I was so moved by this today [among so many other things], and was glad the Associated Press published a transcript. I think this might be the **coolest** prayer ever! This old gentleman has seen so much, and his benediction was so lovely. Welcome President Obama. Hope.
"God of our weary years, God of our silent tears, thou, who has brought us thus far along the way, thou, who has by thy might led us into the light, keep us forever in the path we pray, lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met thee, lest our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget thee.
Shadowed beneath thy hand, may we forever stand true to thee, oh God, and true to our native land.
We truly give thanks for the glorious experience we've shared this day.
We pray now, oh Lord, for your blessing upon thy servant Barack Obama, the 44th president of these United States, his family and his administration.
He has come to this high office at a low moment in the national, and indeed the global, fiscal climate. But because we know you got the whole world in your hands, we pray for not only our nation, but for the community of nations.
Our faith does not shrink though pressed by the flood of mortal ills.
For we know that, Lord, you are able and you're willing to work through faithful leadership to restore stability, mend our brokenness, heal our wounds, and deliver us from the exploitation of the poor, of the least of these, and from favoritism toward the rich, the elite of these.
We thank you for the empowering of thy servant, our 44th president, to inspire our nation to believe that yes we can work together to achieve a more perfect union.
And while we have sown the seeds of greed — the wind of greed and corruption, and even as we reap the whirlwind of social and economic disruption, we seek forgiveness and we come in a spirit of unity and solidarity to commit our support to our president by our willingness to make sacrifices, to respect your creation, to turn to each other and not on each other.
And now, Lord, in the complex arena of human relations, help us to make choices on the side of love, not hate; on the side of inclusion, not exclusion; tolerance, not intolerance.
And as we leave this mountain top, help us to hold on to the spirit of fellowship and the oneness of our family. Let us take that power back to our homes, our workplaces, our churches, our temples, our mosques, or wherever we seek your will.
Bless President Barack, First Lady Michelle. Look over our little angelic Sasha and Malia.
We go now to walk together as children, pledging that we won't get weary in the difficult days ahead. We know you will not leave us alone.
With your hands of power and your heart of love, help us then, now, Lord, to work for that day when nations shall not lift up sword against nation, when tanks will be beaten into tractors, when every man and every woman shall sit under his or her own vine and fig tree and none shall be afraid, when justice will roll down like waters and righteousness as a mighty stream.
Lord, in the memory of all the saints who from their labors rest, and in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get in back, when brown can stick around ... when yellow will be mellow ... when the red man can get ahead, man; and when white will embrace what is right. That all those who do justice and love mercy say Amen."
20 January 2009
05 January 2009
My Modernists
Good Afternoon.
So it's a bit surreal blogging while sitting in the reading room at the Beinecke, but why not. I'm overwhelmed with primary sources; I have a horrible cold and am a bit hopped up on medicine [my body hates all foreign drug substances]; and I need to start putting things together for myself and start to draft an outline to the book I'm working on. Having just returned from a weekend in NYC at the American Historical Association Conference [lovely to see old grad school friends, not so lovely to have barely left the Hilton b/c of conducting interviews and because I'm so sick], the wheels are beginning to crank again and I feel the need to put some order to what I've done and what I'm doing.
I have found, in the past two and 1/2 weeks, an absolutely surreal amount of information. When I won this fellowship, I thought I would find some stuff and maybe have a hard time filling four weeks. Now I know four weeks won't be enough. I'm also wondering why no one else has pursued my topic [though I'm glad that they didn't]. I shan't reveal all my amazing discoveries [lest there be any modernist project poachers in cyberspace], but let's start at the beginning.
