Becoming)Walker)Evans:)Photography,)Literature,)and)Transnational)Modernism,) 1926B1938) ) ) ) ) ) ) By)Kristen)Oehlrich) ) B.A.,)State)University)of)New)York)College)at)Fredonia,)2000) ) M.A.,)Stony)Brook)University,)2002) ) ) ) ) ) A)Dissertation)Submitted)in)Partial)Fulfillment)of)the) )Requirements)for)the)Degree)of)Doctor)of)Philosophy)in)the) )Department)of)the)History)of)Art)and)Architecture)at)Brown)University) ) ) ) Providence,)Rhode)Island) May,)2014) ) ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ©!Copyright!2014!by!Kristen!Oehlrich! ! ! Curriculum!Vitae! ! Kristen Oehlrich is a Ph.D. Candidate in the History of Art and Architecture Department at Brown University. She was born near Buffalo, New York in 1978. Her teaching and research interests focus on the history of photography, film, theory, visual culture, and the intersections of modern and contemporary American and European art. Her dissertation examines Walker Evans’s formative years in photography, 1926-1938, in the context of transatlanticism, theory, literature, and politics. Kristen received her M.A. in Art History and Criticism from Stony Brook University (2002). She has held positions at the Museum of Modern Art, the RISD Museum, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, and has taught art history and theory at Parsons, The School of Visual Arts, Brown University, and RISD. Kristen was a Helena Rubenstein Fellow in the Whitney Independent Study Program in Critical Studies, and a selected member of the Beinecke Library Master Class at Yale University in photography and archival research. She has been a recipient of fellowships from the Victorian Society in America as well as the DAAD for research and teaching at the Bauhaus, Dessau, Germany. For the past two years, she has served as the co-chair of the Visual Culture Caucus Committee at the College Art Association. At present, Kristen is a Post-Doctoral Teaching and Research Fellow in the Graduate Program in the History of Art at Williams College housed in the Clark Institute, Williamstown, MA. ! ! iv! ! ! ! ! Acknowledgments! ! ! Many!mentors,!advisors,!friends,!colleagues,!and!family!members!played! important!and!vital!roles!in!the!research!and!writing!of!this!dissertation.!The!list!is! long!and!varied,!but!I!would!particularly!like!to!acknowledge!my!outstanding!and! supportive!advisors,!including!Douglas!Nickel,!with!whom!I!spent!many!many!hours! chatting!about!Walker!Evans!and!whose!critical!eye!helped!to!shape!the!scope!of! this!work,!Alan!Trachtenberg,!whose!personal!knowledge!of!Evans,!and!infectious! excitement!for!his!photography!remained!a!constant!source!of!inspiration!for!my! research,!and!Hervé!Vanel,!who!supported!my!project!from!my!first!day!at!Brown!as! a!graduate!student!until!my!last.!!To!the!research!departments!at!The!Museum!of! Modern!Art!and!especially!the!Metropolitan!Museum!of!Art’s!Walker!Evans!Archive,! a!heartfelt!thank!you!for!access!to!the!materials!that!formed!the!foundation!of!this! research.!To!my!family,!especially!my!supportive!parents!who!helped!me!finish!this! dissertation!in!a!timely!manner!with!their!constant,!and!from!the!heart!refrain!of! “are!you!done!yet?”!To!them!I!can!finally!say,!“yes.”!To!my!first!love,!and!soon!to!be! husband!Tim,!thank!you!for!the!love!no!words!are!qualified!to!describe.!You!are!the! apple!to!my!eye,!the!feather!to!my!wing.!And!finally,!to!my!constant!companion! through!all!of!this,!my!wonderful!little!dog!Mabel,!whose!persistent!presence!by!my! side!throughout!all!of!the!writing,!reading,!and!editing!always!kept!me!warm!and! content.!I!am!especially!grateful!for!your!undying!excitement!every!time!I!said! “WALKer!Evans”!when!reading!drafts!aloud.!! ! ! ! ! v! ! ! ! Table!of!Contents! ! ! ! Chapter!one:!Becoming!Walker!Evans! ! Chapter!two:!!Intimate!Interiors:!Walker!Evans’s!Photographs!of!1930s!Domestic!! ! ! Spaces! ! Chapter!three:!American!Haunts:!Walker!Evans’s!Photographs!of!Nineteenth!!! ! ! Century!Architecture! ! Chapter!four:!Contextualizing!American)Photographs) ! vi! ! ! ! ! List!of!Illustrations! ! ! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!For!complete!illustrations!with!captions,!please!see!pages!342;489.!! ! ! ! vii! ! ! INTRODUCTION BECOMING WALKER EVANS: PHOTOGRAPHY, LITERATURE, AND TRANSNATIONAL MODERNISM, 1926-1938 This dissertation foregrounds the connections between American, European, and Latin American influences in American art history as signaled by the use of “transnational” in my title. Using a contextualist approach, I demonstrate how the iconic American photographer Walker Evans’s images from the Great Depression were created in a period that forged aesthetic alliances between disparate international influences, including the work of the French photographer Eugène Atget, the poetry of Hart Crane and other American queer writers, the agrarianism of William Faulkner, and the radical politics of the Diego Rivera circle. Moreover, I examine how debates about immigrant policy and racial politics in the United States and cultural relations with Cuba informed the subjects of Evans’s photographs. This project contributes to the discipline of visual studies by renegotiating the parameters and delineations of art history. It questions traditional regional and continental divisions, preferring instead to adopt a more culturally integrative approach to the study of American art, one which focuses on the fluidity of artistic and intellectual exchange in a broadly defined North America. Chapter one begins with a discussion of the rebellion against Victorianism by the twentieth-century American avant-garde. Modern writers and artists in the 1920s and 1930s were interested in two primary ideas of American history: one drew upon the notion of America’s “usable past” as posited by the literary critic Van Wyck Brooks in 1916, while the other looked forward to the future of the United States, and particularly of New York City, as the site of modern industrial progress. This chapter situates Walker 1 Evans within this polarized context, and considers his work both as product of American vernacular traditions and as representative of a progressive aesthetic movement towards what would become an iconic American documentary style during the 1930s. The following chapter shifts to a discussion of Evans’s photographs of interiors of working class and immigrant homes during the Great Depression. These images are contextualized within the history of the strict European immigration laws enacted throughout the 1920s and 1930s as an attempt to control the increasingly culturally diverse populations of America. Evans, who had a strong literary background and spent time in Paris studying literature, turned toward the American domestic vernacular interior, with its well-worn surfaces and Americana-inspired decor, in part because of a larger literary shift towards notions of the “interior” occurring in modernist literature. In particular, the work of James Joyce (Evans’s literary idol), Gustave Flaubert, Marcel Proust, Edith Wharton, and Henry James were formative models for Evans in this regard. Chapter three examines Evans’s first small-scale solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1933, Walker Evans: Photographs of Nineteenth-Century Houses. This chapter, in contrast to the previous, considers the idea of “exteriority” as manifested in American vernacular architecture during the so-called Brown Decades through the Great Depression. In particular, Evans’s architectural photographs of homes from this period reflect a specifically American obsession with the idea of the “home,” and its shifting representation in American mass culture, literature, and art. The work of American writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson, and William Faulkner, and 2 American artists such as Charles Burchfield and Charles Sheeler are considered in relation to Evans’s photographs from this period. The final chapter looks at two remarkably different projects by Evans also created during the 1930s. The first is his photographic work for Carleton Beals’s The Crime of Cuba (1933), a project for which he traveled to a politically unstable and violent Cuba during a period of strained cultural relations between that country and the United States. The second is his publication in 1938 of his well-known book, American Photographs. This chapter examines these two very different projects as works that are actually very much in dialog with each other. Several of Evans’s Cuba photographs, for instance, appeared in the later American Photographs publication. The idea of what “America” was in the 1930s, the ways in which this idea was represented photographically in images that have now become iconic, and the fact of Evans’s continued interest in literature and contemporary works of nonfiction informs the framework of the final chapter. 3 CHAPTER 1: BECOMING WALKER EVANS When did you begin to take pictures that caught hold with you? About 1928 and 1929. I had a few prescient flashes and they led me on. -Leslie Katz, “An Interview with Walker Evans” 1971 “These are simply documents I make.” -Eugène Atget The literary and artistic circles of the 1920s and 1930s had a profound effect on Walker Evans’s development as a self-defined literary minded photographer. Like many critically engaged artists of his generation, Evans’s work was shaped in a large part by the writing of literary figures such as Van Wyck Brooks, T.S. Eliot, and Waldo Frank. These writers called for the production of a new American art; one that would draw upon America’s past achievements and simultaneously speak to the contemporary moment. In a similar way, Paul Rosenfeld’s The Port of New York (1924) and the art criticism of Henry McBride helped to define American art as distinct and separate from European traditions. Lewis Mumford and John Dewey’s philosophical writings similarly affected artists and cultural thinkers working in the 1930s, providing pragmatic models for how to create socially engaged art practices that spoke to specific political situations of the 1930s in meaningful ways. The artwork produced during the interwar period in the United States expressed to an attentive international audience a specifically American aesthetic and social philosophy. At the forefront of these discussions and debates were the visual artists associated with the photographer Alfred Stieglitz. The so-called Stieglitz Circle included 4 the American artists Paul Strand, Charles Sheeler, Georgia O’Keeffe, Arthur Dove, John Marin, Marsden Hartley, and Charles Demuth. Their work was exhibited at Stieglitz’s famous 291gallery (1905-1917), as well as its later iterations: the Intimate Gallery (1925- 1929) and An American Place (1929-1946). Writers associated with this circle, such as Sherwood Anderson, Van Wyck Brooks, Paul Rosenfeld, Waldo Frank, and Lewis Mumford, self-consciously drew from the radical democratic vision of Walt Whitman and produced literary work and criticism that became the dominant discourse on art in this period. Walker Evans was profoundly influenced by many of the artists and writers of the Stieglitz Circle, even though he eventually came to reject Stieglitz’s dominant personality and what he called his “arty” photographic aesthetic. By the late 1920s and 1930s, Stieglitz’s work represented to Evans and his milieu a conservative photographic practice and style that foregrounded an aesthetic sensibility rooted in the traditions of painting. In reality, by the mid to late 1920s, Stieglitz was producing far more formally radical work that had been during the 1910s (see for example his series of Equivalents, and his New York City series)1 but even so, this aesthetic felt too constrained for Evan’s burgeoning artistic sensibility. James Mellow, Evans’s biographer recounts one of Evans’s responses to Stieglitz: “...undoubtedly the most ‘artistic’ practitioner of all time; with the adverse effect that it was he who forced ‘art’ into quotation marks and into unwonted earnestness.”2 Evans came to reject Stieglitz 1 Photographs like Stieglitz’s From Room ‘303’(Intimate Gallery) (1927) makes use of punning signage, 2 James R. Mellow. Walker Evans. New York: Basic Books, 2008, p. 87. Evans’s continued assessment of Stieglitz, “On the other had, Stieglitz’s overstated, self-conscious aestheticism engendered a healthy reaction...There is reason to believe that Alfred Stieglitz may very well have been the father of serious 5 and his photographic dominance, and instead looked to the work of Stieglitz’s protégé, Paul Strand as the type of photographic practice to emulate. In an interview Evans recalled the first time he saw Strand’s work reproduced in Camera Work: “I remember coming across Paul Strand's Blind Woman when I was very young, and that really bowled me over... It's a very powerful picture. I saw it in the New York Public Library file of Camera Work, and I remember going out of there over stimulated: That's the stuff, that's the thing to do. It charged me up.”3 The generation of artists who reached maturity in the 1920s reacted strongly against the tenets of American Victorianism,4 which, after WWI, were perceived to be decadent and no longer applicable to the new, modern age. In art and literature, Victorianism was best represented by an interest in decorum, social acceptability, visual excess, and a privileging of white Anglo-Saxon narratives (to the exclusion of other races or cultural groups). Characters in Victorian literature tended towards the predictable: the types of characters found, for instance, in the stern and diligent businessmen that appear in William Dean Howells’s work, A Hazard of New Fortune, (1890), or the polite, contemporary photography. I hedge first because Stieglitz never really stopped being a ‘salon’ photographer; second because his most successful offspring,have, in truth, worked in inspired opposition to his heavy tenets and manner.” Evans pictured Stieglitz as a “19th century master in black hat and cape...I think the fact that Stieglitz was such a screaming aesthete came from the [circumstance] that he had a private income of unearned money. The effect of this kind of concern upon artists seldom seems to be given the importance I think it has” Mellow, p. 87. 3 Vicki Goldberg, ed., Leslie Katz. “An Interview with Walker Evans.” Photography in Print: Writings from 1816 to the Present. New Mexico: University of New Mexico Press, p. 367-368. 4 The Victorian Era is a name designating the period from 1837 to 1901, the length of the rule of Britain's Queen Victoria. American Victorianism was an offshoot of this period and lifestyle that occurred in the United States, chiefly in heavily populated regions such as New England and the Deep South. The name was derived from the reign of Queen Victoria, which reflected the heavy British cultural influence on the nation during the time. 6 domestically-oriented women as popularly found in the pages of Louisa May Alcott’s more popular work, Little Women (1868). In these novels, as in much of Victorian literature, one’s “character” and moral position were held in the utmost regard. Victorianism in the United States was perhaps most clearly embodied in the political position and mannerism of the nation’s leader, Theodore Roosevelt who attempted through the Progressive movement to bring social, political, and economic reality closer to Victorian values during his presidency.5 In 1900, Roosevelt remarked upon the necessity of virtue in one’s life: “No brilliance of intellect, no perfection of bodily development, will count when weighted against that assemblage of virtues…which we group together under the name of character.”6 Victorian art, especially work produced in Europe, was most characterized by an emphasis on portraiture, landscape painting, history painting, and strong traditions in the decorative arts, especially with regard to the domestic setting. The Victorian avant-garde in Britain, for instance, was embodied in the work of the Pre-Raphaelites, of the circle surrounding William Morris, and the poet and writer William Ruskin. By the early 1900s, Victorian style and artistic practice, especially Victorian art not labeled as avant-garde, was regarded as stuffy, overdetermined, and overly staid by American artists working abroad and in the United States. The new era of modernism had begun. By the 1920s, in the post WWI-era, American Culture had undergone a profound shift towards “the new,” and the old values and ideals of Victorianism no longer seemed 5 Stanley Coben. Rebellion Against Victorianism. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991, p. 32. 6 As quoted in Coben, 32. 7 culturally applicable. The rise of opportunities and increased funding for the intellectual class at universities in the United States led to the emergence of harsh critiques of Victorian values, especially in the work of Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson, and Upton Sinclair. These writers and cultural critics questioned Victorian ideas of race, identity, and social decorum. In art, the formal tenets of realism or academism were seen as decadent styles and utterly too bourgeois in taste and sensibility for the avant-garde practitioner. Instead, the jazz-age era of the 1920s saw the rise of radical experimentation in literature and poetry, as well the popularization of machine-age aesthetics in art. And yet, however powerful the vitriolic attacks by the intelligentsia were on Victorian ideals, critics writing and working in the late 1910s and 1920s ultimately did not succeed in replacing Victorian belief systems with another more viable model. This led to a sharp difference in how those working in the next generation of the 1930s perceived the Victorian past, and in what they learned from it. Evans’s generation, which artistically matured during the 1930s, had a more complex relationship with the American past, and particularly with the post-Civil war period and the era of late Victorianism. While the previous generation had rebelled against stuffy Victorian ideals, artists working in the late 1920s and early 1930s searched for ways to create meaningful American art that drew from and utilized certain past achievements of artists and writers in the United States in the previous century. While modern artists in this period certainly maintained their disdain for nineteenth-century bourgeois existence, and harshly criticized Gilded Age sensibilities and materialism (which many felt had led to the Great Depression) they nonetheless mined the American 8 Victorian past for important artistic achievements that they felt had been overlooked. As a result of this turn towards America’s “usable past”—a term popularized by Van Wyck Brooks in his essay “'On Creating a Usable Past”7—heretofore neglected works such as the writings of Herman Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the Civil War-era photographs by Mathew Brady saw a wide re-popularization and cultural acceptance. This period also saw a revival of interest in the poetic lyricism of Walt Whitman and a fascination with Victorian vernacular architecture, including ornate wooden Victorian-era homes and Shaker-style barns. In general, the idea of the vernacular or folk art had associations with left-leaning politics, especially the socialist theories of William Morris and John Ruskin, whose emphasis on craft and the importance of artisanal skill had been revisited in America by members of the Stieglitz Circle. These reconsiderations of how American traditions in art and literature could inform current, Depression-era art practice had a profound effect on Evans’s burgeoning photographic sensibility, and many of these ideas were reflected in his best-known work of this period, the publication and exhibition American Photographs (1938). Before an analysis of that important book and show, it is important first to trace out Evans’s artistic and literary inheritance, so that a more accurate understanding of his iconic images from the Great Depression can be formed. This contextualization, including a discussion of Evans’s life-long interest in American and European literature and his artistic formation by these discourses, will be the subject of this chapter. 7 See Van Wyck Brooks, “'On Creating a Usable Past,” The Dial, 64, April 11 l9l8, p. 339. 9 The literary discourses of the 1920s and 1930s functioned as ideological bookends to Evans’s formation as a photographer informed by literary traditions. The work of Sinclair Lewis, T.S. Eliot, Sherwood Anderson, William Faulkner, and the radicalism of James Joyce among many others shaped Evans’s discerning eye during this period. In particular, Evans was fascinated by these writer’s emphasis on the minute details of daily life, and their indebtedness to a Realist literary heritage. However, it was the modernist impulse running through the work of these authors that had the most profound effect on Evans. These literary models profoundly shaped his photography during the late 1920s and 1930s. At Williams College, where Walker Evans was enrolled from 1922-1923, he was exposed to the latest avant-garde writing through literary journals and small magazines. As Evans would later recount in an interview, it was not through the formal channels of English classes at Williams that he was exposed to the ground-breaking literature; instead, he recalls being exposed to the moderns though his reading in the Williams library and through illicitly finding copies of Ezra Pound’s The Dial through friendships with other literary-minded students. He recalls: “I used Williams very, very positively for reading. Really that was subsidized leisure time to read. I went to the library and read. There was a very good little library. Somebody had left a good collection of modern first editions I remember. I would discover people like George Moore and I don’t remember who all, and I would sit there reading these things, and neglecting my studies but passing 10 them anyway by listening in class and getting low grades in examinations, you know, gentleman’s C’s.”8 Evans’s year at Williams coincided with the beginning of a new era of avant- garde literature. His claim that he “became intensely literary in that one year”9 (1922-23) is fortuitous given that these were the years when so many avant-garde journals and the writers featured in them were beginning to stylistically break from past literary traditions and publish their new work in little magazines and literary journals. This moment was later recalled excitedly by Evans “…just look who was publishing then! That’s who I was reading, Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, all those people. I was in the class of 1926. This was taking place in 1922-23. T. S. Eliot was just coming up. You can be sure that Williams didn’t teach you those. You had to go and get them. But we did.”10 When asked if he was aware at that time that the work he was fascinated by was really “modern,” Evans replied, “You’re damn right. I was right there. I now pride myself on that.”11 Some of the more significant literary works that Evans had access to during his year at Williams included T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, which was published in The Dial in November 1922. Eliot’s work, an extended poem of individual and societal despair, was written in the wake of World War I and had a profound influence on the next generation of writers, including Evans’s friend Hart Crane, whose The Bridge (1930) was 8 Oral history interview with Walker Evans, 1971 Oct. 13-Dec. 23, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 11 in many ways a response to Eliot’s work. Evans was drawn to Eliot’s colloquialisms and his use of uncanny detail to describe a scene or landscape. These literary techniques, derived from the influence of the French Symbolists, were stylistic devices that Evans later translated into visual idioms in his more mature photographic work. During these formative years, Evans likely encountered T.S. Eliot’s short essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), wherein Eliot redefined “tradition” by emphasizing the importance of history to writing and understanding poetry, and argued that poetry should be “impersonal,” i.e., separate and distinct from the personality of its writer. Eliot’s notion of tradition involved an idea that he referred to as “the historical sense,” which is a perception of “the pastness of the past” as well as of its “presence.” Eliot’s discussion of how the present was shaped, informed, and altered by the past, and his call for distance between a poet and his or her work, echoed Evans’s own sentiments about his photographic practice.12 Broadly speaking, Evans’s work during the 1930s as a photographer cataloguing the effects of the Great Depression on small-town rural America can be seen as an attempt to photograph “the present moment of the past” from an outsider’s position. Or put another way, Evans’s work attempted to see the present from a position of the future looking back upon a specific, temporal past. T.S. Eliot’s own words describe these ideas most succinctly. He wrote: “The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without 12 A broader discussion of Evans’s sentiments about his photographic practice and techniques appears in chapter four of this dissertation. 12 surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living.”13 In order to follow Eliot’s dictum that “the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past,” a poet must be intimately familiar with many literary traditions, including the whole “mind of Europe.” According to Eliot, these influences would necessarily appear as “ghosts” in the work of the modern poet or artist. Another important model of modernist writing for Evans was The Dial. This publication was a literary magazine that discussed international and domestic contemporary aesthetic developments in a way that demonstrated a deliberate break from previous Victorian literary traditions. As Maria Morris Hambourg has written, “The Dial championed and gained wide acceptance for the modern movement in which the pompous, prolix discussions of Victorian English were replaced by projections of direct emotion and descriptions of real objects in the vernacular language of normal discourse. Young writers, like Hart Crane, and serious young readers with hopes of writing, like Walker Evans, read The Dial, cover to cover.”14 In December 1922, Edmund Wilson’s review essay of Eliot’s The Waste Land appeared in The Dial. This essay was one of the first to discuss the poem critically while simultaneously celebrating its modern radicality. Early on, Evans was enthusiastic about 13 See T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” In The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, (1920) section 3. Originally published 1919. 14 See Maria Morris Hambourg, “A Portrait of the Artist.” In Walker Evans, New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, p. 7. 13 Eliot’s writing. Hambourg notes that Evans saved Eliot’s early poems, which appeared in the Little Review (1917), and would later “permanently borrow” Eliot’s second book of verse, Poems (1920) from the New York Public Library.15 The photographer was attracted to Eliot’s prose for several reasons: his work describes a young upper-class man living in and observing the modern condition. Full of disillusion and malaise, Eliot’s words paralleled Evans’s own self-professed mental and psychological state at the time. Also, like Evans himself, Eliot was a born Midwesterner, from St. Louis, Missouri. 16 In reading The Dial and other little magazines of the era, Evans also encountered the work of ee cummings, whose poems incorporated colloquialisms, American vernacular, and references to signs, and visually and stylistically broke from established poetic traditions. The daring simplicity and use of spare and precise language that appeared in cummings’s book of poems, is 5, appealed to Evans’s burgeoning ironic sensibility. Especially delightful in this regard was cummings’s “Poem, or Beauty Hurts Mr. Vinal,” which is filled with slang, advertising slogans, brand names, and snippets from patriotic songs. Evans’s father was an advertising man, and he probably found the 15 Hambourg, p. 7. An annotated copy of Eliot’s Poems once owned by Evans exists in the Walker Evans Archive. Hambourg also makes an important point about the stylistic attributes of Eliot’s writing “For Eliot it was essential to express the most intensely felt situation in an oblique, impersonal tone and to make one’s country or epoch the subject, not one’s self.” This type of insight is interesting given the formal attributes of Evans’s mature work, which expresses a similar sense of detachment (on behalf of the artist) and a simultaneous engagement with representations of “America” in the 1930s. 16 For more on T.S Eliot’s influence on Walker Evans, see Robert Oliver Ware, “The Eye of the Poet: Walker Evans and Modern Poetry.” Dissertation, University of New Mexico, 1997. 14 parody of American advertising and consumerism here witty, biting, and humorous. Below is an excerpt from cummings’s “Poem, or Beauty Hurts Mr. Vinal”: take it from me kiddo believe me my country,'tis of you, land of the Cluett Shirt Boston Garter and Spearmint Girl With The Wrigley Eyes(of you land of the Arrow Ide and Earl & Wilson Collars)of you i sing:land of Abraham Lincoln and Lydia E. Pinkham, land above all of Just Add Hot Water And Serve-- from every B.V.D. let freedom ring... cummings published in The Dial, Vanity Fair, and European and American magazines such as Broom, Secession, and S4N. The Walker Evans Archive contains a self-annotated edition of Cummings’s is 5 (1926). Several photographs taken by Evans in New York City during this period reflect the influence of cummings’s use of advertisement texts and fragments of language from modern life, as seen in the above poem. Two examples of Evans’s work that reflect the poet’s influence are Bronx, New York City, ca. 1928-29 and Signs, New York, ca.1928–30 (figures 1 and 2). These photographs demonstrate Evans’s early interest in signage, urban scenes, and tongue-in- cheek textual fragments. Another magazine which Evans’s had access to during and after his time at Williams was Smart Set. This magazine was formerly a women’s magazine but in the 15 years between 1918-1924 became a critical voice of conservative traditions, i.e. those likely held by Evans’s conservative parents. During this period, Smart Set was edited by the American critic and journalist H.L. Mencken with George Jean Nathan.17 In an interview later in life, Evans spoke about the influence of this publication on him at the time and how, as he perceived it, Mencken peeled from his country the “barnacles of Victorianism.”18 Probably one of the largest influences on Evans during this period (and throughout his life) was the work of James Joyce. Evans recounts reading Ulysses as it appeared in America in the Little Review, and remembers the author’s work having such a profound effect on him that it halted his own ability to write: “He was my god. That, too, prevented me from writing. I wanted to write like that or not at all.”19 Joyce’s radical writing style which made use of stream of consciousness as a literary device, was formative for Evans’s own development as a writer. Some of Evans’s early attempts at writing reflect a clear influence of the Irish author’s style.20 Because of Evans’s passion for literature he persuaded his father to cover his expenses to study in Paris, France for one year. Evans withdrew permanently from 17 Malcolm Cowley in Exiles Return (1934, 1994), writing about Mencken and Nathan said the following: “[from these two authors] we derived the sense of paradox, which became a standard for judging writers we afterward encountered. If they were paradoxical — if they turned platitudes upside down, showed the damage wrought by virtue, made heroes of their villains — then they were ‘moderns’; they deserved our respect.” Cowley, p. 20. 18 Vicki Goldberg, ed., Leslie Katz. “An Interview with Walker Evans.” Photography in Print: Writings from 1816 to the Present. New Mexico: University of New Mexico Press, p. 361. 19 Oral history interview with Walker Evans, 1971 Oct. 13-Dec. 23, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 20 For examples of these see Jeff Rosenheim, Unclassified: A Walker Evans Anthology. New York: Scalo Publishers, 2000. 