smith Dayton Appears on Screen Introducing an Animated Clay Figure Production of Romeo and Juliet Fashioned by her Hand,” Moving Picture World, November 24, 1917. 29 Robert Hamilton Ball, Shakespeare on Silent Film: A Strange Eventful History (Boston, MA: The Writer Inc., 1968) and The Greenwich Village Bookshop Door: A Portal to Bohemia,

Leading Ladies 103

30

31

32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

45 46

47 48 49

1920–1925. Website from the Harry Ransom Center, University Texas at Austin consulted September 4, 2016. http://norman.hrc.utexas.edu/bookshopdoor/signature.cfm?item=38#1. Jason Douglass, “Artist, Author and Pioneering Motion Picture Animator: The Career of Helena Smith Dayton,” Animation Studies Online Journal 12 (2017) consulted January 4, 2018. https://journal.animationstudies.org/jason-douglass-artist-author-and-pioneeringmotion-picture-animator-the-career-of-helena-smith-dayton-runner-up/. Quoted Barbara J. Bloemink, The Life and Art of Florine Stettheimer (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 118. To some degree Frishmuth’s personal and family life paralleled those of Stettheimer: her parents separated when she was eight, when she and her two older sisters moved with their mother to Europe. They had an upper middle class upbringing, studying during winter and visiting various watering holes in the summer. And like Frishmuth she promoted herself by exhibiting with other women in group shows rather than commercial, solo exhibitions. Quoted in Henry McBride, Florine Stettheimer (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1946), p. 43. Bloemink, pp. 76–78. Bloemink, p. 87. Parker Tyler, Florine Stettheimer: A Life in Art (New York: Farrer, Strauss, 1963), p. 18. Bloemink, p. 166. Review npr.org/2017/09/19 Fresh air. Transcript of Stettheimer poetry, quoted in Florine Stettheimer: Painting Poetry. Matthew Bernstein, Walter Wanger: Hollywood Independent (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994) provides background. Bret Wood, “The White Sister,” TCM website, consulted April 6, 2018. www.tcm.com/thismonth/article/235452%7C0/The-White-Sister.html. Quoted Bloemink, p. 166. Information from text label, New Britain Museum of American Art, accessed February 15, 2017. Charles W. Wood, “Thoughts on God and Annette Kellermann,” The Masses 9, 5 (1917) 31–33, she’s discussed p. 32; see also Charles W. Wood, “The Prevention and Cure of Childhood,” The Masses 9, 6 (April 1917), 32. Quoted in Willard Spiegelman, “Buoyancy,” The American Scholar June 1, 2008, consulted June 7, 2017. https://theamericanscholar.org/buoyancy/#. Quoted Bloemink, p. 99, where she elaborates on its temporal unfolding: “Stettheimer implied a temporal unfolding in the painting, as Carrie can be seen a second time, swimming toward the raft’s left corner. Ettie is also depicted twice – once in the middle right, racing with the good-looking and popular rabbi Stephen Wise, and again, seated in her red suit and cap on the left side of the float.” Michael Williams, “Gloria Swanson as Venus: Silent Stardom, Antiquity and the Classical Vernacular,” in Pantelis Michelakis and Maria Wyke, eds., The Ancient World in Silent Cinema (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2013), p. 139, fn. 44. Plot synopsis of American Venus (1926): Mary Gray, whose father manufactures cold cream, is engaged to Horace Niles, son of Hugo Niles, the elder Gray’s big rival in the cosmetics business. PR man Chip Armstrong persuades Mary to enter the Miss America contest at Atlantic City, with the intention of using her to endorse Gray cosmetics if she wins. Mary breaks her engagement with Horace. When it looks as though Mary will win the contest, Hugo lures her home on the pretext that her father is ill, and she misses the contest. Chip and Mary return to Atlantic City, where they learn that the new Miss America has told the world that she owes her success to Gray’s cold cream, and with that Chip and Mary decide to wed. Cassandra Langer, Romaine Brooks (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin, 2015). Salomé. Directed by Charles Bryant and Alla Nazimova (uncredited). Nazimova Productions, 1923. Whitney Chadwick, Amazons in the Drawing Room. The Art of Romaine Brooks (Chesterfield, MA: Chameleon Books; Berkeley, CA: University of California, 2000) provides background.

104  New Woman, New Negro 50 Line from Paul Colin’s autobiography, quoted in Karen C.C. Dalton and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Josephine Baker and Paul Colin: African American Dance Seen Through Parisian Eyes,” Critical Inquiry 24 (Summer 1998): 920. 51 Bennetta Jules-Rosette, Josephine Baker in Art & Life: The Icon & the Image (ChampaignUrbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2007) is one of a number of recent studies on Baker, this one provides thorough, balanced coverage. 52 Dalton and Gates, p. 916. 53 Josephine Baker, Les Mémoires de Joséphine Baker, ed. Marcel Sauvage (Paris: Editions Correa, 1927), p. 149, quoted Dalton and Gates, p. 924. 54 Dalton and Gates, p. 934. 55 It was followed by sound pictures Zou Zou (1934) and Princesse Tam-Tam (1935). Katherine Groo, “Shadow Lives: Josephine Baker and the Body of Cinema,” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 54 (Spring 2013): 7–39, provides an extended discussion of her movies. 56 Anthea Kraut, Choreographing Copyright: Race, Gender and Intellectual Property in American Dance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016): 154–155. 57 Les Mémoires de Joséphine Baker, p. 146; quoted in Groo, p. 7.

4 Seeing in Black and White Resistance, Rhythm, Renaissance

Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin Goes to the Movies Harriet Beecher Stowe’s best-selling abolitionist novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly (1852) spawned innumerable theater productions throughout the second half of the nineteenth century including touring “Tom Shows,” loosely based on the original story and varying wildly according to audience, from moral reform dramas to blackface minstrel shows that perpetuated gross racial stereotypes.1 Between 1903 and 1927 it also inspired at least nine movies in the United States, making it the most filmed story of the silent era. Their cinematic portrayals of enslaved African American set in the 1850s exerted a forceful impact on audience perceptions of African Americans in the early twentieth century, an influence with which visual artists collectively had to struggle.2 The silent era was bookended by two surviving versions: Edison’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Slavery Days made in 1903 and Universal Studio’s two-hour extravaganza – advertised as “two years in the making” and “the greatest human drama ever screened” – made in 1927, just as The Jazz Singer ushered in talkies. In between D.W. Griffith made his epic The Birth of a Nation (1915), whose negative racial stereotypes exerted their effect throughout the teens and twenties as the film was perpetually shown. Working for Edison, Edwin S. Porter made the first moving picture of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1903. This one-reeler consisted of 14 “acts” each introduced with its own title (an early instance of their use) and performed on an individualized set consisting of a painted backdrop and a few props arranged in a shallow space. Here Porter was drawing upon the familiar trappings of stage productions to facilitate audience comprehension of an intricate story once unfolded over a 500-page novel, then in stage productions lasting an hour or more, and now a 15 minute moving picture devoid of dialogue. This is filmed theater: a bridge between the live performances that entertained audiences for decades and moving pictures just then evolving their own language and conventions. With the subtitle “Slavery Days” the movie established expectations of historical reality. While the original novel individualized the black characters who struggled to maintain their dignity in the face of harsh and immoral treatment, the stage and screen production reduced them to the stereotypes, here played by white actors in blackface. Two of Porter’s scenes in particular were often singled out for criticism. “Auction Sale of St. Clair’s Slaves” features black figures game playing and dancing (a common motif, appearing in many of the scenes) before

106  New Woman, New Negro their brethren take their turn on the auction block, making them appear ignorant, even inhuman in the face of tragedy. In “Tom Refuses to Flog Emaline,” the movie reduces Simon Legree’s punishment of Tom to a few token slashes while in the novel he was savagely beaten. Such scenes diluted the two primary motifs through which Stowe conveyed her unmistakable anti-slavery message: the savage cruelty that whites inflicted on slaves and the Christian virtue demonstrated by the African Americans in the face of that inhumanity. The closing film scene entitled “Tableau. Death of Tom” shows him in his dungeon-like cell, chained to the wall, near death. Then the angel appears and carries his soul to heaven, paralleling the earlier depiction of Little Eva’s death. But Porter did not leave it there, and tied the sentimental to the historic. As the figure of the angel dissolves she is replaced by a sequence of historic images of events related to the Civil War (1861–1865) projected on the wall: a vignette resembling Thomas Hovenden’s famous painting The Last Moments of John Brown (ca. 1884, de Young Museum); a Civil War battle, Lincoln emancipating the slave kneeling at his feet (à la Thomas Ball’s sculpture Emancipation Memorial), and the moment of reconciliation between North and South. Apparently done with magic lantern slides, these fleeting pictures provide a coda to the novel by inserting the events that occurred subsequent to its 1852 publication. While it would be a stretch to claim these final images as a happy ending, they do represent Porter’s effort to update the history by

Figure 4.1  Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Universal, 1927), Poster, 11 × 14 in. For Carl Laemmle production, Private Collection.

Seeing in Black and White 107 indicating the end of slavery and opening the door on the period of Reconstruction that followed. In 1927 Hollywood’s most famous and troubling depiction of slavery to date appeared in the form of Universal’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Figure 4.1). It claimed bragging rights from the casting of black actor James B. Lowe as Uncle Tom, but in fact he had only minimal screen time while his fellow slaves were all played by white actors in blackface. Convinced that audiences could only empathize with the suffering of a white woman, Stowe’s mixed-race Eliza was also played by a white actress. Unheard of sums were spent to create an elaborate planation on the studio lot, capture scenic footage on location along the Mississippi and make the famous scene of Eliza and her baby escaping across the ice floes a showstopper. Blacks strum banjoes, cavort together and generally look foolish. Technically following the original story line, director Harry Pollard managed to transform it into an entertaining adventure film lacking any trace of social consciousness.

Resisting Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) On March 3, 1915 what has been called the most racist movie ever made opened in New York. The Birth of a Nation had debuted in Los Angeles on February 8, and ten days later became the first feature film to be screened in the White House. It was not until the premiere at New York’s Liberty Theater, however, that the battle lines were drawn. While director D.W. Griffith kicked off an extensive publicity campaign that helped make it the first and one of the greatest box-office attractions in cinema’s history, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) led a massive demonstration protesting its dehumanizing depiction of blacks as ignorant and brutish. For almost three hours the movie follows two white families – the Northern Stonemans and the Southern Camerons – from the antebellum period through Civil War and Reconstruction. Employing white actors in blackface, Griffith moved beyond the familiar black caricatures drawn from minstrel shows and “coon” songs to create a far more extreme portrayal of them as “subhuman,” displaying “vicious bestiality” and “primitive sexuality.” In this he followed the lead of Baptist minister Thomas Dixon Jr., whose play The Clansman (1905) had a long run in the South, awakening audiences to the Black Peril that – according to him – threatened white womanhood and all of American civilization.3 The play and movie coincided with the most repressive and violent chapter in the history of race relations in the South between 1898 and 1915, culminating in the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and public lynchings of black women and men. Simultaneously, pseudoscientific theories circulated that purported to demonstrate the racial inferiority of blacks and justify segregation and racial hatred. These factors helped set the stage for the movie’s reception, complicated by the fact that mainstream audiences were seduced into accepting its perverted version of American history and ugly portrayal of a race of inferiors through Griffith’s unforgettable graphic imagery. Its flickering black and white images arguably catalyzed a generation of visual artists to mount their counterattacks in the form of still and moving pictures. W.E.B. Du Bois was the most vocal of the black leaders to urge the African American community to produce their own films in response to The Birth of a Nation. Before

108  New Woman, New Negro Du Bois had ever seen the movie and before Griffith even knew of Dixon’s work, a black female journalist in Oklahoma named Drusilla Dunjee Houston began planning a movie of her own. Having read Dixon’s The Leopard’s Spots (1902) – his prequel to The Clansman – she recognized its pernicious influence. Writing in secret, she prepared a blow-by-blow refutation of Dixon, a “flashing photo play” she hoped would be produced. The appearance of Griffith’s movie only flamed her resolve. “The story told by a powerful grapho-phone with pictures flashing,” she suggested in her prologue, “might be something new in moving pictures.” But her work never got to the screen, as she explained: The photoplay lay for long years, pushed aside by executive duties and also because the author knew that American literature was only catering to Topsy, Uncle Tom, and slap-stick minstrel Negro types. This screenplay represents an early attempt to refute not just the racist themes in Birth of a Nation but also an attack on all of Thomas Dixon’s novels and plays that contributed to the film, Birth of a Nation. In fact, as she later revealed, she kept her play a secret, fearing for her life and the safety of her family because the content violated the Sedition and Espionage Acts and would have incurred the wrath of the Ku Klux Klan active at the time in Oklahoma. Angered by the ongoing attention to the notorious film, she did however publish her call to set the historical record straight and concluded: “The Negro must produce plays to answer and undo the work of The Clansman.”4 Ubiquitous and popular, movies provided an important space of interracial power struggles. But throughout the period under discussion African Americans were relegated to watching movies containing demeaning racial images often in segregated spaces that, as Jacqueline Najuma Stewart asserts, made movie going for them an emotionally fraught and complex experience.5 In 1883 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled to allow state-legislated segregation in theaters, and the practice of separating audiences by race transferred over from vaudeville into the nickelodeons. In the Jim Crow South some theaters were designated as blacks-only. Though northern cities were not always formally segregated, theaters enforced these policies by admitting blacks only at certain less desirable times (late at night, often midnight), via separate entrances that led to the balcony (Figure 4.2) or in designated neighborhood theaters. It need hardly be said that these establishments were neither as numerous nor as well maintained as those for whites. It is important to take these factors into consideration as we endeavor to establish a dialogue between these products of the Euro-American movie establishment and African American filmmakers and fine artists who interrogated and challenged the limiting tropes associated with blacks in these powerful and popular cinematic vehicles. To mount their resistance, they followed Stowe’s lead and emphasized the humanity and cultural contributions of African Americans. Their counter-narrative focused on select themes here identified as shared by fine art and film: (1) documenting African Americans in non-racist and non-stereotyped roles, with an emphasis on religious faith and education; (2) serving country and family, including male military service; (3) making music, especially blues and jazz; (4) creating a distinct visual language for self-expression.