In 2000 I wrote a seminar paper on the photographer F. Holland Day. From this paper sprung forth a dissertation: Against An Epoch: Boston Moderns, 1890-1905 where I argued, among other things, that Boston was aesthetically 'modern' before NYC, that it was a different sort of 'alternative' modernism based less on the individual artist genius and more on the cultural productions made possible by friendship and collaboration among like-minded artists, photographers, writers, poets, architects, etc. At the heart of the dissertation were aesthetic Bostonians [and transplants] of the 1880s and 1890s--a sometimes decadent crew that included [among others]: the publisher and photographer F. Holland Day, the Irish Catholic poet and essayist Louise Imogen Guiney, the architect Ralph Adams Cram, the poets Richard Hovey and Bliss Carman, the impressionist painter Thomas Buford Meteyard, the regional prose author Alice Brown and some others. The group individually published a good deal of singular work, while at the same time collaborating on small magazines like: The Knight Errant, The Mahogany Tree, and Le Courier Innocent [while at the same time publishing mainstream--Harper's, The Atlantic, etc.] as well as being members of clubs and secret societies--Brotherhood of the Linked Ring, The Visionists, etc. They hung around Harvard, they spent time at Meteyard's house by the shore in Scituate; they were visible members of major movements like Arts and Crafts in Boston and were celebrated among peers for accomplishments in Boston and beyond. They weren't pleased or sold with the currents of the nineties--industrialization, a world moving ever faster, a disconnect between art and life, a diminishing natural world--but they fought their dissatisfaction with their art, and stemmed the tide of progress away from communal ties and collaboration with their friendship. They were NOT as Jackson Lears has argued, "anti-modern." They didn't wish to stop progress, but they didn't wish to lose their souls and identities in the sweep of progress either. For more about them--you can see my dissertation.
I finished that project in 2005, and was, for awhile DONE with it. I pursued other threads. I have a side interest in friendships among disparate generations of 19th century women writers; I learned more about 19th century Boston; I thought about the transatlantic flow of ideas among art colonies [all the ideas didn't come from Europe to America--the currents flowed both ways] and I kept working on F. Holland Day, and particularly his initial friendship and later rivalry with the famed Alfred Stieglitz. It's the classic Boston vs. New York, but it's something more too. It has a lot to do with who gets remembered from the past, who gets called the father of American Art Photography, and who falls into the annals of history remembered infrequently and pigeon-holed as a pictorialist whose influence waned. I'll eventually write the article that tells everyone how Day was more famous at the turn-of-the century; that Day was more interested in mentoring a generation of photographers who were his friends than in mentoring the movement as a whole--that was Stieglitz's passion. Day chose to leave the mainstream and keep his friendships. Stieglitz prized the movement above the individuals who comprised it. I spent a semester teasing out the simultaneous rise of both photographers and their allegiances--culminating in Day's 1900-1901 New School of American Photography Show in London and Paris and Stieglitz's 1902 founding of the Photo-Secession. Day refused to join--his name was soon forgotten--this was not a game he wanted to play. Stieglitz soldiered on, took pictorialism to what he felt was its natural end in 1910 and ushered in his modern--straight lines--the city--currents from Europe. The Armory SHow Came to NYC in 1913. Stieglitz opened his galleries to painters and sculptors. He supported photographers with no pictorial pasts--Paul Strand, especially, and reinvented himself as the main promoter of modern art in America. He married the promising female modernist Georgia O'Keeffe. He was reborn--he divorced himself from his first wife and from his first life. He turned from photographer to promoter to businessman to demagogue. He got very good at alienating his ever-evolving stable of artists. He was the Axis; and, by default, so was New York.
So here comes my new project--rising like a phoenix from the ashes of the old. And it all centers around a small coastal town in Maine: Georgetown.
Guiney and Day went to Georgetown to escape Boston. It was a retreat, but a place in which they brought all the friendships but not the city. It was quiet, it was on the coast, it was lovely, it was rejuvinating. Day bought the place from Guiney; he built a huge Chalet there in 1910-1911; he brought up all his former pictorialist friends--Clarence H. White, Gertrude Kasebier, George Seely, etc. By 1910--both Kasebier and White had split with Stieglitz in unpleasant ways. Day was the other pole-star; he received them and nurtured. White bought his own house in Georgetown--his family was happiest there--away from the city. He started a summer school for photographers there--he brought up other modernists to help--including the painter Max Weber. Day stopped coming to Maine in the late-teens. He died in Norwood, MA in 1933. White died in 1925 on a photographic trip to Mexico with students. In short, Georgetown is where many of the pictorialists found escape from Stieglitz and New York.
Fast forward a decade or more. There are more modernists in Georgetown--the sculptor Zorach and his painter wife Marguerite, the sculptor Gaston Lachaise--they both set up summer residences there in the 1920s--they're part of the Stieglitz circle. Come to 1928--Paul and Beck Strand and Marsden Hartley spend a good chunk of the summer there with the Lachaises--they all write about the collaborative environment--how energizing it is to be together there. Strand takes photographs unlike any others he's done before--he shows them all at Stieglitz's gallery in NYC. But more people come: Hart Crane, Charles Sheeler, Hartley spends another summer--1937. This is the extremely short version.