16 Williams and crossed the Atlantic in 1926. His desire to be in Paris, and so amongst what would later be termed the “lost generation” (a term coined by Gertrude Stein after World War I21) was prompted, in part, by George Moore’s Confessions of a Young Man (1888). Evans owned a copy of this book, and by his account it inspired his desire to travel abroad. In an excerpt from Evans’s interview with Paul Cummings, he remarked upon the importance of Moore’s writings for him. PAUL CUMMINGS: Well, you went off to Paris? WALKER EVANS: I certainly did. Yes. PAUL CUMMINGS: How did that come about? Was that because of your reading about Paris and those places? WALKER EVANS: Oh, sure! I’ll bet you George Moore sent me to Paris. According to Moore, “café-education” in Paris was important for “the natural man, who schools himself, allowing his mind to grow and ripen under the sun and wind of modern life, in contradistinction to the University man, who is fed upon the dust of ages, and after a formula which has been composed to suit the requirements of the average human being.”22 Moore stressed the importance of acquiring certain skills including “disinterested observation,” which allowed the “natural man” to be like the nineteenth century flâneur–a detached observer of modern life. “Detached observation” 21 As Malcolm Cowley writes, “It was Gertrude Stein who first applied the phrase to them [the writers of this period]. ‘You are all a lost generation,’ she said to Ernest Hemingway, and Hemingway used the remark as an inscription for his first novel.” 22 Hambourg, p. 4. 17 as a method of recording the everyday world, would prove to be a formative influence on the development of Evans’s photographic style, and is similar to the technique of “poetic distance” as posited by T.S. Eliot. Another likely influence on Evans’s decision to study in Paris was Harold Stearns’s, “What Should a Young Man Do?” an article which appeared in The Freeman, on August 4, 1920, as well as Stearn’s book, America and the Young Intellectual (1921). Both works remarked upon the difference between the acceptance of rebellious youth culture in the United States as compared to France. Stearns wrote: “Rebellious youth is not wanted here…In our environment there is nothing to challenge our young men; there is no flexibility, no color, no possibility for adventure, no chance to shape events more generously than is permitted under the rules of highly organized looting.”23 According to Stearns, such inflexibility left America’s youth in a position where they were forced to accept the status quo. In contrast, Sterns described the difference in the tolerance of youth culture in France as follows: One is not thought eccentric in France if one has a mental individuality of one’s own; to have one’s peculiar way of looking at, feeling, and appraising things is considered as much one’s personal prerogative as the right to choose one’s personal style of hats. And with this fundamental respect for individuality goes a deep and abiding interest in form and beauty. It is no accident that the country in which human personality can function most freely, remains…the country that still sets the standard of civilized taste.24 23 Stearns, as quoted in Hambourg, p. 8. 24 Stearns, as quoted in Hambourg, p. 8. 18 From such statements, it is clear why Evans would have been attracted to the thought of spending time abroad in France: his rebellious nature and “against the grain” attitude would, he thought, find its niche in Europe. Malcolm Cowley, one of the more famous writers to discuss the lost generation in Paris, wrote in his Exiles Return (1934) about the mass exodus of writers, artists, and intellectuals from America to France: Ever since 1920 there had been no break in the movement toward France. Artists and writers, art photographers, art salesmen, dancers, movie actors, Guggenheim fellows, divorcées dabbling in sculpture, unhappy ex-débutantes wondering whether a literary career wouldn’t take the place of marriage—a whole world of people with and without talent but sharing the same ideals happily deserted the homeland. Each year some of them returned while others crowded into their places: the migration continued at a swifter rate.25 Some of the more famous exiles in Paris included (now) well-known artists and writers, who at the time were unknown and just beginning their careers. These included the artists Berenice Abbott, Man Ray, Stuart Davis, and Alexander Calder, and writers such as Ernest Hemingway, Dos Passos, Harold Stearns, Malcolm Cowley, ee cummings, Ezra Pound, John Peale Bishop, and Archibald MacLeish. These are the figures with whom Evans shared the cafés and culture of Paris in the late 1920s. Evans’s generation admired French writers immensely; Gustav Flaubert, Charles Baudelaire, LaFourge, Proust, and Remy de Gourmont were among the favorites of the exiles, and also among the French authors most admired by Evans. 25 Cowley, p. 240. 19 WALKER EVANS IN PARIS When Walker Evans went to France in 1926, it was at moment when the art capital of the world was shifting from Paris to New York. The Paris cultural scene and artistic milieu that Evans experienced during his time abroad led to his interest in photography as a medium, as an art form, and as a means to popularize ones’ own artistic identity. Specifically, in Paris Evans saw the work of the Surrealists, headed by André Breton, who was at the helm of the Paris art scene of the 1920s. In the early twentieth century, and especially in the generation prior to Evans’s own, many expatriate artists deliberately stationed themselves in Europe (particularly in France) in response to what they perceived as a lack of critical artistic engagement and production in the United States, specifically in New York City. However, by the time Evans reached Paris it was a well-established site for avant-garde and culture that by 1926 was beginning to give way to New York, signaled by the recent move of Dadaists and Surrealists such as Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, and Francis Picabia to America. Evans arrived in Paris at the tail-end of its artistic height and witnessed first-hand the transition of the art world dominance from Paris to New York City. In the years between 1918 and 1939, droves of expatriate European and American artists, writers, and performers spent time in Paris. Authors such as the Irish James Joyce, the American Ernest Hemingway, and artists such as the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, Spanish painter Pablo Picasso, French composer Erik Satie, and the American performer Josephine Baker all made Paris their home during this period. Census figures indicate that the population of greater Paris increased significantly 20 between 1921 and 1931 (rising from 5.3% to 9.2% of total inhabitants, including some 10,000 Americans).26 In 1921, when the photographer Man Ray speaking of Europeans, stated that “they crave America” he was referring to Americans’ realization that Europeans idealized and craved American culture. Europeans were infatuated with American billboard advertising, Manhattan skyscrapers, jazz music, and cocktails.27 By the 1920s, artists and writers both in the United States and in Europe had become aware of the importance of circulating photographic images of themselves within this context of transatlantic exchange. In essence, they realized the power of the cult of personality as represented and promoted through the photographic image. Man Ray, Berenice Abbott, and Lee Miller all became renowned portrait photographers during this period. Their popularity was such that Sylvia Beach, owner of the Shakespeare & Company bookstore in Paris, stated, “To be done by Man Ray and Berenice Abbott meant that you were rated as somebody.”28 Indeed, many portraits by these photographers hung on the walls of the Shakespeare & Company bookstore in Paris, and were in easy view of patrons such as Evans who frequented it during his time abroad. Because of the prevalence of these types of portraits in avant-garde circles, American artists in Paris 26 See Sophie Lévy, ed. American Artists in Paris, 1918-1939, A Transatlantic Avant-Garde. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Notably, these numbers shrunk drastically during the Depression and during WWII. For instance, foreigners accounted for only 4.1% of the population in 1946. 27 Adapted from wall text from exhibition American Artists in Paris, 1918-1939, A Transatlantic Avant- Garde. Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois, April 17, 2004 - June 27, 2004. 28 See Sophie Lévy, ed., A Transatlantic Avant-garde: American Artists in Paris, 1918-1939. University of California Press, 2003, p. 187. 21 soon realized the power of the portrait photograph to promote both their work and social standing while in Europe. Many artists celebrated the transcontinental exchanges that the period afforded. In a letter from 1913, for instance, the painter John Storrs wrote of the advantages of moving between the two countries: “I am only waiting and hoping for the moment when I shall receive enough real appreciation and material encouragement from America to make it possible for me to make my home here. In the meantime I shall continue to reside in France, coming every year or so to America to bring over and show any new work and profit by the prestige which America gives to its artists coming from abroad.”29 In contrast to this positive view of life abroad, there were, on the other hand, artists who saw Paris as a city past its prime, already supplanted by New York. The most emblematic figure in this regard was Alfred Stieglitz and those artists active in his 291 Gallery circle. Stieglitz did not possess the same obsession with France that so many did during this period, even though, early on, he did exhibit the work of European artists such Matisse, Picasso, and Renoir. Instead, for most of his long career, Stieglitz devoted his time to the exclusive promotion of American art and artists. In this effort, Stieglitz was not alone, as a 1927 edition of The Nation celebrating American art illustrates. An article there, “Americans we Like: Georgia O’Keeffe,” celebrates O’Keeffe’s work precisely because it existed outside (as critics of the period believed) of a European influence. In one place, the article notes that: “O’Keeffe is America’s. Its own exclusive product. It is 29 See John Storrs, “Museums of Artists.” The Little Review, Winter 1922, p. 63. 22 refreshing to realize that she has never been to Europe. More refreshing still that she has no ambition to go there.”30 These two differing nationalist positions point to the disparate views and receptions of the international arts scene among those interested in the arts in the 1910s and 1920s, and suggests how prevalent the discourse of European versus American culture was during this period. However, even within these nationalist attempts at essentialism, a significant amount of transnational exchange of ideas was evident. An example of such a confluence of cultures is clear in the following letter from Charles Demuth to Stieglitz in 1921, wherein Demuth outlines the increasing importance of American ideas, culture, and literature to the French. The letter was written during Demuth’s final stay in Paris, and points to the importance of the little magazines in establishing the American artist’s reputation abroad: “All the French painters, the great ones, and the men interested in the two magazines—“L’Amour de l’Art” and “L’Esprit Nouveau,” are very anxious to have the best of the Americans in with them. It is a thrill, really, to hear what they think of us, knowing us so slightly, mostly through the “Dial”— strange, isn’t it?—but it is thought very well of in France & England.” 31 In this cultural moment, the rise of the “American” artist began to emerge in literary and artistic discourse. 30 See Francis O’Brien, “Americans we Like: Georgia O’Keeffe.” The Nation, issue 12, October 1927, as quoted in Wanda M. Corn, The Great American Thing. p. 33. 31 As reproduced in Bruce Kellner, ed., Letters of Charles Demuth, American Artist, 1883-1935. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000, pp. 28-31. 23 Henry McBride, a popular art and cultural critic of the time, remarked upon the rise to prominence of American artists in literary and arts publications during this period. McBride was one of the earliest critics to recognize the increasing shift of the artistic center from Paris to New York. The following statement, written in an article by McBride entitled “American Art is ‘Looking Up’” (1922), hints at the burgeoning rise of American art and artists: “The Dial, too, is all for modernity and seems so avid for American productions that it is now unlikely that our revolutionary thinkers will be kept waiting long at the gates.”32 Several years later, in an article in The Dial in1929, McBride definitively declared that this shift had occurred. He wrote, “Paris is no longer the capital of Cosmopolis. All the intelligence of the world is focused on New York; it has become the battleground of modern civilization; all the roads now lead in this direction, and all the world knows this save the misguided artists who are jeopardizing their careers for the dubious consummations of the Café de le Rotonde.” 33 The shift in density of avant-garde American artists actively working in Paris back to their native shores correlated closely with Evans’s time abroad and subsequent return to New York. It is therefore not surprising that Evans would return to the United States with a baggage of French and European influence (so to speak) but be very willing, at the same time, to break away from this dominance and begin a search for a style that spoke more directly to his native experience. With this in mind, it is helpful to trace out 32 See Henry McBride, “American Art is ‘Looking Up.’” The New York Herald, October 15, 1922. 33 McBride, “Modern Art.” The Dial, April 1929, pp.84-86. 24 the artists and artistic styles that Evans encountered while abroad and his implementation of these sources into his own burgeoning photographic practice upon his return to the United States. Evans professed the importance of the artistic and literary milieu that he was exposed to while abroad when he stated that “I think mine was the first generation that went to Europe and instead of studying European art and coming back and imitating it, went to Europe and got a European technique and applied it to America. Got a perspective and a technique.”34 “I went there,” Walker Evans said of his 1926 trip to Paris, “because I had an intelligent and forbearing father who said if you want to leave college, which I did want to do, and go to Paris instead, and study there, go ahead and I’ll pay for it… I went there because it was economically possible, because I wanted to”35 (figure 3). Forty-five years later, in a talk with college students, Evans recalled: “Any man of my age who was sensitive to the arts was drawn as by a magnet to Paris because that was the incandescent center, the place to be… figure what was going on, who was alive: Proust was just dead; Gide was alive; Picasso was in mid-career; there was all the School of Paris art, which seemed revolutionary at the time. It was terribly exciting.”36 Evans embarked for Europe on April 6, 1926. He was twenty-two. He arrived in Cherbourg on April 16 having traveled on the R.S.M.P Orduna with his mother. Once in Paris, Evans enrolled in French classes at the American University Union and the 34 As quoted in Mellow, pp. 44-45. 35 Quoted in James R. Mellow, Walker Evans, p. 37. 36 Mellow, p. 38. 25 Sorbonne and frequently traveled to the coastal towns of France, including Juan-les-Pins and Cannes. A two-column list in the Walker Evans archive at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is a more or less chronologically accurate itinerary of his travels (figure 4). The list includes his reaction to international travel: “Disgust in the boat train. The taxi horns of Paris. In the Tuileries gardens.” He also made note of places he would come to frequently visit: “Shakespeare & Company” (figure 5) and “The Dome”—the famed expatriate café. Speaking with Paul Cummings in 1971, Evans was asked if he visited any bookstores while in Paris. Evans responded with: “Oh, yes, I did go to Sylvia Beach’s. I used to see James Joyce. I used to talk to Sylvia. She sensed that I knew my Joyce and she said, ‘I’ll introduce you to him.’ But I was scared to death to meet him. I wouldn’t do it. He came in and I left the shop.”37 Evans came to Paris because he wanted to be a writer. This had long been his ambition, but after what he referred to as a serious case of writer’s block and a period of severe depression, he returned from trips to Cannes and Juan-les-Pins in July 1926 with new motivation, though not just for writing. An intriguing series of images created by Evans between the years 1926-1927 reflects a possible familiarity with the work of the French photographer Eugène Atget. In the 1920s, Atget was celebrated and lauded by the surrealists—his work was reproduced in their magazines and journals, many of which were available at Shakespeare & Company (figure 6). For most of his life Atget worked in relative 37 Oral history interview with Walker Evans, 1971 Oct. 13-Dec. 23, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 26 obscurity. He created haunting images of the streets of medieval Paris for artists and designers to use as backdrops for their paintings or plays (figure 7). During his life, Atget lived just a few apartments down from the photographer Man Ray in Paris. Berenice Abbott, who worked in Man Ray’s studio at the time as an assistant, knew Atget’s work and visited him in his studio. In 1927, she asked him to sit for a portrait (figure 8). Atget obliged, wearing his best overcoat. When Abbott took the developed prints over to his apartment down the street a few days later, she found that he had died on August 4, 1927. Abbott eventually arranged for the purchase of the much of the Atget archive, funded in part by a New York City gallery owner, Julien Levy. Together, Abbott and Levy saved an enormously important body of work in the history of photography from falling into obscurity. The archive was eventually purchased by the Museum of Modern Art where it remains today. In 1930, when Abbott returned to New York City, she published some of Atget’s work in Atget Photographe de Paris, a book that will be discussed in more detail later in this chapter. Although Evans claimed later in life not to have seen Atget’s work while in Paris, his European itinerary complicates this claim: it contains two curious notations: the first is a crossed-out note that appears on Evan’s three page itinerary after his return to Paris on August 1, 1926 from a first trip to Juan-les-Pins, it reads “Hotel—rue Campagne ler.” Another similar notation appears after trips to Cannes and Juan-les-Pins in July 1927, with an illegible notation after the name “Campagne ler.” These notations are intriguing because 31 bis rue Campagne-Premiere is the address of Man Ray’s studio where Berenice Abbot also worked. Even more enticing is the fact that Atget himself lived at 27 number 17, just a bit down the street. The presence of this address on Evan’s itinerary suggests that Evans may have visited Man Ray’s studio (where he had a collection of Atget’s work) or perhaps even saw Atget’s studio itself. Evans may have deliberately crossed out these references later in life in part to keep historians curious about Atget’s formative influence on his photographic practice.38 During Evans’s year in France he decided to leave his career ambitions as a writer aside and began to experiment with the medium of photography. From his letters and journals, it is clear that this was a difficult decision for him to make, and in the end he never fully cut himself off from writing and his passion for literature. Upon his return to New York City on May 16, 1927, Evans continued to translate literature from French to 38 A brief comparison of an Atget photograph with one of Evans’s early photographs demonstrates that he had at least a visual familiarity with Atget’s style. When one examines the formal similarity between a 1926-1927 photograph taken by Evans of one of his hotel rooms and an Atget image from the same period (figures 9-10) the formal similarities are clear. Notice in particular how the angle of the shutters is remarkably similar. In the next set of images we see Evans’s Cobblestone Street, Paris 1926-1927 on the left and Eugène Atget’s Church of St Gervais, Paris, about 1903 (figures 11-12). Both photographs are taken from a low vantage point, looking upwards towards the rising cobblestone street. Atget was using a large tripod camera to create his photograph, while Evans was using a small, hand-held camera. In order to capture the street from the vantage point that he does, Evans would have had to bend down low holding the camera, placing it well below its normal belly-button position. The camera positioning on Evan’s behalf is therefore deliberate and intentional: he is trying to create a specific type of composition, rather than an arbitrary exposure and one which emulates the type of composition seen in the Atget. In many ways, Evans’s work from this period strongly reflects Atget’s influence. Evans’s, Villa Les Cypres de St-Jean, Juan-les-Pins France, 1927 similarly demonstrates an Atget-esque frontality (figure 13) but perhaps more importantly it foreshadows the type of photography Evan’s will become famous for after his return to the United States. Many photography historians have claimed that Evans begins to work in this style (simplified compositions, symmetrical, and carefully composed) only after his return to the United States (beginning roughly in the 1930s), but here we have evidence that he began to work in this style, even if just at the level of experimentation, during the years 1926-1927 while he was Europe. While it certainly is true that the bulk of work done in this style was made when Evans returned to the United States, here at least we see a brief hint of the burgeoning style for which Evans will soon become famous. 28 English, and would wrote articles and published photographs in journals such as Hound & Horn and other literary publications. The editor of Hound & Horn was Lincoln Kirstein, whom Evans may have met at the salons of the Manhattan socialite Muriel Draper in 1928 or 1929 when he was living in Manhattan and working at a 57th street bookstore. Kirstein would prove to be a formative influence on Evans upon his return to New York, introducing him to society circles in Draper’s salons, supporting his early projects such as his series of Victorian House photographs, and eventually writing the introduction to his famous book American Photographs, which accompanied an exhibition at the Museum of Modern art in 1938. Oddly enough, Kirstein, prior to meeting Evans, was also a close acquaintance of Sylvia Beach, owner of the Shakespeare & Company bookstore. In a letter dated January 19,1927 from Kirstein to Beach, Kirstein asked very politely if Sylvia Beach could send him literary journals and publications with works of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, so that they might be reviewed in Hound & Horn, which Kirstein launched later that year. In the fall of 1930, Evans published his photographs in the pages of that very same journal. While in Paris, Evans assimilated the lessons of avant-garde photography—his frequent visits to Shakespeare & Company undoubtedly fueled his dual interests in literature and photography. The Parisian avant-garde’s admiration for Atget, and his popularity in Paris at the time was strong fodder for Evan’s visual development, though he never entirely gave up on writing and literature. In many ways Evan’s career reflects a great collaboration between the literary and visual arts; many of his best-known photographs were made while collaborating with 29 writers. These include his project with the poet Hart Crane, whose epic poem The Bridge was published in 1929, and perhaps most famously his collaboration with James Agee in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). Evans understood photography as a medium able to create literary or poetic “texts.” Towards the end of his life, Evans recollected the following about his turn towards photography: “Oh yes, I was a passionate photographer, and for a while somewhat guiltily, because I thought that this is a substitute for something else—well for writing, for one thing… But I got very engaged and I was compulsive about it too… It was a real drive. Particularly when the lighting was right. You couldn’t keep me in.” 39 Even though there was much that was positive about Evans’s experiences in Europe, he also experienced a profound state of sadness while abroad, perhaps even depression. As Evans relayed in an interview with Paul Cummings in 1971, “I was very poor and obscure and quite unhappy and lonely. No, it wasn’t what most people think Paris in the golden age was. Not for me. I didn’t know anybody. But I was intensely excited about and interested in the ferment… in the air… I felt very much outside of the [the scene] because I was nobody. And I wasn’t doing anything. I was absorbing it all.”40 Rather than engage directly with avant-garde circles in Paris, Evans remained an outsider, someone always looking in on events and cultural happenings, but rarely looking out 39 Walker Evans as quoted in Daniel Mark Epstein, "The Passion of Walker Evans" The New Criterion Vol. 18, No. 7, March 2000, p. 37. 40 Oral history interview with Walker Evans, 1971 Oct. 13-Dec. 23, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 30 from them. Nevertheless, Evans maneuvered and hovered just outside the Parisian art circles, becoming something like a modern-day Baudelairean flâneur. While in France, in the summer of 1926, Evans attended the College de le Guilde. In the fall, he enrolled in a course in French civilization for foreigners at the Sorbonne and sat in lectures at the College de France. For his coursework, Evans wrote short stories and works of fiction. His instructors left encouraging notes in the margins of his corrected papers. Evans read Gautier, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, and Huysmans before and after his trip abroad. He translated Blaise Cendrars’s novel Moravagine (a stream of consciousness text about a psychopath), and even published a portion of this work in the literary journal translation. During this same year, Evans saw Jean Cocteau’s play Orphée, and read Cocteau’s books Call to Order, Jacques Maritain, and Les Enfants Terrible. Two important gallery exhibitions opened in 1926 while Evans was in Paris. The first, entitled Artistes Américains de France, opened at the Galerie Jean Charpentier, and was organized by the Association Française d’Expansion et des Échanges Artistiques. The second was the Groupe de Peintres et Sculpteurs Américains de Paris, organized by the American Art Association at the Galerie Durand-Ruel. While it is impossible to know whether Evans saw these shows, their existence points to a strong interest in American art and artists in Paris during the period which Evans was living there. Authors such as the American writer Janet Flanner, a novelist who worked as the Paris correspondent for The New Yorker, reviewed and discussed these and other exhibitions of American artists 31 living abroad, and the American writer Malcolm Cowley detailed interactions between American and European artists in his work. 41 As noted, one of the more important sites in Paris for Evans was the Shakespeare & Company bookstore which opened in Paris after World War I on November 17, 1919, on the rue de l'Odéon, no. 12. This famous bookstore was perhaps best known for its connections to James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway, however no less pivotal, though lesser known, was the role the bookstore and it’s owner, Sylvia Beach played in promoting and shaping the work of emerging photographers (figure 14). The bookstore supported the work of photographers like Man Ray, Berenice Abbott, and Gisele Freund by displaying their photographs on the walls of the bookstore and by selling publications featuring their work. The photographs displayed at Shakespeare & Company (typically portrait photographs of artists and writers), were hung in an ad-hoc fashion on the wall spaces available in between book piles and cases (figure 15). In the mid-1920s, the Shakespeare & Company bookstore was one of the few places in Paris (outside of art galleries and private collections) where such photographic work was visible in a casual environment for a general public audience (figure 16). Evans, a young American in Paris with a literary sensitivity, spent a lot of time at this bookstore. He found there a space wherein photography and literature could co-mingle and exist successfully together. This 41 See for instance, Janet Flanner’s "Paris Was Yesterday" (1925-1939), and Malcolm Cowley’s Exiles Return (1934). 32 opened up new horizons of possibility for him, and the relationship between literature and photography would remain important to him throughout his career. Several examples of specific photographs that were on view at Shakespeare & Company from the early to mid-1920s onward include the work of Man Ray, especially his portraits of Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, and the composer George Antheil, who lived in the apartment above the bookstore (figure 17 and 18). Also displayed were works by Bernice Abbott, including her portraits of James Joyce and Sylvia Beach (figures 19 and 20). These photographs were so memorable that Ernest Hemingway, many years later, reminisced about his early experiences in Beach’s bookstore in his memoir A Moveable Feast (1964) (figure 21). In those days there was no money to buy books. I borrowed books from the rental library of Shakespeare & Company, which was the library and bookstore of Sylvia Beach at 12 rue de l’Odeon. On a cold windswept street, this was a warm, cheerful place with a big stove in winter, tables and shelves of books, new books in the window, and photographs on the wall of famous writers both dead and living. The photographs all looked like snapshots and even the dead writers looked as though they had really been alive.42 The historian Kenneth Silver, speaking of the value of portraiture, outlined the importance of the photographic portrait as a type of cultural currency, one which promoted an artist or writer’s career and served as a form of publicity for him or her. 42 From Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, p. 39. 33 Silver defined a portrait’s use value by “its function as a document and a ritual object,”43 a definition which speaks directly to Hemingway’s sentiments expressed above. The photographic portraits of avant-garde writers and artists which lined the walls of Shakespeare & Company were examples of this type of photographic currency. Both established authors (including Walt Whitman, Edgar Allen Poe, and William Shakespeare) as well as contemporary writers and artists, had their portraits hanging on the walls of the store. Many of these works were personally inscribed to Sylvia Beach herself. Berenice Abbott and Man Ray were responsible for most of the contemporary portraits, and to have your portrait “done” by one of these two artists meant you had achieved significant social standing in Parisian society. Abbot and Ray’s sitters included James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Djuna Barnes, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), and George Antheil, among many others. In her autobiography, Sylvia Beach stated: “the artists Man Ray and his pupil Berenice Abbott, who assisted him for awhile, were the official portraits of ‘the Crowd.’ The walls of my bookshop were covered with their photographs.”44 In all these ways, the literary avant-garde of Paris was intimately tied to photography from its inception. Some of Evans’s first photographs made in Paris were a series of self-portraits, including Self-portrait, 5 rue de le Sante, Paris, September 1926 (figure 22). It appears 43 Kenneth E. Silver, “In Praise of the Particular: American Portraits,” in Face Value: American Portraits. ed. Donna De Salvo, Paris: Flammarion, 1995, p. 65. 44 See Sylvia Beach, Shakespeare & Company. 1959; reprint London: Platinum Publishers, 1987, pp.111- 112. 