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Figure 4.2  Marion Post Wolcott, Negro Man Entering Movie Theater by “Colored Entrance,” 1939, photograph, 8.3 × 12 in. (image). LC-DIG-ppmsca-12888, Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

Documenting African Americans in Non-Racist and Non-Stereotyped Roles Bert Williams’ Lime Kiln Field Day Project Dozens of so-called race films – black-cast films produced independently for segregated African American audiences – were made during the first half of the twentieth century. Given the budgetary restraints that hindered production quality and the fact that they were made in fewer copies than mainstream films, only a small portion survives with many lost or badly deteriorated. With renewed attention to preservation, however, every now and then a long-lost movie is found and restored. At the Museum of Modern Art footage from perhaps the earliest surviving feature film with a black cast was rediscovered and studied: Bert Williams’ Lime Kiln Field Day Project.6 Broadway theatrical impresarios Klaw and Erlanger mounted the project but for reasons unknown they abandoned the seven reels of exposed film in postproduction (before it was edited and titled). It starred Jamaican-born Bert Williams, the most famous blackface comedian on Broadway before World War I, working with a white crew and black cast including Harlem-based entertainment pioneers Sam Lucas, Abbie Mitchell and J. Leubrie Hill (without the final credits it is nearly impossible to identify all the actors). Playing

110  New Woman, New Negro in blackface in the movie as he always did on stage, Williams provided a rare glimpse into the lives of middle-class black characters. Although MoMA curators have worked hard to reconstruct Lime Kiln, unless a script is discovered it may never be completed. But it was certainly intended as a romantic comedy in which Williams has his eye on an elegant lady played by Odessa Warren Grey but faces competition from two other suitors. During its 35–40 minutes it features domestic scenes, gatherings at a social club, and a fun-filled day at a fair. What’s especially remarkable is the glimpse it offers into everyday life: children and adults go to a fair and ride the carousel, they dress up for an evening out, and Williams and Gray have tender exchanges. The cast even performs the Cakewalk, a cultural practice that originated in slavery and became a standard feature of minstrel shows. Backstage footage reveals the interaction of the white crew with the black cast, including the application of Williams’ blackface. Even in its unfinished state, as film scholar Jan-Christopher Horak emphasizes, it provides us with a counter-narrative to confront the status quo.7

Oscar Micheaux Among the many race films that could be interpreted as correctives to The Birth of a Nation’s misrepresentations, Oscar Micheaux’s work emerges as the most successful for his ability to create a complex fiction that conveyed its social message via compelling pictorial effect. A pioneer in African American cinema, Micheaux challenged racial injustices beginning with his first film The Homesteader (1919, now lost) and continuing into the sound era. He was born in Metropolis, Illinois, close to the Kentucky border, and in 1900 headed to Chicago where he worked as a Pullman porter. When he saved enough money he bought land in South Dakota, where he developed a successful homestead. Next he tried his hand at writing and published three novels: The Conquest (1913), The Forged Note (1915) and The Homesteader (1917). Loosely based on his own experiences, they reveal him refashioning his biography to exemplify Booker T. Washington’s concept of racial uplift. In 1919 he formed his own firm, Micheaux Film and Book Company, where he directed his most highly regarded movies including Within Our Gates (1920) and Body and Soul (1925).8 Among his extensive output – both literary and cinematic – Within Our Gates is for me the one that addresses the range of sociopolitical issues raised by Griffith head on, and does so in the most visually compelling way. Released in 1920, it antedates the visual output of the Harlem Renaissance and offers important insights into the ways moving pictures could be used as a social weapon. Responding to The Birth of a Nation, it was far ahead of other movies in depicting rape and lynching, and in addressing stereotypes of blacks. For decades presumed lost, Micheaux’s early masterpiece was largely omitted from film history while Griffith’s movie dominated the field. The son of former slaves and a homesteader, Michaeux was a cinematic neophyte when he made Within Our Gates while Griffith brought to The Birth of a Nation almost eight years at Biograph, where he had made as many as 300 short movies. Within Our Gates, nonetheless, provides a lever to legitimize early Black cinema. “Crammed into 80 minutes is a complex plot of love, betrayal, murder, rape, lynching, gambling, miscegenation, racial uplift, white bigotry and black migration from the rural South to the urban North,” as historian W. Fitzhugh Brundage summarizes it. “The film is one of the earliest examples, and certainly the most ambitious extant example, of black appropriation of the emerging technology to contest representations

Seeing in Black and White 111 of African Americans in mass culture.” Black characters in The Birth of a Nation tend to be one-dimensional, either bestial or subservient. Micheaux’s African Americans display greater complexity, negotiating the promises and frustrations of black freedom and struggling to attain the dignity of the “New Negro” in the face of the demeaning restrictions of the Jim Crow era. In Within Our Gates the black preacher “Old Ned” grovels before the bigoted white establishment to elicit small donations for his congregation: “Yes’m. White folks is mighty fine,” he assures them. After leaving their presence he stares straight into the camera and then the intertitle reveals his self-reflections: “Again, I’ve sold my birthright. And for a miserable mess of pottage. Negroes and Whites – all are equal. As for me, miserable sinner, hell is my destiny.” Through this startling confession, the audience immediately apprehends Old Ned’s conflict to maintain an outward adherence to white domination while inwardly he tries to retain a modicum of pride. With a lifelong abhorrence of ministers who perpetrated hoaxes on their congregations, Micheaux shows him little mercy and strips his conflicts bare. Or consider Gus, the Negro rapist in The Birth of a Nation played by a white actor in blackface. On a rampage, he drives Flora (Mae Marsh) to jump off a cliff to escape his marriage proposal. Under Micheaux’s direction, by contrast, the brother of the plantation owner (Armand Girdlestone) attempts to rape the female protagonist (Sylvia Landry) but stops when he sees a scar on her breast that identifies her as his daughter. While Griffith relies on the stereotype of an ignorant, inhuman black incapable of self-restraint Micheaux throws the audience a curveball with his characterization of the attacker as a privileged and seemingly respectable white businessman. He reminds us of the historical fact that white on black sexual violence was far more common in the South than black on white. Another powerful moment occurs when a black tenant farmer is falsely accused of murder. The emotional scene where he and his wife are quickly lynched by a white mob that includes women and children highlights their sadism, an element that Griffith entirely omits.10 Micheaux’s fourth feature film troubles these matters further, including “a spectacular staging of the night ride of the Ku Klux Klan in The Symbol of the Unconquered [that] rivals the infamous equivalent in The Birth of a Nation,” as Janet Gaines argues, “even without the famous orchestral accompaniment of Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries.”11 “Micheux’s work, however, is not only important because it counters negative types, it also offers alternative narratives,” Gaines continues: “What kinds of stories should the new black entertainment tell? How could these stories demonstrate respectability and work as gripping narratives at the same time?”12 The hero concludes Within Our Gates with what amounts to Micheaux’s cinematic philosophy: “It is the message of each member of our race to help destroy ignorance and superstition.” He is calling for race solidarity and self-reliance. These new opportunity narratives displace the older fiction that had its origins in slave narrative. The question of alternative narratives would become important for fine artists too. What stories can be told in the easel paintings or murals, and how? At the outset of their careers Aaron Douglas and Jacob Lawrence trolled American history for any trace of historical African American figures and key events to depict. Earlier Henry Ossawa Tanner took another tack: he saw the need to look at contemporary, everyday life: intergenerational families, education, work and leisure.13 Educated in Philadelphia, Tanner was the only African American expatriate of his generation then working in Paris, from 1891 until his death in 1937. He was 9

112  New Woman, New Negro “a light-skinned black,” Albert Boime points out, “at a time when color differentiation functioned as an intra-group stratifier as well as a social signifier for the dominant white society.”14 Tanner’s motivation for embarking upon his series of genre pictures late in the nineteenth century was not dissimilar from that of Micheaux and other filmmakers a bit later: “to counter the negative stereotype of the black and to revive genre painting by seeking to transform its original function.” Tanner was deliberately positioning himself as an African American fine artist painting from personal experience, as is evident in his autobiographical statement (written in the third person) from the early 1890s: Since his return from Europe he has painted mostly Negro subjects, he feels drawn to such subjects on account of the newness of the field and because of his desire to represent the serious and pathetic side of life among them, and it is his thought that other things being equal, he who has most sympathy with his subject will obtain the best results. To his mind many of the artists who have represented Negro life have only seen the comic, the ludicrous side of it, and have lacked sympathy with and appreciation for the warm big heart that dwells within such a rough exterior.15 In traditional genre painting the Euro-American artist positions himself in a superior vantage point in relation to his subject in order to win middle-class approval. Tanner, on the other hand, identifies himself with the subject matter and thus subverts the original social intention of genre. He believed wholeheartedly that the work of art could sway public opinion and do serious social work. His Bagpipe Lesson, a picture he showed at Columbian Exposition, was part of a series focused on transmission of knowledge and mentoring by older man of a younger one. The Banjo Lesson (1893, Hampton University Museum) was another, praised by W.S. Scarborough, a classics scholar and then vice-president of the African Methodist Episcopal Church-sponsored Wilberforce University who visited Tanner in 1902: When The Banjo Lesson appeared many of the friends of the race sincerely hoped that a portrayer of Negro life by a Negro artist had risen indeed. They hoped, too, that the treatment of race subjects by him would serve to counterbalance so much that has made the race only a laughing-stock subject for those artists who see nothing in it but the most extravagantly absurd and grotesque. Following the teachings of his A.M.E. church, Tanner’s pictures promoted education and black uplift while opposing segregation. Black spokesmen W.E.B. Du Bois held Tanner up as a role model and his art the needed inspiration for his people “There is not a large colored church or school or lodge or corporation which could not and should not own a painting by Tanner,” W.E.B Du Bois wrote in May 1924 in The Crisis, and went on to speculate that “As a sheer investment it would be more valuable than government bonds. And to this why not add a group by Meta Fuller, a bust by May Jackson and an etching by Albert Smith?”16 In mid-1890s Tanner began to favor biblical themes remembered from his upbringing in a household headed by his father Benjamin Tucker Tanner, who had become a bishop and leading theologian of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Ordained

Seeing in Black and White 113 in 1858, he wrote a significant book entitled An Apology for African Methodism (1867) that offers a thorough account of the schism between the black and white Methodist churches. Founded in Philadelphia in 1816, the A.M.E. owed its origins to American racism and the need of black American to possess at least one church, Bishop Tanner wrote, “where the men of this despised race could hope to enjoy the liberty that is in Christ under a vine and fig tree where none could resist or make afraid.”17 His son’s paintings were born of this same deep personal sense of racial injustice. A mature, canonical work of 1923, Flight into Egypt (Figure 4.3) synthesized empirical observations made during his travels in North Africa and the Near East with his personal beliefs and reflections. Here is Tanner’s favorite Biblical subject: the Holy Family’s clandestine evasion of King Herod’s men. It was painted in 1923, when Micheaux was making movies expressive of black American lives. Tanner’s canvas focuses on the Holy Family’s attempt to escape religious persecution, which becomes in his hands a vehicle for ideas about personal freedom and the ongoing migrations of blacks from the American South to northern cities like New York and Chicago. Like the film director, the painter developed a highly personal style including the use of “Tanner blues,” complex layers of glazes and flat decorative surfaces. Their movies and paintings also represent their individual reactions to the central role of faith and the figure of the Minister in African American culture. Sympathetic to his father’s own vocation and bishopric within the A.M.E., Tanner

Figure 4.3  Henry Osawa Tanner, Flight into Egypt, 1923. Oil on canvas, 29 × 26 in. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY.

114  New Woman, New Negro strikes a respectful attitude towards the religious figure. By contrast Michaeux treated him as a fraud and ridiculed him in his early movies, in Within Our Gates and elsewhere. For both knowledge and enlightenment of the people are important, symbolized in Tanner’s painting by the lantern that establishes a strong beacon to illuminate the Holy Family’s path to emancipation but also points to the cinema’s dependence on projected images. Dramas centered on black families highlighted the power of religious faith in the face of adversity. Ten Nights in a Bar Room (1926) is one of four films produced by the Colored Players Film Corporation of Philadelphia (only two of which survive, the other being The Scar of Shame (1929)).18 It was based on a melodramatic novel of 1854 by Timothy Shay Arthur and was adapted to stage and then screen on multiple occasions. An accomplished theater actor, Charles Gilpin plays Joe Morgan, a former mill owner swindled out of his business by his old partner Simon Slade, who owns the bar where Joe spends his nights lost to drink. The bar is presented as a site of human sin and degradation, where drinking is only one of the panorama of vices taking place there including gambling, seducing innocent young girls, and many bar fights. It is during one of these brawls that Slade threw a glass at Joe and mistakenly hit his young daughter who had come to the bar to coax her father to come home. His daughter dies and Joe is nearly driven mad with grief. Playing the difficult role of a drunk (at the height of Prohibition (1920–1933)), Gilpin delivers a nuanced performance eliciting a balance of disgust and sympathy from the audience. But it’s his daughter who wins our hearts, demonstrating constant love and concern for her father in the face of his neglect and always saying her evening prayers even when he is not there to supervise her. It is she who sets him on the path to redemption through her deathbed entreaties. Joe reforms, runs for mayor and at the movie’s end learns he has won the election, proving that his daughter did not die in vain and the black man can attain salvation. The restored order of their modest home provides a foil to the evil bar, which at the movie’s climax is consumed by fire no one attempts to extinguish. Compelled by a scene he encountered in a Pentecostal Church in 1929, Archibald Motley Jr. (1891–1981) painted his Tongues (Holy Rollers) (Figure 4.4). Closely resembling a freeze frame from a movie, you can almost hear the singing and imagine the motion occurring before and after this moment in time. One by one the attendees are succumbing to the power of the spirit: a man with a cane in the lower right hopes for a cure while the woman in white – echoing the posture of the preacher – raises her arms and moves to the music as she speaks “in tongues.” The presence of the curtain framing the scene enhances the work’s performative aspect, and raises the question: is this a minstrel show, a church service, or – given the darkened surroundings – a movie theater? Then again it could suggest a synthesis of all these dimensions that make up the black experience in twenties America. Born in New Orleans, Motley spent most of his life in Chicago and trained at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He began his career in a conservative, classical mode, painting family members and friends in weighty, dignified portraits in the early 1920s. But shortly thereafter he began to produce scenes crowded with figures in motion that captured the spirit of the Jazz Age, whom we imagine swaying to the jazz of Duke Ellington or the blues of Bessie Smith. The reason for the transformation goes undocumented but likely paralleled the encounter with popular culture – music,

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Figure 4.4  Archibald Motley, Tongues (Holy Rollers), 1929. Oil on canvas, 29 1/4 × 36 1/8 in. Private Collection © Valerie Gerrard Browne, Chicago History Museum, Bridgeman Images.

dance and moving pictures – that was seminal for many of his contemporaries. Raised a Roman Catholic, Motley seems simultaneously fascinated and repulsed by what was to him a foreign mode of worship practiced by these wildly gesticulating figures. Historian of African Diaspora Davarian Baldwin explains the form of devotion Motley has captured: Before this, the dominant form of worship was a much more kind of reverent, particularly in large black churches of Chicago and other places, old line form of worship. But here, we have this more kind of working class hybrid form of worship that is being captured visually and taking shape. So, literally, you have the body swing in this piece as if meant to embody a new sonic articulation of black worship and spiritual affect.19 Motley provides a two-word coda to his image, emblazoned on the back wall of his church interior: “Jesus Saves.”