But the question remains:
Why do they all come to Georgetown? What do they find there? And what's the connection between the early pictorialists and the later modernists being inspired by the same place? And what's with the later more individualistic modernists finding the same sort of collaborative possibilities in friendships deepened in Georgetown? Georgetown becomes an alternative site of American modernism and also a site of Alternative American Modernism. Let's de-center from New York but not run into the "regionalist" camp too quickly.
It's the place AND the people who come there. And they all come to Georgetown to flee New York. And they all find new work and inspiration there. And despite two very different eras, the common person they're all, in a sense, fleeing, is Stieglitz.
And so, what I've been looking for, in all this correspondence between these artists and writers at Yale, are mentions of Georgetown, and what that time meant to them. AND it meant ALOT. And they took this work back to NYC and sold it. So what's the role of the market here, what's the role of region? Of Maine? And what's the role of retreat, and informal colonies? And how might one go about analyzing the cultural productions? And what might it all mean?
Well, that's what I'm trying to figure out. What I know, however, is that it's more than coincidence. And I need the missing link between Pictorialism and Modernism, and I think it's Georgetown.
So it's a bit surreal blogging while sitting in the reading room at the Beinecke, but why not. I'm overwhelmed with primary sources; I have a horrible cold and am a bit hopped up on medicine [my body hates all foreign drug substances]; and I need to start putting things together for myself and start to draft an outline to the book I'm working on. Having just returned from a weekend in NYC at the American Historical Association Conference [lovely to see old grad school friends, not so lovely to have barely left the Hilton b/c of conducting interviews and because I'm so sick], the wheels are beginning to crank again and I feel the need to put some order to what I've done and what I'm doing.
I have found, in the past two and 1/2 weeks, an absolutely surreal amount of information. When I won this fellowship, I thought I would find some stuff and maybe have a hard time filling four weeks. Now I know four weeks won't be enough. I'm also wondering why no one else has pursued my topic [though I'm glad that they didn't]. I shan't reveal all my amazing discoveries [lest there be any modernist project poachers in cyberspace], but let's start at the beginning.
In 2000 I wrote a seminar paper on the photographer F. Holland Day. From this paper sprung forth a dissertation: Against An Epoch: Boston Moderns, 1890-1905 where I argued, among other things, that Boston was aesthetically 'modern' before NYC, that it was a different sort of 'alternative' modernism based less on the individual artist genius and more on the cultural productions made possible by friendship and collaboration among like-minded artists, photographers, writers, poets, architects, etc. At the heart of the dissertation were aesthetic Bostonians [and transplants] of the 1880s and 1890s--a sometimes decadent crew that included [among others]: the publisher and photographer F. Holland Day, the Irish Catholic poet and essayist Louise Imogen Guiney, the architect Ralph Adams Cram, the poets Richard Hovey and Bliss Carman, the impressionist painter Thomas Buford Meteyard, the regional prose author Alice Brown and some others. The group individually published a good deal of singular work, while at the same time collaborating on small magazines like: The Knight Errant, The Mahogany Tree, and Le Courier Innocent [while at the same time publishing mainstream--Harper's, The Atlantic, etc.] as well as being members of clubs and secret societies--Brotherhood of the Linked Ring, The Visionists, etc. They hung around Harvard, they spent time at Meteyard's house by the shore in Scituate; they were visible members of major movements like Arts and Crafts in Boston and were celebrated among peers for accomplishments in Boston and beyond. They weren't pleased or sold with the currents of the nineties--industrialization, a world moving ever faster, a disconnect between art and life, a diminishing natural world--but they fought their dissatisfaction with their art, and stemmed the tide of progress away from communal ties and collaboration with their friendship. They were NOT as Jackson Lears has argued, "anti-modern." They didn't wish to stop progress, but they didn't wish to lose their souls and identities in the sweep of progress either. For more about them--you can see my dissertation.