34 that this photograph may have been taken by Evans himself with the aid of a carefully placed mirror. The photograph is taken from a view from below, angled slightly upwards, which means that the camera was tilted slightly away from the picture plane. This corresponds to the way Evans holds the camera at chest level. The standard New Vision camera angle from below-up, and the strong horizontality of the shutter slats in conjunction with the otherwise vertically emphasized background suggests that Evans was at this time conversant (albeit slightly awkward in execution) with avant-garde portrait photography, such as was on view on the walls at Shakespeare & Company. A strong contrast between light and dark is most apparent on Evans’s face, where the shadowed regions begin to resemble his face in profile. This effect suggests a familiarly with a popular trope in Surrealism, where through the use of shadows two images are present in one simultaneously. The looming negative space above Evans’s head recalls contemporary work by Man Ray, including his portrait of Berenice Abbott, 1922 (figure 23). This photograph foreshadows Evans’s next set of self portraits created while on winter vacation in the French Riviera a few months later. Evans’s series of Shadow Self-Portraits (figure 24), created while vacationing in January 1927, reflects a more precise awareness of avant-garde photographic styles and a tongue-in-cheek humor regarding the capacities of the medium to show detail (here all specific facial details are invisible). One or two of these photographs were sent to Evans’s German friend and roommate, Hans Skolle, back in New York. Skolle’s reply was enthusiastic and supportive: “Upon my word,” he wrote, “the photos you took of yourself are superb. The one ‘en face’ is truly a treat of a picture. I wish I could paint as 35 well as that.”45 The enthusiastic correspondence surrounding these photographs suggests that Evans realized early on that these images were more than mere experiments. Today we understand them to be the early works of a burgeoning photographer. Skolle’s clear approval of them, and his continued support of Evans’ photographic work upon his return to New York (Skolle would become Evan’s roommate in New York City), was precisely the kind of encouragement Evans needed as he experimented with the new medium. Evans returned to photographic explorations such as these after he returned to New York, as demonstrated in his portrait of Paul Grotz, another of Evans’s German roommates (figure 25). However these are Evans’s early experiments with a new medium, and should be understood as exactly that. Both Abbott and Man Ray took liberties with their photographic portraits and made use of the innovative artistic vocabularies of the day – including skewed, off- balance compositions, sharply cropped images, superimposed multiple images, creative darkroom techniques, strong graphic contrasts, and more.46 As Bronwyn A.E. Griffith wrote in her essay “To Be is to Be Perceived: Portraits of the Avant-Garde in Paris,” “The result often is a substitution of the realistic representation of a person for a more creative, fragmentary, and symbolic equivalent of the sitter.”47 The substitution of the real person for a symbolic one may have fueled Evans’s choice of the silhouette or 45 Mellow, p. 43. 46 Sophie Levy, A Transatlantic Avant-garde: American Artists in Paris, 1918-1939. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003, p. 4. 47 Bronwyn A.E. Griffith “To Be is to Be Perceived: Portraits of the Avant-Garde in Paris.” In Sophie Levy, A Transatlantic Avant-garde: American Artists in Paris, 1918-1939. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003, p. 27. 36 shadow-portrait as a stand-in for his own person — a young man who at that moment, was not yet fully defined intellectually and uncertain about his future path. Portraits of the Parisian avant-garde were frequently reproduced in popular press magazines, including literary and art journals such as Vanity Fair, Variétés, Harpers Bazaar, The Little Review, transition, and Minotaure. Often these portraits were accompanied by articles or poetry by avant-garde writers. Griffith notes that the combination of photographic portraits with literature (often written by the authors in the portraits) were “among the most tangible examples of how the role of the artist in society was being fundamentally redefined during the interwar period. The emergence of public artistic personalities, truly beginning with Pablo Picasso, is vitally indebted to the published photographic portraits and accompanying articles, which linked the artistic avant-garde to an ever-expanding mass culture.”48 For Walker Evans, who was an avid and devoted reader of such publications, the combination of photography and literature served as an important model for how the two could be successfully combined. His silhouette self-portrait series may well have been made in response to these examples. AMERICAN “LITTLE MAGAZINES” IN PARIS “Little Magazines” (small press avant-garde literary and artistic publications from the 1920s and 1930s) played a large role in Evans’s literary development during his 48 Levy, p. 188. 37 school years in the United States. Once Evans arrived in Europe, the prominence of American and international literary magazines continued to be an important source of his exposure to new literary material. These magazines frequently reproduced the work of contemporary photographers, thus providing a model for Evans that demonstrated how artists could successfully combine literature and photography. American literary magazines were ubiquitous in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. Inside these journals were essays by international authors and reproductions of works by contemporary artists. The articles in the magazines were written for and by the avant- garde, and the internal dialog they promoted contributed to a growing consciousness of a European-American intellectual and artistic circle. Some of the more popular examples of these magazines include The New Review (1931-32), edited by Sam Putnam, transition, (1927-32), edited by French-born American Eugène Jolas, Transatlantic Review (1924- 25), edited in Paris by Ford Madox Ford, Tambour (1929-30), edited by Harold J. Salemson, Échanges (1929-31), edited by Allanah Harper, and This Quarter (1925-27 and 1929-32), edited by Edward W. Titus. The authors featured in these magazines included Djuna Barnes, Kay Boyle, Hart Crane, Ernest Hemingway, Mina Loy, Gertrude Stein, and Williams Carlos Williams; often their work would appear simultaneously in several different publications. In 1923, Margaret Anderson, editor of The Little Review, came to Paris to work on the publication of an important edition of her magazine entitled the “Exiles Number.” This issue included works by Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and Mina Loy, as well as Fernand Léger’s short piece, “The Esthetics of the Machine.” The next issue of The Little 38 Review was the “French Number” (autumn/winter 1923-24), co-edited by Jean Heap while Flanner was in Paris. This issue included English translations of French avant- garde writers such as Louis Aragon, René, Crevel, and Paul Eluard. Importantly, this volume also included a section devoted to Rayographs by Man Ray. In May 1929, Anderson published the final issue of her magazine with both New York and Paris editorial offices listed in the publication. Commenting on the printing of this last issue, Janet Flanner wrote, “In a sense then, The Little Review, though it had never been in Paris before, came to its home to die.”49 Another short-lived, but no less influential journal was The Transatlantic Review (1924-25), which included essays by American writers (some of whom were living in Paris) as well as reproductions of works by Léger, Man Ray, Pablo Picasso, George Braque, John Storrs, and Constantin Brancusi.50 The reproduced works by these and other artists were meant to illuminate “a little of what is being done in Paris — and bought by the United States — at this moment.”51 Between the years 1927-1932, one of the most important European-American publications in Paris was transition. Editor Eugène Jolas’s self-proclaimed “international magazine” promoted the work of experimental artists and writers on both sides of the Atlantic, including Harry and Carese Crosby, H.D., Malcolm Cowley, Hart Crane, Hemingway, Max Ernst, Alexander Calder, Stuart Davis, Fernand Léger, Charles 49 In Janet Flanner, Paris was Yesterday. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Pub., 1972, p. 56. 50 See for instance, “Art Supplement.” The Transatlantic Review, March 1924 and June 1924. 51 “Art Supplement.” The Transatlantic Review, March 1924, p. 24. 39 Sheeler, Man Ray, and Juan Miró. In the March 1928 volume, Jolas suggested that contemporary American writing had surpassed its European counterpart, noting that “While transition will continue to regard itself as a link between Europe and America… the emphasis in the future will be placed on American contributions, as we feel that our intensified inquiry into international writing is, for the moment, at a standstill.”52 In addition to the many literary and arts publications published in Paris at this time, numerous photobooks were also published, devoted exclusively to photography. Photobooks are extended essays in photographs, where the photographs are given the primary (and sometimes exclusive) place amongst the publication’s pages. The photobook is different from the photography magazine (different from, say, Camera Work) in that the photographs therein are not meant to supplement a text. As defined by Marin Parr in The Photobook, “The photobook, in short, is the ‘literary novel’ amongst photographic books. And if that in itself is no guarantee of quality, and sometimes a guarantee of pretension, at the very least it is a statement of intent—an indication that something more ambitious than the commonplace photographically illustrated book has been attempted...”53 Parr’s comparison of the photobook to the “literary novel” is useful in comparison to Evans’s photobook from 1938, American Photographs. In the afterword of American Photographs, Kirstein remarked on the literary quality of this book. The photographs, he wrote, followed their theme with “intention, logic, continuity, climax, 52 Eugène Jolas and Elliot Paul, “A Review,” transition 12, March 1928, p. 182. In 1928, Bernice Abbott published an essay “Why do Americans live in Europe?” transition 14, fall 1928, p. 111. 53 Parr, Martin, and Gerry Badger, The Photobook: A History, Volume I. Phaidon Press, New York, 2004, p. 8. 40 sense and perfection” — in much the same way that a work of literature, particularly a novel, progresses from beginning to end.54 Some of the more prominent examples of photobooks of the period that Evans could easily have seen either in Paris or upon his return to New York City (he worked for a time in a French bookstore) included the following: Germaine Krull’s 100 x Paris (1929), Moï Ver’s Paris, with an introduction by Fernand Léger (1931), Emmanuel Sougez’s Paris ville d’art (1931), Brassaï’s Paris de nuit, with accompanying text by Paul Morand, and Volupté de Paris (1933 and 1934), Ilya Ehrenburg’s Moi Parij (My Paris) (1933), Paris vu par Kertész with accompanying text by Mac Orlan (1934), Roger Schall’s Paris de jour, with a preface by Jean Cocteau (1937), and Francis Carco’s Envoûtement de Paris, illustrated by René-Jacques (1938), to list just a few. The photobook was widely popular in Germany as well as in France. Evans was familiar with the German tradition of photobooks by 1931, if not much earlier, as is indicated by his written review in Hound & Horn of contemporary photobooks and photographically illustrated publications.55 This essay, entitled “The Reappearance of Photography,” focused primarily on the work of Eugène Atget (which will be discussed at length below) and five recently published photobooks including Renger-Patzsch’s Die Welt ist Shön (1929), August Sander’s Antlitz der Zeit (1929), and Franz Roh’s Foto- Auge (1929). Of these five texts, Evans had the most positive things to say about 54 Kirstein, Lincoln, Afterword, in Walker Evans, American Photographs. Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1938. p. 190 55 See Walker Evans, “The Reappearance of Photography.” Hound & Horn 5, no. 1 (Oct.-Dec., 1931), pp. 125-128. 41 Sander’s work, which he understood to be a direct line of lineage from Atget’s photography. Evans wrote the following about Antilz der Zeit: “Finally the photo document is directed into a volume, again in Germany. Antlitz der Zeit is more than a book of ‘type studies’; a case of the camera looking in the right direction among people. This is one of the futures of photography foretold by Atget. It is a photographic editing of society, a clinical process; even enough of a cultural necessity to make one wonder why other so- called advanced countries of the world have not also been examined and recorded.” From Evans’s own pronouncements, it is clear that by 1931 he was acutely aware of the history of documentary photography and very supportive of its social ambitions. The city of Paris had strong attraction for another American artist, Berenice Abbott, who soon found herself living there as an expatriate. Abbott arrived in Europe in 1921, the same year as Man Ray, and eventually, after working odd jobs as an artist’s model and American dance instructor, found her way into Man Ray’s studio as his photographic assistant in 1923. Quickly Abbott excelled at printing and developing photographs and eventually was allowed to use Man Ray’s photographic equipment to take portraits of her own clients in lieu of a salary raise. Years later, Abbott recalled her early foray into photography, noting that: “the first [portraits] I took came out well, which surprised me. … I had no idea of becoming a photographer, but the pictures kept coming 42 out and most of them were good.”56 Some of her most famous clients included the author André Gide, the playwright Jean Cocteau, the artist Marie Laurencin, and Janet Flanner. Soon, Abbott began to charge clients for her work, and eventually gained recognition in Paris as a portrait photographer in her own right. In 1925, Berenice Abbott left Man Ray’s studio to found her own at 44 rue de Bac (she did this with financial assistance from expatriates Rober MacAlmon, his wife Winifred Bryher, and Peggy Guggenheim, who helped her purchase a 4” x 5” view camera). In her studio, Abbott made portraits of Jean Cocteau, Marie Laurencin, Max Ernst, Leo Stein, James Joyce, and Peggy Guggenheim. Much of Abbott’s income came from reselling her prints of popular Parisian clientele to fashion, art, and literary reviews including The Little Review, Vanity Fair, Paris-American, La Nouvelle revue française, Paris Comet, L’Intransigeant, Variétés, transition, and Vu. Her clients were loyal to her and this caused friction between her and Man Ray, who quickly realized the rival she had become. Partially out of respect for Man Ray, who supported her early on and taught her all she knew about the medium, and partially because she developed her own individual style, her work did not look like his, nor did she strive to imitate it. Abbott noted that in terms of gender representation, “[Man Ray’s] portraits of men were good, but he always made women look like pretty objects… He never let them be strong characters in themselves.”57 Stylistically, Abbott’s and Man Rays’ portraits tended to differ, with 56 As quoted in George Sullivan, Berenice Abbott, Photographer, An Independent Vision. Clarion Books: New York, 2006, p. 43. 57 Sullivan, p. 44. 43 Abbott’s capturing a greater spontaneity of expression in her sitters. Eventually, this became her signature style as she emerged as a successful portrait photographer. By 1926, Abbott had her own solo exhibition, Portraits Photographiques, at Jan Slivinsky’s gallery Au Sacre du Printemps from June 8-20. This show included portrait photographs of contemporary artists and writers in Paris including James Joyce, Jean Cocteau, Sylvia Beach, André Tardieu, Djuna Barnes, Alexander Berkman, Marie Laurencin, and André Gide. It is likely that Walker Evans, who arrived in Paris in April, saw this exhibit or read a review of it. When he arrived in Paris, Evans was somewhat obsessed with the work of Cocteau and Joyce and would have been interested in seeing their portraits because of their association with the literary world, a circle which, in 1926, he was intent on entering. If Evans did see this show, it would have been yet another demonstration to him of the successful confluence of literature and photography in the 1920s. By 1928, the personal and professional strain between Man Ray and Berenice Abbott, who were now direct competitors for the same clientele, was cemented with press coverage following the Premiere Salon Indépendant de la Photographie (commonly referred to as the Salon de l’Escalier).58 This independent salon was held in May and June of 1928 on the staircase of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. The exhibition attracted strong attention in the press, and would prove to be a major event in modern 58 For an excellent scholarly discussion of this exhibition see Maria Morris Hambourg, “Atget, Precursor of Modern Documentary Photography.” in Observations: Essays on Documentary Photography. David Featherstone, ed., Carmel, CA: The Friends of Photography, 1984, pp. 28-29. 44 photographic history in France. In the contemporary press, both before, during, and after the exhibition, critics praised Abbott’s portraits and pointed to how they differed from those by Man Ray. For example, the Paris Times reported that “although she had studied under [Man Ray] and learned the groundwork of her craft from him, her own work is entirely different. In the first place she stresses human values and she is not particularly interested in abstract arrangement of inanimate objects.”59 The Salon de l’Escalier was frequently cited as the first exhibition in Paris to display modern photography. These types of exhibitions nurtured Evans’s burgeoning photographic eye while abroad. Although small, the exhibition demonstrated that photography was an art “having its own laws, dependent neither on reality nor on the art of painting.”60 The purpose of the exhibition, as noted by the organizers in a brief catalog essay, was to “show that photography, far from being a mechanical medium, tends increasingly to become an art with its own laws, and that it is subordinate neither to reality nor to pictorial art.”61 Florent Fels, one of the organizers of the exhibition noted in 59 “In the Quarter,” Paris Times, (2 April 1927), pasted into Abbott’s Paris scrapbook, p. 65. As quoted in Barr, p. 52. In a similar vein, the Paris edition of the New York Herald wrote: “Miss Abbot’s [sic] technique has a distinctly different flavor than that of Man Ray. Lacking his spirit of fantasy, her work has a strong and simple note of sincerity. There is absolutely no striving for an ‘effect’ or a ‘pretty picture.’ There are no elaborate backgrounds to detract from the personality of the sitter, no trick lighting effects or unnecessary retouching. In consequence her portraits are most convincing and have an unusual quality best described as ‘folksiness.’ Naturally, to arrive at these desirable results much patience and intuition are required to make the sitter forget the self-consciousness always present in a person about to be photographed.” From “Around the Studios”, New York Herald of Paris (26 December 1926), as pasted in Abbott’s Paris scrapbook in the collection of Ronald Kurtz, owner of Commerce Graphics in New York City and East Rutherford, NJ. 60 Florent Fels, “Le Premire Salon Independent de la Photographie,” L’Art vivant, Paris, June 1, 1928, p. 445. As translated in Christopher Phillips, ed. Photography in the Modern Era: European Documents and Critical Writings, 1913-1940. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, 1989, pp. 23-26. 61 Ibid., p. 23. 45 the art review L’Art vivant that the photographers in this “Salon” had returned to a French tradition of depicting subjects, through use of a simple, bold style which moved markedly away from the style of “certain Englishmen,” who “have a mania to treat their subjects with [graduations of] light and shade.”62 The modern photographs in this exhibit, Fels noted, moved away from pictorialist traditions of portraiture preferring instead sharp focus to fuzzy techniques, and high contrast exposures over muted grey or sepia tones; the pictorialist style, he believed, was better suited to the medium of film than to photography. This exhibition also included an important “retrospective” exhibition of several works by Atget (who died the previous year) and Nadar (both father and son). These photographs, like their modern counterparts, were direct and functioned in a more “documentary” fashion than did their pictorialist precursors. Fels was careful to point to the traditions of Atget’s cityscapes and Nadar’s portrait photographs as establishing the tradition of French photography to which the modern photographs on display were responding. The mission of the exhibition, as outlined in the catalogue, was to focus the public’s “attention on a few works by precursors [Nadar and Atget] and by others now in full possession of their craft.”63 This was the first public showing of Atget’s work, whereas Nadar, a very successful portrait photographer in nineteenth-century literary and 62 Florent Fels, “Le Premire Salon Independent de la Photographie.” Without using their names directly, it is likely that Fels is referring here to the photographic styles and techniques of Southworth and Hawes, two photographers who were working in Scotland in the late nineteenth century, both of whom emulated Rembrandt’s painterly style. “Certains praticiens anglais ont la manie de traiter leurs sujets par ombres et lumières, et tentent de donner è leurs oeuvres un côté Rembrandt.” 63 Fels in Phillips, ed., p. 23. 46 artistic circles, exhibited his work often. In particular, Fels noted Nadar’s skill in capturing the “truth of his subject less by means of attributes than by the reproduction of the particular character of each of his models” and pointed to Atget’s “haunting” landscapes, which he described as “belonging to a society that has since disappeared.” 64 For Fels, Nadar and Atget represented two alternative approaches to creating an archive of Parisian life and culture. 65 Later in the same catalog, Fels described the work of nine modern photographers in the exhibition, noting how each responded to the tradition of Nadar and Atget. Peter Barr nicely summarizes Fels review of these photographers in his recent essay, “The Reception and Sources of Berenice Abbott’s Paris Portrait Style, 1925-1929”: [Fels] credited Abbott’s former mentor Man Ray with rehabilitating amateur photography through his use of a simple Kodak camera and nothing but judiciously employed lighting. He praised Germaine Krull for her dedication to photojournalism, and André Kertész for his poetic still-lifes and street scenes. Additionally, Fels described Abbott’s portraits—along with those of three other portrait photographers—as “precious and living documents of elegant style and of the most beautiful faces in the world.” Then Fels praised all the photographers in the exhibition for taking pains to make their photographs stylistically distinct from the self-consciously artistic prints that 64 Ibid. As quoted and translated in Peter Barr, “The Reception and Sources of Berenice Abbott’s Paris Portrait Style, 1925-1929.” History of Photography, Volume 34, number 1, February 2010. 65 Fels in his review of the Salon indépendent de la photographie, pointed to the ways in which Nadar was as firmly a part of literary Paris of the nineteenth century as he was of artistic circles. “Nadar, the friend of Baudelaire, Gautier, and Dumas (whom he resembles body and soul); Nadar whose name, transposed, became Jules Verne’s Michel Ardan, an invented character who differs little from the original; Nadar the journalist, collaborator on Charivari, Le Journal pour Rire, Le Corsaire, founder of the Revue comique, author of La Robe de Déganire, the Histoire de Murger et de la vraie bohème, and Baudelaire le poète vierge; Nadar who ensured postal service by balloon during the siege of Paris; Nadar who created that panorama of nineteenth-century celebrities, the Panthéon Nadar; mind of a thousand resources and multiple ventures, fantastic and brilliant, he whose name would come in the final hour to the lips of the dying Baudelaire: ‘Nadar…Manet…’” In “The First Salon indépendent de la photographie,” Christopher Phillips, ed. Photography in the Modern Era: European Documents and Critical Writings, 1913-1940. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1989, p. 24. 47 appeared yearly in the Paris “Salon de la photographie” exhibitions mounted by the Société française de la photographie and the Photo-Club de Paris. He admired the way Abbott and others observed the “strict laws of photography based upon the two tones of black and white,” avoided soft-focus imagery inspired by painting, engraving and drawing, and produced works that were exact, clear and precise.66 The portraits of famous individuals in the Salon de l’Escalier attracted the most attention and were celebrated for their straight-forward clarity. Berenice Abbott was praised by Fels for her clear photographic approach to portraiture. In his review, he alluded to the documentary quality of Abbott’s portrait style, writing that “[she gave] us precious and living documents of elegant style and of the most beautiful faces in the world.”67 At the Salon, Abbott exhibited twelve portraits, including photographs of George Antheil, Jean Cocteau, Buddie Gilmore, James Joyce, François Mauriac, and André Gide. These portraits clearly fit into the French tradition of classical photography as established by Fels. For example, Abbott’s portrait of Gide resembles Nadar’s portrait of the nineteenth century poet Charles Baudelaire; both draw attention to hands and clothing and use neutral studio backdrops and deliberate lighting to emphasize facial expressions. Many of these portraits taken in the years between 1925 and 1928 hung on the walls of Shakespeare & Company, easily in view of all who entered the store, including, of course, Walker Evans. By the time Abbott’s work was exhibited at the Salon de L’Escalier, her work was immediately recognizable because of its prominence in the bookstore as well as its appearance in several avant-garde journals of the period. 66 Barr, p. 44. 67 Phillips, p. 25. 48 Fels ended his review of the Salon with an interesting remark which foreshadowed much of the practice of the next generation of photographers: “A good photograph is, above all, a good document.”68 DOCUMENTARY STYLE While Fels offered a nationalistic interpretation of the photographs on view at the Salon de L’Escalier, another writer, Pierre Mac Orlan69 praised what he referred to as the “documentary style” of many of the photographs, which he understood as having a romantic or imaginative component (in contrast to Fels’s naturalistic definition). Mac Orlan, whose name was a pseudonym for Pierre Dumarchaise, was one of the foremost photography critics of his day. He was also a well-known writer of fiction, whose novels focused on marginalized characters as they struggled to adapt to the modern world. Many of his fiction pieces were set in picturesque districts of Paris such as Montmartre, and in many ways may be read as textual versions of Atget photographs (especially his series of street people). Mac Orlan’s essay, “L’Art littéraire d’imagination et la photographie” (The Literary Art of Imagination and Photography) appeared in Les nouvelles littéraires, on September 22, 1928, a few months after the Salon indépendent de la photographie ended. 68 Phillips, p. 26. 69 Mac Orlan is perhaps best known for his novel Quai des Brumes (1927) and A Bord de l’Etoile Matutine, translated into English by Malcolm Cowley as On Board the Morning Star. Berenice Abbott was highly influenced by Mac Orlan's writings on the "fantastique" and the "social fantastique," as was Guy Debord several generations later. In 1938 Marcel Carné directed a film adaptation of Quai des Brumes (Port of Shadows), which was acclaimed as an early example of poetic realism in film. 49 In this essay, Mac Orlan provided an overview of contemporary photography and outlined two major stylistic tendencies within in it: plastic (artistic) and documentary. As he wrote, “the second category [documentary] is literary without knowing it, because it is no more than a document of contemporary life captured at the right moment by an author capable of grasping that moment.” 70 Mac Orlan’s fusion of literary and photographic qualities is important because it demonstrates that there was (at least for avant-garde writers of the period) a clear relationship between the act of creating literature and that of making photographs. Mac Orlan took this relationship to its furthest extent by referring to the photographer as an “author” in the above passage. Undoubtedly, these type of sentiments appealed to Evans, who was just beginning to explore the relationship between the two mediums. Later in his essay, Mac Orlan made several remarks which further illustrate his understanding of the overlapping nature of literature and photography. He wrote that the names of contemporary photographers, like Man Ray and Kertesz, will need to be added to the history of literature: “If our age leaves on the literary history of our time the very clear impression of a new school dedicated to European Romanticism and social fantasy, and produces lasting works, we will have to add to the names of writers…those of photographer-poets like Man Ray and Kertesz.”71 The literary quality of the photographic document pointed to by Mac Orlan in many ways foreshadowed the turn towards 70 In Mac Orlan, “Literary Imagination and Photography.” in Phillips, ed. Photography in the Modern Era: European Documents and Critical Writings, 1913-1940, p. 28. 71 Mac Orlan, in Phillips, ed., p. 29. 50 documentary photography that emerged in both the United States and in Europe in the 1930s. It also describes with remarkable precision the type of photography that Evans began to practice in this period. Several of Mac Orlan’s pronouncements could easily be used to summarize Evans’s work in the 1930s: “for those who look for the often subtle details of modern society,” he wrote, “photography is an incomparable revelation”; or again, “there are terrifying photographs that show humanity, after several centuries of reading, inventions, and scared patter… we must contemplate these documents of social activity of our time.”72 Even more to the point, Mac Orlan’s statement that “the artist sometimes has to search for six hours to find the unique second when life, in some way, is ‘caught in the act’”73 sounds like a remarkably photographic way to understand the act of writing. It may seem odd that the two most prominent reviewers of this landmark photography exhibition in 1928 had such divergent definitions of documentary photography (Fels defining documentary against a backdrop of national tradition and Mac Orlan adopting a more romantic definition of documentary emphasizing qualities of the fantastic and the uncanny detail). However, the fluidity of the definition of documentary photography at this moment points to the newness of the discourse surrounding it and the relative newness of the style itself. Both of these definitions helped to shape Evans’s developing documentary style. 72 Ibid., pp. 29-30. 73 Ibid. 51 Following the success of the Salon de l’Escalier, modern documentary photography began to be seen with greater frequency in France, Belgium, and Europe and America in general.74 The Galerie de l’Epoque, for example, put on an exhibition of documentary photography in Belgium in October 1928. The catalog for this exhibition, Une Exposition de photographie à la Galerie de l’Epoque, began with Abbott’s portrait of Atget (discussed below) followed by sixteen Atget photographs. The catalog essay was by Mac Orlan,75 and the book contained twelve photographs each by Abbott, Kertesz, Man Ray, Krull, Eli Lotar, Aenne Bierman, Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, and Belgian photographers Robert Desmet, E. Gobert, and E.L.T Mesens. In 1928, several articles and publications featured the work of Eugène Atget. His popularity by this date was well established, and would have been difficult to overlook, especially for Evans, who by this point had a self-declared interest in photography.76 For example, Atget’s work was discussed in the publication Variétés, which featured an important essay on Atget by Albert Velentin along with a portfolio of eight of his 74 Note for instance the following publications that appeared during this period: Germaine Krull’s Métal (1929), and various photographs by Man Ray, Abbott, and Kertesz appearing in transition and Variétés. Sheeler’s photographs of Red Rouge Ford Plant (1927), in addition to their promotional use by the corporation, could be seen in the pages of Vanity Fair, Creative Art, Hound & Horn, and Arts et Métiers Graphiques where it gained an early reputation as photographic art. These images quickly became Sheeler’s best known works and today remain icons of modern photography. 