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Norman Films Some film companies were less prone to tackle racial discourse directly and more interested in providing audiences with thrills, laughs and romance that conveyed messages of morality and self-respect in the process. “There is not a white man in the cast, nor is there depicted in the entire picture anything of the usual mimicry of the Negro,” boasted the promotional literature for The Green Eyed Monster (1920). “This photoplay has been endorsed by the most prominent colored people of America as being the greatest picture of its kind.”20 This feature film was the first of seven produced by the Norman Film Manufacturing Company of Jacksonville, Florida. Their enormous popularity derived from a distinct combination of factors: outstanding production quality, all African American casts representing themselves for African American audiences, and a well-run business headed by Euro-American Richard Norman. Other white men made films with black actors, but studios such as Lubin made films like Rastus in Zululand (1910), The Zulu King (1913) and Coontown Suffragettes (1914) that relied on offensive racial stereotypes for comic effect. (Kalem Studios worked in a similar vein.) But Richard Norman was convinced that by presenting blacks in a more positive light he could turn a profit while simultaneously improving race relations. He was among the first to highlight the significant role of blacks in settling the American West in The Bull-Dogger and The Crimson Skull (both 1922).21 But since those films are now lost, let’s turn our attention to his only film to survive intact: The Flying Ace (1926, copy in the Library of Congress) that featured an “entire cast composed of colored artists” including Kathryn Boyd, touted as “the female daredevil.”22 Publicity material often gave her top billing and featured her in multiple stills (Figure 4.5). In one scene she is trapped in a burning plane in mid-flight and escapes by ascending a slender rope ladder dropped from the rescue plane overhead. Watching the film even today still puts viewers on the edge of their seats, and only later do we learn that she never left the ground, since all the aviation sequences were filmed on terra firma with painted backdrops. Throughout the film she alternates between dual personas – the dutiful daughter in a conservative dress with high collar and long sleeves versus the daring wouldbe aviator played in para-military jodhpurs and jacket – both of which challenge cinematic stereotypes of black women as either mammies or prostitutes. Her attractive dress, fashionably coiffed hair and proper behavior (she refuses to kiss one admirer because, as she confesses, she’s not in love with him) all contribute to her characterization as the black counterpart to the New Woman that rarely made an appearance on painted canvases. Blacks in the interwar years relied on photography more than painted portraits to convey their upward mobility. James VanDerZee was the go-to photographer in Harlem, especially for women in nursing, teaching and business who desired to project a self-image of participants in the modern workforce. Norman’s films takes that a step further, with the Kathryn Boyd character eager to learn how to fly a plane, and thus master the absolute latest technology. Still photographs and moving images – both reproducible and portable – worked in tandem, informing one another. Their projections of independent culturally refined and physically fit black bodies of the teens and twenties provided counterpoints to negative perceptions.

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Figure 4.5  Flying Ace, Norman Studios, 1926. Advertisement from the U.S. Herald, 7 × 9 in. Private Collection.

Serving Home and Country Buffalo Soldiers and Cowboys The black horse soldier was a subject in the visual arts long before John Ford directed Sergeant Rutledge (1960), the story of a black U.S. Cavalry sergeant (African American Woody Strode) leading an all-black regiment in the Old West.23 Bill Pickett was among those who starred as black cowboys in the silent movies of the 1920s. Linking them together was artist Frederic Remington. According to McBride and Wilmington, James Warner Bellah, the scriptwriter of Sergeant Rutledge and also the author of the stories on which Ford’s cavalry trilogy is based, got the idea for a film about black cavalrymen from a Remington painting.24 The Yale-educated Remington resided primarily in the East – in New Rochelle and Ogdensburg, NY – but made strategic visits to the West, including a trip in 1886 to follow the Geronimo Campaign for Outing: An Illustrated Magazine of Recreation. On that trip he made drawings to accompany Lt. John Bigelow Jr.’s account of his days with the 10th Cavalry black troopers in Arizona Territory. To survey the region for himself he boarded a train and by June 10 he recorded in his diary: “Got up late after a good night rest at Palace Hotel [Tucson],

118  New Woman, New Negro took camera went up to the detachment of 10th Colored Cavalry – took a whole set of photographs.” This marked the beginning of his exploration of a then-novel subject: the black soldier in the West. One incident Remington heard about second-hand became the subject of a picture. The 10th Calvary was pursuing Indians when the some of the black troopers were wounded including Cpl. Edward Scott, whom Lt. Powhatan Clarke carried to safety. Although the Louisiana-born officer previously held blacks in low regard, he now wrote to his mother: “Do not tell me about the colored troops there is not a troop in the U.S. Army that I would trust my life to as quickly as this K troop” of the 10th Cavalry. Remington traveled to Fort Huachuca to sketch Corporal Scott. Later when the artist received a commission from The Century Magazine he wrote to Clarke on April 11, 1888: “I am going to do the ‘Black Buffaloes.’” Using language common at the time he continued: “All I want is one good crack at your nigger cavalrymen and d[amn] your eyes I’ll make you all famous!” But further contact made him more sympathetic, and he admitted that “I like the Negro soldiers character as a soldier in almost every particular,” and in another entry wrote “These nigs are the best d[amned] soldiers in the world.” Upon returning home he gathered his impressions of the West into his nationally distributed article “A Scout with the Buffalo Soldiers,” which appeared in The Century for April 1889. Insisting on their bravery when fighting the Cheyenne and Apaches, Remington helped to elevate the reputation of these soldiers (and it is said put the term “Buffalo Solider” into widespread use).25 This coincided with the publication of Eadweard Muybridge’s book Animal Locomotion (1887), a milestone along the road to cinema that apparently impressed Remington greatly. Up until this point horses in full gallop had been represented with both front and back legs stretched full out. The success of the camera in recording what the naked eye could not perceive was capitalized on by Remington to impart a new realism to his work; he was reported to have “foresworn conventions and to (have) accepted the statement of the camera as his guide in the future.”26 So perhaps it’s fair to say that protocinematic devices informed Remington’s art, which in turn impacted the movies of Ford and others.

Spanish American War Black soldiers continued to make their way into the art and film of war, especially during the Spanish American War (1898) that reshaped not only global politics but also the history of cinema. Remington was one of a number of artists who headed for Cuba to record the arrival of the American naval fleet and soldiers including Theodore Roosevelt, a key figure in the conflict whose reputation was markedly enhanced by his involvement there. Roosevelt was already known as a rancher for his self-publicized experiences in the West through his book Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail, serialized in The Century in 1888 with pictures provided by Remington. When war with Spain broke out, Roosevelt resigned his post as Assistant Secretary of the Navy and formed a cavalry troop called the Rough Riders, composed of western cowboys and a few well-heeled New Yorkers. Present as a war correspondent, Remington painted a canvas entitled Charge of the Rough Riders at San Juan Hill (ca. 1899, Remington Art Museum, Ogdensburg, NY) showing Teddy Roosevelt leading the charge. But as the

Seeing in Black and White 119 artist well knew it was not “correct in every detail” since Roosevelt did not actually secure San Juan Hill, but instead participated in the supporting action on nearby Kettle Hill. Nor were they actually riding horses, as the terrain prohibited their use. In the meantime, however, Remington and at least one other artist – Fletcher C. Ransom – pictured the heroic black soldiers who fought alongside white soldiers in Cuba. Ransom’s two-page spread for Harper’s entitled “Forgotten Heroes: Troop C, 9th Calvary, Captain Taylor Leading a Charge at San Juan” (Figure 4.6) shows them just clearing the cusp of the hill and descending the other side.27 But it was politics as usual, and Roosevelt was determined that he and his Rough Riders would be center stage not only in still pictures but also in movies, pushing the black soldiers from public view. Edison, Biograph and others made films related to the war, often staged or re-enacted for the benefit of the camera (the limitations of which precluded filming during battles or any other moments of action). These short (less than 45 seconds) soundless movies effectively functioned as public relations for Teddy and his men: Roosevelt’s Rough Riders Embarking for Santiago (Edison, June 22, 1898) show them leaving from Tampa, Florida and Skirmish of the Rough Riders (Edison, 1899) provides a glimpse of them on site. So reality aside, pictures like Remington’s Charge of the Rough Riders at San Juan Hill that illuminated Roosevelt’s account of the war published in 1903 made Roosevelt the stuff of legends. But Remington, Ransom and others preserved some record of the black soldiers on San Juan Hill, quietly inserting them into the record.

Figure 4.6  Fletcher C. Ransom, Forgotten Heroes: Troop C., 9th Cavalry, Captain Tayler Leading a Charge at San Juan, 1898, print, 22 × 34 in. Private Collection.

120  New Woman, New Negro

Madame E. Touissant Welcome and Harlem’s Hellfighters A case could be made for Madame E. Touissant (sometimes spelled Toussaint) Welcome being the first female filmmaker of African American descent. She directed a film of black soldiers from World War I, produced in partnership with her husband, E. Toussaint Welcome, for the Toussaint Motion Picture Exchange.28 She also practiced photography and painting in her Harlem studio, and took out an advertisement in the magazine The Crisis and declared herself “The Foremost Female Artist of the Race.” The film they made in 1918 was entitled Doing Their Bit and focused on African American military participation in World War I. It was a 12-part movie in two reels, for which she is credited with one of the 12 segments. Like many films from this era, this one is lost or destroyed, but a related poster from her hand promoting the 1918 Liberty Loan campaign entitled We Are Doing Our Bit (Figure 4.7) sheds some light on the film’s content. A lithograph, it depicts a lone African American soldier engaged in close combat on the battlefields of Europe. We know that this patriotic poster circulated during the final months of World War I to encourage citizens to buy war savings bonds, but to which citizens was it intended to appeal? Although more than 200,000 black men and women served in the war, images of African Americans in the posters produced to support the war effort are rare. Since these bonds would have been sold in the Boston area, which had a relatively small African American population (only

Figure 4.7  Touissant Welcome, We Are Doing Our Bit, 1918, lithograph, 32 × 20 in. Massachusetts Historical Society.

Seeing in Black and White 121 45,000 out of almost 3,700,000 Massachusetts residents were black in 1915), it seems unlikely that this image was circulated in direct appeal to people of color. Whoever its intended audience, her poster was among those that stirred Americans to donate to the four great wartime bond drives that raised billions of dollars toward the enormous cost of the war. Based on the painting Charge of the Colored Divisions: Somewhere in France by Touissant Welcome (also presumed lost), the poster demonstrates only a rudimentary knowledge of modern combat. Her German soldier wears a spiked leather helmet even though by 1918 they would have worn steel helmets. And she shows a tattered flag even though no flags were known to fly over late-war battlefields. But there is a single telling detail: her African American soldier’s canteen cover bears the number “15.” This refers to one of the most famous American units in World War I, the segregated 369th U.S. Infantry Regiment. The original designation of the 369th had been the 15th Regiment, New York National Guard. The men of the 369th referred to themselves as “Rattlers” (the symbol of the ‘old 15th’ was a rattlesnake), but they were to become legendary as “Harlem’s Hellfighters.” Never intended as an accurate portrayal of the soldier or his uniform, her image documents his bravery confronting the enemy alone on a European battlefield. Born Jane (“Jennie”) Louise VanDerZee in Lenox, Massachusetts in 1884, she was the eldest of six children of John and Susan Brister VanDerZee. Jennie, her father, and two of her brothers moved to New York early in the twentieth century when she began a career in music and photography. In 1910 she married inventor and business entrepreneur Ernest Touissant Welcome and soon branched out into art and filmmaking. The same year, in the first issue of the NAACP journal The Crisis she published a full-page advertisement for the “Touissant Conservatory of Art and Music.” As proprietors of the Touissant Studio, Ernest and Jennie Touissant Welcome copyrighted her picture Charge of the Colored Division in August 1918, and as the Touissant Motion Picture Exchange they advertised a serial documentary about black military service in the war, Doing Their Bit. For the Touissant Pictorial Company, Mme. Touissant Welcome compiled A Pictorial History of the Negro in the Great War, 1917–1918, which featured her Charge of the Colored Division as the frontispiece.29 Jennie Louise Touissant Welcome, best known today as a pioneer African American filmmaker, created paintings, lithographs and movies meant to celebrate African American patriotism and their participation in the war effort. Her positive images of black New Yorkers, disseminated in a variety of media that reached large numbers of people, were powerful visual rebuttals to Griffith’s stereotypes. She also helped foster the career of her younger brother James VanDerZee, who got his start as one of Harlem’s leading photographers in 1916 when he set up his studio in his sister’s music conservatory. Although James VanDerZee lived until 1983 and photographed a young JeanMichel Basquiat, his most celebrated portraits of Harlem residents date from the 1920s and 1930s. At a time when blacks were pigeonholed as sharecroppers, domestic servants or worse, VanDerZee countered those denigrating caricatures. Alongside wellknown leaders such as the Black Nationalist Marcus Garvey, dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson and poet Countee Cullen he also photographed an upwardly mobile black middle class whose names are unfamiliar or unrecorded. Sometimes the brownstonelined streets of Harlem provided his backdrops, as in his canonical picture of man and woman in raccoon coats alongside their Cadillac roadster. At other times he worked

122  New Woman, New Negro in the studio, posing sitters against backdrops of his fashioning that conveyed respectability and pride of accomplishment. Ralph Ellison wrote that The Birth of a Nation “became the main manipulator of the American dream, for Negroes that dream contained a strong dose of such stuff as nightmares are made of.”30 VanDerZee’s black and white studio portraits provided at least one form of visual documentation to counteract those nightmarish visual images.

Making Music: Jazz and Blues Working with exclusively black companies allowed Micheaux and other directorproducers of race films to control the image their movies projected.31 Many of the initiatives of the twenties, by contrast, were products of what Ann Douglas termed “Mongrel Manhattan” – those who bridged black and white New York.32 Among them was Dudley Murphy, best known for his misconceived role in the avant-garde film Ballet Mécanique (1924). Long claimed by Fernand Léger, it is better comprehended as a joint effort with Murphy as its driving force (it was his eighth film) working in Paris with the film novice Léger and embracing input from artist Man Ray, writer Ezra Pound and composer George Antheil.33 Even this brief list of Murphy’s contributors provides some idea of the distinctive and multifaceted brand of media convergence he fashioned. Moving from Paris to New York and from the silent into the sound era, we follow his evolution from Ballet Mécanique in 1924 to 1929 when he made two films in Harlem that crossed the racial divide: St. Louis Blues with Bessie Smith and Black and Tan, based on Duke Ellington’s Black and Tan Fantasy.34 Murphy’s films have rightly been discussed in relation to musical inspiration. Moving beyond that film–music duality, this discussion maintains that the pictorial arts equally impacted his cinematic eye, and that he employed them to give his movies a sophisticated look that elevated his subject. His movies, in turn, fed the imaginations of visual artists working in Harlem creating artwork expressive of their experiences.35 In 1924 Opportunity magazine hosted a dinner at the Civic Club in New York with Alain Locke as master of ceremonies. This event is often considered the formal launching of the “New Negro” movement or Harlem Renaissance, the flowering of African American culture embracing literary, musical and theatrical arts. That same year painter Aaron Douglas arrived in Harlem to study with Winold Reiss, a Germanborn artist whose African-inspired designs often appeared in race publications (i.e., those intended for African Americans). His student Douglas went on to become one of the key visual artists of the Harlem Renaissance, thus ensuring the inclusion of visual arts in the movement. Around this time Reiss was working with silhouette imagery to create works such as African Fantasy (ca. 1925) that would have had resonance for black artists. From that moment forward a network of cultural relationships linked uptown and downtown New York and synthesized jazz music, still pictures and moving images. From youth Murphy was profoundly immersed in the visual arts. His personal journey meandered through electrical engineering, military aviation and Southern California mysticism before film. But the fine arts provided his grounding, for both parents were artists who had met while studying art in Paris in the 1890s. His father Hermann Dudley Murphy had a long career as a Boston-based academic painter. He fostered a home atmosphere in which his son absorbed both the visual arts and the mechanisms of self-promotion and patronage upon which his later