I finished that project in 2005, and was, for awhile DONE with it. I pursued other threads. I have a side interest in friendships among disparate generations of 19th century women writers; I learned more about 19th century Boston; I thought about the transatlantic flow of ideas among art colonies [all the ideas didn't come from Europe to America--the currents flowed both ways] and I kept working on F. Holland Day, and particularly his initial friendship and later rivalry with the famed Alfred Stieglitz. It's the classic Boston vs. New York, but it's something more too. It has a lot to do with who gets remembered from the past, who gets called the father of American Art Photography, and who falls into the annals of history remembered infrequently and pigeon-holed as a pictorialist whose influence waned. I'll eventually write the article that tells everyone how Day was more famous at the turn-of-the century; that Day was more interested in mentoring a generation of photographers who were his friends than in mentoring the movement as a whole--that was Stieglitz's passion. Day chose to leave the mainstream and keep his friendships. Stieglitz prized the movement above the individuals who comprised it. I spent a semester teasing out the simultaneous rise of both photographers and their allegiances--culminating in Day's 1900-1901 New School of American Photography Show in London and Paris and Stieglitz's 1902 founding of the Photo-Secession. Day refused to join--his name was soon forgotten--this was not a game he wanted to play. Stieglitz soldiered on, took pictorialism to what he felt was its natural end in 1910 and ushered in his modern--straight lines--the city--currents from Europe. The Armory SHow Came to NYC in 1913. Stieglitz opened his galleries to painters and sculptors. He supported photographers with no pictorial pasts--Paul Strand, especially, and reinvented himself as the main promoter of modern art in America. He married the promising female modernist Georgia O'Keeffe. He was reborn--he divorced himself from his first wife and from his first life. He turned from photographer to promoter to businessman to demagogue. He got very good at alienating his ever-evolving stable of artists. He was the Axis; and, by default, so was New York.
So here comes my new project--rising like a phoenix from the ashes of the old. And it all centers around a small coastal town in Maine: Georgetown.
Guiney and Day went to Georgetown to escape Boston. It was a retreat, but a place in which they brought all the friendships but not the city. It was quiet, it was on the coast, it was lovely, it was rejuvinating. Day bought the place from Guiney; he built a huge Chalet there in 1910-1911; he brought up all his former pictorialist friends--Clarence H. White, Gertrude Kasebier, George Seely, etc. By 1910--both Kasebier and White had split with Stieglitz in unpleasant ways. Day was the other pole-star; he received them and nurtured. White bought his own house in Georgetown--his family was happiest there--away from the city. He started a summer school for photographers there--he brought up other modernists to help--including the painter Max Weber. Day stopped coming to Maine in the late-teens. He died in Norwood, MA in 1933. White died in 1925 on a photographic trip to Mexico with students. In short, Georgetown is where many of the pictorialists found escape from Stieglitz and New York.
Fast forward a decade or more. There are more modernists in Georgetown--the sculptor Zorach and his painter wife Marguerite, the sculptor Gaston Lachaise--they both set up summer residences there in the 1920s--they're part of the Stieglitz circle. Come to 1928--Paul and Beck Strand and Marsden Hartley spend a good chunk of the summer there with the Lachaises--they all write about the collaborative environment--how energizing it is to be together there. Strand takes photographs unlike any others he's done before--he shows them all at Stieglitz's gallery in NYC. But more people come: Hart Crane, Charles Sheeler, Hartley spends another summer--1937. This is the extremely short version.
But the question remains:
Why do they all come to Georgetown? What do they find there? And what's the connection between the early pictorialists and the later modernists being inspired by the same place? And what's with the later more individualistic modernists finding the same sort of collaborative possibilities in friendships deepened in Georgetown? Georgetown becomes an alternative site of American modernism and also a site of Alternative American Modernism. Let's de-center from New York but not run into the "regionalist" camp too quickly.
It's the place AND the people who come there. And they all come to Georgetown to flee New York. And they all find new work and inspiration there. And despite two very different eras, the common person they're all, in a sense, fleeing, is Stieglitz.
And so, what I've been looking for, in all this correspondence between these artists and writers at Yale, are mentions of Georgetown, and what that time meant to them. AND it meant ALOT. And they took this work back to NYC and sold it. So what's the role of the market here, what's the role of region? Of Maine? And what's the role of retreat, and informal colonies? And how might one go about analyzing the cultural productions? And what might it all mean?
Well, that's what I'm trying to figure out. What I know, however, is that it's more than coincidence. And I need the missing link between Pictorialism and Modernism, and I think it's Georgetown.
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