75 The essay by Mac Orlan, as it appeared in this catalog was a reprint of a recent article in Nouvelles littéraires. See Hambourg, “Atget, Precursor of Modern Documentary Photography,” fn. 15, p. 38. 76 For example, Janet Flanner, foreign correspondent in Paris for The New Yorker, noted that “After seventy years of obscure living and dying, Eugène Atget, the most remarkable photographic documentor of his day, is now featured in all the avant-garde European reviews.” The New Yorker (May 4, 1929), reprinted in Janet Flanner, Paris was Yesterday (New York: Popular Library, 1972), p. 50. 52 photographs.77 This was an important avenue for the dissemination of Atget’s work to a larger audience, because it was a popular and widely-read publication. In his essay, Velentin wrote, “the eight pictures represented street scenes, fêtes forains, boutiques (and mannequins), and the petits métiers, a selection quite typical of the taste of the period. (Photographs of architecture and of the small towns and formal gardens in the environs of Paris were rarely published.)”78 In 1928, another important publication on Atget emerged by the book publisher and art critic Christian Zervos. Zervos’s article appeared in the literary and fine arts magazine Cahiers d’art, which he had founded. In his article, Zervos linked Atget’s photographic style to documentary photography, and pointed to contemporary photographers whose work Atget had influenced: The first to have given capital importance to documentary photography was E. Atget, who died last year in Paris. Who among us does not remember this old man who knocked at every door in Montmartre to show and sell artists prints of his Parisian views which captured all the métiers, quarters and types of the past half- century?...The appearance of this work is indispensible for it will instruct us in a preemptive fashion of the unsuspected significance of documentary photography, which already accounts among its adherents such well-known names as the Hungarian Andre Kertesz, the American Sheeler, the Belgian E. Gobert, Germaine Krull, and Eli Lotar. 79 77 Albert Valentin, "Eugène Atget." Variétés, no. 8, décembre 1928, p. 405. 78 Maria Morris Hambourg, “Atget, Precursor of Modern Documentary Photography.” In Observations: Essays on Documentary Photography, Friends of Photography, 1984, p. 30. 79 “Bruxelles, Exposition de photographie” Cahiers d’Art, 4, no. 8, 1928, p. 356. 53 Later in the article, Zervos mentioned an upcoming photography exhibition that including works by Atget. This exhibition, sponsored by the German Werkbund in Stuttgart, was known by the title Film und Foto (1929). This show was widely popular and subsequently traveled to Berlin, Munich, Vienna, Zagreb, Basel, and Zurich. Atget was represented in the exhibition by the display of eleven of his photographs. A version of this exhibit was later organized by Kirstein at Harvard University.80 Overall, the preponderance of documentary photography in both exhibitions and publications of this period points to a rise in popular acceptance of and interest in both Atget’s work and what was understood at the time to be the new photographic style. THE ROOTS OF DOCUMENTARY The British filmmaker John Grierson (1898-1972) was likely the first to use the term “documentary” in the manner in which it is most often used today. He first employed the term to describe the films of American filmmaker Robert Flaherty, particularly his South Sea island film, Moana (1926), and Nanook of the North (1922). The complicated meanings behind this term are varied, and an in-depth discussion of them are for another place, but in brief, the term documentary, as it was used in the 1930s, referred to photography and film that attempted to convey “factual” information to the viewer. 80 Details about Kirstein’s exhibition appear later in this chapter. 54 The idea behind documentary film and photography was that the artist was an objective observer recording a series of events or data in a neutral manner. Today, of course, we understand this premise of neutrality and purported objectivity to be false and nearly impossible to obtain, but this was, in the late 1920s and 1930s, the stated aim of the style. Grierson was interested in factual film as a means of conveying “the information necessary to organized and harmonious living.”81 He called such film “documentary.” However, Grierson later ceased using the term because he believed he was dealing with documents of facts, not feelings. As it turns out, and as we have learned from many scholars, including William Stott in Documentary Expression and Thirties America, the documentary style more often than not is emotive and subjective. 82 It does not depict an objective view and is very rarely devoid of some type of political position. In the mid-1920s in Paris, however, these problematic definitions of the term “documentary” were still mostly unknown, and the descriptive word was applied to many photographers whose work today we would not readily call “documentary” at all. As we have seen, Fels and Mac Orlan used the term to describe the work of a variety of photographers ranging from Nadar, to Abbott, and Kertesz to Man Ray. It is unlikely that any scholar today would refer to the work of these photographers as “documentary.” Yet, in many scholarly articles and books, the work of Atget is still referred to in this manner. If not classified as a “documentary photographer” in the strict sense, his work is still 81 In William Stott, Documentary Expression and Thirties America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973, p. 9. 82 See William Stott, Documentary Expression and Thirties America, introduction and chapter one. 55 referred to as an “archive” or a series of “documents” of the streets of Paris in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.83 EUGÈNE ATGET: DOCUMENTS POUR ARTISTES By the 1930s, there were two widely divergent interpretations of Eugène Atget’s work. His photographs were typically either seen as precursors of surrealism (as promoted by the circles of Man Ray and Andre Breton) or understood to be more documentary in nature, capturing the “reality” of Parisian urban life and architecture (as discussed in the circles of Mac Orlan, Lincoln Kirstein, and Walker Evans). These two differing interpretations of Atget’s work shaped much photographic practice in the 1930s. In the scholarly literature on Atget, it is often stated that Man Ray “discovered” Atget sometime between 1924 and 1926. Atget was Man Ray’s neighbor on rue Campagne-Première, and Man Ray introduced his work to Abbott, Tzara, Cocteau, Levy, and Breton.84 In 1926, four of Atget’s photographs were published against his wishes in La Révolution surréalist. Maria Morris Hambourg, in her discussion of how Atget was received by the surrealist circle, points out that “these men [sic] saw Atget as a primitive of his art, a sort of Douanier Rousseau of photography who independently discovered the means of capturing the bizarre inherent in the ordinary. They compared his vision with 83 See Molly Nesbit, Atget’s Seven Albums, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993; Maria Morris Hambourg and John Szarkowski. Atget, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2000; and John Szarkowski and Maria Morris Hambourg, The Work of Atget. 4 vols. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1981–85. 84 See Hambourg, “Atget, Precursor of Modern Documentary Photography,” p. 26. 56 the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud, Gérard de Nerval and Louis Aragon, and with the popular mystery films ‘Fantômas,’ which they loved for their naïveté, their sinister mood and their realistically detailed décor.”85 In 1925, May Ray introduced Abbott to Atget. By 1926, Abbott had visited Atget’s studio and begun to purchase some of his photographs. Even in the late 1920s, Atget was still using photographic technologies and printing techniques from the previous century, preferring the nineteenth-century tradition of using albumen prints and gold-tone print finishing to modern styles. A sign hung outside of Atget’s apartment which read: “documents pour artistes,” indicating Atget’s allegiance to the trade of commercial photography rather than “art” photography in the strict sense. In the years 1926-1927, Abbott saw Atget with greater frequency, so much so that in 1927 Abbott asked Atget to sit for her. Atget agreed, and in July, she took several portraits of the photographer in her studio shortly before his death. Three exposures were made: a standing view, a side, and a front view. In early August, Abbott went to deliver the prints to Atget, and found that the small sign offering his photographic services, documents pour artistes, was gone. Soon after, Abbott learned of Atget’s death in Paris on August 4, 1927. Following his death, Atget’s friend and estate manager placed half of Atget’s archive (including prints and negatives of historical Paris) in the collections of the Monuments Historiques. The 85 Ibid, 26. One can, of course, see how this type of discussion of interiors and detailed spaces would have been intriguing to Walker Evans, especially during the latter 1930s when he begins to document interior spaces in the rural south. I will move into a broader discussion of this point in chapter two. 57 remaining half of Atget’s work, approximately 1,400 negative plates and 8,000 prints were sold to Abbott in 1928.86 She was thirty years old. Abbott was able to acquire this collection of negatives and prints with the help of Julian Levy — a then-aspiring New York gallery owner living in Paris at the time.87 Shortly after this purchase, Abbott returned to New York in 1929 (bringing with her a large portion of Atget’s collection), where she began to introduce audiences in America and Europe to Atget’s work. Abbott promoted Atget’s photographs primarily through a publication which she self-organized, entitled Atget: photographe de Paris (1930). This was the first publication devoted to the artist and helped to secure Atget’s place within the history of photography. The book was released in American, German, and French additions of 1000 copies each, and contained 96 collotype book plates of the streets and street life of Paris. Each plate in Atget: photographe de Paris was printed separately and attached to the binding with linen strips. The publisher of the American edition of this book was Erhard Weyhe, a gallery and bookstore owner at 794 Lexington Avenue, in New York City. Julian Levy (who was partially responsible for the purchase 86 An inventory of Atget’s work made in 1934 listed the following numbers for works in the collection: 1,415 negative plates, 4,218 original prints, and 3,681 duplicate original prints. This information is listed in Clark Worswick, Berenice Abbott and Eugène Atget. Santa Fe, New Mexico: Arena Editions, 2002, p. 41. 87 Following the success of the Salon de l’Escalier, was the meeting of Abbot with Atget’s old friend Andre Calmettes, the executor of Atget’s estate. Calmettes invited Abbot to discuss a “matter that interests you,” referring to the sale of many of the remaining Atget negatives to Abbott. The sale was documented in the press, with the Chicago Tribune reporting on June 27, 1928, “American buys famous collection of Atget, Paris photographer.” As quoted in Hambourg, p. 30. Letter of June 11, 1928, from Andre Calmettes to Berenice Abbott (Atget Archives, MOMA). 58 of the Atget archive) worked as a gallery assistant for Wehye and convinced him to organize an Atget exhibition as well as to publish Atget: photographe de Paris.88 It was Pierre Mac Orlan who wrote the introduction to the English and French editions of the book,89 and exposed audiences to an Atget that was more complicated than had been previously presented in the context of Breton and surrealism (the surrealists adopted Atget as an early practitioner of automatic or uncanny photography).90 Against the popular perception and interpretation of Atget’s work as surrealist, Mac Orlan presented to the reader (one of whom was Evans) an Atget that was hard-working, knowledgeable, and most importantly, a “man of the street,”91 on intimate social terms with the city in which he lived. Mac Orlan noted the importance of this kind of familiarity with one’s subject matter: The sentimental past of Paris goes along very nicely with everything that a simple old man, an old street peddler such as Atget, can possess in the way of literary subtlety. Paris is not a city that right away surrenders herself to the first desire of a photographer, no matter how lyrical. It takes time for the houses to adopt a passerby who isn’t from the neighborhood… The photographic elements of Paris, those that 88 Jeffrey Ladd, Making Atget: photographe de Paris, (New York: Errata Editions, 2008). This publication is part of the Books on Books series, and reproduces the original publication of Atget: photographe de Paris. 89 The German edition contains an introduction by Camille Recht, rather than Pierre Mac Orlan. 90 For more on Atget as a surrealist, see Maria Morris Hambourg, “Atget, Precursor of Modern Documentary Photography.” In Observations: Essays on Documentary Photography. Friends of Photography, 1984, pp. 25-39. “In the years following Atget’s death his work was championed by three sorts of partisans: those who claimed photography as a surreal art, those who supported it as a fine art and those who admired it as a technological art. The Surrealists considered the camera a servant of the imagination and reveled in its automatism, its banal recordmaking capacity and its potential for fantastic plastic invention. They found certain of Atget’s pictures interesting because they fixed and isolated ordinary objects, freeing them of conventional associations to divulge their animistic singularity.” p. 26 91 Pierre Mac Orlan, “Atget Photographe de Paris” in Phillips, ed., p. 48. “That one-time man of the theater was impenetrable. In the first place, because no one tried to understand him and to understand the profound value of his work. Atget was a man of the street, an artisan Poet of the crossroads of Paris.” 59 give this collection of images assembled by Berenice Abbott its force, are what our fathers called le petite commerce, the small-shop trade. The small-time shopkeeper of Paris, the worker on the public streets, have a place of key importance in it… What we need is a man like Atget, a conscientious individual almost entirely free of vanity, to come into the world in each of the globe’s great cities, to leave us and exact image of them, because only the visions inspired by the collective emotions ring humanly true.92 In this passage, Mac Orlan points to Atget’s importance to history. By recording humanity’s “collective emotions,” Atget was able to record public spaces and images of le petite commerce for posterity. These images, Mac Orlan suggested, would not be visible to later generations had a figure from the same social class not recorded them. Without Atget, there would be no old Paris for future generations to marvel at. In Atget’s time, and even before it, many of the medieval, working class sections of Paris were being destroyed. Atget chose consciously to preserve these sections of Paris photographically, and not “popular” Paris. The Eiffel Tower, the icon of Paris, visible from almost any point within in the city, markedly does not appear in Atget’s photographs. It is likely that Atget made a conscious effort not to photograph the tower given how readily it appears in the backgrounds of so many popular photographs of the urban fabric of the city. Instead he chose the streets, people, and spaces that were intimate and familiar to him. WALKER EVANS: “THE REAPPEARANCE OF PHOTOGRAPHY” (1931) 92 Ibid., p. 48. 60 Walker Evans’s “The Reappearance of Photography” appeared in Hound & Horn, 5 (October-December 1931), a publication edited by Lincoln Kirstein.93 The essay was a short review of recently published photography books including Albert Renger-Patzsch’s Die Welt ist Schön, Franz Roh’s Photo Eye, Berenice Abbott’s Atget: photographe de Paris, and August Sander’s Antlitz der Zeit. In his essay, Evans outlined a history of photography that went against the two most dominant currents of photography at the time: the pictorialist photograph (in the tradition of Clarence White and the early work by Alfred Stieglitz) and the glossy commercial photograph (in the tradition of Edward Steichen); the latter used a “new vision” style, Evans contended, but in an emptied out, vacant manner. Against these two strains, Evans proposed a photography which, like the work of Sander and Atget, functioned as a document: a descriptive “editing of society” through the photographic medium. In his essay, Evans used a descriptive language similar to Mac Orlan’s to discuss what he understood to be the important components of Atget’s work, including his “lyrical understanding of the street” (emphasis mine). Evans’s use of the term “lyrical” likely stemmed from Mac Orlan’s use of it, and would be retained throughout this life to describe the type of documentary style he came practice.94 Evans’s discussion called 93 A more in-depth discussion of Lincoln Kirstein and his formative influence on Walker Evans will take place in chapter two. 94 For example, Evans entitled a talk given at Yale University “Lyric Documentary.” The talk took place in March 1964, shortly after Evans was hired to teach photography in the Graphic Design Department. In John T. Hill’s Walker Evans: Lyric Documentary. London: Steidl Publishers, 2006 (with an essay by Alan Trachtenberg), the following is stated: “He [Evans] called the lecture his ‘aesthetic autobiography’ and entitled it Lyric Documentary. Twenty-six years earlier, in March 1938, Thomas Mabry, executive director 61 Atget the “father” of documentary style and outlined Evans’s hopes for documentary photography in the future: Certain men of the past century have been renoticed who stood away from this confusion. Eugène Atget worked right through a period of utter decadence in photography. He was simply isolated, and his story is a little difficult to understand. Apparently he was oblivious to everything but the necessity of photographing Paris and its environs; but just what vision he carried in him of the monument he was leaving is not clear. It is possible to read into his photographs so many things he may have never formulated to himself. In some of his work he even places himself in a position to be pounced upon by the most orthodox of surrealists. His general note is lyrical (my emphasis) understanding of the street, trained observation of it, special feeling for patina, eye for revealing detail, over all of which is thrown a poetry which is not ‘the poetry of the street’ or the ‘poetry of Paris,’ but the projection of Atget’s person.95 It is clear from the above passage that Evans celebrated Atget’s work, even though later in his essay he critiqued Abbott’s recent publication, Atget: photographe de Paris. About this book he wrote: “The published reproductions are extremely disappointing. They and the typography and the binding make the book look like a pirated edition of some other publication.” Apparently Evans believed Atget’s work was not given justice as reproduced. of the Museum of Modern Art, had written to Lincoln Kirstein — apropos of Kirstein’s promised essay for American Photographs – cautioning him to clearly distinguish Evans’ work from that of all other photographers, both ‘documentary’ and ‘lyric.’ Evans and Mabry were close friends: either could have devised these two categories. In any case, it is clear that these distinctions were clear in Evans’ mind long before his lecture at Yale.” p. 12. Hill does not point to the fact that the terms “lyric” and “documentary” were used much earlier by writers such as Mac Orlan. 95 See Walker Evans, “The Reappearance of Photography,” Hound & Horn, no. 5, October-December 1931, p. 127. 62 In “The Reappearance of Photography” Evans came down even harder on Edward Steichen, of whose work he clearly did not approve, calling it “slick” commercialism: America is really the natural home of photography if photography is thought of without operators [sic]. Except that Edward Steichen has made up a book that happens to stand on the present shelf, the American problem is almost too sad to restate and too trite. Steichen is photography off its track in our own reiterated way of technical impressiveness and spiritual non existence. In paraphrase, his general note is money, understanding of advertising values, special feeling for parvenu elegance, slick technique, over all of which is thrown a hardness and superficiality that is the hardness and superficiality of America's latter day, and has nothing to do with any person. The publication of this work carries an inverted interest as reflection of the Chrysler period.96 Walker Evans continued his critical assessment in his review of Renger-Patzsch’s Die Welt ist Schön: “Renger Patzsch's hundred photos,” he wrote there, “make a book exciting to run through in a shop and disappointing to take home. His is a photo method, but turns out to be precisely the method that makes it said ‘painting is no longer necessary, the world can be photographed.’ It is a roundabout return to the middle period of photography.”97 On Fraz Roh’s Photo eye (which Evans compared to Abbott’s photographe) he made the following assessment, which, unlike his dismissal of the work of Steichen and Renger-Patzsch, is actually a positive review. Evans wrote that Roh’s book widened the definition of photography to include new mediums such as press photography and photographs created for scientific purposes: 96 Ibid. 97 Ibid. 63 Photo eye is a nervous and important book. Its editors call the world not only beautiful but exciting, cruel, and weird. In intention social and didactic, this is an anthology of the ‘new’ photography; yet its editors knew where to look for their material, and print examples of the news photo, aerial photography, microphotography, astronomical photography, photomontage and the photogram, multiple-exposure and the negative print. Evans next drew parallels between Roh’s Photo eye and Abbott’s Atget: photographe de Paris, noting that “photographe is the French equivalent to Photo eye with the added intention of giving a history of photography. It is without tendency but has lost consistency by a de luxe process of reproduction. An essay on photographie vision du monde could be a good deal briefer than the one which prefaces this collection. But it is valuable, in its French intellectual way, as a respectable statement of the functions and possibilities of photography. The reproductions do little to illustrate this essay.”98 Although Evans said very little about Atget, this passage does acknowledge that Evans read Mac Orlan’s introduction to the book, finding it “valuable, in its French intellectual way.” Thus, Evans’s use of the term “lyric” to describe Atget’s work in the Atget passage above, likely stemmed from Mac Orlan’s. This is an important point, because both Mac Orlan and Evans use the term to describe a type of photographic practice that is “poetic,” that is to say, literary in its emphasis. Evans concluded his Hound & Horn essay with a discussion of August Sander, whose work, like Atget’s, he greatly admired. Writing about Sander, he stated: “Finally the photo document is directed into a volume, again in Germany. Antlitz der Zeit is more than a book of ‘type studies; a case of the camera looking the right direction among 98 Ibid., p. 128. 64 people. This is one of the futures of photography foretold by Atget. It is a photographic editing of society, a clinical process; even enough of a cultural necessity to make one wonder why other so-called advanced countries of the world have not also been examined and recorded.”99 This passage points to Evans’s understanding of Sander’s work as a group of “photo documents,” a categorization of style and technique that he also gave to Atget. In fact, Evans went so far as to establish a historical trajectory of the development of documentary photography beginning with Atget and leading to Sander, indicated by his suggestion above that Sander’s work “is one of the futures of photography foretold by Atget.” Importantly, Evans later came to see his own work as standing next in line in this lineage. Given Evans’s demonstrated interest in and commitment to literature, it is important to demonstrate, as these passages do, the historical connection between documentary photography and a “lyrical” or “poetic understanding of the street.” Summarizing Evans’s essay, Hambourg noted the following: “Like a navigator fixing his vessel’s position, Evans defined modern documentary photography as a cultural necessity foretold by Atget, a photographic editing of society effected by a camera looking in the right direction. Ostensibly mechanical and intentionally clinical, documentary photography nonetheless might transcribe a certain poetry, the projection not of the thing seen but of its seer” (emphasis mine).100 Here, Hambourg pointed to the complicated 99 Ibid. 100 In Maria Morris Hambourg, “Atget: Precursor of Modern Documentary Photography.” In Observations: Essays on Documentary Photography, p. 36. 65 definition of documentary photography as understood in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The modern documentary style had good intentions of being “clinical” or objective, but nonetheless had within it an element (perhaps necessarily so) of the subjectivity of the photographer. This subjectivity, more often than not, was interpreted at the time to be a type of “honesty” with the subject matter rather than an engagement or sympathy with the objects or people depicted in the photograph. Thus, birth was given to a subjective documentary style, or, as Evans would later call it: “lyric documentary.” For Evans, a lyric documentary photographic style was always intermeshed with literature, particularly poetry, which he understood to “speak the same language” as the type of photography he practiced. Evans understood photography as a descriptive document—a visual writing which produced a type of poetics. As Mac Orlan wrote: “The art of photography is a literary art. … A camera lens and the turntable of a talking machine are the two greatest intermediaries between life and all the lyrical or simply literary interpretations that can be extracted from it… a photograph of a street almost always discloses some detail which will lend that street a literary character.”101 Evans’s use of the term “lyrical” might have been made in reference to the Lyrical Left, a “loose coalition of cultural radicals living in New York City, [who] dreamed of changing the world with pens, paint brushes, and new publications. They thought they 101 Orlan, p.50. 66 could liberate society by combining radical politics and modern culture.”102 One of the more prominent members of this coalition was Alfred Stieglitz, who remained deliberately outside of 1920s and 1930s politics, preferring to instead remain committed to promoting American art and artists outside of the framework of the political. In a letter to Waldo Frank, chairman of the League of American Writers, Stieglitz wrote: “In reality, I am much more active in a revolutionary sense than most of the so-called Communists I have met.”103 Edward Abrahams has written, in his book The Lyrical Left, that “Unlike most intellectuals in the thirties who were then reexamining the links between art and social change, Stieglitz simply refused to reconsider his point of view.”104 Although Evans spoke out repeatedly against Stieglitz’s dominance of the photography scene during this period, politically, at least, the two photographers were closely aligned. In an essay written five years after Evans’s “Reappearance of Photography,” the German art critic and cultural historian Walter Benjamin likened Atget’s photographs of the timeworn streets of Paris to “scenes of a crime.”105 While some historians have 102 See Edward Abrahams, The Lyrical Left: Randolph Bourne and Alfred Stieglitz. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1986, p. i. 103 Abrahams, p. 97. 104 Ibid. 105 In section VI of Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), he made the following remarks about about photography and Atget’s work in particular: “In photography, exhibition value begins to displace cult value all along the line. But cult value does not give way without resistance. It retires into an ultimate retrenchment: the human countenance. It is no accident that the portrait was the focal point of early photography. The cult of remembrance of loved ones, absent or dead, offers a last refuge for the cult value of the picture. For the last time the aura emanates from the early photographs in the fleeting expression of a human face. This is what constitutes their melancholy, incomparable beauty. But as man withdraws from the photographic image, the exhibition value for the first time shows its superiority to the ritual value. To have pinpointed this new stage constitutes the incomparable significance of Atget, who, around 1900, took photographs of deserted Paris streets. It has quite justly been said of him that he photographed them like scenes of crime. The scene of a crime, too, is deserted; it is photographed 67 argued that Benjamin’s description of Atget’s work in this manner points to Atget’s camera capturing the “remains” of an emerging capitalist economy in France — i.e. those things left behind after the close of business, or objects that might be left behind at a crime scene — there is another more likely interpretation of Benjamin’s use of this particular turn of phrase. In the early twentieth century, specifically in the early 1920s, there were a number of crime novels published in France that took place in the very same arrondissements or districts of Paris where Atget was photographing. The genre of crime fiction saw a marked rise in the 1920s, and was popularized by the late nineteenth century writings of authors such as Émile Gaboriau, whose novels showed attention to detail, documentation and exactitude. Because these documentary-like attributes, Gaboriau’s work can be seen as similar to Atget’s photographs. This type of crime fiction was immensely popular in France in the 1920s. Gaboriau's writing has been pointed to as containing the first example in French literature of a detective minutely examining a crime scene for clues.106 for the purpose of establishing evidence. With Atget, photographs become standard evidence for historical occurrences, and acquire a hidden political significance. They demand a specific kind of approach; free- floating contemplation is not appropriate to them. They stir the viewer; he feels challenged by them in a new way. At the same time picture magazines begin to put up signposts for him, right ones or wrong ones, no matter. For the first time, captions have become obligatory. And it is clear that they have an altogether different character than the title of a painting. The directives which the captions give to those looking at pictures in illustrated magazines soon become even more explicit and more imperative in the film where the meaning of each single picture appears to be prescribed by the sequence of all preceding ones.” It is useful to consider Atget’s work, as Benjamin does here, as representing some of the earliest photography to break away from ritual or cult value. Instead, Atget’s work, for Benjamin represents a body of photography more concerned with “exhibition” or documentary value than with sentimentality. Thus, his photographs are for Benjamin “emptied out” of sentiment and imbued with “a hidden political significance.” 