Seeing in Black and White 123 career would depend. His father’s work as a portraitist and decorative painter laid the foundations for his volatile son’s growing resolve to make visually and aurally innovative movies. Murphy Sr.’s friendship with Henry Ossawa Tanner during their student days in Paris – when he painted a sensitive portrait of his roommate (1891–1896, Art Institute of Chicago) – must also have contributed to his son’s openness to African American culture. To create his Harlem-based movies he moved from the realm of “art film” to that of a “high lowbrow,” to use Charlie Chaplin’s self-definition, eager to capture mass audiences and elite praise simultaneously. Besides straddling the highbrow / lowbrow divide, the other line that was being crossed in New York City in the 1920s was the color line. African Americans in the 1920s were on the move as part of the Great Migration from South to North, and New York’s uptown neighborhood of Harlem was becoming a mecca. It might have taken white Manhattanites a very long time to discover what was going on at the north end of their island, as Ann Douglas explains, were it not for a few adventurous go-betweens. Carl Van Vechten – writer, photographer and flâneur – served as liaison between Black Harlem and White Downtown New York. Born in Iowa, he moved to Manhattan and the more time he spent there the more interested he became in Harlem, where spirited nightclubs were thriving during Prohibition. Miguel Covarrubias shows him in bust-length – blond-haired and debonair – while Florine Stettheimer portrayed him in his library, surrounded by books and his beloved cats (1922, Beinecke Library, Yale University) with a view to Broadway theater district out the window. In 1926 Van Vechten published his novel with the incendiary title Nigger Heaven, a slang term for a theater’s segregated balcony.36 A best seller, the book brought Harlem to broad public attention even as it precipitated vigorous protests and split the black community. W.E.B. Du Bois derided it as “an affront to the hospitality of black folk and to the intelligence of white,” and “cheap melodrama” while poet Langston Hughes, widely regarded as Van Vechten’s protégé, defended it.37 At issue was the question of who should portray Harlem, and the differences between black and white perspectives on its character and mission. With his entrée into Black New York facilitated by Van Vechten, white moviemaker Murphy was eager to add his filmic interpretation to the mix. “I felt,” Murphy wrote, “I must capture this excitement in film.”38 In June 1929 Murphy produced St. Louis Blues, a cutting edge sound film initiating the canon of jazz and blues films set in Harlem. It is valued, in part, as the only known film footage of the great blues singer Bessie Smith. During the Harlem Renaissance, a blues singer was the “poet laureate” of African America. “Successful singers such as Smith lived the blues,” as Margaret Vendryes observes, “and in performance enacted the words they sang through their gesturing bodies.”39 All that translated into Murphy’s film, dominated by her forceful presence. On screen for most of this 15 minute short, she demonstrates a range of her vocal trademarks: a voice that evokes joy and pain, one that sounds like an open trumpet and sinks and soars with the lyrics. Hers is a commanding performance, the capturing of which was a remarkable feat in the early days of the new medium of sound film. Visually it is arresting, especially if we compare it to Al Jolson’s in The Jazz Singer (1927), where he appeared two years earlier in blackface. Murphy achieved what no one else at the time had: he made a jazz film featuring a black artist. The movie’s minimal story line opens in a hotel room, where Smith confronts her boyfriend Jimmy cheating with another woman, referred to as a “high yeller” girl. It then moves to the café bar, where Smith sings her heart out after Jimmy leaves her. Here “Murphy’s efforts to construct natural cinematic performances pushed

124  New Woman, New Negro him to integrate music and narrative as fully as possible.”40 Harlem Renaissance artists gravitated to this same subject matter and setting, in ways that parallel, intersect with or inspired Murphy’s widely circulating film. Archibald Motley’s crowded dance floor scene entitled Blues was painted in 1929, the year of the movie’s release. Palmer Hayden’s more open composition Jeunesse (n.d., watercolor), by comparison, allows the skills of this black couple to shine. Hayden could have seen such dancing at the Savoy, which was Harlem’s most famous jazz club at the time. More than a dozen artists from this era referenced African Americans dancing. Their still images reveal black bodies inspired by music we cannot hear, but which is palpable in the picture’s color, lines and forms. Both painters and filmmaker were immersed in this visualization of the blues, but Murphy was able to take it a step further, utilizing the latest technology to create a movie soundtrack of incredible power. Jazz was the subject of a groundbreaking article that appeared in a special issue of the Survey Graphic magazine devoted to Harlem. Referring to jazz as “a tonic for the strong and a poison for the weak,” Winold Reiss illustrated J.A. Rogers’ article. Around the same time Douglas’ Play De Blues (1926) created images to appear with Langston Hughes’ poem “Misery” in Opportunity Magazine. Rendered in deep blue in an art deco silhouette style, it depicts a piano player opposite a figure dancing and singing the blues. It appeared above Hughes’ words: “A good woman’s cryin’/ for a no good man.” Clearly erotic, Douglas’ image gives visual form to the blues. He wants us to experience the sounds of percussion and horn. Douglas’ visual style will find echoes in Murphy’s film. African American women and men gathered in clubs to dance and interpret the music, as depicted in Charles Alston’s Lindy Hop at the Savoy (late 1930s). Although this popular entertainment mecca would have been packed with bodies doing the latest popular dances, Alston isolates one couple on the dance floor. This motif of a single dancing African America couple becomes like a hieroglyph, a shorthand reference for the Harlem Blues scene. They gyrate, swing and bounce to the music while the lyrics tell a story of love and loss: the quintessential blues. This motif finds its counterparts in Murphy’s St. Louis Blues. Another important delineator of Harlem was Mexican artist Miguel Covarrubias, who was Murphy’s frequent guide clubbing in Harlem. In 1923 the young Covarrubias moved from Mexico City to New York, where he soon earned a reputation as caricaturist. Immediately fascinated with the Harlem scene, he produced many drawings evoking its nightlife, which Vanity Fair published as satirical sketches. Later he compiled 67 images into a book that appeared in 1927 as Negro Drawings.41 In many of the drawings Covarrubias treats his subjects like objects of folk culture he discovered in the black neighborhoods. They depict various “types” – flappers, musicians, dancers, socialites, blues singers, waiters – the same cast of characters who inhabit Murphy’s Harlem movies. Covarrubias’ renderings move between low caricature and modernist idioms. They speak to the nearly simultaneous cultural rebirths taking place in Harlem and Covarrubias’ post-Revolutionary Mexico. As the creation of a foreign born artist who was neither Euro- nor African American, they are hybrids that negotiate back and forth between those two worlds. Coincident with the publication of Covarrubias’ Negro Drawings in 1927 his associate Duke Ellington co-wrote the tune Black and Tan Fantasy with his trumpet specialist James “Bubber” Miley, which became an instant success. A composer, pianist and big band leader, Ellington was at the beginning of his 50-year career but already acclaimed for his inventive use of orchestral elements. The emerging medium of radio helped bring him to national prominence, as his band broadcasted on CBS

Seeing in Black and White 125 Radio from the Cotton Club in Harlem. People everywhere could hear him directing his band to convey a distinct story and mood. Already immersed in jazz, Murphy prepared to make his next movie featuring Ellington. Like the voice of Bessie Smith, Ellington was able to make his instruments do strange and unexpected things that created novel sounds. While capturing his music with the new “talkies” technology, Murphy also looked to African American and modern art to invigorate his jazz movie, as exemplified by these visual juxtapositions and collaborations. Completed in November 1929, the movie Black and Tan featured far more innovative pictorial motifs than St. Louis Blues, although it too relies on a melodramatic plot.42 The movie opens with a rehearsal of the title tune, which is interrupted with low comedy of the movers coming to repossess the piano. The action rapidly shifts to the nightclub, where the dance numbers fill the screen with Cubist geometries and expressionist forms such as the scene with the reflective floor. Five tuxedo-clad men of ascending height perform a dance, appearing in strict linear formation on a mirror-like floor. Although they do nothing to advance the “plot,” the effect is visually arresting. But as a filmic representation of race, this motif possesses a degree of ambiguity – of in between-ness – that would allow the director to navigate the black/white divide, much as Covarrubias had done in his Negro Drawings. Fredi Washington then enters and begins her frantic shimmying dance, which grows increasingly demonic, as suggested by the sudden shot from below the glass floor of her gyrating movements, creating Dadaist disorientation. She then becomes dizzy, her physical state echoed in the patterns on the wall behind her. But as we know from the opening scene, she has a heart condition and shouldn’t be dancing. She inevitably collapses – her face, arms and sparkling headpiece reflected in the floor, creating an unsettling vision. Next we shift to Fredi’s death chamber where the compressed space, chiaroscuro effects and crowd of people, combined with the unceasing beat of the brass instruments is disorienting in its intensity. When she asks the ensemble to play the title song they comply and Black and Tan Fantasy slowly turns into a funeral march. Then she dies and Ellington’s blurred features fill the screen and fade away with the music. Murphy relied on visual repetitions at various points in the film to further destabilize the viewer’s experience, such as we see in his multiplication of the images of Duke Ellington. In Black and Tan Murphy proved himself to be one of Chaplin’s “high lowbrows,” combining hot jazz, enticing showgirls and a sentimental story line with nearly abstract visual sequences that have no other rationale but pure visual pleasure. Here he crowds the screen with the repletion of trumpeters. Throughout the 15 minutes of film, he constantly improvises in the manner of jazz musicians, such as in the scene of repeating trumpeters. Improvisation and repeating visual forms will have their echoes in the work of Aaron Douglas, exemplified by his 1934 mural Aspects of Negro Life: Song of the Towers (Figure 4.8). Murphy’s biographer considers it an oddity that he puts such emphasis on the visual in a film ostensibly foregrounding music. Yet that is precisely his aim, to craft a format where the music was given visual form. Directors who successfully incorporate jazz into their films are rare. But as film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum argues, Black and Tan – made at the onset of sound film – demonstrates the exciting potential for synthesizing film and jazz. Painters like Motley and Alston created twodimensional images of black figures and made them move to sounds we cannot hear but only feel. Maximizing the potential of the new talking pictures, Murphy took it one step further. Pushing Duke Ellington’s orchestra into the background, he gave the dancers center stage but maintained the linkage between the two. The film Black and

126  New Woman, New Negro

Figure 4.8  Aaron Douglas, Aspects of Negro Life: Song of the Towers, 1934, Oil on canvas, 9 × 9 ft. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, New York, NY.

Tan pairs innovative visual strategies deployed by Harlem Renaissance artists with African American jazz, raised to a more integrated and sophisticated level than his previous efforts. Harlem’s cultural leaders criticized the work of Murphy, Covarrubias and especially Van Vechten, even as they recognized the oversized role these outsiders played in the promotion of African American music, literature and the arts. And that is precisely what Du Bois found so troubling: “the fact that one well-connected white man [such as Van Vechten] could alter the course of a movement, just by writing some [books and] articles and making some introductions.” This has been interpreted as proof of black artists’ isolation and powerlessness in the 1920s and 1930s. It’s also possible to see it as evidence of the fruitful collaborations that occurred between white and black artists. Ann Douglas’ contention that a “Mongrel Manhattan” led to a literary Renaissance can be extended to the visual arts, when painters and filmmakers helped bring African American folk and popular art briefly but irrevocably into the mainstream.43 Working in a medium dependent upon teamwork and intent on expanding film’s interdisciplinary boundaries even further, Dudley Murphy’s movies of the late twenties operated as a nexus for converging media of visual arts, music, dance and literature.

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Creating a Distinct Visual Language for Self-Expression Like Micheaux, leading artist of the Harlem Renaissance Aaron Douglas struggled to create a personal visual language to narrate the history of Black America seen through the eyes of a black artist. In the early twenties his art evidenced a reliance on generic Africa. But his 1927 drawing of Nobosodrou for the cover of Opportunity – as Richard Powell notes – signaled his shift to an Africa “where pride was signified in an uplifted head and anatomical elongation.”44 Along with the masks and other motifs borrowed from the arts of Africa the visual style he evolved consisted of three essential elements: reduction of figures into basic geometric shapes that is usually credit to a reliance on Cubism; sleek silhouettes with slit eyes related to the arts of Africa; and concentric circles surrounding important elements of the picture. At the height of his powers in 1934 Douglas was commissioned to paint murals for the 135th Street branch of the New York Public Library under the sponsorship of the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), a government funded initiative that ran from December 1933 to June 1934 and was precursor to the Works Progress Administration (WPA). For that space – what is today the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture – he painted a four-panel chronological cycle to narrate Aspects of Negro Life: The Negro in an African Setting; An Idyll of the Deep South; From Slavery Through Reconstruction; and its finale, Song of the Towers. Given the social realist style and bald-faced celebrations of white America that prevailed in the majority of WPA murals, Douglas’s panels stand out as original and provocative, and have been analyzed in multiple contexts from African Art and Cubism to jazz music. Here we explore Aspects of Negro Life through the lens of cinema, which further illuminate this remarkable cycle. Particular motifs can be singled out for their resonance with the imagery of motion pictures, especially those found in Song of the Towers. That final and most epigrammatic panel of the series features at its compositional center a saxophonist raising high his right arm holding his instrument. He stands on the cogs of a wheel between two skyscrapers that represent New York, the northern urban center to which people from the rural South and Caribbean migrated in large numbers after World War I. It conveys a message of hope: the creativity and freedom possible for the “New Negro.” It anticipates a specific visual symbol later employed in film, as Powell notes: All three representatives of a twentieth-century African-American experience [in this panel] are depicted by Douglas as standing upon, running on top of, or having fallen off a huge cogwheel, the same symbol of an industrial rat race that Hollywood legend Charles Chaplin would employ in his 1936 film, Modern Times.45 (And, he might have added, by Diego Rivera in his response to the Ford Motor plant in his Detroit Industry Murals, 1933.) Between 1923 and 1926 Lotte Reiniger worked painstakingly in her Berlin studio on her remarkable animated film entitled The Adventures of Prince Achmed, based on tales from One Thousand and One Arabian Nights. The result is visually arresting feature-length movie all done in black silhouettes against backgrounds of different colors and patterns. Fashioning each figure with the dexterous handling of her scissors, she had to distinguish the players with subtle variations in their profile and manner of

128  New Woman, New Negro movement. She gave the ancient fairytale a modern spin in the elegantly stylized forms of the figures moving rhythmically across geometrically patterned, exotic interiors and tropical landscapes. Seeing these magical forms animate the screen, parallels to the work of Winold Reiss and Aaron Douglas seem unavoidable. Given the German origins Reiss shared with Reiniger, his eclecticism of sources and involvement in media spectrum embracing graphics, mosaics, mural painting and Art Deco design he would certainly have known of this pioneering animated film by his countrywoman, and visual evidence suggests that he passed the reference on to his young student Douglas. Consider the scene in the movie where Achmed raises his arm to hold high his magic lantern, surrounded by concentric circles (Figure 4.9). Reiniger’s motif finds unmistakable parallels in the male silhouette in the center of Douglas’ Son of the Towers, whose trombone is similarly ringed by repeating circles. As an art form silhouettes have a long history, from the ancient art of shadow plays (especially those of China and Indonesia) to a mode of portraiture popular with the middle class from the late eighteenth century onward in the hands of Auguste Edouart and others. Its reductive format with emphasis on outline is a potent metaphor for stereotype, a fact that contributed to contemporary artist Kara Walker’s adoption of it as her signature style. As used by Reiniger for this tale of exoticism and the dark-skinned other, it would have had further resonance for artists working in Harlem. Revealing also are the distinctive narratives of American history that Douglas (and subsequently Jacob Lawrence) chose to tell. A close reading of the third panel From Slavery to Reconstruction (Figure 4.10) suggests that it too was embedded in

Figure 4.9  Adventures of Prince Achmed. Directed by Lotte Reiniger, 1926, Screenshot.

