By the end of the nineteenth century, New York City was the accepted
cultural and artistic capital of the United States. The country’s
largest, wealthiest, and most successful city and a growing international
community, by 1900 New York was home to an increasing number of
world-class cultural institutions. The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
formed in 1870, was immediately recognized as a leading museum,
housing a remarkable collection of international art; Carnegie Hall,
opened in 1891, was to become one of the most celebrated concert
halls in the world. The New York Public Library, formed in 1895,
opened the city’s temple to knowledge, the library’s Fifth
Avenue Branch, in 1911.
In the decades following the turn of the century, New York welcomed
artistic innovation, supporting new and sometimes radical arts projects
that would certainly have failed in smaller, less diverse cities.
In the fine and literary arts, as well as the theater, New York
City became a center of the avant-garde. In 1920, Scofield Thayer
published the first number of his influential literary journal,
The Dial, including work by Ezra Pound, Marianne
Moore, Hart Crane, and Djuna
Barnes. The socialist magazine The Masses issued
its first number in 1911 and, in its six years of publication, the
journal included literary work and art by Amy Lowell, Sherwood Anderson,
Rockwell Kent, Mabel
Dodge, and Robert Henri. Michael Gold and John Sloan
revived the journal’s spirit in 1926 when they began publishing
the New Masses; the radical political and arts magazine would
publish the period’s most important writers, from Langston
Hughes to Ernest Hemingway, Eugene O’Neill to Upton Sinclair.
The International Exhibition of Modern Art of 1913 was the first
exhibition of its kind anywhere in the world; with the Armory Show,
as it was called, and its exhibition of Cubist, Futurist, and Postimpressionist
art, the city embraced modern art with enthusiasm. In 1929, Miss
Lillie P. Bliss, Mrs. Cornelius J. Sullivan, and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller,
Jr., founded the Museum of Modern Art; the following year, Gertrude
Vanderbilt Whitney founded the city’s Whitney Museum of American
Art.
The embodiment of the mythic American land of opportunity, New York
welcomed many women whose pursuit of a career in the arts might
have been unrealistic elsewhere. “New York was largely run
by women,” Mabel
Dodge Luhan wrote of the period, “there was a woman
behind every man in every publisher’s office, in all the editorial
circles, and in Wall Street offices, and it was the judgment and
intuition of these that determined many policies, but they were
anonymous women.” In the arts
community, women were involved with every aspect of the radically
changing cultural landscape. At “evenings” hosted by influential
women artists and patrons, art and politics, literature and social
action were fused. Though Mabel
Dodge’s salon was perhaps the best known of these
gatherings, her friend Muriel
Draper was also an avid supporter of the arts who brought
artists and activists together in her home. Actress Fania
Marinoff, with her husband Carl Van Vechten, hosted outrageous
all-night parties famous for gathering together the finest artists
and intellectuals of the New Negro Movement with white artists,
publishers, and patrons. The Stettheimer
sisters—Carrie, Ettie, and Florine—all artists
in their own rights, were hostesses to an international group of
writers, critics, and painters that included Man Ray and Marcel
Duchamp.
In collaboration with Duchamp, painter and art collector Katherine
Dreier, a New York native, helped to create an audience
for modern art in the United States by establishing the Société
Anonyme, an organization dedicated to exhibiting and promoting modern
and contemporary art. Another New York artist, painter and colorist
Pamela
Coleman Smith first exhibited her work in the city at
291, the famous gallery run by photographer Alfred Stieglitz. Smith’s
work explored a variety of subjects, including the occult, music,
and theater.
The city’s thriving theater movement matched the innovation
of its art scene; women were central to all aspects of the movement—as
playwrights, actresses, set designers, directors, producers, and
promoters. In 1916, the Provincetown Players, one of the most significant
noncommercial theater groups of the twentieth century, performed
their first play in Greenwich Village; their first season included
new plays by Eugene O’Neill, Louise Bryant, Susan
Glaspell and George Cram Cook, and Neith
Boyce. Just a few years later, in 1919, the groundbreaking
theater company known as the Theatre Guild produced its first show;
in the years that followed, the company would become famous for
outstanding original plays unlike anything ever seen on the New
York stage. Playwright and novelist Neith
Boyce Hapgood, a founder of the Provincetown Players,
helped to begin a revolution in noncommercial theater devoted to
performing the highest quality plays, regardless of popular trends.
Women like Adele
Gutman Nathan and Eva
Le Gallienne headed small theater companies that performed
new plays for eager, if sometimes small audiences in Greenwich Village
and other city neighborhoods. Theresa
Helburn, a producer with the famed Theatre Guild, helped
to establish the period’s most important playwrights and actors
with groundbreaking shows that in some cases literally changed American
theater.
A center of publishing and literary development, the city was a
natural home for writers and editors. Poet Elinor
Wylie, who lived in Washington and Europe before settling
in New York, found in the city a community of writers and editors
that included her future husband, William Rose Benét, and
his sister, poet and critic Laura
Benét. As managing editor of The Dial,
Alyse
Gregory was in a position to direct contemporary literary
tastes and help determine the character of twentieth-century American
poetry.
Marianne Moore was perhaps the most
important and influential member of this literary circle. An innovative
poet and visionary editor, Moore
was among the most significant forces in Modernist literature internationally;
a widely read and visible figure in New York’s literary scene
for half a century, she played a defining role in twentieth-century
American literature. Bridging the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
novelist
Edith Wharton was no less important
in shaping American literature.
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