106 See Tom Gunning, ”Lynx-Eyed Detectives and Shadow Bandits: Visuality and Eclipse in French Detective Stories.” Yale French Studies 108, 2005, p. 75 68 In all likelihood it was to these crime novels (and their settings) that Benjamin (an avid reader of French publications and novels) was referring when he described Atget’s photographs as “scenes of a crime.” The idea of the remnant (or sense of things left behind) in Benjamin’s description of Atget’s work has a common resonance with one of Evans’s favorite quotes by the American author Henry James. The following introductory passage from James’s The American Scene (1907) 107 stressed the importance of the artist as one of the few figures able to “report” on the notion that objects have their own inherent sense of “thingness” which they “give out.” For Evans, it was the photographer’s task to record these things, objects, and places: To be at all critically, or as we have been fond of calling it, analytically minded — over and beyond an inherent love of the general many-colored picture of things — is to be subject to the superstition that objects and places, coherently grouped, disposed for human use and addressed to it, must have a sense of their own, a mystic meaning proper to themselves to give out: to give out, that is, to the participant at once so interested and detached as to be moved to a report of the matter.108 Another important model for Atget and eventually Evans work was Honoré de Balzac’s Comédie Humaine—a massive compendium of street types and people written in a realist style, recording the minute details of individuals and places. The epic scope of 107 I am indebted to professor Alan Trachtenberg for sharing this information with me. As he recalls, this was an oft-cited quote of James’s that Evans referred to periodically in their conversations. The same quote was used by Trachtenberg as a frontispiece [or epigraph?] to a recent exhibition of his own photography at Yale University. The quote also appeared as an epigraph in Wright Morris’s series of photographs of Nebraska entitled The Home Place (1947). 108 See Henry James, “Philadelphia.” The North American Review, Vol. 182, No. 593 (Apr., 1906), p. 542. 69 Balzac’s work, in its attempt to exhaustively record French street life and the urban environment, presages the similar ambitions of Atget’s photographic project. Together, these two models informed Evans’s own work, especially his publication and exhibition, American Photographs (1938). Hambourg’s essay once again provides a useful summary of the period’s interest and interpretation of Atget’s photographic project: Evan’s understanding of the photographer’s moral purpose and his high regard for Atget were shared by other documentary photographers in the thirties. What made Atget so compelling to them was not just the beauty and the seemingly straightforward style of the individual pictures, but also the principled stance toward the world which the work as a whole revealed. For a generation seeking an alternative to both fin-de-siècle pictorialism and the formal experimentation of the twenties, Atget’s example established a precept for treating significant subject matter with uncontrived honesty.109 In the United States, the importance of Atget and of documentary photography in general did not go unnoticed. It was represented in small shows in even smaller galleries in the United States in the early 1930s, and was a welcomed as a respite from the decadence of pictorialism. In New York City, the first gallery to give Atget a one-man show was the Wehye Gallery (the same gallery that had funded Abbott’s book on Atget in 1929). The Atget exhibition ran in New York from November 24—December 6, 1930. 109 Hambourg, pp. 36-37. 70 In 1929, Atget’s work appeared in many publications including transition, L’Art vivant, Le Crapouillet, Jazz, Creative Art.110 In 1931, the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art put on an exhibition of photography curated, in part, by Lincoln Kirstein. The exhibition, International Photography, accompanied by a catalog (likely by Kirstein), noted that the show intended “to prove that the mechanism of the photograph is worthy and capable of producing creative work.”111 On display at this exhibition were ten Atget prints on loan from the Wehye Gallery, ten portraits by Abbott (including her already famous Atget portrait), as well as work by Margaret Bourke-White, Walker Evans, Arthur Gerlach, Anton Bruehl, Pirie MacDonald, Tina Modotti, William Rittase, Charles Sheeler, Sherril Schell, Edward Steichen, Ralph Steiner, Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Doris Ulman and Edward Weston. Concurrently displayed were aerial photographs, x-rays, astronomical photographs, and press photographs. When Kirstein was asked by both the editor and business manager of Hound & Horn to print Atget photos in the journal he refused, contending that Atget was not an American.112 110 Jean Galliotti, “La Photographie est-elle un art? Atget.” L’Art vivant, 5 (January 1, 1949); “Eugène Atget” transition, 15, February 1929, pp. 122-124, with two reproductions; Le Crapouillet, May 1929, special number with cover and 30 reproductions; Jazz, 7, Summer 1929, with one reproduction; Robert Desnos, “Emile Atget (sic) Merle, n.s., no. 3, September 1929, pp. 651-656, with seven reproductions, 111 Maria Morris Hambourg, “Atget, Precursor of Modern Documentary Photography.” In Observations: Essays on Documentary Photography. Friends of Photography, 1984, p. 36. 112 In Kirstein’s letters from this period, he is continually encouraging the publication of hitherto unpublished American writers. As Mitzi Berger Hamovitch has written, “This policy provoked an exchange between editor A. Hyatt Mayor and Alan Stroock, business manager of the magazine. A query from Mayor about the reason for Kirstein’s refusal to publish photographs by the French photographer Eugéne Atget elicited the reply that Atget was not an American. ‘Ask Kirstein if Diaghilev was an American,’ wrote co- editor Bernard Bandler to Stroock, urging the publication of Atget. Stroock wrote plaintively to Mayor, 71 In its scope and span, the Harvard Society show was a smaller, American version of the German Film und Foto exhibition put on in 1929. Nevertheless, the Harvard Society exhibition was meaningful in that it demonstrated how Atget’s work might be seen apart from the mystical interpretation of the Surrealists working in France. In theUnited States, Atget’s work was appreciated “simply” for its documentary style.113 As a group show, the exhibition contextualized Atget’s work and demonstrated its influence on both “art” and “objective” photography. Importantly, this show demonstrated that by 1930, Lincoln Kirstein had displayed Walker Evans’s work in the same exhibition with Atget. At the time, it was probably not completely understood by either Kirstein or Evans just how fundamental establishing this visual relationship would be for the developing photographer. Nevertheless, by 1930, the continuity between Atget and Evans’s work had been firmly established. Evans’s Victorian photographs of nineteenth century houses on the verge of decay or destruction, are the subject of chapter three of this dissertation. In many ways, these images parallel the type of photographic archive that Atget was creating at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. Even though they worked in different historical moments, both Evans and Atget were concerned with creating an archive of an everyday existence that was under threat. In America, this threat was the rise of modernism, mass production and the sleek, machine-made, rather than hand-made ‘The Pope and Henry VIII are at it again.’ Atget was not published. Hamovitch, The Hound & Horn Letters. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1982, p. 3. 113 Hambourg, p. 34. 72 home. In Atget’s Paris, the threat was Hausmannization (a radical plan for the modernization of Paris) which called for the destruction of the city’s medieval quarters. In addition to Atget, Evans was influenced in this early series by the French critic Charles Baudelaire whom Evans thought of as a “kind of God,” and whom he considered, in his words, to be “the father of modern literature [and] the whole modern movement such as it is. Baudelaire influenced me and everybody else too.”114 Additionally, it is likely that Evans’s use of the term “lyric documentary” is indebted, in part, to the writings of Baudelaire—that is to say, Evans believed the medium of photography was intrinsically able to capture the specifics (the “poetry” or patina) of an age in a way that other mediums were not. On the role of photography in modern life, Baudelaire made the following summary: “Let it [photography] be the secretary and clerk of whoever needs an absolute factual exactitude in his profession—up to that point nothing could be better. Let it rescue from oblivion those tumbling ruins, those books, prints, and manuscripts which time is devouring, precious things whose form is dissolving and which demand a place in the archives of our memory.”115 Kirstein wrote in the press release for the Museum of Modern Art exhibition Photographs of Nineteenth Century Houses that “these wooden houses disintegrate, almost, between snaps of the lens. Many shown in these photographs 114 Oral history interview with Walker Evans, 1971 Oct. 13-Dec. 23, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 115 See Charles Baudelaire, “On Photography,” Salon of 1859, in Alan Trachtenberg, Classic Essays on Photography, New Haven: Leete’s Island Press, 1980, pp. 87-88. 73 no longer stand,”116 This statement aligns with Baudelaire’s account of photography’s role in modern life because it points to photography’s capacity to capture that which is in flux or disintegrating in the forward march of history. Indeed, the only remaining record of some of these architectural structures are Evans’s photographs of them—time has otherwise devoured their physical presence. Baudelaire believed in photography’s ability to “cut through” a historical moment and present it as it was popularly perceived. His polemic against the forward march of progress had enormous appeal to Evans and his intellectual circle and likely influenced their critique of modernism. Baudelaire’s stance against the idea of modern “progress,” best summarized in his 1855 review of the Exposition Universelle, had a significant impact on both Kirstein’s and Evans’s critiques of modernism in the 1930s. Of “progress,” Baudelaire wrote the following, blaming it for clouding of our ability to understand history: “There is yet another, and very fashionable, error which I am anxious to avoid like the very devil. I refer to the idea of ‘progress.’ This obscure beacon, invention of present-day philosophizing, licensed without guarantee of Nature or God — this modern lantern throws a stream of chaos on all objects of knowledge; liberty melts away, punishment disappears. Anyone who wants to see history clearly must first of all put out this treacherous light.”117 116 Kirstein, MoMA press release: “Walker Evans’s Photographs of Victorian Architecture.” The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art, Vol. 1, No. 4, Dec., 1933, p. 4. 117 Baudelaire, “On the Modern Idea of Progress as Applied to the Fine Arts.” from the Exposition Universelle, 1855, as quoted in Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity. London: Verso, 1993, p. 144. 74 WALKER EVANS: EARLY NEW YORK CITY PHOTOGRAPHS Walker Evans retuned to New York in 1927. After his sojourn in Paris he continued to explore the capacities of photography to poetically capture the American social scene. That spring, Evans made photographs of the Lindbergh Day celebrations taking place in New York City on June 13, 1927. The exposures made that afternoon were some of Evans’s earliest photographic explorations of Manhattan and city street life. In Lindbergh Day Parade (1927) (Figures 26 and 27), Evans captured the confetti-lined streets of the city along with an assembled marching band. This series of photographs captured the celebration of the first transatlantic flight ever made between Paris and New York by the American pilot Charles Lindbergh. Lindbergh’s voyage embodied the modern ideals of international exchange, and his transatlantic flight enacted the pattern of influence and exchange between avant-garde art and artists living in Paris and New York. As historian John Ward noted in his essay “The Meaning of Lindbergh’s Flight,” the importance of Lindbergh’s historic voyage was its duality: it represented both the past and the future.118 Lindbergh “was celebrated by some as a self-sufficient individual, a pioneer who came out of the Old West. For others, he represented the progress of American industry and the exciting potential of the machine.”119 In many ways, this series of photographs pointed to a larger theme that continually reemerged in Evans’s 118 See John W. Ward, “The meaning of Lindberg’s Flight.” American Quarterly X:1 (spring, 1958), pp. 3- 16. 119 In Judith Keller, Walker Evans, the Getty Museum Collection. London: Thames and Hudson, 1995, p. 3. 75 work throughout the late 1920s and 1930s: the relationship between the past, present, and future, and photography’s role in capturing these shifting temporalities.120 After Evans returned to New York, he began to wrestle with photographing iconic “American” subjects, such as skyscrapers, in the New Vision style of the European avant- garde. The German photographer Erich Mendelsohn’s photobook Amerika (1926) (figure 28 and 29), recently published, presented views of New York’s skyscrapers for a European audience. Possibly upon the urging of Evans’s German friends (who were familiar with European modernism and architecture, including his German roommate at the time, Hans Skolle), Evans began photographing iconic New York skyscrapers in a similar modernist-inflected vein. In the late twenties and thirties, Evans photographed the Graybar Building, as well as Lincoln Center and the Chrysler, International Telephone, and Flatiron Buildings (figures 30-32). Evans referred to these photographs as “architectural studies” and many of his images from this time captured contemporary buildings under construction. Evans intention was to sell these images to journals and magazines that were actively publishing photographs of these subjects. Soon enough Evans’s work began to appear in publications such as Hound & Horn, Architectural Review, USA, and Creative Art (figure 33). Creative Art, “the quarterly magazine of the American scene,” published and reproduced art, photography, literature, and articles about politics and industrial design. In December 1930, the journal 120 A similar theme will appear in Evans’s published series of photographs for Hart Crane’s The Bridge (1930) as discussed below. 76 published a photo-essay of four of Evans’s photographs entitled “Mr. Walker Evans Records a City’s Scene.”121 Creative Art described Evans as a commercial photographer, which is surprising given Evans’s own disdain for the commercial art world: “Mr. Walker Evans is a Commercial Photographer, working in New York. He has been in Europe where he studied modern Continental methods, and has since spent some time in experimenting. He now records in a vivid and peculiarly appropriate manner the scene of which he is a product.”122 Later, the same journal published four city views by Evans accompanied by a typeface collage about modern urban life. One of these photographs, Evans’s Broadway Composition123 (figure 34), is a photomontage created with several Leica negatives. As pointed out in the Getty Museum, Evans’s exhibition catalog, Broadway Composition, “Seems to have been inspired by [his] fascination with the title of a new “jailbreak melodrama” The Big House (1930) starring Robert Montgomery and Wallace Beery.”124 The title “The Big House” is easily visible lit up in marquee lights in the center of the composition. Another photograph reproduced in this spread was Evans’s New York City’s Quick Lunch (figure 35), an image that strongly foreshadowed what would become his dominant visual style. 121 “Mr. Walker Evans Records a City’s Scene.” Creative Art, Dec. 1930, p. 454. (These images are reproduced in the Getty Walker Evans exhibition catalog, 1995, nos. 49-51, 68-69, 92- 93. 122 It is likely that this somewhat tongue-in-cheek commentary was written by Evans himself. “Mr. Walker Evans Records a City’s Scene.” Creative Art, Dec. 1930, p. 454. 123 See Judith Keller, Walker Evans: The Getty Museum Collection. London: Thames and Hudson, 1995, image no. 68. 124 Keller, p. 8. 77 The following year Creative Art reproduced another series of Evans’s photographs. These images accompanied an article by Frank Lloyd Wright, “The Tyranny of the Skyscraper,”125 criticizing the modern skyscraper. Evans’s photographs included an image of the Graybar Building and an image of skyscrapers surrounding the construction site of the Lincoln Building. The Wright article was one of the architect’s Kahn lectures for Princeton University. It had recently appeared in the monograph Modern Architecture (Evans’s work did not appear in this original version). In the second, Creative Art version, Evans’s work was accompanied by a photograph by Ralph Steiner, two lithographs by Adriaan Lubbers, and one city panorama by World Wide Photos. Wright had only good things to say about what he called the “first skyscraper,” the work of his mentor Louis Sullivan. However, Wright was famously very critical of International Style skyscraper architecture in this article, especially the multitude of contemporary buildings being constructed in New York City during the late 1920s. Walker Evans’s skyscraper photographs as reproduced in this spread were significant because they were used to accompany a critique of modern architecture. In this sense, these images represent Evans’s first foray into a larger debate in architecture circles between old forms and new styles. This early spread points to Evans’s later interest in photographing nineteenth-century Victorian American architecture; a project discussed at length in the third chapter of this dissertation. 125 Frank Lloyd Wright, “The Tyranny of the Skyscraper.” Creative Art 8:5, May 1931, pp. 324-332. 78 In December 1930, the literary journal Hound & Horn featured an Evans portfolio, “New York City.”126 This same issue featured essays on the work of Henry Adams and Vsevoldo Meyerhold’s theater, as well as short works of fiction by Erskine Caldwell and Kay Boyle. Evans’s portfolio spread featured four photographs that “were largely attempts to apply elements of the New Vision advocated by László Moholy-Nagy and other European artist-photographers to subjects Evans had found on Manhattan streets, near the tenements, and at the Port of New York.”127 The first image, captioned Sixth Avenue (figure 36), is of an African American woman on a city street wearing a fur- collared coat. This is an early example of Evans’s street portrait style so apparent in much of his later work. Other photographs from this spread included various city and urban architectural views done in a more straightforward New Vision style. Hound & Horn’s first issue was printed in 1927. From the beginning, architecture was discussed regularly in its pages. In the April-June 1931 issue, two photographs by Evans appeared in a section called the “Architecture Chronicle.” Featured in the section was a piece by Lyman Paine subtitled “Is Character Necessary?” Paine discussed two recently constructed buildings, the New York chapter of the American Red Cross and the newly built site for the New School for Social Research, which he identified as examples of negative and positive versions, respectively, of “architectural character.” Paine pointed to the Red Cross building as one possessing little character and stylistically emulating 126 The images featured in the “New York City” spread correlate to Getty catalog numbers 29-30, 82, 94, 143, 169-71, 227-28, 233, and 237-38. Hound & Horn, December 1930. 127 Keller, p. 7. 79 International Style skyscrapers. Conversely, he celebrated architect Joseph Urban’s New School building, which he described as “a small, steel skeleton building” that featured an “envelope of brick and glass,” and was “decisive” and “unambiguous” as well as “intense and assertive.” Evans’s photographs served to illustrate Paine’s point. His photograph of the Red Cross building is banal in its presentation, whereas his view of the New School structure emphasizes its difference and modernity (emphasis on glass) in comparison to the surrounding neighborhood buildings. In the year between 1929 and 1930, Evans made a significant stylistic shift away from New Vision-inspired street photography towards what would eventually become his own signature style, a “lyric documentary” capturing of the American scene with his camera. One of his earliest collaborations with a writer (a working relationship he revisited several key times throughout his life) was with his friend and colleague, the emerging poet Hart Crane. THE MYTH OF AMERICA: HART CRANE’S THE BRIDGE (1930) Hart Crane’s The Bridge was first published in March 1930 by The Black Sun Press, an English language book publisher founded in 1927 by the poet Harry Crosby and his wife Caresse Crosby, who were at the time American expatriates living in Paris (figures 37-39). This deluxe limited edition, and subsequent trade editions printed in the United States in April and July of 1930 by Horace Liveright, featured several of Walker Evans’s photographs (figures 40-44). Although these different editions reproduced slightly varying versions of Evans’s work, each publication maintained a formal 80 emphasis on presenting the Brooklyn Bridge as distinctly “modernist.” To this end, Evans’s photographs as they appeared in The Bridge broke away from traditional representations of the structure as an iconic architectural totality, instead favoring modernist viewpoints, angularities, and even something like the hard-edged machine aesthetic of precisionism. Evans’s photographs looked nothing like popular representations of the Brooklyn Bridge completed by John A. Roebling in 1883, and undoubtedly such defamiliarization was intentional. In its structure, Crane’s poem The Bridge is a romantic lyrical poem with strong overtones of an epic, comprised of fifteen lyric poems of varying length and scope.128 In summary, it tells the tale of an exiled poet’s quest for an ideal beauty in contemporary American society. In his poem, Crane selected specific historical moments in American history that resembled his own ecstatic visions of experience and struggles with modern life. In The Bridge, a fictional protagonist embarks on a voyage to a mythic Indian past, represented as “the childhood of the continent.” The protagonist (also referred to as the 128 Crane’s poem is divided into the following sections (each followed by a brief synopsis): “Proem” First section, “Ave Maria,” included a monologue by Columbus Second section, “Powhatan’s Daughter,” has five subdivisions. Powhatan is the mythical body of America. She is the embodiment of the past, the Absolute. Third section, “Cutty Shark” “Cape Hatteras” Crane described this section as a “kind of ode to Whitman” (Spears, p. 37). This section is an ironic celebration of the airplane as an embodiment of the modern [Note to self]“Three songs” is about the distortion of love in the modern world. “National Winter Garden” describes a mythic dance reduced to burlesque show. “Quaker Hill” discusses the corruption of the countryside by commercialism. “The Tunnel” describes the subway ride under the river to get to the bridge; and “Inferno,” a descent into the abyss before the ascent. The final section, “Atlantis,” Crane described as a “sweeping dithyramb in which the Bridge becomes the symbol of consciousness panning time and space.” This is the first section Crane completed. 81 “quester” in Crane’s discourse) travels from the present to this mythic past and becomes a Native American Indian, marrying Pocahontas in a ritual fire dance. Eventually, as a result of his journey, the protagonist loses his romantic notions of the mythic American past, and instead of seeing Pocahontas as a goddess he comes to envision her as a sterile prostitute. However, the narrator’s shift to a critical orientation toward the American past does not prompt him to lose faith — the poem concludes with a hymn celebrating the bridge as a modern embodiment of America’s potentiality and with the protagonist’s return to his own time, New York City in the 1920s. MODERNITY AND THE BRIDGE Far from “modern,” the Brooklyn Bridge was nearly half a century old in 1929. In New York City there were numerous recently constructed skyscrapers, such as the Chrysler building and the soon-to-be completed Empire State Building, that more explicitly embodied modernist ideals. With this in mind, Crane was clearly not interested in celebrating modernism per se in The Bridge. Instead, as several scholars have pointed out, the Brooklyn Bridge “was offered as an example that negotiated a position midway between tradition and novelty, the stable and the exploratory.”129 For Crane, modern industrial achievements such as the airplane and the subway had caused more problems than good. In contrast, the more traditional structure of the Brooklyn Bridge, as Alan 129 The University of Illinois' Modern American Poetry site, http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/crane/bridge_ill.htm. Accessed 2/27/2013 82 Trachtenberg has noted, relied on engineering innovation and architectural tradition; thus its appeal for the poet: Unavoidably, it [the bridge] embodies two styles of building: the masonry, good or bad, is traditional, while the steel is something new. To be recognized as architecture, structural stone must be carved into a familiar shape, while the steel, unburdened with precedents, could take whatever 130 shape its function demanded. Because of its link to both progress and historical stability, in Crane’s estimation, the Brooklyn Bridge was the perfect metaphor for the experience of modern life. Nevertheless, Crane was critical of modernity, something which he believed lacked a sense of spirituality. As the Crane scholar Derek Savage has noted: What Crane was really trying to do, as a poet, was to give an inward, spiritual significance to the material, outward conditions of twentieth-century industrial civilization. He wanted to take the whole complex structure of American mechanized society into his soul and to give it back again endowed with the spiritual significance and meaning of his own personality. … However, his poems are never about machines and machinery. There are about (if the world may be used at all) Crane’s own experience. But into his own experience he tried to incorporate the whole of urban society and, in The 131 Bridge, the history of the American nation. Hart Crane began work on The Bridge in 1923 as an attempt to continue his interpretation of modern life as it related to the past. He had previously addressed this theme in his poem “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen” (1922-1923), which was similar in intention to Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) with its emphasis on a fusion of present and past, or, in Crane’s words, its serving as a “bridge 130 See Alan Trachtenberg, Brooklyn Bridge: Fact and Symbol, pp. 87-88. 131 Derek Savage, “The Americanism of Hart Crane.” in Hart Crane: a Collection of Critical Essays, ed., Alan Trachtenberg, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1982, p. 46. 83 between so-called classic experience and... our seething, confused cosmos of today.”132 In reference to The Waste Land, Crane wrote, “After this perfection of death — nothing is possible in motion but a resurrection of some kind.”133 Crane hoped that The Bridge would embody the myth of America, and work in contrast to the pessimism of The Waste Land to provide an affirmative vision of modern civilization. In this context, Crane spoke of his work as an epic akin to the Aeneid, parallel in its structure to that of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel. Writing in the 1920s, Crane remarked, "Emotionally I should like to write The Bridge. Intellectually the whole theme seems more and more absurd. The very idea of a bridge is an act of faith. The form of my poem rises out of a past that so overwhelms the present with its worth and vision that I'm at a loss to explain my delusion that there exists any real links between that past and a future destiny worthy of it. If only America were half as worthy today to be spoken of as Whitman spoke of it fifty years ago, there might be something for me to say."134 This musing signals Crane’s interest in mining the past for inspiration in the present, an idea so many of his generation were engaged with, including Walker Evans. Slowly, Crane made progress on his epic work, writing sporadically, with one of his most productive periods happening while writing at his grandmother’s plantation 132 As quoted in Monroe K. Spears. Hart Crane - American Writers 47: University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers No. 47, University of Minnesota Press, p. 32. 133 Spears, p. 32. 134 Voice and Visions Series. "Hart Crane." Video produced by the New York Center for Visual History, 1988. 84 estate on the Isle of Pines, Cuba in 1926.135 Throughout the 1920s, as The Bridge began to take shape and show promise, Crane wrote, "The Bridge is symphonic in including all the strands: Columbus, conquest of water, land, Pocahontas, subways, offices. The Bridge, in becoming a ship, a world, a woman, a tremendous harp as it does finally, seems to really have a career."136 On September 12, 1927, Crane wrote his financial backer, the banker Otto Kahn, requesting financial help. Kahn had already given Crane $2,000 to work on his epic poem, but he seemed unable to finish the project. During this period Crane was drinking heavily, having anonymous sex with sailors he picked up on the New York docks, and frequently getting into fights, many of which ended with a night or two in jail. Hoping to impress Kahn with the progress he had made on The Bridge, he sent the following in a letter to him: I jump from the monologue of Columbus in ‘Ave Maria’ — right across the four intervening centuries-into the harbor of twentieth-century Manhattan. And from that point in time and place I begin to work backward through the pioneer period, always in terms of the present — finally to the very core of the nature-world of the Indian. What I am really handling, you see, is the 137 myth of America (italics mine). Crane’s charmingly ideal statement in the last sentence, “What I am really handling, you see, is the myth of America” speaks to his intentions for his epic poem, 135 Cuba, as a site for artistic inspiration, played an equally important role for Walker Evans, who completed a series of photographs there that were subsequently published in Carleton Beals’s The Crime of Cuba (1933). 136 Voice and Visions Series. "Hart Crane." Video produced by the New York Center for Visual History, 1988. 137 In Clive Fisher, Hart Crane: A Life. Yale University Press, 2002, p. 45. 85 which introduced well-known American historical figures such as Columbus, Pocahontas, Edgar Allen Poe, Whitman, and the Wright brothers (among many others) into the fabric of poetic lyricism. In a larger sense, Crane’s engagement with myth signaled how his work aligned with a broader historical discourse that emerged in the 1930s regarding what “America” was and what it looked like. Importantly, Walker Evans picked up on and responded to this same theme in his 1938 publication, American Photographs. CRANE’S MYTH OF AMERICA Crane’s vision of America represented a specifically 1930s interpretation of a unique convergence of art, politics, and literature in a politically volatile period. Attempts to define what was meant by “America” became a common exercise among intellectuals during this time in a way that bridged artistic genres. For example, writers such as Waldo Frank in Our America (1919), attempted to categorically define what “America” meant during the early twentieth century both nationally and internationally. Artists such as Alfred Stieglitz and the art collectors Louise and Walter Arensberg sought out a specifically American faction of artists whose work they hoped would speak to the rise of the United States on the international art stage. Jazz musicians searched for a uniquely American sound, and found it in the work of Louis Armstrong and later Billy Holiday. Crane summarized his understanding of the country as a nation uniquely poised for a rise in spiritual values: 86 I am concerned with the future of America, but not because I think that America has any so-called par value as a state or as a group of people... It is only because I feel persuaded that here are destined to be discovered certain as yet undefined spiritual qualities, perhaps a new hierarchy of faith not to be developed so completely elsewhere. And in this process I like to feel myself as a potential factor; certainly I must speak in its terms and what discoveries I may make are situated in its experience. 