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Figure 4.10  Aaron Douglas, Aspects of Negro Life: From Slavery to Reconstruction, 1934. Oil on canvas, 5 ft. 11 in. × 11 ft. 7 in. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, New York, NY.

the debates over Griffith and the power of cinema. Three discrete motifs inhabit this panel, united by the foreground strip of earth out of which sprout the cotton plants or “slave crop.” Reading from right to left, Scene 1 shows agitated slaves in shadowy silhouettes in the middle distance with the darker-toned more forceful triumph-playing figures before them: a visual strategy to indicate the temporal transition from despair to celebration with emancipation. Concentric circles surround a document, understood to represent the Emancipation Proclamation that was read to great jubilation to gatherings of African Americans throughout the land on January 1, 1863. Dominating Scene 2 is a male leader standing at the center of the panel, his upright form extending above all the other figures in the composition. With his back to us he gestures toward a building on a distant hill – the U.S. Capitol with its distinctive dome – and in his left hand holds a sheet of paper. Again Douglas composes the circles like a target, the paper identified as a ballot signifying their hard-won right to vote. Scene 3 is the Reconstruction South in the year 1877, when federal troops (seen here as faint silhouettes) were withdrawn from the region, signifying the government’s unwillingness to protect the rights of black citizens. The departing Union soldiers are dwarfed by forceful hooded figures on horseback: the Ku Klux Klan spreading white supremacism.46 In this single panel Douglas compresses the same historic time span conveyed during almost three hours by The Birth of a Nation. More specifically, his decision to devote more than half of the precious space of this panel to the Reconstruction era ties him to Griffith and our discussion. Reconstruction (1863–1877, from the Emancipation Proclamation to the withdrawal of federal troops from the South) was one of the most controversial and least understood periods in American history. During that time Radical Republicans passed the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, granting blacks the same rights to citizenship, suffrage and legal protections that whites enjoyed. In his groundbreaking book Black Reconstruction in America (1935) W.E.B. Du Bois described it as the period when “the slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.”47 But what blacks and Northerners saw as progress Southerners like

130  New Woman, New Negro Griffith interpreted as upheaval, and populated his film with negative caricatures: blacks threatening white womanhood, elected black senators wreaking havoc on the government and hooded Klansmen seeking justice. Working out the historic program for his mural, Douglas needed to respond to Griffith’s provocation. But with few canonical events, recognizable heroic leaders or associated locations, Reconstruction did not easily lend itself to positive visual representation.48 One overlooked source is Mexican muralist Diego Rivera in his mural series for New York’s New Workers’ School (now destroyed and known only in black and white photographs) begun in June and completed December 1933.49 Art historians often link African American artists to Rivera through his infamous murals at Rockefeller Center. But after that debacle he used the money Rockefeller had paid him to paint a series of 21 fresco panels together titled Portrait of America. Fashioning his own version of American history, he depicted not only the Civil War but also its aftermath, combining a positive view of the ideals Reconstruction with the horrors of the postwar South. In one frescoed panel he combined the macabre specter of hooded Klansman and black men lynched and burned with political leaders of the day: Benjamin Wade, Thaddeus Stevens, Charles Sumner appear in the foreground with their seminal texts. Sympathetic to the Marxist politics of the New Workers’ School and eager for the opportunity to see murals by the renowned Rivera, Douglas undoubtedly viewed his Portrait of America. Its Reconstruction panel inspired Douglas as he conceived his Aspects of Negro Life to feature this moment in American history with little trace in the work of the WPA, but that had cast a strong shadow from The Birth of a Nation. In 1925 Aaron Douglas wrote to Langston Hughes making a plea to embrace the full spectrum of black cultural experience that constituted an aesthetic blueprint for the Harlem Renaissance and beyond. His letter coincided with the release of Oscar Micheaux’s Body and Soul. “Sing, dance it, write it, paint it,” he urged, and within a few years may well have wished to add the postscript “film it.”

Notes 1 The website “Uncle Tom’s Cabin on Film” provides comprehensive survey of the various versions, see http://utc.iath.virginia.edu/onstage/films/fihp.html, consulted June 21, 2018. 2 Jo-Ann Morgan, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” as Visual Culture (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2007) provides a comprehensive overview of the novel’s presence in nineteenth century fine art and popular culture. 3 The Leopard’s Spots (1902) was the first of what became Thomas Dixon Jr.’s Reconstruction era trilogy that would also include The Clansman (1905). Synthesizing these two novels, Dixon’s play The Clansman (1905) began its long run in the South that year. See Leon F. Litwack, “The Birth of a Nation,” in Mark C. Carnes, Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies (New York: Henry Holt, 1996), pp. 136–141. 4 Peggy Brooks-Bertram, “Drusilla Dunjee Houston,” Women Film Pioneers Project. Online, consulted August 5, 2017. https://wfpp.cdrs.columbia.edu/pioneer/drusilla-dunjeehouston-2/. 5 Jacqueline Najuma Stewart, “Race Movies: A Patchwork History,” Pioneers of African American Cinema Film Notes (2015), p. 31. 6 Seven reels of unexamined film that languished for decades in the film archives of Museum of Modern Art have been studied, and were released in 2014. Nsenga Burton, “Bert Williams: Lime Kiln Club Field Day,” San Francisco Silent Film Festival Blog, consulted May 4, 2017. http://silentfilm.org/archive/bert-williams-lime-kiln-club-field-day. 7 Jan-Christopher Horak, “Bert Williams Discovery at MoMA,” UCLA Film & Television Archive Blog, December 5, 2014, consulted July 20, 2018, www.cinema.ucla.edu/blogs/ archival-spaces/2014/12/05/bert-williams-discovery-moma.

Seeing in Black and White 131 8 Micheaux is often cast as an outsider from Chicago who was operating on the fringes of the Harlem Renaissance, in a different cultural sphere entirely. Charles Musser offers his perspective on the matter: “In background, outlook and artistic results, Micheaux was at odds with the shapers of the movement. David Levering Lewis suggests that Charles Johnson wanted “to redeem, through art, the standing of his people. James Weldon Johnson and Alain Locke ‘both wanted the same art for the same purpose – highly polished stuff, preferably about polished people, but certainly untainted by racial stereotypes or embarrassing vulgarity. Too much blackness, too much streetgeist and folklore – nitty-gritty music, prose and verse – were not welcome.’ Neither was Micheaux. He was to plebeian, too crude, and even too propagandistic. The Harlem Renaissance celebrated its Phi Beta Kappa scholars from prestigious schools. Micheaux was an autodidact.” Pearl Bowser, Jane Gaines and Charles Musser, Oscar Micheaux and His Circle: African-American Filmmaking and Race Cinema in the Silent Era (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2001), pp. 127–128. 9 W. Fitzhugh Brundage, “Why I’ll Watch Oscar Micheaux’s Within our Gates Until I Wear it Out,” Perspectives on History, September 1, 2010, consulted April 4, 2017. www.historians. org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/september-2010/why-ill-watchoscar-micheauxs-within-our-gates-until-i-wear-it-out. 10 The five-disc boxed set from Kino Classics entitled Pioneers of African American Cinema is the most comprehensive source for studying these amazing films. Charles Musser’s “Race Cinema and the Color Line,” in its Film Notes pamphlet, pp. 6–29, discusses Micheaux and others. 11 Bowser, Gaines and Musser, p. 70. 12 Bowser, Gaines and Musser, p. 70. 13 Morgan, pp. 166–204. 1 4 Albert Boime, “Henry Ossawa Tanner’s Subversion of Genre,” The Art Bulletin 75 (1993): 415. 15 Handwritten statement in the files of the Pennsylvania School for the Deaf, quoted Boime, p. 419. 16 Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, “Henry Ossawa Tanner: Modern Spirit,” Transitions 107 (2012): 162–163. 17 Boime, p. 417. 18 Both movies can be viewed on Pioneers of African-American Cinema. Directed by Richard Norman, Richard Maurice, Spencer Williams and Oscar Micheaux (New York: Kino-Lorber, 2016). 5 disc DVD set. 19 The full transcript of his insightful commentary can be found at https://whitney.org/ WatchAndListen/1256, consulted May 17, 2017. 20 John Duke Kisch, Separate Cinema: The First 100 Years of Black Poster Art (London: Reel Art Press, 2014), p. 28. 21 Allison Graham and Sharon Monteith, ed. The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, v. 18 Media (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), pp. 322–324 and Separate Cinema, 28–31 provide background. 22 Opening credit stated “entire cast composed of colored artists;” copy on the five-disc set Pioneers of African American Cinema that includes the only surviving reel of the Norman film Regeneration (1923) in a badly degraded state to demonstrate the tragic loss of these films and the need for preservation. 23 Although Strode played the lead part, he was only given third billing. 24 Joseph McBride and Michael Wilmington, John Ford (London: Seeker & Warburg, 1974), 164, cited in Edward Buscombe, “Painting the Legend: Frederic Remington and the Western,” Cinema Journal 23 (1984): 14. 25 John Langellier,“Remington’s Buffalo Soldiers,” True West (September 4, 2011). http://truewest magazine.com/remingtos-buffalo-soldiers-2/, consulted June 22, 2018. 26 Buscombe, p. 19. 27 Harper’s Weekly 42 (October 15, 1898): 1012–1013 (centerfold, 22 x 16 in.). It is said to be an engraving after a painting, but so far I have not located the painting. 28 Morgan, Kyna; Aimee Dixon. “African-American Women in the Silent Film Industry.” In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds., Women Film Pioneers Project. Center for Digital Research and Scholarship. New York: Columbia University Libraries, 2013,

132  New Woman, New Negro

29

30 31 32 33 34 35 36

37 38 39 40 41 42

43 44 45 46 47 48 49

https://wfpp.cdrs.columbia.edu/essay/african-american-women-in-the-silent-film-industry/ #citation Consulted April 2, 2018. We Are Doing Our Bit (1918; lithograph, 81 x 56 cm, [New York] Touissant Studios [1918], poster advertising bonds for Commonwealth Liberty Loan Committee, Boston, in the collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society. Their website provides the most complete discussion of the work, www.masshist.org/object-of-the-month/september-2014, consulted August 6, 2017. Quoted Litwack, p. 141, no source given. Bowser, Gaines and Musser, p. 128. Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), pp. 287–291. Susan Delson, Dudley Murphy: Hollywood Wild Card (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), pp. 41–68. The movies St. Louis Blues and Black and Tan – each 15 minutes long – can be viewed on YouTube. My work on Murphy was advanced before I discovered Richard Powell’s insightful discussion of his “race films” in relation to Aaron Douglas. See Richard J. Powell, “Paint that Thing: Aaron Douglas’s Call to Modernism,” American Studies 49 (2008): 107–119. The term “Nigger Heaven” was an analogy for Harlem – as one of his characters explains: “Nigger Heaven! That’s what Harlem is. We sit in our places in the gallery of this New York theatre and watch the white world sitting below in the good seats in the orchestra. Occasionally they turn their faces up towards us, their hard, cruel faces, to laugh or sneer, but they never beckon.” Amy Helene Kirschke, Aaron Douglas. Art, Race, & the Harlem Renaissance (Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 1995), pp. 47–49 for additional insights on Van Vechten. Dudley Murphy, “Murphy by Murphy,” memoir, 1966, 61–62, Murphy Family Collection, quoted in Delson, p. 88. Margaret Vendryes, “Shake that Thang: Dancing Figures and Figures That Dance in African American Art,” The Visual Blues, ed. Natalie A. Mault (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2014), 12. Delson, p. 90. Miguel Covarrubias, Negro Drawings (New York and London: A.A. Knopf, 1927). Film Scenario for Black and Tan Fantasy: The opening scene finds Duke Ellington in his apartment rehearsing his “Black and Tan Fantasy” for a club date with trumpeter Arthur Whetsol until interrupted by two men from the piano company, sent to repossess his piano for non-payment. Dancer Fredi Washington bribes the movers with a bottle of gin into telling her boss no one was home. Duke tells Fredi that they can’t take the job at the club because of her heart condition, which brings on faintness and causes her to see multiple images. Brushing his objections aside, she insists on performing her dance and collapses on stage. A chorus of other dancers is brought on, but Duke stops the band in the middle of their number so they can be with Fredi on her deathbed. She requests them to play the “Black and Tan Fantasy” as she slips away. Ann Douglas, pp. 303–345. Richard J. Powell and David A. Bailey, Rhapsodies in Black: The Art of the Harlem Renaissance (London and Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), p. 29. Powell and Bailey, Rhapsodies in Black, p. 24. A useful breakdown of the panel is provided in: Melissa Burlovich, “Aspects of Negro Life,” e-Vision 4 (2004), www.jmu.edu/evision, consulted August 8, 2017. W.E.B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America: 1860–1880 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1935), p. 30. Winslow Homer was a marked exception, returning to Virginia in the 1870s and exploring the lives of blacks after Emancipation. Diego Rivera, Portrait of America, with an explanatory text by Bertram D. Wolfe (New York: Covici Friede, Inc., 1934).

Timeline

1893 Edison’s “Black Maria,” the world’s first movie studio, opened in February in East Orange, NJ. Its first production: Fred Ott’s Sneeze, running a few seconds, recording an employee sneezing. At the World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago: Working for Edison, Laurie Dickson produced the Kinetoscope, a peep-show device for viewing moving pictures on celluloid film. A Kinetoscope parlor was on view. Henry Ossawa Tanner exhibited The Banjo Player. Gilded Age painters and architects H.H. Richardson, Frederick Law Olmsted, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Stanford White, John La Farge and Louis Comfort Tiffany had a strong presence there. Mary MacMonnies’ mural Primitive Woman hung opposite Mary Cassatt’s Modern Woman in the Woman’s Building.

1894 New York’s first Kinetoscope peep-show opens at 1155 Broadway.

1895 Lumière Brothers (Louis and Auguste) Cinematographe had its debut in Paris at the Grand Café, Blvd. des Capucines, December 28.

1896 Debut of Edison’s Vitascope at Koster and Bial’s Music Hall, New York City, located on 34th St. at Herald Square, now the site of Macy’s department store.

1897 Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight was filmed; 11 reels of footage shot. Originally running for approximately 100 minutes, it was the longest film released to date.

134 Timeline

1898 Spanish-American War was the subject of many movies that helped buttress a sagging taste for movies.

1900 At the Paris World’s Fair (L’Exposition Universelle, Paris): Lumière Brothers projected a program of 15 movies lasting 25 minutes onto a giant screen before vast crowds. Thomas Edison’s film company shot footage of the fair. Loie Fuller was featured in her own pavilion, Le Theatre Loie Fuller.

1901 President William McKinley was the first U.S. president to be captured consistently on film from his inauguration (March 1897) to his appearance at the Pan-American Exposition (Buffalo, NY) the day before he was assassinated.

1903 Alfred Stieglitz began his publication of Camera Work that continued through 1917 and promoted photography as a fine art. In 1905 he opened Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession at 291 Fifth Avenue, where he exhibited photographers and modernist painters and sculptors. At Edison Studios, Edwin S. Porter helped shift film toward narrative story telling with his Life of an American Fireman, The Great Train Robbery and Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

1905 In Pittsburgh the first nickelodeon (movie theaters named for the price of the ticket and “Odeon,” the Greek word for theater) opened. By 1908 there were an estimated 8,000 nickelodeons in the U.S. Cooper Hewitt mercury lamps made it practical to shoot movies indoors without sunlight. John Sloan began his ten-etching series New York City Life (completed 1906).

1907 Edwin S. Porter, Laughing Gas, a nine-minute movie featuring Bertha Regustus, an African American woman playing the lead role. Shinn painted 18 decorative panels in rococo revival style for David Belasco’s Stuyvesant (now Belasco) Theater. Sloan painted Movies, Five Cents, the first of a number of canvases devoted to his interest in moving pictures.

Timeline 135

Figure T.1  Loud Talking or Whistling Not Allowed, ca. 1912, Silent Movie Etiquette Title Card, photograph, 8 1/2 × 11 in. Private Collection.

1908 A group of eight painters, later known as The Eight, organized an exhibition at the Macbeth Gallery, NY and sent subsequently on a multi-city tour. “The Eight” were realist painters William Glackens, Robert Henri, George Luks, Everett Shinn, John Sloan as well as Arthur B. Davies, Maurice Prendergast and Ernest Lawson.

1909 The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was founded to promote socioeconomic goals of African Americans. D. W. Griffith, A Corner in Wheat the year after his arrival at Biograph.

1910 Carl Laemmle introduced the star system, catalyzing the rise of the American movie star phenomenon. Max Factor created first make-up formulated especially for movies. Alice Guy-Blaché became the first woman to own her own studio – Solax Co. – first in Flushing, NY and then Fort Lee, NJ.

136 Timeline

1911 The Masses began publication as a magazine for leftist culture, and included many artists as contributors; in 1917 the government suppressed it for its anti-war position. Founding of The Motion Picture Story (1911–1977) and Photoplay (1911–1980), the first movie fan magazines. Shinn painted murals in the Council Chamber of City Hall of Trenton, NJ.

1912 Queen Elizabeth with Sarah Bernhardt was a four-reel historical drama that along with Richard III with Frederick Warde and other movies with ambitious historic and literary themes starred legendary stage actors to help launch feature films. Helen Gardner wrote, directed and starred in her own company’s six-reel film Cleopatra. Sadakichi Hartmann, “The Esthetic Significance of the Motion Picture,” Camera Work no. 38 (1912). Margaret Foster Richardson painted A Motion Picture (Self-Portrait).

1913 This year declared the beginning of “the age of cinema” by René Doumic, influential editor of Revue des Deux Mondes, who identified two strands of movies in relation to early modernist paintings: film as motion and film as fantasy (Surrealism). Jubilee Year, 50th Anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, celebrated nationwide. Bert Williams in Lime Kiln Field Day became the first African American actor to star in motion pictures. The International Exposition of Modern Art (the “Armory Show”) introduced Americans to modernist works at New York’s 69th Regiment Armory, including Duchamp’s succès de scandale, Nude Descending a Staircase. It subsequently traveled to Boston and Chicago.

1914 Gertie the Dinosaur by Winsor McCay – “first keystone animation cartoon.” Panama Pacific International Exposition, San Francisco – Tower of Jewels said to have served as inspiration for D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916).

1915 The Ku Klux Klan was revived in Georgia. Release of Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation. Lois Weber directed Hypocrites, followed by Shoes and The Dumb Girl of Portici in 1916.

Timeline 137 A Fool There Was – Frank Powell (U.S.) starring Theda Barra – the screen’s original vamp. Charlie Chaplin, The Tramp. Great Migration of African Americans from South to North begins. Publication of Vachel Lindsay’s The Art of Moving Pictures and William Morgan Hannon’s The Photodrama and its Place Among the Fine Arts.

1916 Hugo Münsterberg, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study was the first study of film experience.

1917 Everett Shinn started work for Sam Goldfish at Goldwyn Pictures as art director, beginning with Polly of the Circus starring Mae Marsh. Painter and sculptor Helena Smith Dayton became the first female stop-motion animator with the release of her Animated Sculpture and Romeo and Juliet. Florine Stettheimer painted Fête à Duchamp, announcing her unique blend of portraiture and narrativity.

Figure T.2  Bardelle, Take Your Girlie to the Movies (If You Can’t Make Love at Home), 1919. Colored lithograph (Music Song Sheet), 8 1/2 × 11 in. Private Collection.

138 Timeline First Exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists, Grand Central Palace, New York where along with fine art Robert Coady showed two movies: A Daughter of the Gods starring Annette Kellerman and The Honor System on a 50-foot screen. April 6, the U.S. enters World War I (with Armistice on November 11, 1918).

1918 Blind Husbands directed by Erich von Stroheim (catapulted him to fame). Broken Blossoms directed by D.W. Griffith.

1919 Oscar Micheaux released his first film The Homesteader and over the next four decades would produce and direct 24 silent films and 19 sound films, establishing him as the most prolific African American filmmaker.

1920 Beginning of Prohibition, which ended in 1933. 19th Amendment passed, granting women the right to vote. 1920–1930s literary, visual and performing arts flourish in Harlem. Poets, novelists, painters and musicians of the “New Negro Movement” – later called the Harlem Renaissance – search for ways to express African American cultural identity. Oscar Michaux’s Within Our Gates. The Daughter of the Dawn – all-Indian cast who brought their own tipis, horses, clothing and traditions to the set in Oklahoma. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde directed by John S. Robertson with John Barrymore, considered by many to be first great American horror film. Shinn left Goldwyn and worked as art director for Inspiration Pictures, and had an art exhibition from June to August at Knoedler Gallery.

1921 One of the earliest exhibits of African American artists including Tanner and Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller was held at the 135th St. Branch of the New York Public Library. Harriet Frishmuth modeled The Bubble on a small scale that spawned 13 casts, each 19 inches tall. The larger version was modeled in 1927 and cast in 1928. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Metro Pictures) directed by Rex Ingram catapulted newcomer Rudolph Valentino to stardom.

1922 Manslaughter directed by Cecil B. DeMille warned of Jazz Age excesses. Nanook of the North – Robert Flaherty’s documentary.

Timeline 139 The Toll of the Sea – in her first leading Anna May Wong played Lotus Flower in this loose adaptation of Puccini’s classic opera Madame Butterfly. This was the first two-color Technicolor feature film shot in Hollywood, replaced in 1933 by three-color process. Harmon Foundation established in New York City to promote African American participation in the fine arts.

1923 The sign “Hollywoodland” was erected by a real estate company to advertise a housing development in Beechwood Canyon, Los Angeles. In 1949 the “land” was removed and on its 50th anniversary it became an historic cultural landmark. The Extra Girl directed by Mack Sennet and starring Mabel Normand told the story of a girl who goes to Hollywood. Shinn left Inspiration Pictures to work for William Randolph Hearst at Cosmopolitan Pictures as art director. Tanner painted his mature, canonical Flight into Egypt. Romaine Brooks (née Beatrice Romaine Goddard), living in Paris, painted her SelfPortrait.

Figure T.3  Artist unidentified, Cover, Storybook for The Covered Wagon, 1923, Paramount Pictures. Colored lithograph, 12 × 9 in. Private Collection.

140 Timeline Alla Nazimova’s Salomé (Nazimova Productions) released in February, said to have been made with an all-homosexual cast.

1924 The Iron Horse directed by John Ford.

1925 Oscar Micheaux’s movie Body and Soul released. Alain Locke published The New Negro. The Lost World – featuring stop-motion special effects by Willis O’Brien (a forerunner of his work on King Kong) based on a story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The Phantom of the Opera directed by Rupert Julian with Lon Chaney was called “one of the most lavish productions in silent cinema.” Stieglitz organized the exhibition Seven Americans (Demuth, Dove, Hartley, Marin, O’Keeffe, Stieglitz and Strand) at Anderson Galleries.

1926 The Flying Ace, Norman Pictures. Death of Rudolph Valentino on August 23 at age 31 sent fans into mass hysteria. The General – Clyde Bruckman with Buster Keaton.

1927 Al Jolson starred in The Jazz Singer, marking the birth of talking pictures. Paul Colin created a portfolio of 45 lithographs entitled Le Tumulte Noir as a tribute to Josephine Baker’s dance. Josephine Baker made La Sirène des tropiques, the first of three movies featuring her life as a dancer. It starring Clara Bow. Uncle Tom’s Cabin – Universal Picture’s lavish production directed by Harry Pollard – took two years and $1.8 million to make. Isadora Duncan passed away in a freak automobile accident in Nice, France, strangled by the same scarf with which she danced the Marseillaise. It happened just months after completing her autobiography My Life. First year of the Academy Awards. Emil Jennings won Best Actor. F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise won the first and only Unique and Artistic Production Award and King Vidor’s The Crowd won Best Title Writing, a category that became obsolete with the coming of talking pictures.

Timeline 141

1928 The Passion of Joan of Arc directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer. Buster Keaton’s The Cameraman, also the year he joined MGM, marking a shift in movie production from independent studios to big companies. Kodak produced the first 16 mm movie film, which facilitates amateur color motion pictures. Walt Disney created the cartoon character Mickey Mouse.

1929 The U.S. stock market crashed on October 24, “Black Thursday,” initiating a worldwide economic collapse – the Great Depression – that lasted until the onset of World War II. Diary of a Lost Girl directed by G.W. Pabst and starring Louise Brooks. Florine Stettheimer painted The Cathedrals of Broadway, celebrating the birth of talkies. Archibald Motley, Tongues (Holy Rollers).

1930 Establishment of Howard University’s Art Gallery, the first gallery in the U.S. to be run by African Americans and to highlight African American art. Production Code, the industry’s mechanism for regulating the content and treatment of movies, was put into effect and remained so until 1968. The Silent Enemy – shot on location with all-Indian cast. The “enemy” was hunger, threatening the tribe as they hunt caribou. It opened with sound prologue by Chief Yellow Robe: This is the story of my people . . . When you look at this picture, therefore, look not upon us as actors. We are Indians living once more our old life. Soon we will be gone. Your civilization will destroy us. But by your magic we will live forever.

1934 Aaron Douglas, Aspects of Negro Life (four-part mural), 1934, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

Select Bibliography

Askari, Kaveh, Picture Craft from the Magic Lantern to Early Hollywood: Making Movies into Art. London: British Film Institute, 2014. Bailly, Austin Barron, ed., American Epics: Thomas Hart Benton and Hollywood. Salem, MA: Peabody Essex Museum, 2015. Bloemink, Barbara J., The Life and Art of Florine Stettheimer. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1995. Bowser, Elaine, Transformation of Cinema, 1907–1915. Berkeley, CA and London: University of California Press, 1994. Brougher, Kerry, Art and Film Since 1945: Hall of Mirrors. Los Angeles, CA: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1996. Cahn, Iris, “The Changing Landscape of Modernity: Early Film and America’s Great Picture Tradition,” Wide Angle, 18, 3, 1996, pp. 85–100. Chadwick, Whitney, Amazons in the Drawing Room: The Art of Romaine Brooks. Chesterfield, MA: Chameleon Books; Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000. Coyle, Heather Campbell and Joyce K. Schiller, John Sloan’s New York. Wilmington, DE: Delaware Art Museum, 2007. DeShazo, Edith, Everett Shinn, 1896–1953: A Figure in His Time. New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1974. Douglas, Ann, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995. Gunning, Tom, D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film: The Early Years at Biograph. Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1991. Haskell, Barbara, The American Century: Art & Culture, 1900–1950. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1999. Langer, Cassandra, Romaine Brooks. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin, 2015. Loughery, John, John Sloan: Painter and Rebel. New York: Holt, 1995. MacDonald, Scott, The Garden in the Machine: A Field Guide to Independent Films About Place, Berkeley, CA and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2001. McDonnell, Patricia, The Edge of Your Seat: Popular Theater and Film in Early Twentieth Century American Art. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002. Manthorne, Katherine, “Cinematic New York: From the Hudson River to Niagara Falls, 1896–1920,” Kunsttexte.de (2015), online: https://edoc.hu-berlin.de/bitstream/handle/ 18452/8131/manthorne.pdf. Mathews, Nancy Mowll, ed., Moving Pictures: American Art and Early Film, 1880–1910. Manchester, VT: Hudson Hills Press with William College Museum of Art, 2005. Marcus, Laura, The Tenth Muse: Writing about Cinema in the Modernist Period. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Mecklenburg, Virginia with Todd McCarthy, Telling Stories: Norman Rockwell from the Collections of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. Washington, DC: Smithsonian American Art Museum with Abrams, 2010.

Select Bibliography 143 Musser, Charles, Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991. Powell, Richard J. and David A. Bailey, Rhapsodies in Black: The Art of the Harlem Renaissance. London and Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997. Sklar, Robert, Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies. New York: Vintage Books, 1994. Tallack, Douglas, Twentieth-Century America: The Intellectual and Cultural Context. London and New York: Longman, 1991.

Figures

I.1

Iron Horse directed by John Ford, Fox Film Corporation, 1924, Screenshot. 2 I.2 Metropolitan Print Company, New York. Edison’s Greatest Marvel the Vitascope, ca. 1896. Color lithograph, 30 1/8 × 40 in. The Library of Congress. 4 I.3 George Biddle, King Street Movie, Charleston, South Carolina, 1931. Oil on canvas, 40 1/2 × 30 in. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Bennett, 1999.011. Image courtesy of the Gibbes Museum of Art/ Carolina Art Association. 7 1.1 John Sloan, Subway Stairs, 1926, etching, plate 6 7/8 × 5 in. Private Collection. 11 1.2 John Sloan, Connoisseurs of Prints from the series New York City Life, 1905. Etching plate 4 15/16 × 6 7/8 in. Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR. 13 1.3 John Sloan, Fun, One Cent from the series New York City Life, 1905. Etching plate 4 15/16 × 6 7/8 in. Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR. 16 1.4 John Sloan, Man, Wife and Child, from the series New York City Life, 1905. Etching plate 4 15/16 × 6 15/16 in. Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR. 18 1.5 John Sloan, Turning Out the Light, from the series New York City Life, 1905. Etching plate 4 7/8 × 6 3/4 in. Private Collection. 19 1.6 John Sloan, Roofs, Summer Night; from the series New York City Life, 1906. Etching plate 5 1/4 × 7 in. Private Collection. 20 1.7 Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Diana, 1893–1894, cast 1894 or after. Bronze, 28 1/4 × 16 1/4 × 14 in. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY. 24 1.8 H.C. Leighton Co., Portland, ME, Manufacturers of Postal Cards, Gem Theater, Peaks Island, Portland Maine, ca. 1908. Colored postcard, 3 1/2 × 5 1/2 in. (As a young man, future director John Ford worked here as an usher during the summer.) 26 1.9 John Sloan, Movies, Five Cents, 1907. Oil on canvas, 23 1/2 × 31 1/2 in. Private Collection. Photograph, Rowland Elzea Catalogue Raisonne File on John Sloan, Delaware Art Museum. 27 1.10 John Sloan, Movies, 1913. Oil on canvas, 19 7/8 × 24 in. Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, OH. 37