138 In his essay “The Americanism of Hart Crane,” Derek Savage called Crane the “unofficial laureate of modern America,” noting that, “it is strange that the peculiar significance of Hart Crane in the light of the modern poet’s relationship to an industrial society has not been more generally recognized than it has. Crane is the unofficial laureate of modern America—although perhaps an America that is passing away.”139 The question of what exactly constituted an “American” artist was one of nationalism, specifically a carving out of a native artistic tradition separate and uniquely outside of European traditions. As Crane’s biographer has suggested, the poet reacted against the notion that his work should “harmonize” with any school or group of modern writers—he desired freedom to be himself and to be American, not European. On this point, Crane wrote, “I am interested in possibilities. Appollinaire [sic] lived in Paris, I live in Cleveland, Ohio.”140 138 Hart Crane, “General Aims and Theories.” in Hart Crane: A Collection of Critical Essays. ed., Alan Trachtenberg, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc. 1982, p. 14. 139 Derek Savage, “The Americanism of Hart Crane.” in Hart Crane: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed., Alan Trachtenberg, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc. 1982, p. 42. 140 See John T. Irwin, Hart Crane’s Poetry. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011, p. xiii., p. 276. 87 Nevertheless, like so many of his generation Crane did eventually make his way to Paris. In late 1928, Crane sailed for Europe and spent the first half of 1929 in Paris, where the Crosby’s provided him with stimulus to finish The Bridge. After the book’s publication in Paris and New York City 1930, Crane went to Mexico on a Guggenheim Fellowship to begin work on his next project, a poem about the history of Montezuma, a variation on the theme of America so explicitly addressed in The Bridge. However, this project was never realized. After years of mental instability, Crane tragically committed suicide on April 27, 1932 by jumping off a boat headed back to the United States, three months before what would have been his thirty-third birthday. LITERARY ROOTS Crane, like Walker Evans, was deeply engaged throughout his life with the history of Romantic, Realist, and Modernist art and literature, even though he had little formal training or schooling in these disciplines. The Bridge drew strongly from traditions of European Romanticism, especially the work of Percy Bysshe Shelley and William Blake, but Crane’s work was most indebted to American literature and prose. Crane believed emphatically in a particular type of American Romanticism best embodied in the work of Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Edgar Allan Poe. In addition to these American writers, Crane was simultaneously interested in modernist writers and thinkers such as James Joyce and T.S. Eliot. These opposing literary influences (American literature and European modernism) were formed in large part by Crane’s association with two very different 88 literary journals: the Little Review, which promoted the work of modernists such as Joyce and Eliot, and a quite different periodical, Seven Arts, which devoted itself to traditional American literature extending from Nathaniel Hawthorne and Walt Whitman to Sherwood Anderson and Robert Frost. Both the Little Review and Seven Arts exerted considerable influence on the impressionable young Crane, and in his writing he sought to reconcile the two magazines' disparate philosophies. Eliot’s influence on Crane was immense, and he often wrote about The Waste Land in his letters to friends and colleagues. Yet while Eliot’s work turned at times pessimistically or nostalgically towards the past, emphasizing the role of tradition, Crane’s writing looked forward, though not naïvely, towards a utopian future. When The Waste Land was first published, Crane wrote to a friend: “There is no one writing in English who can command so much respect, to my mind, as Eliot. However, I take Eliot as a point of departure towards an almost complete reverse of direction. His pessimism is amply justified, in his own case. But I would apply as much of his erudition and technique as I can absorb towards a more positive, or (if I must put it so in a sceptical [sic] age) ecstatic goal.”141 Hart Crane’s first biographer noted the following about the two poets: “The difference in temper between the two men was clearly indicated by the nature of their leading symbols: for Eliot the wasteland with its rubble of disintegrated 141 See Derek Savage, “The Americanism of Hart Crane.”Hart Crane: A Collection of Critical Essays. ed., Alan Trachtenberg, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc. 1982, p. 43. 89 values and desiccated spirits; for Crane the bridge with its hope of spiritual harmony and order above and beyond the acceptance of contemporary chaos.”142 The question that remains then is this: if Eliot and Crane represent two opposing sensibilities concerning modernity, what is it about Crane’s work that can be understood as modern, and what role did Evans’s photographs have in representing this modernity? WHAT MAKES THE BRIDGE MODERN? The modernism of Hart Crane’s The Bridge can be found in several primary components: the first is in its use of symbolic forms to convey meaning. For the Modernists, poetry was not meant to represent the world outside language, but rather to create a new linguistic field that had its own rules and forms of meaning. Modernist literature saw the demise of mimesis as one of its primary purposes. Following this, “reality,” as it was understood, could not be known directly, but only through the mediation of the symbol. The literary critic Marjorie Perfloff has written about how Crane’s work made use of symbolism. The Bridge, she writes, “presents its myth of spanning the American continent by means of the symbolism of Brooklyn Bridge and related circular forms.”143 An additional element of modernist poetry is the notion of autonomy, i.e. the perceived emotional distanciation of the text or artwork. On this point, T.S. Eliot wrote 142 Philip Horton, Hart Crane, The Life of an American Poet. New York: W.W. Norton, 1937 143 http://marjorieperloff.com/stein-duchamp-picasso/modernism-now/#ixzz2BH4vLbOd 90 that “Poetry,” as outlined in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” “is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion,” although, he added knowingly, “... of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.”144 The modernist autonomous poem avoided Romantic and Victorian linearity, instead favoring juxtapositions that came to be known as collage. This type of work was called “spatial form” by the literary critic Joseph Frank, who remarked that the alogical form of much of this writing was comprised of parts relating less to ideas of sequence than to juxtapostions known as collage.145 Collage (from collée, literally a “pasting together,” originally meant to evoke the comingling of lovers) was the dominant avant- garde art form after 1912. The collage technique appeared in modernist poetry, Perfloff has written, most notably in “Eliot’s The Waste Land, Pound's Cantos, Williams's Spring and All, Mina Loy's Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose, Louis Zukofsky's ‘A.’”146 One contemporary work that helped to shape the composition of The Bridge was William 144 T.S. Eliot. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” In The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, (1920) section 3. Originally published 1919. 145 Joseph Frank. “Spatial Form in Modern Literature.” The Sewanee Review, Vol. 53, No. 4 (Autumn, 1945), pp. 643-653. 146 Marjorie Perloff expands upon this point: “That language, Modernist poetics held, had to be concrete. From Eliot's objective correlative to Marianne Moore's ‘imaginary gardens with real toads in them,’ to Ezra Pound's Imagist manifesto in ‘A Retrospect,’ with its demand to ‘Go in fear of abstractions,’ and his definition of the Image as ‘an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time,’ to Williams's ‘No ideas but in things,’ precision and what Pound called ‘constatation of fact’ were the order of the day. Yet precision did not necessarily mean ‘clear, visual images’ – the term Eliot used to describe Dante's poetry in The Divine Comedy. The term could also refer to precision of syntax — a syntax commensurate to the articulation of a complex set of ideas — as in Gertrude Stein or in Wallace Stevens, or, for that matter, to precision of sound, to the finding of the perfectly appropriate rhyme or rhythm, as in Langston Hughes or Jean Toomer. In all these instances, poetry is regarded as an art of “verbivocovisual” (Joyce’s term) complexity and difficulty,” http://marjorieperloff.com/stein-duchamp-picasso/modernism- now/#ixzz2BH4vLbOd 91 Carlos Williams’s collage of American history and myth in his In the American Grain (1925).147 This work brought together disparate narratives, ideas, and voices to create a intricate semantic weave. Crane’s The Bridge pulled directly from this type of work especially with regard to its sweeping engagements with history and historical figures. Hart Crane went to New York City for the first time in 1916. There he met Carl Schmitt, a young painter who according to Horton (Crane’s biographer), encouraged Crane “to compose a certain number of poems per week simply as technical exercise with the purposes of breaking down formal patterns.” Crane brought these to Schmitt and “the two would read them over together, Schmitt illustrating with a pencil and paper the rising and falling of cadences, the dramatic effect of caesural breaks, and the general movement of the poem as a whole…”148 Crane’s interest in the plastic components of poetry, the literal visual mapping of his writing into lines of stress and pull, signals his interest in the equivalency between word and image and suggests that this interest in the relationship between word and image was fundamental for him. CONTEMPORARY REVIEWS OF THE BRIDGE Crane’s grand visions for his epic poem were quickly dashed by his contemporary critics and sometimes friends, Allen Tate and Yvor Winters, whose critical assessments of The Bridge after its publication set the tone for its negative reception in the 1930s. 147 For more on the influence of In the American Grain, see Irwin, pp. 55-57. 148 Spencer, p. 15. 92 Yvor Winters, who had praised Crane’s previous book, White Buildings (1926), compared The Bridge with Modernist works by James Joyce and William Carlos Williams, a literary heritage many today would be proud to have. Yet Winters, who maintained a disparaging view towards Modernism, made this association negatively. Speaking to the contrasting elements of Romanticism and Modernism inherent in Crane’s text, Winters outlined the following criticisms: “The book cannot be called an epic, in spite of its endeavor to create and embody a national myth, because it has no narrative framework and so lacks the formal unity of an epic... The structure we shall find is lyrical; but the poem is not a single lyric.”149 In his review Winters recognized Crane’s genius: “... he possesses the greatest genius in the Whitmanian tradition, and [he] grafts onto the Whitmanian tradition something of the stylistic discipline of the Symbolists, most often exceeds himself in this manner. The Whitmanian basis of Mr. Crane’s book makes a hero, as I have said, impossible.”150 And yet Winters called into question the validity of the poems’ ambition to outline in Crane’s terms, the “myth of America”: ...the ‘destiny’ of a nation is hard to get at in the abstract, since it is a vague generality, like ‘the French temperament’ or the ‘average American.’ It reduces itself, when one comes to describe it—without a hero—to the most 149 Winters later continues, “ I do not offer this analysis as complete or final, but as the best I have been able to devise so far; I have discovered in the past that Mr. Crane’s work is likely to clear up in a measure with familiarity. Nevertheless, it should be apparent from the looseness of the progression — and it will be more apparent after an inspection of the variety of meters — that the book as a whole has no more unity than the Song of Myself; it must be treated, as I have said, as a series of lyrics on a theme that is basically Whitmanian, but that, under the influence of Blake and Mr. Crane’s own inclinations, is extended into regions with which Whitman did not concern himself.” Yvor Winters, "The Progress of Hart Crane," Poetry 36 (June 1930), pp. 153, 164-65. 150 Yvor Winters, "The Progress of Hart Crane." Poetry 36 (June 1930), 157, pp. 164-65. 93 elementary and the least interesting aspects of the general landscape, aspects which cannot possibly be imbued with any definite significance, no matter how excited one may get, for the simple reason that no definite significance is available.151 A contemporary review of The Bridge by Cudworth Flint, offers a slightly more mixed assessment: This poem seems to me indubitably the work of a man of genius, and it contains passages of compact imagination and compelling rhythms. But in its central intention, to give to America a myth embodying a creed which may sustain us somewhat as Christianity has done in the past, the poem fails.152 Crane’s use of myth in The Bridge aligned the poem with other modernist works. As Perfloff has noted, “Modernism attached much importance to the newly discovered Freudian unconscious, to dream work, and to the use of myth and archetypal narratives as organizing structures. Thus The Waste Land takes its structural motive from the vegetation myths discussed in J. M. Frazer’s Golden Bough and Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance, even as Pound’s Cantos fuse Confucian historiography with Greek myth and the Homeric paradigm of the Odyssey.”153 Several figures in Crane’s circle (including the poet himself) were fascinated by mythical understandings of the world and how it functioned. Along with his friends Waldo Frank and Gorham Munson, Crane studied mysticism and oriental religions. During the 1920s, Crane was captivated by the spiritual teachings of George Gurdjieff and P.D. Ouspensky. Generally, Crane and his circle were preoccupied with a mystical 151 Ibid. 152 "Metaphor in Contemporary Poetry." The Symposium I:3 (July 1930), pp. 323-324, 334-335. 153 http://marjorieperloff.com/stein-duchamp-picasso/modernism-now/#ixzz2BH4vLbOd 94 interpretation of American history in which America appears as a visionary place where spiritual regeneration impossible in the old world was a real possibility in the present; and Gurdjieff, they believed, might be the agent of this spiritual renewal.154 Broadly speaking, Crane drew from historical examples of mythic quests to form the foundation for The Bridge as a prophetic vision of origins. Between June and July 1926, while living on the Isle of Pines, Cuba, Crane read the first volume of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West (1918). This was just prior to the most productive period in his writing. In a letter to Waldo Frank that August, Crane described the formative influence Spengler’s work had on his own work. As Crane recalled, reading Spengler was, for him, “perhaps a very good experience for ripening some of The Bridge,” and it seems to have “conspired in a strangely symbolical way toward the present speed of my work.”155 In a letter to Allen Tate in March 1927, Crane described Washington Roebling, the engineer behind the Brooklyn Bridge as “a true Spenglerian hero.”156 As the Crane scholar John T. Irwin has noted, it was Spengler’s discussions of late Gothic and Renaissance visual representations of prophetic vision that helped to establish the pictorial framework out of which both the form and content of Crane’s The 154 Henry Hart, ed., The American Writers' Congress. New York: International Publishers, 1935. However, later in that decade Frank and others came to heavily criticize Gurdjieff and his activities, finding them too esoteric in the face of the rising national economic depression. 155 As quoted in John T. Irwin, Hart Crane’s Poetry, p. 6. 156 Irwin, 32. Irwin continues with this point: “‘A true Spenglerian hero’, an appellation that one can easily imagine Crane applying to Columbus, who discovered the land bridge between East and West, and to Whitman, who, in Crane’s words, ‘stood up and flung the span on even wing/Of that great Bridge, or Myth, whereof I sing!’ And indeed, Crane treats Columbus and Whitman as Spenglerian infinity seekers” p. 32. 95 Bridge emerged.157 In the temporal structure of The Bridge, the quester moves back and forth through different historical moments in the (mythic) construction of American history. This narrative begins in “The Harbor Dawn” section where the quester dreams of a mystical union with Pocahontas, a symbol of the virgin continent. The narrative then moves temporally backward through symbolic episodes in American history until arriving at the pre-Columbian world of “The Dance.” Here, as Irwin summarizes: “the quester witnesses, in the sacred marriage of the chieftain Maquokeeta and the virgin Pocahontas, a primal scene of origin in which time and space, American history and environment, mythic lore and physical land are conjoined in a ‘mystical‘ union whose emblem is the bird-serpent, the Indian symbol of the conjunction of opposites.”158 Having witnessed this originary moment of American spirituality and consciousness, the poetic quester continues on his journey, making his way, in Irwin’s words “through a series of symbolic moments in the history of the American spirit, moments that show the gradual loss of that original, visionary world as the white man’s materialism submerged the mythic Amerindian nature-world.”159 Throughout this narrative process, Crane points to the loss of an original, pure world of Native American existence, and simultaneously considers moments in contemporary American history where its symbolic traces remain. In this portion of his poem, Crane alludes to the work 157 Irwin, p. 6. 158 Irwin, p. 6. 159 Irwin, p. 6. 96 of visionary writers such as Whitman, Poe, and Dickinson, whose poems evoked images of an ideal America.160 In the final section, “Atlantis,” the quester continues his mystical exploration of American spiritual history and suggests that America’s ultimate destiny is to return to its origins. The Crane scholar John Irwin wrote that in this contemporary moment (the 1920s and 1930s) “the visions of individual seers such as Poe, Whitman, Dickinson, and Crane” had the potential to “dominate the materialist world view and become the shared mythos of all Americans.” Crane’s sustained use of Spengler’s161 theories in his associative ties between Columbus and Whitman (both of whom he regards as visionaries discovering the “New Worlds,” physically and spiritually) and his reliance on historical counterpoints 160 Irwin, p. 7. 161 In terms of formal structure, Crane’s The Bridge recalls Spengler’s discussion of the development of the notion of “counterpoint” in the Gothic and Renaissance eras. Counterpoint, which Spengler defined as the balancing of “parallel and contrary motions” (Spengler, p. 229), developed, according to him, alongside the emergence of the flying buttress during the Gothic period. Like Spengler’s counterpoint, the flying buttress system placed weight and stress against each other resulting in the soaring heights of the Gothic cathedral. The architect of the Brooklyn Bridge, John Roebling, had a similar understanding of the architectonics and contrapuntal engineering of the structure. Roebling studied with Hegel in Germany before emigrating to the United States. Roebling’s Hegelianism, Irwin suggests, “seems to have found material expression in manipulating the suspension bridge’s dialectic of opposing forces — vertical compression in the stone towers (thesis) balanced against horizontal tension in the steel cables (antithesis) to produce suspension (synthesis) as the bridge, in a kind of Hegelian Aufhebung, was raised up, soaring above the water and uniting the shores.” (Irwin, p. 36). The explicitly Gothic motif of the Brooklyn Bridge, which uses two soaring gothic arches on the bridge’s terminal towers, suggests that Roebling may have utilized the Gothic arch for its associative relationship to the contrapuntal nature of Hegelian dialects. Following this Hegelian structuring of space, Irwin notes that “... pictorial counterpoint structures the prophetic vision of origins in The Bridge as a simultaneous forward and backward motion of foreshadowing and foreshortening, as that parallel and contrary interplay that occurs when the forethrown shadow of an ideal original America falls across (and in so doing, delineates and organizes) the symbolic moments of a foreshortened national history. This forward and backward movement in The Bridge’s narrative structure is the literary counterpart, in Crane’s words, of that ‘marvelous feeling... of a simultaneous forward and upward motion’ that the ‘webbed cables’ of Brooklyn Bridge give as one walks across it.’” Irwin, p. 45. 97 (literally shifting from one temporal experience to the next throughout the “span” of The Bridge) suggests an engagement with a view of history popular in artistic and theoretical discourses of the time: historical materialism. Crane’s understanding of the present by looking into the past is in dialog with Frankfurt School historical materialist thinkers such as Walter Benjamin, whose “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940) outlined a similar understanding of history. Originally, Crane wanted to use Joseph Stella’s fifth panel, Brooklyn Bridge, a painting on canvas from his series New York Interpreted, (1922) (figure 44) as the frontispiece for the Black Sun Press edition of The Bridge. Stella’s painting, which evokes the vibrant colors of stained glass in a Gothic cathedral in the visual language of Cubism, would have been a fitting image to illustrate the overarching theme of Crane’s poem. However, Crane eventually opted instead for Evans’s photographs for reasons that are not entirely clear. In a letter to Caresse Crosby on January 2, 1930, Crane wrote the following: "I think Evans is the most living, vital photographer of any whose work I know. More and more I rejoice that we decided on his pictures rather than Stella’s."162 Walker Evans’s photographs, as they appeared in the first Black Sun Press edition of The Bridge, drew upon and were in conversation with modernist poetic and artistic formal attributes. In the 1930 Black Sun Press deluxe gold sleeve printing of The Bridge, three of Evans photographs appeared as gravures. These were small, “postage stamp” sized images that were strategically placed between sections of Crane’s poem. As Alan 162 In Weber, O My Land, My Friends. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1997, p. 422. 98 Trachtenberg recounts, “It is not certain exactly when Crane decided to use the Evans photographs (or to ask Evans to make them), but by December 26, [1929] they were a definite feature of the book. On that date Crane sent off the final revisions of the text and added: ‘By the way, will you see that the middle photograph (the one of the barges and tug) goes between the ‘Cutty Sark’ Section and the ‘Hatteras’ Section. That is the ‘center’ of the book, physically and symbolically.’”163 Crane added later, in the same letter, “Evans is very anxious, as am I, that no ruling or printing appear on the pages devoted to the reproductions.” In Evans scholarship, these photographs (and the subsequent iterations of the series as they appeared in two later printings of The Bridge) (figures 42 and 43) are typically understood as formal experiments, capturing an iconic American structure in the visual language of European modernist photography. For instance, the Getty catalogue for the 1995 Walker Evans exhibition notes that “Evans seems to be reducing the basic elements of a major American monument to the fragmentary, two-dimensional aspects of European Modernism.”164However, to consider Evans’s photographs as they appeared in The Bridge as merely experiments with New Vision-style photography is to oversimplify these images and so misunderstand their dialog with the themes of Crane’s epic poem. Evans’s photographs appear at the beginning, middle, and end of the poem. The first image, (figure 38) appears on the facing page of the first poem in Crane’s 163 As quoted in Alan Trachtenberg, second ed., Brooklyn Bridge: Fact and Symbol, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979, p. 189. 164 Keller, p. 5. 99 publication, “To Brooklyn Bridge.” This photograph, which occupies less than a quarter of the available page, appears diminutive in the expanse of space surrounding it. In this image, the photographer stands beneath the soaring expanse of the bridge, gazing up into its underbelly. Slightly off center, the bridge looms large and becomes an almost abstract element against the stark white Manhattan sky. This is not a conventional representation of the iconic structure. We do not see, for instance, the recognizable Gothic arches or the cable supports. What we do see is something like the visual equivalent of the Hegelian dialectic: if Manhattan (out of which the Bridge emerges in this photograph) is the thesis, and Brooklyn the antithesis, then the photograph is taken somewhere in the synthesis. Even in its diminutive size, this photograph makes viewers feel dwarfed by the might of the industrial expanse above; we feel frozen within a dynamic contrapuntal space. Underneath the Brooklyn Bridge, where the viewer stands (and where Walker Evans once stood with his camera) was a particularly motivated space in the city during the late 1920s. This was a notorious haunt in queer New York, a space for sailors to gather, meet, and have casual sex. Far from simply a “modernist” vantage point (from below up) this view of the bridge relates explicitly to Cranes’s lover, Emil Opffer, with whom Crane had taken up residence by 1924. The Opffer family household, at 110 Brooklyn Heights, afforded stunning views of the bridge, and ironically was the very site from which Joseph Roebling oversaw its construction, having resided there when the bridge was being built. Crane’s interest in the Bridge, then, as a subject for his new work was not so much about the bridge per se, but rather about his love for Opffer, who was embodied in the poem as the bridge itself. 100 Shortly after moving to Brooklyn Heights, Crane began work again on his epic poem. In a letter to his mother on May 11, 1924, he stated, "For the first time in many weeks I am beginning to further elaborate my plans for my Bridge poem.”165 Crane wrote much of this section of the poem in his and Opffer’s apartment looking directly out at the Brooklyn Bridge. In a letter to Waldo Frank on April 21, 1924, Crane associated the bridge with his lover: "For many days, now, I have gone about quite dumb with something for which ‘happiness’ must be too mild a term."166 Crane later relayed "the ecstasy of walking hand in hand across the most beautiful bridge in the world, the cables enclosing us and pulling us upward in such a dance as I have never walked and never can walk with another."167 Certainly, the dynamic “thrust” of Evans’s photograph could be an ironic allusion to this highly sexualized space. The University of Illinois' Modern American Poetry site elaborates on this point: When Crane positions himself under the shadows of the bridge, he is, in one sense, simply the poet of the romantic tradition, the observer who stands aside the better to see; but he is, in another sense, the gay male cruising in an area notorious for its casual sex. Even the bridge itself, the Brooklyn Bridge that is the central object of the poem, was strongly identified in Crane’s own mind with [Crane's lover] Emil Opffer, to whom Voyages was dedicated. The appearance of the bridge secretly encrypts a highly personal memory and a specific presence in the text. Crane’s "epic of America" gets underway as a personal quest, as a poem divided against itself, in devotion to an urban setting that encourages social diversity, with secret inscriptions that retain their meanings to which only a privileged few are accessible.168 165 Brom Weber, ed., The Letters of Hart Crane, New York, 1952, p 347. 166 Ibid. 167 Ibid., p. 348. 168 The University of Illinois' Modern American Poetry site, http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/crane/bridge_ill.htm Accessed 2/27/2013. The queer 101 Evans’s photograph shows us the East River in the foreground, some tugboats in the middle distance, and a diminutive skyline in the background. In addition to aligning with a specifically charged personal and sexualized space for Crane, Evans’s photograph also parallels the quester’s angle of vision at the commencement of his symbolic journey through space and time in the "Proem" section of Crane’s poem: Under thy shadow by the piers I waited; Only in darkness is thy shadow clear.169 As Horton (Crane’s first biographer) put it, Crane’s attitude towards his poems “was primarily plastic... Crane intended these poems not as descriptions of experience that could be read about, but as immediate experiences that the reader could have.”170 Walker Evans’s photographs, as they appeared in this and subsequent editions of The components of Crane’s work are further discussed here: “It is perhaps not an accident that a homosexual presence remains furtively on hand in both the free-ranging tramps of "The River," in the vagabond Whitman of "Cape Hatteras." For the great problem that stymied Crane after 1926 had to do with the conflict between his identity as a gay male and his identity as a poet. Numerous unpublished lyrics, most written between 1927 and 1931, attest to the struggle Crane undertook to invent a discourse that would honestly translate aspects of his homosexual experience into poetry.” 169 Hart Crane. The Bridge. Black Sun Press, 1930, n.p. As Gordon K. Grigsby notes in his short essay, “The Photographs in the First Edition of The Bridge,” it is from this position “That the protagonist rises through the poem to stand, at last, on the center of the span. Moreover, the picture is itself an imaginative achievement, a shaping of the dark realities of modern life into the significant form of art. The ‘Proem’ identifies the real Bridge as visionary symbol and expresses the conflict between reality and vision, which becomes the main motive of the poem. The vision of the free, graceful gulls (contrasted with "Liberty" chained in the bay waters) is brief and the birds ‘forsake our eyes/ As apparitional as sails that cross/ Some page of figures to be filed away.’ Elevators drop us into the ersatz visions of movies and the snow that ‘submerges an iron year.’ But the Bridge is there across the harbor if we can see it, if we can comprehend it, if we can avoid becoming bedlamites whose only escape from iron oppression is the suicidal leap from the height of the span. We can transcend our bedlam, our oppression, our underneath view if we are enabled to see the Bridge imaginatively and symbolically – that is, as a ‘threshold of the prophet's pledge.’” Gordon K. Grigsby, “The Photographs in the First Edition of The Bridge.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Vol. 4, No. 1, Spring 1962, pp. 5-11. 170 Spencer, p. 12. 102 Bridge, were meant to evoke and echo the formal components of Crane’s writing, as well as provide a phenomenological sense of the physical space and presence of the bridge. The second Evans photograph that appeared in Crane’s poem was located at the center of the book (figure 40). Crane referred to the point between the poem’s sections "Cutty Sark" and "Cape Hatteras" as "the 'center' of the book, both physically and symbolically."171 The second photograph appears at this point. The section "Cutty Sark" ends with the protagonist walking home across the Bridge when he suddenly begins to envision ghosts of ships on the river: Blithe Yankee vanities, turreted sprites, winged British repartees, skillful savage sea-girls that bloomed in the spring—Heave, weave those bright designs the trade winds drive . . . Sweet opium and tea, Yo-ho! Pennies for porpoises that bank the keel! Fins whip the breeze around Japan! Bright skysails ticketing the Line, wink round the Horn to Frisco, Melbourne . . . Pennants, parabolas— clipper dreams indelible and ranging, baronial white on lucky blue! Evans’s photograph, appearing on the facing page, is taken from a view that approximates the angle of standing on the bridge, looking down upon a flatbed tugboat. 