Figures 145 2.1

Photographer unidentified, advertisement: “Polly of the Circus,” 1917, 8 1/2 × 11 in. Private Collection. 2.2 Everett Shinn, Deacon Strong’s House. Sketch for the Set of “Polly of the Circus,” 1917. Pencil on paper, Delaware Art Museum. 2.3 Everett Shinn, Strongman, Clown and Dancer, ca. 1906. Oil on canvas board, 9 15/16 × 7 7/8 in. Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA. 2.4 Photographer unidentified, promotional photograph: Mae Marsh with cast members of “Polly of the Circus,” 1917, 8 1/2 × 11 in. Private Collection. 2.5 Everett Shinn, A French Music Hall, 1906. Oil on canvas, 24 × 29 1/2 in. Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR. 2.6 Everett Shinn, Keith’s Union Square, ca. 1902–1906. Oil on canvas, 20 5/16 × 24 1/4 in. Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY. 2.7 Photographer unidentified, promotional photograph: Theater Lobby: The Bright Shawl, 1923, 8 1/2 × 11 in. Private Collection. 2.8 Everett Shinn, La Clavel [Dorothy Gish in The Bright Shawl], ca. 1922–1923. Pencil on paper, Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia, Richmond, VA. 2.9 Everett Shinn, Revolutionary War Scene, ca. 1924. Watercolor on paper, 11 × 15 in. Inscribed lower left “Cosmo #51.” Private Collection. 3.1 Margaret Foster Richardson, A Motion Picture (Self-Portrait), 1912. Oil on canvas, 40 3/8 × 23 1/8 in. Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA. 3.2 Mary MacMonnies, The Breeze, 1895. Oil on canvas, 69 × 52 in. Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection. 3.3 Harriet Whitney Frishmuth, The Bubble, 1928. Bronze and glass, 94 × 38 3/4 × 26 in. Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR, Fractional Gift of Frank L. Hohmann, III and Museum Purchase. 3.4 Theresa Bernstein, Waiting Room – Employment Office, 1917. Oil on canvas, 29 1/2 × 39 1/2 in. Jewish Museum, New York, NY. 3.5 Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones, Shoe Shop, ca. 1911. Oil on canvas, 39 × 33 1/4 in. The William Owen Goodman and Emma Sawyer Goodman Collection, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL. 3.6 Andre De Takacs, Since Mother Goes to Picture Shows, 1916. Colored lithograph, 8 1/2 × 11 in. Private Collection. 3.7 Photographer Unidentified, Annette Kellerman in “A Daughter of the Gods”, 1916. Promotional photograph, 8 1/2 × 11 in. Private Collection. 3.8 “Statues that Run, Dance and Fight,” Popular Science Monthly 90.2 (February 1917): 257–258. Private Collection. 3.9 Florine Stettheimer, The Cathedrals of Broadway, 1929. Oil on canvas, 60 1/8 × 50 1/8 in. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY. 3.10 Romaine Brooks, Self-Portrait, 1923. Oil on canvas 46, 1/4 × 26 7/8 in. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC. 3.11 Photographer Unidentified, Alla Nazimova in Salomé, 1923. 8 1/2 × 11 in. Private Collection.

42 47 48 49 51 53 58 61 64 74 76

78 82 83 85 87 89 94 98 99

146 Figures 4.1

Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Universal, 1927), Poster, 11 × 14 in. For Carl Laemmle production, Private Collection. 4.2 Marion Post Wolcott, Negro Man Entering Movie Theater by “Colored Entrance,” 1939, photograph, 8.3 × 12 in. (image). LC-DIG-ppmsca-12888, Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. 4.3 Henry Osawa Tanner, Flight into Egypt, 1923. Oil on canvas, 29 × 26 in. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY. 4.4 Archibald Motley, Tongues (Holy Rollers), 1929. Oil on canvas, 29 1/4 × 36 1/8 in. Private Collection © Valerie Gerrard Browne, Chicago History Museum, Bridgeman Images. 4.5 Flying Ace, Norman Studios, 1926. Advertisement from the U.S. Herald, 7 × 9 in. Private Collection. 4.6 Fletcher C. Ransom, Forgotten Heroes: Troop C., 9th Cavalry, Captain Tayler Leading a Charge at San Juan, 1898, print, 22 × 34 in. Private Collection. 4.7 Touissant Welcome, We Are Doing Our Bit, 1918, lithograph, 32 × 20 in. Massachusetts Historical Society. 4.8 Aaron Douglas, Aspects of Negro Life: Song of the Towers, 1934. Oil on canvas, 9 × 9 ft. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, New York, NY. 4.9 Adventures of Prince Achmed. Directed by Lotte Reiniger, 1926, Screenshot. 4.10 Aaron Douglas, Aspects of Negro Life: From Slavery to Reconstruction, 1934. Oil on canvas, 5 ft. 11 in. × 11 ft. 7 in. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, New York, NY. T.1 Loud Talking or Whistling Not Allowed, ca. 1912, Silent Movie Etiquette Title Card, photograph, 8 1/2 × 11 in. Private Collection. T.2 Bardelle, Take Your Girlie to the Movies (If You Can’t Make Love at Home), 1919. Colored lithograph (Music Song Sheet), 8 1/2 × 11 in. Private Collection. T.3 Artist unidentified, Cover, Storybook for The Covered Wagon, 1923, Paramount Pictures. Colored lithograph, 12 × 9 in. Private Collection.

106

109 113 115 117 119 120 126 128

129 135 137 139

Index

Page numbers in italics refer to figures. Abel, Richard 30 Addams, Jane 84 Admiration of the Orchestrelle for the Cinematograph (Man Ray) 3 Adventures of Prince Achmed, The (Reiniger) 127–128, 128 African Americans 105–130 African Fantasy (Reiss) 122 Albright, Ivan 3 Alston, Charles 124, 125 African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) church 112–113 America Today (Benton) 3 Anémic Cinéma 3 Angelus (Millet) 1 Animal Locomotion (Muybridge) 118 Animated Sculpture 89–90 Annunzio, Gabriele d’ 99 Antheil, George 122 Aoki, Tsuru 5 Apology for African Methodism, An (Tanner) 113 Art Deco 128 art directors, role of 43 Arthur, Timothy Shay 114 Artist’s Great Madonna, The 57 Askari, Kaveh 57 Aspects of Negro Life (Douglas) 130 Aspects of Negro Life: From Slavery Through Reconstructions (Douglas) 127, 128–129, 129 Aspects of Negro Life: Idyll of the Deep South, An (Douglas) 127 Aspects of Negro Life: Song of the Towers (Douglas) 125, 126, 127, 128 Aspects of Negro Life: The Negro in an African Setting (Douglas) 127 Astor, Mary 57 audience, early cinema and 52–56 Bacall, Lauren 3 “Back porch Parsonage” (Shinn) 47 Back Row at the Follies (Shinn) 56

Backstage Scene (Shinn) 51 Bagpipe Lesson (Tanner) 112 Baker, Josephine 100–101 Baldwin, Davarian 115 Ball, Thomas 106 Ballet Mécanique 55, 122 Ballin, Hugo 45–46, 50, 57, 68 Ballin, Mabel 46 Banjo Lesson, The (Tanner) 112 Barney, Natalie 98 Barnum, P.T. 36 Barrymore, John 59 Barthelmess, Richard 57, 60, 68 Basquiat, Jean-Michel 121 Bayer, Herbert 97 Beardsley, Aubrey 97, 99 Becan, Bernard 76 Behind the Screen 55 Belasco, David 43, 52 Bellah, James Warner 117 Bellows, George 31, 35 Belt, Benjamin 79 Benton, Thomas Hart 3, 50, 95 Bergson, Henri 92 Bernhardt, Sarah 41 Bernstein, Theresa 54–55, 56, 75, 77, 80–81, 82, 82 Bert Williams’ Lime Kiln Field Day Project 109–110 Biddle, George 6, 7, 95 Bigelow, John, Jr. 117 billboard painter 30–31 Bird Doctor, The 48 Birth of a Nation, The 7, 29, 33, 105, 107–108, 110–111, 122, 129, 130 Bishop, Isabel 82 Bitter, Karl 78 Bitzer, G. W. “Billy” 1 Black and Tan 122, 125–126 Black and Tan Fantasy (Ellington) 122, 124–125 Black Reconstruction in America (Du Bois) 129 black soldiers 117–119

148 Index Blake, Eubie 100 blues 122–126 Blues (Motley) 124 bodily engagement 52–56 Body and Soul 110, 130 Boime, Albert 112 Bonheur, Rosa 95 Borglum, Gutzon 78 Bow, Clara 83, 93 Bowen, Louise De Koven 84 Boyd, Kathryn 116 Breeze, The (MacMonnies) 75, 76 Bridge of San Luis Rey, The 99 Bright Shawl, The 44, 57–63, 58, 61, 68 Broadway Jones 91 Brooks, Louise 97 Brooks, Romaine 97–99, 98 Brundage, W. Fitzhugh 110–111 Bryan, William Jennings 33 Bubble, The (Frishmuth) 77, 78, 80 Bubble, The (movie) 77 Buckland, Wilfred 52 Buffalo Soldiers 117–118 Bull-Dogger, The 116 Burra, Edward 97 Busy Day for Corset Models, A 17 Caffin, Charles 31 Cagney, James 1, 92 Camille 99 Carmen 30 Carmine Theater, The (Sloan) 35, 36 Cathedrals of Broadway (Stettheimer) 93–95, 94 Cathedrals of New York (Stettheimer) 93 Chaney, Lon 97 Chaplin, Charlie 5, 7, 55 Charge of the Colored Divisions: Somewhere in France (Touissant Welcome) 121 Charge of the Rough Riders at San Juan Hill (Remington) 118, 119 Cheslyn, Alice 52 Child of the Ghetto, A 34 Chocolate Dandies, The 100 Citizen Kane 28, 65 Civil War 106 Clair, René 76 Clansman, The (Dixon) 107–108 Clarke, Powhatan 118 Clavel, La (Shinn) 61 Cleopatra 73 Coady, Robert J. 86–87, 88 Cocoanuts, The 94 Cocteau, Jean 99 Cohan, George M. 1, 91 Colin, Paul 100–101 Colored Players Film Corporation 114 Connoisseurs of Prints (Sloan) 12–13, 13, 21

Connoisseurs of Virtue (Sloan) 12–13, 21 Conquest, The (Micheaux) 110 Coontown Suffragettes 116 Cornell, Joseph 3 Corner in Wheat, A 1, 34 Cotton Club 125 Count of Monte Cristo, The 41 Covarrubias, Miguel 123, 124, 125, 126 cowboys 117–118 Crimson Skull, The 116 Cuban Independence Movement 57–58 Cubism 29, 92, 125, 127 Cullen, Countee 121 Curie, Marie and Pierre 76 Cytherea: Goddess of Love (Hergesheimer) 59 Dalton, Karen 100 dance 77–80 Daughter of the Gods, A 50, 87, 87–88 Davies, Marion 43, 63, 65–66, 68 Davis, Stuart 5, 35 Dawson, Manierre 2 Day at West Point, A (Stettheimer) 92 Dayton, Helena Smith 50, 75, 80, 88–91 Deacon Strong’s House. Sketch for the Set of “Polly of the Circus” (Shinn) 46–47, 47 Death of Cleopatra (Lewis) 73 De Brulier, Nigel 97 Degas, Edgar 51 Delteil, Desha 77–80, 100 Demoiselles d’Avignon, Les (Picasso) 32, 100 DeShazo, Edith 44 de Takacs, Andre 54, 84, 85 Detroit Industry murals (Rivera) 127 de Wolfe, Elsie 44 Diana (Saint-Gaudens) 24 Dietrich, Marlene 93 Dixon, Thomas, Jr. 107–108 Doing Their Bit 120–121 Douglas, Aaron 111, 122, 125, 126, 127, 128–130, 129 Douglas, Ann 122, 123, 126 Doyle, Arthur Conan 2 Dragon Painter, The 5 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde 59 Du Bois, W.E.B. 107–108, 112, 123, 126, 129 Duchamp, Marcel 3, 50, 88, 91–92 Dudley, Harry 52 Dumb Girl of Portici, The 77–78 Duncan, Isadora 78 Eakins, Thomas 23 East and West Shaking Hands at the Laying of the Last Rail (Russell) 1 Easter Eve (Sloan) 32 Eaton, Mary 79 Edison, Thomas 21, 65, 75, 76, 105, 119 Edouart, Auguste 128

Index 149 “Eight, The” 6 Eisenstein, Sergei 28 Election Night (Sloan) 32–33 Ellington, Duke 122, 124–125 Ellison, Ralph 122 Emak Bakia 3 Emancipation Memorial (Ball) 106 escapism 73–74 Espionage Act 108 Ethel Clayton, or Wronged from the Start 52 Eve’s Daughter 57 Exhibition, Stare-Case (Rowlandson) 11–12 Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture by Women Artists for the Benefit of the Women’s Suffrage Campaign 80 Fairbanks, Douglas 22 Fast Times at Ridgemont High 73 Fée aux Choux, La 73 feminism, as term 80 Fenollosa, Ernest 5 Fenollosa, Mary McNeil 5 Fête à Duchamp (Stettheimer) 91 Fields, W.C. 63 Fifth Avenue Critics (Sloan) 12 Fighting Blade, The 59, 68 Fitch, Clyde 44 Fitzgerald, Barry 95 FitzGerald, Charles 21 Flight into Egypt (Tanner) 113, 113 Flying Ace, The 116, 117 Fokine, Michel 79 Folies-Bergère 100 Ford, John 1–2, 2, 93, 95, 117 Ford, Paul Leicester 63 Forged Note, The (Micheaux) 110 “Forgotten Heroes: Troop C, 9th Calvary, Captain Taylor Leading a Charge at San Juan” (Ransom) 119, 119 Fountain (Duchamp) 50, 88 Four Beautiful Pairs 17 Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse 57 France, Anatole 77 Freeburg, Victor 42 Freeman, Elizabeth 80 French Music Hall, A (Shinn) 51, 51 Frère, Pathé 30 Friedberg, Anne 32 Frishmuth, Harriet 75, 77–80, 78, 100 Fuller, Loie 56, 75–77, 78, 101 Fun, One Cent (Sloan) 16, 16, 25 fuoco, Il 99 Futurism 92 Gaines, Janet 111 Gance, Abel 101 Gardner, Helen 73 Garvey, Marcus 121

Gates, Henry Louis 100 Gay Shoe Clerk, The 23, 82 Gem Theater, Peaks Island, Portland Maine 26 Ghalian, Sonia 55 Gibbons, Cedric 68 Gilpin, Charles 114 Girdlestone, Armand 111 Gish, Dorothy 57, 60, 61–62, 61, 73 Gish, Lillian 30, 73, 75, 95 Gist of Art (Sloan) 29 Glackens, Edith 52 Glackens, Ira 43, 44 Glackens, William 31, 52 Glass, Bonnie 59 Gleizes, Albert 92 Glorifying the American Girl 77, 79 Glove cycle (Klinger) 21 Goldfish, Samuel 41–42, 45 Goldman, Emma 99 Great Train Robbery, The 21 Green Eyed Monster, The 116 Grey, Odessa Warren 110 Griffith, D.W. 1, 5, 7, 29, 30, 33–34, 52, 56, 77, 105, 107–108, 110, 121, 129–130 Groll, A.L. 22 Gunning, Tom 55 Guy-Blaché, Alice 73 Hairdresser’s Window (Sloan) 32 Hansen, Miriam 30 Hardy, Thomas 34 Harlem Renaissance 122–126, 130 Harlem’s Hellfighters 120–122 Hartmann, Sadakichi 22–23 Hayakawa, Sessue 5 Hayden, Palmer 124 Hazel Weston, or More Sinned Against than Usual 52 Hearst, William Randolph 33, 35, 43, 63, 65–67 He Can Vote (Dayton) 80 Heckering, Amy 73 Hell Bent 1 Henri, Robert 6, 17, 23, 30, 31, 34–35, 44, 50 Hergesheimer, Joseph 57–59, 62 hieroglyphics 30 Hill, J. Leubrie 109 History of American Art (Hartmann) 22 Hoffman, Malvina 77 Hogan’s Alley 35 Hogarth, William 21 Homesteader, The (Micheaux) 110 Homesteader, The (movie) 110 Hopkins, Arthur 45, 52 Hopper, Edward 3, 31, 35 Hopper, E. Mason 68