171 Brom Weber, ed., The Letters of Hart Crane. New York, 1952, p. 347. In a letter written by Crane to Caresse Crosby, Crane notes: “By the way, will you see that the middle photograph (the one of the barges and tug) goes between the "Cutty Sark" section and the "Hatteras" section. That is the "center" of the book, both physically and symbolically. Evans is very anxious, as I am, that no ruling or printing appear on the pages devoted to the reproductions – which is probably your intention anyway.” In Weber, O My Land, My Friends, p. 421. 103 Instead of elegant clipper ships, however, Evans’s eye captures the more modern image of a tugboat barge laden with what appear to be coal cars. The repetition of regular rectangular shapes is juxtaposed with variegated shadows on the surface of the water. Evans, a great lover of visual puns, subtle humor, and learned irony, appears to be playing with the idea of visionary experience (visions of clipper ships) versus reality (tugboats full of coal). At the end of Crane’s poem, in the section “Atlantis,” the protagonist again stands on the bridge. The elevated tone and rhythm of this portion of the poem echoes Crane’s own sentiments about this section, where the protagonist is "being carried forward and upward simultaneously."172 Later in the section, the anticipatory language settles a bit and the poem ends quietly and ambiguously with a reference to the traditional Native American symbol of space-time duality, the winged eagle/serpent: Forever Deity’s glittering Pledge, O Thou Whose canticle fresh chemistry assigns To wrapt inception and beatitude,— Always through blinding cables, to our joy, Of thy white seizure springs the prophecy: Always through spiring cordage, pyramids Of silver sequel, Deity’s young name Kinetic of white choiring wings . . . ascends. Migrations that must needs void memory, Inventions that cobblestone the heart,— Unspeakable Thou Bridge to Thee, O Love. Thy pardon for this history, whitest Flower, O Answerer of all,—Anemone,— 172 Weber, p. 232. 104 Now while thy petals spend the suns about us, hold— (O Thou whose radiance doth inherit me) Atlantis,—hold thy floating singer late! So to thine Everpresence, beyond time, Like spears ensanguined of one tolling star That bleeds infinity—the orphic strings, Sidereal phalanxes, leap and converge: —One Song, one Bridge of Fire! Is it Cathay, Now pity steeps the grass and rainbows ring The serpent with the eagle in the leaves. . . . ? Whispers antiphonal in azure swing. With this portion of the poem in mind, the appearance of Evans’s third photograph is revealing (figure 41). This image is likewise taken from a viewpoint analogous to the poem’s protagonist, standing in the center of the bridge. Evans’s photograph shows an abstraction of vertical and diagonal cables, a truncated lamp post, and two soaring gothic arches of the bridges’ structural terminus. Cables appear to emerge like a spider’s web from the space slightly above these arches, suggesting something of the complicated weave of time into which the poem’s protagonist has entered. If Crane’s The Bridge is understood as a prophetic vision of America’s future, then the truncated vision of the bridge’s expansion, as seen in the first and third Evans photographs, suggest that this idealism had been curtailed by the reality of modern life during the Great Depression. Evans created these photographs shortly after the Wall Street crash of 1929, and their soaring lines, dramatic push and pull, and diminutive scale allude to a lost economic and social stability. Examined in this context, Evans’s work lies 105 somewhere between a mythical dialectical understanding of the bridge as an icon of a hopeful future and the truncation of that potentiality during the 1930s. 106 CHAPTER 2: INTIMATE INTERIORS: WALKER EVANS’S PHOTOGRAPHS OF 1930s DOMESTIC SPACES After the United States was struck by the Great Depression, tremendous social and political upheavals marked Americans’ daily existence. New York City, once full of jazzy thrills and exciting, soaring architectural structures, now represented for Walker Evans all that was dark and dismal about American capitalist politics. Some of the more dramatic changes in the United States during this time included a marked rise in radical political movements, drastic changes in social reform, and a cultural obsession with issues of national identity. In the early 1930s, Evans grew increasingly critical of his native country in the face of modernism and began instead to embrace America’s vernacular and folk traditions. Evans’s intellectual position during this period was made explicit in a letter he sent to his friend Hans Skolle on May 19, 1932, where he wrote: …this city is offering a spectacle of disintegration such as has never been equaled. So the first thing I want to impress upon your ever acute consciousness is Don’t come to America … If you are still an individualist and an artist and a human being and a man of character, and if you can live in Europe, stay there. However if you care now to go to pieces and to see all your friends doing the same you could come over here and sponge off a few crumbs dropped by our still oversupplied upper crust.173 Following Evans’s period of artistic transition during the early 1930s, his photographic practice began to shift away from an avant-garde aesthetic to more vernacular-based images of places, architecture, and people overtly recognizable as 173 Walker Evans to Hans Skolle, May 19, 1932, Department of Photographs. "Walker Evans Archive (1903–1975)." The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 107 “American.” This transition was a slow one, and Evans continued to work in both visual modalities throughout the early 1930s. Eventually, and perhaps with the encouragement of his exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art and an increasing number of publications of his work, Evans moved away from modernist urban imagery almost entirely. This chapter examines several key moments in Evans’s photographic production during the era of the Great Depression in the United States and his adoption of what many consider to be his iconic photographic style. As was the case throughout most of his life, Evans’s relationships with other artists and writers fueled many collaborative projects during this period. After his early work with Hart Crane, Evans continued during the 1930s to work side by side with artists and thinkers, many of whom were politically engaged and socially radical in their leftist positions. These included the photographer’s early friendships with artists and photographers such as Ben Shahn, Ralph Steiner, and Berenice Abbott as well as his long and somewhat tenuous friendship with Lincoln Kirstein. These formative relationships shaped Evans’s photographic aesthetic and artistic sensibilities. His collaboration with Shahn on an exhibition the two artists held in Truro on Cape Cod is notable for its underlying political motivations. Likewise, Steiner and Abbott both influenced Evans’s photographic practice during this period in distinct and separate ways. In general, this period of photographic production in Evans’s life reflected a keenly-honed literary sensibility; one which assimilated modern literary ideas of interiority and the significance of what the French critical theorist Pierre Bourdieu would refer to as habitus. Habitus is a mental structure through which people navigate the social 108 world. It is an internalized framework that reflects and individual’s class, age, gender, and location. Those who maintain similar social positions will maintain a similar habitus. In this sense, the concept is collective, yet also individualized; there is a similar “taste” among equal social classes which may differ slightly among individuals. However, in general there are specific markers of class and social identity which maintain a continuum among social strata. Subjects may have a different habitus depending on the position they occupy — although one’s habitus operates as a structure, one does not adopt it mechanically. An individual’s habitus can change when no longer applicable to one’s social needs. This condition is called hysteresis. One’s habitus both produces and is produced by social conditions. People internalize external structures, and externalize internal learned and lived experiences. The concept of habitus is perhaps best “seen” in Evans’s photographs from the early 1930s of nineteenth century Victorian houses, rural barns and structures, and the domestic interior spaces of disparate social classes. These photographs are a bridge between Evans’s early densely formal experiments and his later work created for the Farm Security Administration in 1936. Evans’s work from the early 1930s, the subject of this chapter, established for him a photographic sensibility that would yield some of his most iconic images of the period. This chapter will examine the habitus of select photographs by Evans made during the 1930s that reflect his interest in recording the interior domestic spaces of the working class. These photographs should be understood in conversation with nineteenth century bourgeois domestic traditions — particularly as these appeared in the literature 109 and material culture of the period. These include the novels of Henry James, the interior decorating publications of Edith Wharton and Muriel Draper, popular publications such as Andrew Jackson Downing’s stylebook drawings, and photographic publications such as Eugène Atget’s Interieurs Parisiens. Evans’s photographs, created a generation after many of these popular discussions of “proper” bourgeois interiors, draw on nineteenth- century traditions of domestic space, and use these established visual modalities to record working class domestic life during the Great Depression. Evans’s photographs of working-class interiors show us the lived-in spaces of an immigrant family, a struggling writer, and later, famously, the interiors of tenant farmer’s homes. Changes in domestic architecture between the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries were drastic. In the nineteenth century, literature suddenly began to describe interiors in minute detail, and the eighteenth-century multipurpose room gave way to a series of specialized spaces: hallways, parlors, closets, and servant staircases. In these increasingly compartmentalized rooms, the modern, interiorized subject so prevalent in literature of the period began to emerge. Authors like Honoré de Balzac, J.K. Huysmans, and Edmond de Goncourt started to relay in words every detail of the interiors of their private homes. Rilke and Rabelais gave readers extended descriptive inventories of interior spaces in their novels.174 These detailed lists, describing every 174 For example, the novelist Honoré de Balzac, who is generally hailed as the grandfather of literary Realism often included extended passages of descriptive text in his writing. His long series of novels and stories titled La Comédie humaine (The Human Comedy) attempted systematically to render a portrait of all aspects of the France of his time from the lowest thief or prostitute to the highest aristocrat or political leader. The title of the series was chosen to contrast with Dante's Divine Comedy. His attention to detail 110 object, corner, compartment, and furnishing of an interior space prompted Edmond de Goncourt to conclude in 1881 that “Existence is no longer exterior.” In 1910, following this turn towards the interior, the French photographer Eugène Atget began work on an album of photographs meant to serve as documents for artists and illustrators. This photographic series, Intérieurs parisiens, début du XXe Siècle, artistiques, pittoresques et bourgeois, documented the private residences of different classes throughout the city of Paris. The images are careful, almost obsessive catalogs of the décor of specific rooms in Parisian apartments where intimate views of furniture, bedding, knickknacks, and individualized aesthetic taste were recorded in a voyeuristic, yet banal manner. In the late 1920s, when Atget’s photographs were seen by Walker was obsessive, with long passages of descriptions of settings being a characteristic feature of his work. The following passage from Balzac’s La Comédie humaine demonstrates the author’s typical obsessive handling of descriptions of objects in an interior. In this passage, which is at the beginning of the novel, the main character, Raphaël, has just entered an antique shop. He is immediately overwhelmed by the Baroque clutter of the rooms, filled with antiques, trinkets, and artworks: “He was able to give himself without constraint to his last terrible meditations. He had the soul of a poet and here, chance had given it an immense pasture on which to graze: he was to see in advance the ossuary of a score of civilizations. At first sight, the showrooms offered him a chaotic medley of human and divine works…a Sévres vase on which Madame Jacotot had painted Napoleon was standing next to a sphinx dedicated to Sesostris. The beginning of the world and the events of yesterday were paired off with grotesque good humour. A rosting-jack was posed on a monstrance, a Republican saber on a medieval arquebus. Madame Dubarry, painted in pastel by Latour, with a star on her head, nude and enveloped in cloud, seemed to be concupiscently contemplating an Indian chibouk and trying to divine some purpose in the spirals of smoke which were drifting towards her. Instruments of death, daggers, quaint pistols, weapons with secret springs were hobnobbing with instruments of life: porcelain soup tureens, Dresden china plates, translucent porcelain cups from China, antique salt-sellars, comfit-dishes from feudal times. An ivory ship was sailing under full canvas on the back of an immovable tortoise. A pneumatic machine was poking out the eye of the Emperor Augustus, who remained majestic and unmoved. Several portraits of French aldermen and Dutch burgomasters, insensible now as during their lifetimes, rose above this chaos of antiques…All the countries on earth seemed to have brought here some remnants of their sciences and a sample of their arts. It was a sort of philosophical dunghill in which nothing was lacking…” Honoré De Balzac, La Comédie humaine (The Human Comedy). Baltimore, Maryland: Numena Press, p. 69. 111 Evans, they had a profound effect on his stylistic development and subsequent turn towards photographing working class domestic interiors. By the 1930s, Walker Evans developed a new form of American modernism inspired by straight, documentary-style photography and Atget’s Intérieurs parisiens. Evans’s interest in photographically capturing the interiors of American homes was motivated by literary traditions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as by the photographic “documents” that appeared in interior design and pattern books at the turn of the twentieth century. Evans’s photographs redefined the spaces of American modernism by examining the working class interior of the 1930s and its ties to modernist literary traditions. His images spoke to notions of class identity and social disparity in Depression-era America; documenting utilitarian ornament and everyday, unremarkable interiors. In 1930-31, Evans created a series of photographs of the De Luze household, an immigrant working family living among the vacationing class in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Formally, these photographs focused on the intimacy of the De Luze household and their amassing of personal items and effects. Immediately striking is the conglomeration of objects, ephemera, and the variety of surfaces present in these images. Wallpapers, plants, photographs, newspaper clippings, Americana, piles of well-thumbed books, crochet doilies, and well-used bed linens are all given equal presence and measure. When we look at these photographs it is clear we are seeing the private spaces of a working-class family’s home; individual objects are displayed carefully with a clear eye to familiar tropes of design (order, symmetry, grouping) but are not of great monetary 112 value. Instead, these objects function on the level of the mnemonic or nostalgic; things are often well-worn, well-used, and operate as memorabilia or commemorative devices. Likewise, the furniture, wallpaper, décor, and arrangement of useful and decorative objects “speak” loudly to the notion of class and immigrant identity in an era of increasing cultural exchange between the old world and the new. Additionally, Evans’s fascination with working class domestic interiors, particularly the personal space of the bedroom, will be examined in relationship with literary traditions of Realism and their manifestation in the late nineteenth-century domestic space paintings of Edgar Degas. The Impressionist painter’s work represented an important model for how to represent abstract emotive states such as tension or anxiety in visual form. In his photographs of private domestic spaces, Evans explored issues of how class identity were made manifest through the presence and placement of furniture and decorative objects, and how our ability to “read” these objects shifted based on formal decisions like the use of lighting, cropping, and photographic composition. In the 1930s, at a moment when popular photography (particularly in advertising and journalism) was focusing on the stripped-down, streamlined modern interior, Evans began to photograph intimate interior spaces with a palpable sense of wear and utility. Many of the objects in these rooms bear heavy patinas and are well-worn with age — very little, if anything, in these rooms is new. Evans’s emphasis on the vernacular in these Depression-era photographs spoke directly to the experience of modern life as it was lived by the many, rather than the few. 113 The importance of the relationship between architecture, literature, and photography continued to be a prominent theme for Evans during the 1930s. The same ideological forces that shaped domestic architecture in the United States also shaped other forms of cultural expression, including American literature. The manner in which we construct and inhabit our domestic spaces has quite a lot to do with how we tell and write our stories. Like writing for writers, designing and constructing architecture is comprised of a number of practical, economic, and aesthetic concerns as well as a continual assessment of the interrelations among these concerns. As Marilyn R. Chandler wrote in her Dwelling in the Text: Houses in American Fiction,“The history of architectural ideas in the United States closely parallels the history of literary theory or of the doctrines that define the conventions as appropriate uses of fiction and poetry. The parallel histories of these closely related enterprises can be roughly characterized as having moved from emulation of European models to the development of indigenous forms, which in revitalizing, recasting, or rejecting those models made something new of them.”175 This casting off and (sometimes) reappropriation of European models, as outlined in chapter one, continued to be a major driving ideological force behind Evans’s domestic interior photographs of the 1930s. Evans’s use of literary models in his photographs from this period, as well as his continued and increased fascination with American vernacular architecture and its photographic representation, brought to the fore 175 See Marilyn R. Chandler, Dwelling in the Text: Houses in American Fiction. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991, p 6. 114 how architecture, literature, and photography functioned as reflective and productive social forces during the Great Depression.176 As Chandler importantly points out later in her text, the “symbolic treatment of houses is not simply a literary fancy: houses in their various ways are obviously visible histories of personal and collective life.”177 Walker Evans’s 1930s photographs function as nascent cultural and economic phenomena, signaling, in their simplicity and documentary-like status, larger social and cultural concerns. His photographs of interiors function in a way similar to Henry James’s descriptive narratives in The Bostonians and The Ambassadors and have much in common (sometimes ironically) with Edith Wharton’s literary descriptions in The House of Mirth (1905) and her treatise on interior architecture, The Decoration of Houses (1897).178 For this discussion of Great Depression era interiors, any number of 176 Ibid., p. 11. 177 Ibid. 178 Wharton co-wrote The Decoration of Houses with the noted Gilded Age designer Ogden Codman, Jr. In this text, Wharton established herself as an authority on interiors. Wharton’s The House of Mirth correlates the character of the lovely but flawed Lily Bart to her environment, an environment that consists chiefly of a sequence of interiors. “Nothing could be more antithetical to Lily's mobility, her fluid sensibilities, and her vague vision of an ideal interior than the too-solid Victorian decor and glacial neatness of her aunt's opulent Manhattan townhouse.” Here Mrs. Peniston habitually sits in a "black satin arm-chair tufted with yellow buttons, beside a bead-work table bearing a bronze box with a miniature of Beatrice Cenci in the lid" – this last an icon of Victorian sentimentality. From such ghastly decor Lily understandably recoils; she "felt for these objects the same distaste which the prisoner may entertain for the fittings of the court-room.” With the windows covered by heavy brocade curtains blocking all vistas to the outside – Mrs. Peniston rages when she discovers even a ray of light peeping through — the drawing room is also oppressively dark. Lily longs for an existence outside of this oppressive one, but foolishly blames the interior of her aunt’s townhouse for her woes. "If I could only do over my aunt's drawing-room," she remarks, "I know I should be a better woman."’ In the following passage, John Clubbe describes Lily’s reaction to the interior décor of her room ‘Most of all, however, at Mrs. Peniston's Lily is repulsed by the ugliness of her bedroom with its magenta "flock" wallpaper, steel engravings, and "monumental wardrobe and bedstead of black walnut [which] had migrated from Mr. Peniston's bedroom.” Compared to the "light tints and luxurious appointments of the guest-rooms," where Lily stays in the society houses of the au courant well-to-do, her own room with its 115 photographs of interior spaces by Evans could have been chosen. However, those that most accurately reflected Evans’s simultaneous interests in surfaces, arrangement of objects, intimacy, and sense of voyeurism are his photographs of parlors, kitchens, and bedrooms of working-class families made during the 1930s. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, issues of immigration, including who should be let into the United States and in what number, led to the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924. This act, also referred to as the Johnson-Reed Act, limited the annual number of immigrants to the United States to 2% of the number of foreign-born persons of such nationality resident in the United States in 1890. This revised formula reduced total immigration from 357,803 in 1923–24 to 164,667 in 1924–25. These immigration regulations were aimed at restricting Southern and Eastern Europeans, especially Jews fleeing persecution in Poland and Russia, as well as Middle Easterners, East Asians, and Indians. According to the U.S. Department of State Office of the Historian, "In all its parts, the most basic purpose of the 1924 Immigration Act was to preserve the ideal of American homogeneity.”179 Congressional opposition was minimal. However, the disparity between this congressional approval and the lack of support for the act amongst nauseous wall decor and black walnut Rococo and Renaissance Revival furniture, chosen by someone else's dead husband, "seemed as dreary as a prison.” With her "artistic sensibility," Lily feels superior to so prosaic an environment and longs for a room that would serve as an appropriate backdrop for the display of her person. In such a room, which in her imagining of it remains vague and undefined, "every tint and line should combine to enhance her beauty and give distinction to her leisure!"’ As quoted in John Clubbe, “Interiors and the interior life in Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth.” Studies in the Novel 28:4, Winter 1996, pp. 543-564. 179 The Immigration Act of 1924 (The Johnson-Reed Act), U.S Department of State Office of the Historian. Retrieved 10-02-2012. 116 Evans’s friends and acquaintances during this time was vast: most of Evans’s close friends were first or second generation immigrants and the question of immigration would have been very meaningful for them. WALKER EVANS AND BEN SHAHN The summers of 1930 and 1931 were formative ones for Evans. These he spent with his friend and fellow artist Ben Shahn in Truro, Massachusetts. The two met sometime in 1929, while both were living in Brooklyn Heights. Theirs was an unlikely friendship, built much more on common aesthetic interests than outward personalities or politics. Shahn was an immigrant and a Jew and was a very outspoken leftist. He had a loud and boisterous personality. Evans, on the other hand, was a mid-west born, east- coast educated Christian America (although not one that practiced). By popular accounts, Evans was reserved and affected the mannerism of a genteel cultured gentleman. The two were outwardly very different personalities. Yet it was these differences, perhaps, that drew them together and enabled them to explore their similarities. Both shared a common interest in the capacity of photography to capture images of everyday American existence, especially those of the middle or impoverished classes. In their individual ways, they were both rebellious: acting out at various points in their lives against bourgeois conventionality with irony and mischievousness. Their shared summer experiences in Truro, Cape Cod are documented 117 in the many extant photographs taken by Evans of Shahn, his wife Tillie, and their young child, Judith. The atmosphere of these summers by the sea was both difficult and formative — neither had much if any money to spare, and food was scarce. However, for both artists, their time away from New York City proved to be incredibly productive and in many ways, groundbreaking. By their first summer spent together in 1930, Evans had officially declared himself a photographer in a letter to his friend Hans Skolle. He had recently quit his second job on Wall Street, and moved into a new apartment at 178 Columbia Heights in Brooklyn. Around this time, he met the American photographer Berenice Abbott, who had returned to New York City after living abroad in Paris where she had run a very successful portrait photography practice. Sometime in late 1929 or early 1930, Abbott showed Evans the work of Eugène Atget, whose work she (with the financial assistance of Julian Levy) had salvaged from Atget’s Parisian studio shortly after his death in 1927. In 1929, Evans’s desire to work like a “professional photographer” meant that he began using a large view camera requiring a tripod. In this, he was likely following Atget’s example. Atget had used such a camera from the late nineteenth century until the end of his life. In New York City, Evans used his view camera to take portraits of his friends, including Hart Crane and Berenice Abbott. At this time, he also created some of his first commercial photographs. In the summer of 1930, Evans continued working with his medium format camera and glass negatives, either in 5 x7” or 6 x 8” dimensions. He and Shahn drove around the Cape in his Model T Ford, taking photographs and gathering clams and vegetables when 118 they fell from delivery trucks. Their existence was meager, but the summer did produce some memorable images, including a series of photographs which reflect the influence of a photographer both Evans and Shahn admired, Paul Strand. When Evans first saw Strand’s Blind Woman (1916), a portrait of a blind woman that appeared in the final issue of Camera Work, it struck him rather hard: that was what he wanted to do with photography: “I remember coming across Paul Strand's Blind Woman when I was very young, and that really bowled me over. . . . It's a very powerful picture. I saw it in the New York Public Library file of Camera Work, and I remember going out of there over stimulated: That's the stuff, that's the thing to do. It charged me up” (figure 1). Paul Strand’s Blind Woman (1916), was a powerful source of inspiration for Evans, who was drawn to the photographer’s frontal representation of the blind woman. This frontality reduced traces of the artist’s emotional response to his subject, and Strand’s photograph became a model for Evans of how to combine realistic content with objective authorship: two critical components of his own work in the 1930s. Evans found these two elements at work in Strand’s photograph and in other sources, such as the writings of Flaubert. In an interview Evans recalled: “I think I incorporated Flaubert’s method almost unconsciously, but anyway I used it in two ways; both his realism, or naturalism, and his objectivity of treatment. The non-appearance of the author. The non- subjectivity. That is literally applicable to the way I want to use a camera and do.” Evans combined the purported realism of documentary-style photography with modernism’s formal structure, capturing images of American life in the 1930s with his camera. 119 Evans was quite taken by the directness and strong formal qualities of Strand’s photograph, especially the closeness to the subject, the boldness of the composition, and the contrast of the carefully lettered sign to the woman’s eyes: one alert and searching, the other injured or diseased. The conjunction of unidealized realism with irony (one eye appears to be “seeing” in the photograph, even if this was not necessarily the case) appealed to Evans. He would return to these two tropes of photography throughout his career.180 Strand’s straightforward and stark photography of the late 1920s and 1930s, particularly his series of formal studies including Abstraction, Porch Shadows (1916) and his iconic The White Fence (1916) (figures 2-3) demonstrated to Evans the formal capabilities of photography, especially the medium’s ability to record and represent a variety of textures and surfaces. Like the Cubists, whose lessons concerning spatial organization, dimensionality, and structure Strand was employing in The White Fence, Strand in the late 1910s and 1920s became increasingly aware of the camera’s unique ability to compress and flatten or extend and widen visual space. Evans could have seen 180 Another component of Strand’s appeal to both Evans and Shahn was his use of an angled prism lens with his camera. This type of lens allowed him to photograph subjects at a right angle so that he could photograph them without their knowledge. The effect was unposed, “unaffected” subjects who did not adopt a posture for the camera. As Strand recalled, he had “a very clear desire to solve a problem. How do you photography people on the streets without their being aware of it?”180 In the 1930s, Evans and Shahn began to use this same type of lens to photograph subjects on the streets of New York. It is not certain whether Strand used such a lens for Blind, although if he did, it further complicates the reading of the image; presumably the blind woman would have not been able to see Strand. 