150 Index Horak, Jan-Christopher 110 Houston, Drusilla Dunjee 108 Hovenden, Thomas 106 How They Do Things on the Bowery 14 Hughes, Langston 123, 124, 130 Huysmans, Joris-Karl 76 Idle Wives 56 “Imp of the Perverse, The” (Poe) 84 Ingram, Rex 50, 57, 68 inter-media interactions, early 5–6 Intolerance 30, 33, 56 Iron Horse, The 1–2, 2 Isn’t Life Wonderful 77 Jack and the Beanstalk 21 James, William 86 Janice Meredith 43, 44, 63–65, 66, 68 jazz 122–126 Jazz Singer, The 93, 105, 123 Jenny and Genevieve (Stettheimer) 91 Jeunesse (Hayden) 124 Johnstone, Justine 93 Jolson, Al 93, 123 Jones, Rosalie 80 Joyce, James 29 Kallen, Horace 17–18, 29 Keith’s Union Square (Shinn) 52, 53 Kellerman, Annette 50, 73, 86–88, 87 Kenyon, Doris 92 Kid Auto Races at Venice 55 King Street Movie, Charleston, South Carolina (Biddle) 6, 7 Klaw and Erlanger 109 Klinger, Max 21 Kraut, Anthea 101 Ku Klux Klan 107–108, 111, 129–130 La Cava, George 65 Lady Lies, The 94 Laemmle, Carl 42 Lamb, Thomas 35 Landry, Sylvia 111 Langer, Cassandra 97 Laski, Abraham 52 Last Moments of John Brown, The (Hovenden) 106 Le Tarare, Jean-Paul 76 Laughing Gas 81–82 Lawrence, Florence 33, 75 Lawrence, Jacob 111, 128 Lawrie, Lee 57 Léger, Fernand 55, 122 Leopard’s Spots, The (Dixon) 108 Lesson, The (Ballin) 45 Lewis, Albert 3 Lewis, Edmonia 73

Life of an American Fireman 21 Life of an American Policeman 21–22 Lights of New York 93 Lindsay, Vachel 30, 34, 48–49, 87 Lindy Hop at the Savoy (Alston) 124 Little Bride, The (Sloan) 15, 21 Locke, Alain 122 Loew, Marcus 41 Long Voyage Home, The 95 Lost World, The (Doyle) 2 Lost World, The (movie) 90 Lowe, James B. 107 Lucas, Sam 109 Lucrece (Dawson) 2–3 Lucy More, or the Prune Hater’s Daughter 52 Luks, George 31, 35 Lumière, Auguste and Louis 53–54, 75 Lys de la Vie, Le 76–77 MacDonald, Margaret 90 MacMonnies, Mary 75, 76 MacNeil, Hermon Atkins 78 Madison Square at Noon (Dayton) 88 Magician with the Shears (Shinn) 52 Man, Wife and Child (Sloan) 17, 18, 122 Manhatta 3 Man Monkey (Sloan) 15 Man Ray 3, 122 Marie of Romania, Queen 76 Marriage-A-la-Mode (Hogarth) 21 Marsh, Mae 42, 48–49, 49, 111 Marx Brothers 94 Mattock, Harry 44 May Irwin Kiss, The 14 Mayo, Margaret 42, 51 McBride, Joseph 117 McKinley, William 33 Meadows, Margery 76 Méliès, Georges 14, 75 Mémoires de Joséphine Baker, Les 100 Menichelli, Pina 99 Metz, Christian 53 Meyer, Eva 84 Micheaux, Oscar 110–115, 122, 127, 130 Mickey Mouse 93 Miley, James “Bubber” 124 Millet, Jean-François 1 Misdeal, A (Remington) 1 “Misery” (Hughes) 124 Miss Loie Fuller (Lautrec) 75 Mitchell, Abbie 109 Moeller, Philip 92 Moneychangers, The (Sinclair) 33 Monroe, Marilyn 11 Montero, María 60 Morgan, J.P. 24, 44 Motion Picture (Self-Portrait), A (Richardson) 74–75, 74

Index 151 Motley, Archibald, Jr. 114–115, 115, 124, 125 “Movey” Troupe, The (Sloan) 14, 37 Movies (Sloan) 35, 36, 37 Movies, Five Cents (Sloan) 14, 25, 27, 28–29, 30, 32, 81 Moving Picture World 34, 44–45 Mulvey, Laura 53 Münsterberg, Hugo 29, 86–87 Murphy, Dudley 55, 122–126 Murphy, Hermann Dudley 122–123 music, African Americans and 122–126 Muybridge, Eadweard 79, 118 Nalpas, Mario 101 Napoléon 101 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) 107 Nazimova, Alla 73, 97–100, 99 Negro Drawings (Covarrubias) 124, 125 Negro Man Entering Movie Theater by “Colored Entrance” (Wolcott) 109 Neptune’s Daughter 86–87 New Conscience and an Ancient Evil, A (Addams) 84 New York City Life (Sloan) 12–23, 25 New York Movie (Hopper) 3 Nigger Heaven (Van Vechten) 123 Nobosodrou 127 Norman, Richard 116 O’Brien, Willis 2, 90 O’Neill, Eugene 95 O’Neill, James 41 One Thousand and One Arabian Nights 127 On to Washington 80 Open Air Show (Bernstein) 81 Ostrehim, Blanche 79 Oswald the Lucky Rabbit 93 Pabst, G.W. 97 Pandora’s Box 97 Paramount Pictograph 86 Parker, Lottie Blair 52 Pastor, Tony 36 Pat & the Widow (Dayton) 88 Patten, Simon N. 36 Pavlova, Anna 77–78 Pawnshop, The 55 Perils of Pauline, The 65, 84–85 Perlman, Bennard 34–35 Photoplay, The (Münsterberg) 29, 86 Picabia, Francis 91 Picasso, Pablo 7, 32 Pickett, Bill 117 Pickford, Mary 59, 73, 75, 85 Pictorial History of the Negro in the Great War, 1917–1918, A (Welcome Touissant) 121

Picture of Dorian Gray (Albright) 3 Picture Shop Window (Sloan) 32 Play De Blues 124 “Plea for the Picturesque of New York, A” (Hartmann) 22 Podgorska, Desha 77 Poe, Edgar Allan 84 Pollard, Harry 107 Polly of the Circus 42, 42–43, 44, 46–50, 51, 63 Porter, Edwin S. 14, 21, 25, 33, 81, 82, 105–107 Portrait of America (Rivera) 130 Portrait of Avery Hopwood (Stettheimer) 91 “Portrait Painting and Portrait Photography” (Hartmann) 22 Pound, Ezra 122 Powell, Richard 127 Preston, Jimmy 52 Prisoner of Zenda, The 41 Profile en Face (Bayer) 97 Proust, Marcel 92 Public Enemy 92 Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) 127 Pulitzer, Joseph 35 Queen Elizabeth 41 Rabinovitz, Lauren 82 racial stereotypes 105, 116 Rambova, Natacha 92, 99 Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail (Roosevelt) 118 Ransom, Fletcher C. 119, 119 Rastus in Zululand 116 Raum, Webb B. 34–35 Reading the War News (Bernstein) 81 Reconstruction 129–130 reforming women 80–81 Regustus, Bertha 81 Reid, Laurence 61, 62 Reiniger, Lotte 127–128, 128 Reiss, Winold 122, 124, 128 Remington, Frederic 1, 117–119 Revolutionary War Scenes (Shinn) 63–64, 64 Richardson, Margaret Foster 74–75, 74 Ride of the Valkyries (Wagner) 111 Rink, The 55 Rivera, Diego 127, 130 Roadhouse Nights 94 Robertson, John S. 59, 68 Robinson, Bill “Bojangles” 121 Rockwell, Norman 54, 55, 56 Rodin, Auguste 75, 77, 78 Rogers, J.A. 124 Romeo and Juliet 90 Roofs, Summer Night (Sloan) 19, 20, 20, 21 Roosevelt, Theodore 118–119

152 Index Roosevelt’s Rough Riders Embarking for Santiago 119 Rosenbaum, Jonathan 125 Rough Riders 118–119 Rowlandson, Thomas 11–12 Russell, A.J. 1 Rutherford, Anne 53 Saint-Gaudens, Augustus 24, 45 Salomé 97, 99, 99 San Cristóbal de la Habana (Hergesheimer) 59 Scarborough, W.S. 112 Scar of Shame, The 114 Schwab, Charles 67 scopophilia 53 Scott, Edward 118 Scovel, Florence 52 Sedition Act 108 segregation 108 Seldes, Gilbert 5, 44 Self-Portrait (Brooks) 97, 98 Self Portrait (Vigée Le Brun) 74 Selwyn, Edgar and Archibald 41 Sennett, Mack 33 Sentimental Ballad (Wood) 95 Sergeant Rutledge 117 Serpentine Dance 75 Seven Lively Arts (Seldes) 44 Shame of the Cities, The (Steffens) 33 Sheeler, Charles 3 She Wore a Yellow Ribbon 1 Shinn, Everett 6, 31, 35, 41–67 Shinn, Isaiah 46–47 Shocking Stockings, The 17 Shoes 84 Shoe Shop (Sparhawk-Jones) 83, 83 Shopgirls (Sparhawk-Jones) 84 Show Case, The (Sloan) 17 Shuffle Along 100 Sibylla Europa Prophesying the Massacre of the Innocents, The (Ballin) 45 silent cinema, conventions of 17–20 Simmon, Scott 34 Since Mother Goes to Picture Shows 84, 85 Sinclair, Upton 33 Sirène des Tropiques, La 100, 101 Skirmish of the Rough Riders 119 Sklar, Robert 36 Sloan, John 2, 6, 11–37, 54, 65, 81, 82 Smalley, Phillips 56 Smith, Bessie 123, 125 social aspect of film, critiquing 35–37 Society of Independent Artists (SIA) 50, 87–89, 91 Soil, The 86 Song of the Shirt, The 33–34 Sorere, Gabrielle 76

Soul Fire 68 Soyer, Raphael 95 Spanish American War 118–119 Sparhawk-Jones, Elizabeth 75, 83–84, 83 Spirit and the Clay, The 57 Spirit of ’76, The (Willard) 1 Stagecoach 93 Steamboat Willie 93 Steffens, Lincoln 33 Steichen, Edward 92 Stettheimer, Florine 58–59, 75, 88, 91–95, 94, 97, 123 Stevens, Thaddeus 130 Stewart, Jacqueline Najuma 108 Still Life with “Dial” (Davis) 5 St. Louis Blues 122, 123, 124, 125 stop-motion animation 89–90 Story of American Painting, The (Caffin) 31 Story the Biograph Told, The 23 Stowe, Harriet Beecher 105 Strand, Paul 3 Strongman, Clown and Dancer (Shinn) 48, 48 “Study in the Parsonage” (Shinn) 47 Subway Stairs (Sloan) 11–12, 11 Suffrage Girl (Dayton) 80 Suffrage Meeting (Bernstein) 80–81 suffrage movement 80–81 Suffrage Parade (Bernstein) 81 Sumner, Charles 130 Sunshine Alley 48 Symbol of the Unconquered, The 111 Taliaferro, Mabel 51 Tammany Hall (Sloan) 35–36 Tango Party (Dayton) 88 Tanner, Benjamin Tucker 112–113 Tanner, Henry Ossawa 111–114, 113, 123 Tarbell, Edmund 74 Ten Nights in a Bar Room 114 10th Colored Cavalry 117–118 Tess of the Storm Country 59 Thenon, Georges 100–101 Thief of Bagdad, The 22 Three A.M. (Sloan) 34 369th U.S. Infantry Regiment 121 Tightrope Walker (Shinn) 48 Tongues (Holy Rollers) (Motley) 114, 115 Touissant Welcome, Ernest 120, 121 Touissant Welcome, Jane (“Jennie”) Louise 120–122, 120 Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de 75 Trapeze Disrobing Act 23 Trip to the Moon, A 14 Trotsky, Leon 34 Tumulte Noir, Le 100 Turning Out the Light (Sloan) 19–20, 19, 21 Tyler, Parker 92

Index 153 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (movie) 106, 106 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe) 105 Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Slavery Days 105–107 Urban, Joseph 67 Vagabond, The 55 Valentino, Rudolph 57, 59, 92 VanDerZee, James 116, 121–122 VanDerZee, Jane (“Jennie”) Louise 121 Van Vechten, Carl 58, 123, 126 Vendryes, Margaret 123 Vie Du Christ, La 73 Vigée Le Brun, Élisabeth Louise 74 Vine, The (Frishmuth) 79 visual literacy 3–7 Vitascope 3–4, 4 voyeurism 11–12, 17–20, 23 Wade, Benjamin 130 Wagner, Richard 29, 111 Waiting Room – Employment Office (Bernstein) 82, 82 Walker, Jimmy 93 Walker, Kara 128 Wallace and Gromit 90 Walsh, Raoul 50 Wanger, Beatrice 93 Wanger, Stella 93, 94 Wanger, Walter 94, 95 Wanger, William 93 War Brides 99 Washington, Booker T. 110 Washington, Fredi 125 “Waverly Place Players, The” 52 Way Down East 52 Wayne, John 95 Way to Sell Corsets, The 17 We Are Doing Our Bit 120, 120 Webb, Clifton 34–35

Weber, Lois 56, 73, 78, 83, 84, 86 Welles, Orson 28, 65 What Happened on Twenty-third Street, New York City 12 Whistler, James McNeill 75, 99 White, Pearl 65, 73, 84, 85 White Sister, The 95 Wilde, Oscar 3, 97, 99 Willard, Archibald 1 Williams, Alexander “Clubber” 13 Williams, Bert 109–110 Wilmington, Michael 117 Wilson, Woodrow 34 windows, display 32 Withers, Charles 52 Within Our Gates 110–111, 114 Within the Law 82–83 Wolcott, Marion Post 109 Woman’s Page, The (Sloan) 18–19 women: in 1920s 96–100; in American art 86–95; Baker, Josephine 100–101; bathing beauties 95–96; Delteil, Desha 77–80; Frishmuth, Harriet 77–80; Fuller, Loie 75–77; introduction to 73–75; reforming 80–81; working 81–86 Wood, Grant 95 working women 81–86 Works Progress Administration (WPA) 127, 130 Worthington, William 5 Wrestling Bout (Sloan) 17 Yankee Doodle Dandy 1 Yolanda 63 Ziegfeld, Florenz 77, 79 Zukor, Adolph 41, 86 Zulu King, The 116