120 photographs by Strand that demonstrated these formal qualities in publications like Camera Work. Both Evans and Strand were working in a similar visual idiom in the 1930s. For example, both Strand’s Ghost Town, Red River, New Mexico (1930) and Evans’s Barn Window Detail, Truro, Massachusetts, (1930-31) demonstrate an interest in surface, decay, and the formal arrangement of line, light, shadow, and texture (figures 4-5). Both photographers held their cameras parallel to the picture plane, emphasizing flatness over depth. However, the political context of these works should not be overlooked. The year 1930 was one year after the demise of the stock market and the rise of unprecedented unemployment in the United States. Farmers and those whose livelihoods involved toiling in the soil of the country were among the hardest hit. The shambled appearance of the barn surface and the fraying and crumbling materials behind of the glass of the windows both hint at this looming hardship. In 1931, Evans again visited and stayed with the Shahn family. Ben Shahn had recently joined the Provincetown Art Association and had been showing in their group exhibitions. During this summer, the two men became increasingly frustrated with the provincial and close-minded way of thinking that was pervasive among the artistic community there. Shahn was disenchanted with the goals of the Art Association, especially when the group displayed snobbery towards a local Portuguese family, the De Luzes, who worked as caretakers for the summer residents. The De Luze family were Cape Verdean Portuguese who lived about fifty yards away from the Shahn’s, and the two families had become close friends. The family was large, with more than ten 121 children, many of whom looked after the homes of the moneyed Truro residents, working for them during the summer and taking care of their homes during the winter. Shahn, who was himself a Russian Jewish immigrant outsider, felt a kinship with the De Luzes and was outraged by how they were shunned by the bohemian elites of Provincetown. As a result of these tensions, Evans and Shahn decided to show some of their recent work in the newly white-washed barn of the De Luze family, instead of in the elite space of the Provincetown Art Association galleries. This was a gesture meant to provoke and ruffle the feathers of the summer crowd, and indeed it did. Evans showed some of his recent photographs of interior views of the De Luze family home, and Shahn displayed his newly completed and deliberately simple gouaches of the Dreyfus Affair (figures 6- 7). The subversive qualities of the exhibited works of Evans and Shahn worked against the delicate and provincial sensibilities of the art crowd at the Cape that summer. Both artists were attempting to get a rise out of the local sea-side vacationing populace. Shahn wanted to offend the “politically left but genteelly bigoted ‘artists’ community” and Evans “intended to offend not only the polite Victorian sensibilities of people like his parents but also the ‘smugly rich,’ the pretentious scene-makers of the art world, do- gooders of the Communist crowd, and any other identifiable group of bêtes noires.” 181 181 James Eklund, “Exiles Return: The Early Work, 1928-1934,” in Maria Morris Hambourg, et al., Walker Evans, New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, p. 39. The following footnote in Eklund’s essay helpfully contextualizes Evans’s sentiments as expressed here: In discussing his later photographs of the farmer Bud Fields and his family in Hale County, Alabama, Evans hypothesized about his own motives: “But it may just be shock effect. There are, I mean that whole family sitting on the bed has quite a shock. It’s a shock and I mean it to be. I meant to scare or dismay certain kinds of people. Let’s say the smugly rich. I like to 122 Shahn was drawn to the subject of the Dreyfus affair, the scandalous turn-of-the- century French trial of a Jewish officer that prompted Zola’s legendary J’Accuse! (1898). Shahn later recalled: “I set to work and presented the leading malefactors of the case, the defenders and of course Dreyfus himself. Under each portrait I lettered in my best lithographic script a long or short legend setting forth the role which the original of the portrait had played in the celebrated affair. What had been undertaken lightly became very significant in my eyes. Within the Dreyfus pictures I could see a new avenue of expression opening up.”182 In these images, Shahn “presented his understanding of the personalities of these men through a series of details — their pose, facial features, clothing, and the style and length of the script he used.” This approach signaled a pivotal point in his career, prompting Shahn to “integrate these broad, loose areas of color, the result of encounters with modernist art in Europe, with the sharp, distinctive line he had developed [when he was working] in [a] lithography shop.”183 Shahn’s later “Portrait of Émile Zola” (1938), that appeared along with a printing of Zola’s J’Accuse! demonstrates Shahn’s continued interest in Zola’s writings as well as his life-long political interests; both of these were formative exposures for Evans who worked very closely with Shahn that summer.184 kick them in the teeth with a picture like that.” Goell interview, 1971, p. 21. See also Belinda Rathbone, Walker Evans, p. 49. 182 See Ben Shahn, The Shape of Content. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992, pp. 36-7. 183 See Frances K. Pohl, Ben Shahn. New York: Pomegranate Publications, 1993, p. 38. 184 Both Shahn and Evans worked as documentary photographers for the Resettlement Administration/Farm Security Administration in 1935 and 1936. In the fall of 1935, under government patronage, Shahn took a three-month trip to photograph the rural South. Through this trip, he was drawn to the folk culture of 123 There are no installation photographs of the barn exhibition from that summer (which may have lasted only two days) so one can only speculate on which works were exhibited by Evans. It is likely that images of the interior of the De Luze household which exist today in the Walker Evans Archive at the Metropolitan Museum of Art were displayed (figures 8-11). Formally, this small series of works focuses on the intimacy of the De Luze household and the amassing of personal objects and effects. In these photographs, the furniture, wallpaper, décor, and arrangement of utilitarian and decorative objects “speak” loudly to the notion of class and immigrant identity. There is often Americana dispersed among the knickknacks, tschotskes, and portraits of family members, suggesting the family’s immigrant status and hinting at their pride for their adopted country. For instance, the work now entitled Family Photographs on the Mantle and Wall in De Luze House, Truro Massachusetts, 1931, features a somewhat macabre-looking potted cactus in a wooden vessel, whose stenciled and faded front reads “triple white” (likely alluding to the vessel’s former use as a paint container). This photograph exists in two versions, one tightly and another loosely cropped (figures 9 and 10). In the more tightly cropped version we can better make out the objects on the fireplace mantel. In this image the mantel, visible on the left-hand side of the photograph, is littered with a vase of dried flowers, some (presumably) family photographic portraits, ordinary people and underwent a change “from a social realist to a personal realist.” Ben Shahn, The Shape of Content, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957, p. 40. In October 1932, the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art exhibited twenty-three gouaches from Shahn’s controversial series “The Passion of Sacco-Vanzetti” as well as ten watercolors from “The Dreyfus Case.” 124 as well as two remarkable objects: the first is the cardboard packaging from a perfume company “Houbigant” from Paris—a company founded in France in 1775 and famous for being the perfumer to royal courts in Europe,185 as well as a box of bullet cartridges, labeled “Remington.” These two objects, in combination with various other objects of American ephemera, including a small American flag tucked into the corner, floral wallpaper visible on the right hand side, and another hanging photographic portrait (whose reflective glass surface partially, and rather hauntingly, occludes the subject’s face), speak to ideas of transatlantic exchange referencing “old world” luxuries such as French perfume, family portrait traditions (updated here to modern photographs rather than painted portraits) and American icons such as the flag and Remington bullet casings. In a slightly wider-angled version of this photograph, trappings of an immigrant family caught somewhere between a desire for assimilation and pride for their own European heritage are visible: note, again, how the haphazardly placed books on the small plant-stand on the right suggest an interest in American traditions as well as a desire for European elegance: two visible book titles on the lower table shelf read: Paris Frocks at Home and Tom Swift and his Motorboat. The first title indicates an interest in luxury fashions imported from France (a luxury likely not often afforded by a working class family such as the De Luzes), while the second suggests a similar hope for upward mobility for the De Luze children; Tom Swift was a fictional young American inventor 185 An Houbigant legend, not verified, has it that when Marie Antoinette was fleeing to Varennes to escape the French revolutionaries she was recognized as royalty because of her Houbigant perfume, which only royalty could afford. 125 and cunning thinker who through science and technology created new objects and machines and was considered admirable and heroic by his peers. This volume in particular (Tom Swift and his Motorboat), with its reference to boating, would have been a poignant model for a De Luze child growing up in the coastal Cape Cod town where they would have been surrounded by motorboats and boating culture (see figure 12). Similarly, there is a tension between the doily-covered furniture (a familiar trope of décor of middle and upper class homes) and the dried, rather than fresh flower arrangements. One suggests a desire to assimilate into the American middle class (the doilies being decorative rather than utilitarian objects) and the other indicates the family’s economic placement outside of that class (the presence of potted plants and dried, rather than freshly-cut, and economically out of reach floral arrangements). In a similar way, the two pieces of furniture in the photograph speak to this dichotomy as well: on the left is a darkly stained (perhaps even lacquered) short, vanity-like stand, and on the right a more rustic, less decorative table functioning here as a plant and book stand. One signals elegance, the other, functionality. Two ironic components of this photograph (and those not likely lost on Evans, notorious for including such ironic references in his work), are the small, doll-house sized, white-lacquered table and chairs atop the table on the right. These are the playthings of a child. Their diminutive size and greater “elegance” than the other normal- sized furniture in the room speaks to the idea of hope for the next generations to achieve greater financial stability. The second ironic element here is the prickly cactus pot, labeled: “triple white,” suggesting a commentary on race relations in Cape Cod and the 126 De Luze family’s position outside of the privileged vacationing elite class. This photograph represents one of Walker Evans’s earliest attempts at recording a type of “interior architecture,” a style which focused on personal objects and materials in domestic spaces as indicative of class; a formal trope which would become for him one of his most dominant and recognizable styles by the mid-1930s. This photograph may have been made in response to a similar work created the same year by Charles Sheeler. Sheeler’s Cactus exists in two versions, a photograph and a painting on canvas (the painting was made in 1931, the photograph made just shortly before, see figures 13-14). According to the catalog listing of the Philadelphia Museum of Art where the work resides, “At this time, the cactus was often viewed as a botanical embodiment of the modern, streamlined aesthetic, and Sheeler surely also had this in mind when he chose his subject. The photographic version of this still life reveals that the cactus had large spiny barbs, which Sheeler deleted in the painted version of this arrangement.”186 The equation of the cactus with modernism would not have been lost on Evans, who was likely deliberately referencing this cultural understanding of the plant in his photograph. With this in mind, the irony of this image should not be overlooked: unlike Sheeler’s sleek, modern interior, Evans’s cactus is in a home with decidedly un- modern décor. Instead of a streamlined, smooth cactus, Evans’s photograph shows us a craggy, almost macabre version of the plant, with unwieldy leaves and an unbalanced 186 See Ann Temkin, Twentieth Century Painting and Sculpture in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2001, p. 73. 127 growth pattern. The wooden vessel in which the plant is potted is water stained and unevenly striated. Sheeler’s and Evans’s works could not be formally more different. However, as Kristina Wilson points out in her essay “Ambivalence, Irony, and Americana,” Sheeler’s interior paintings and photographs from the 1920s and 1930s should be understood as “complex expressions of the commercialized society that exhumed such objects.”187 Sheeler’s paintings (based on photographs by the artist) that Evans would have been familiar with include Interior (1926), Americana (1931), and Home Sweet Home (1931) (see figures 15-17). These works, which have been understood as being in dialog with the founding of public art collections, specifically the American Wing (and especially its period rooms) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1924, are read by Wilson as having an ironic relationship to these types of models. She writes, “Sheeler’s Interiors … celebrate historical artifacts even as they remind viewers that such objects are mere lifestyle products catering to a contemporary fad for all things American.”188 Henry McBride, the 1930s cultural critic, saw Sheeler’s Cactus as a reference to the modern fad for sunbathing. As he noted in a contemporary review, “the cactus is taking a hygienic bath in some type of electric rays.” In his discussion of a Downtown Gallery show of Sheeler’s work, McBride suggested that the artist’s paintings of interiors 187 In Kristina Wilson, “Ambivalence, Irony, and Americana.” Winterthur Portfolio, Vol. 45, No. 4. December 2011, pp. 249-276, p. 250. 188 Ibid., p. 251. 128 functioned as clever visual puns.189 According to McBride, Sheeler “always strips art of its artiness” and his artwork made ironic commentaries on popular American culture. Wilson, in her essay, noted that Sheeler’s works “are laced with an ironic tone that often serves to critique the status of the objects depicted,” suggesting that “critics seem to have interpreted [this irony] as dry wit.”190 Wilson goes on to suggest that there are two ways that Sheeler’s use of irony can be understood. One of these is as part of the Dadaist tradition of humor and satire. Sheeler, part of the Dadaist crowd at Walter and Louise Arensberg’s apartment (a crowd that included artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia) was likely influenced by the Dadaists’ use of wit and puns in their artwork. The other influence, one that Evans was most strongly responding to in his photography from this period, was, as Wilson writes: …The tradition of satire, often self-deprecating and subtle, described by [Constance] Rourke in American Humor (1931). In her analysis, this distinctly American form of humor arose in early nineteenth- century traveling theatrical performances and eventually informed the voices of such literary figures as Mark Twain and even Henry James. It included an eye for ‘low-keyed satire,’ ‘understatement,’ ‘irony,’ and ‘faint masquerade.’ Twain himself may have provided the best description of this dry, satirical tradition when he wrote: “The [American] humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it.”191 189 As quoted in Wilson, p. 265. 190 Ibid., p. 266. 191 As quoted in Wilson, pp. 266-267. See also Constance Rourke, American Humour: A Study of the National Character. 1931, reprint, Tallahassee: Florida Sate University Press, 1986, p. 25, and Mark Twain, “How to Tell a Story.” [1895], in Mark Twain: Collected Tails, Sketches, Speeches, and Essays, 1891-1910. vol. 2, ed. Louis J. Budd, New York: Library of America, 1992, p. 201. 129 In much of Evans’s work from this period there is present a very dry humor. Often this involves a witty use of signage or crafty cropping. Sometimes Evans’s humor is so dry, and so subtle, that it can easily be overlooked by a casual viewer. Nevertheless, to miss the often ironic undertones of Evans’s photography from this period is a mistake. This is not to say that Evans’s photographs are meant simply to be punning jokes: instead his images from the 1930s are well-crafted, socially-engaged images that provide unique documents of daily life during the Depression. They just happen to also be witty and ironic when carefully examined. In terms of their social message, the objects and interiors in this body of work suggest that Evans recognized that the immigrant working class in America had its own sensibility of beauty, arrangement, and display that echoed the ideals of bourgeois life, but did not, and could not, be its mimetic equal. There is a palpable sense of utility present in the arrangement of objects in these rooms. Things have been used, and worn. Photographs have been picked up and held; pots and pans have surfaces that indicate heavy use. Potted plants stand in for soon-to-perish fresh floral arrangements. Well-worn furniture suggests utility, not leisure. The photographs from the De Luze household are among Evans’s first attempts to record the surfaces and textures of class existence. He found a poetic sensibility in these rooms, and through these photographs opened the way for a discussion of class, identity, and representation in the small exhibition space of the De Luze barn. For example, Evans’s photograph of the De Luze Kitchen (figure 8) captures the textures and preponderance of well-used cooking implements in combination 130 with personal family ephemera, including a half-woven tapestry on a loom and inexpensive reproductions of artworks. Edgar Degas’ Interior (Le Viol), 1868-69, a painting first publicly shown in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1911, is as an example of a historical precedent for Evans’s interior photographs from the 1930s (figure 18). Degas’s Interior is an example of a genre in nineteenth century painting that depicted domestic interiors and focused on surfaces, the arrangement of objects, intimacy, and sense of voyeurism in a way that foreshadowed Evans’s later use of the camera to record similar domestic themes and spaces. Degas’s enigmatic work, with a difficult-to-interpret meaning and mysterious and apocryphal subtitle: Le Viol, or The Rape, makes us, as viewers, question whether or not we are meant to read a narrative into the work. Susan Sidlauskas’ essay, “Resisting Narrative: the Problem of Edgar Degas’s Interior,” outlines Interior’s resistance to narrative interpretation and suggests that the many interpretations of his work by spectators are historically, theoretically, and visually related.192 Sidlauskas notes that Degas’s Interior is a critique of narrative-bound art, and was produced in a moment “when there was believed to be radical disjunction between ‘reading’ and ‘seeing’ pictures.”193 While many historians have attempted to bridge the gap between word and image (relying on concepts such as ekphrasis and istoria), Sidlauskas points to a historical moment when traditional narratives in painting were 192 Susan Sidlauskas, “Resisting Narrative: The Problem of Edgar Degas's Interior.” The Art Bulletin, Vol. 75, No. 4, Dec., 1993, pp. 671-696, p. 672. 193 Ibid., p. 673. 131 challenged by a new demand for realist subjects. Realist critics, such as Jules Champfleury, Louis-Edmond Duranty, and Jules Castagnary, understood realism as a stylistic trope working against narrative. Degas’s painting, Sidlauskas writes, “concentrates attention on the problem of pictorial narrative, especially as it intersects with theories of realism. … how do we address a painting that seems to tell a story, yet refuses, ultimately, to tell it? ... [Interior’s] resistance to narrative coherence … becomes a defining property of the spectator’s experience of the painting.”194 Louis Emile Edmond Duranty emerged in French literary circles in 1856 as the editor of Réalisme, a short-lived review but one that paved the way for Duranty’s interest in and support of Realism as well as the work of Naturalist writers such as Emile Zola (1840-1902) and Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880). Duranty’s reputation as an author stems primarily from his important essay “The New Painting” (1876), which appeared at around the time of the Impressionists second group show as a thirty-eight page pamphlet. Although Duranty never used the term “Impressionist” in his pamphlet, his essay is one of the first cogent attempts to outline the traits and characteristics of avant-garde painting during the 1870s. For the purposes of our discussion here, Duranty importantly made the connection between one’s domestic environment and an accurate depiction of an individual, noting that “since we embrace nature closely, we will no longer separate the person from the apartment or street that forms the background. He never appears to us in actual life against a neutral, empty, or vague background. Around him and behind him 194 Ibid. 132 are furniture, a fireplace, wallpaper that reveals his fortune, his class, his profession.”195 Or put another way, one’s personal surroundings reflect one’s habitus. Evans’s photographs of working class interiors taken in the 1930s extend this nineteenth century problem of narrative versus realism into twentieth century photography: particularly as it manifested in Evans’s work as “documentary lyricism” (a term that defines itself decidedly at the intersection of word and image). Evans made photographs that directly engaged the viewer but did so from within a pre-established historical rubric of literary realist traditions. In other words, one did not need to understand the textual references Evans was making in his photographs or know anything about his influences in order to appreciate them. Very likely, Evans himself did not have in mind specific textual references when making his photographs; instead he was likely inspired by descriptive passages in novels, broadly speaking. Put another way, Evans relied on a pre-existing tradition of literary realism, and tried to make photographs that were in conversation with this tradition. In this manner, Evans’s photographs from the 1930s worked within the by-then familiar dictates of Realism’s questioning of blatant pictorial narrative; his photographs, like Degas’s paintings, tell stories but ultimately refuse to tell them. In many ways, Evans was carrying on the project of Realism best reflected in the writings of Zola, Balzac, and James and in paintings like Degas’s Interior. 195 See Duranty, “The New Painting.” in C. Moffett, The New Painting: Impressionism, 1874-1886. exh. cat., The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1986, pp. 37-49. 133 Following this line of aligning Evans’s photographs with literary traditions, Alan Trachtenberg points out that given Evan’s literary approach to photography, his photographs “might better be called fictions ... in that his mode of self-presentation is the mode of self-abnegation or the participation by detachment that he learned from his cherished masters of modern writing, Flaubert and Henry James and others.”196 James’s passage from The American Scene, Trachtenberg suggests, could be written as a description of Evans’s interior photographs: “things ... objects and places, coherently grouped, disposed for human use and addressed to it, must have a sense of their own, a mystic meaning proper to themselves to give out: to give out, that is, to the participant at once so interested and so detached as to be moved to a report of the matter.”197 Evans’s called this method “documentary style,” as opposed to “documentary photography” to distinguish his work from overtly documentary photography. As Trachtenberg writes, “[Evans] means he is after the look of objectivity, of vernacular directness and simplicity. It’s this look that gives his pictures their illusion of being merely transcriptive records of a given time and place. That look is a much as prose as any fiction, a fiction of literal fact that disguises the artist’s more complex purposes of interpretations.”198 In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, even casual observers were adroit at assessing class affiliation through architectural features such as the height of windows, 196 See Alan Trachtenberg, Lincoln’s Smile and Other Enigmas. New York: Hill and Wang, 2008, p. 308. 197 In Henry James, The American Scene. New York: Library of America, 1993, p. 273. 198 Ibid. 134 doors, and ceilings and lushness or sparseness of interior decoration. Popular prints and journal illustrations of “apartements-a-loger,” (equivalent to rental apartments and boarding rooms in the United States) were widely circulated in print culture of the period.199 Although Degas’s painting at first may appear to represent an individualized domestic interior, many of the impersonal qualities of the room (for example the non- specific décor) suggest that it may in fact be an “apartement-a-loger” One of Walker Evans’s more infamous photographs, Bedroom in Boarding House on Hudson Street, Residence of John Cheever, New York City (1931-33) (figure 19), echoes the quality of distance and the interpretive difficulty of Degas’s work. Like the room depicted in Degas’s Interior, this is also a photograph of a lodging room. This room, at 633 Hudson Street in New York, where the burgeoning American writer John Cheever stayed during a previous visit in 1931, was photographed by Evans (likely sometime in late 1933) when Cheever re-rented a room in the same boarding house. Evans had met Cheever through mutual friends who were married to each other: Hazel Hawthorne (a descendant of Nathaniel Hawthorne) and Morris Werner, her second husband and biographer of P.T. Barnum and Brigham Young. The couple divided their time between Greenwich Village and Provincetown. Hazel was introduced to Cheever over lunch with Lincoln Kirstein and soon, with her husband, helped Cheever establish his literary career in New York City. Through Hawthorne and Werner, Cheever met e e 199 Sidlauskas, p. 674. Sidlauskas suggests the following for discussions of publications on nineteenth century decoration: J. Ferdy, Architecture intérieure et décoration en France: Des origins a 1875. Paris, 1988 and T. Lambert, Décorations et ameublements intérieurs. Paris, 1906. 135 cummings, Sherwood Anderson, Edmund Wilson, John Dos Passos, James Agee, and Walker Evans. In 1932, just before he met Evans, Cheever rented a studio in Provincetown, and roomed with Charles Flato, a young crippled man (he had a hunchback from a childhood bout with polio) who was then writing about Mathew Brady and publishing articles in Hound & Horn. In late 1933, Cheever moved back to New York City and rented the boarding house at 633 Hudson Street for three dollars a week. Hungry, destitute, and not very successful at publishing his work, he became Evans’s photographic assistant at twenty dollars a week (Evans had just received a large commission from the Museum of Modern Art to photograph the African Negro Art Exhibition). In a letter to a friend, Cheever wrote the following about his return to the same boarding house where he had originally stayed in 1931: “[A]cross the street from me, sits the same old man in the same yellowed underwear.”200 The place, as he recalled, was mostly occupied by unemployed longshoremen, and Evans photographed it because it represented the “quintessential Depression tableau.”201 200 In Blake Bailey, Cheever: A Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009, p. 71. 201 Ibid., p. 71. In 1935, when Evans departed for an extended photographic tour of the South, Cheever moved from the boarding house on Hudson Street into Evans’s basement studio at 23 Bethune, two blocks east of the Hudson. The living conditions there were even more ghastly than those at the boarding house. In this basement apartment, Cheever continued to work for Evans, washing and hanging his many prints for the MoMA African Art Exhibition. At some point, the electricity in the apartment was turned off (Evans had neglected to pay the bill) and a mutual friend appealed to Evans in a letter, “[P]oor John can’t sit over there in the dark, and anyway, there are something like 50 more prints to be done.”201 Nevertheless, even in these deplorable conditions, Cheever 136 In a letter written many years later, Cheever recounted (perhaps fictionally) an erotic encounter between himself and Evans. The letter, written by Cheever to his graduate student Allan Gurganus, functioned as one of the earliest admittances of Cheever’s bisexuality: “… When I was twenty-one Walker Evans invited me to spend the night at his apartment. I said yes. I dropped my clothes (Brooks). He hung his (also Brooks) neatly in a closet. When I asked him how to do it he seemed rather put off. He had an enormous cock that showed only the most fleeting signs of life. I was ravening. I came all over the sheets, the Le Corbusier chair, the Matisse Lithograph and hit him under the chin. I gave up at around three, dressed and spent the rest of the night on a park bench near the river.”202 Although Evans’s photograph of Cheever’s bed was taken at the Hudson boarding house (and not Evans’s basement apartment, the site of Cheever’s description of their erotic encounter) it is not difficult to imagine a similar episode taking place on the rumpled sheets of the bed as we see it here. In this context, it is possible to read this photograph as a commentary on the anxieties of looking and as a fantasy of the real or imagined sexual act. Evans’s voyeuristic view into Cheever’s private (albeit rented) bedroom gives the viewer a sense of looking without possessing; we sense that we are made some important breakthroughs in his writing, including a novella-length apologia entitled “In Passing” that was bought in 1935 by The Atlantic Monthly. Sometime in 1935, Cheever started working on a novel, Sitting on the Whorehouse Steps and Empty Bed Blues, a title that may allude to Evans’s photograph of his empty boarding house bed. 202 See Benjamin Cheever, ed. The Letters of John Cheever. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988, p. 304. 137 seeing something that perhaps we are not meant to see. Evans made this maneuver deliberately. We know from other exposures made on the same day of Cheever’s room that the space was in actuality not so worn, dingy, and threadbare as Evans’s photograph made it seem. Each of the five known exposures of Cheever’s bedroom look decidedly different: in some, the curtains are drawn; in others, a flash was used creating a harsher contrast between the bed, window, and walls, making the room seem more run-down than it actually was (figures 19-23). Another exposure of a different small room in the boarding house shows us a relatively neat, tidy space complete with a chair in the corner and a dresser with a doily and floral-patterned ceramic dresser tray. The lighting in this photograph makes the bed appear clean, white, and ethereal: not dingy and rumpled. One print of Cheever’s boarding-room bed eventually made its way into the MoMA collection in the 1930s (possibly figure 19). This exposure was likely used as an illustration for an architectural exhibition about the deplorable living conditions of workers and laborers in New York City.203 Evans may have been deliberately manipulating the image so that the room appeared more run-down and deplorable than it was in an attempt to appeal to the theme of the exhibition. Evans “changed” the feel of room when he took a second series of photographs of the bedroom from a much lower angle and different perspective. Images such figures 19 203 Evan’s photograph many have been used as a photographic “illustration” during exhibitions such as MoMA’s America Can’t Have Housing Exhibition in 1934. 138 and 23 emphasize the low ceiling of the boarding room, the sodden mattress, and the heavily plastered and unsmooth walls instead of the open space of the room as we see it in figure 22. The subtle manipulations of space from exposure to exposure serve in combination to increase the sense of estrangement and forbidden intimacy presented in these photographs. We know that Degas, some fifty years earlier went through a similar “editing” of his sketches before he completed the final finished oil painting. In what appears to be the first compositional study for Interior, the bed seems boxy, and dour. In a subsequent sketch, the bed is drawn with an iron frame, with more refined proportions. Perspectivally, in later sketches, the bed appears to widen as it comes closer to the viewer. In the final composition, this is made even more explicit: the pillow appears propped up against the bed frame, and the increased forward thrust of the bed accentuates the floor’s upward tilt. Overall, these changes serve to emphasize the room’s architecture as well as to create a deliberately unstable picture plane (figures 25-26). As a point of contrast, another photograph of a bedroom by Evans, taken around the same time, feels much less intimate and certainly less voyeuristic. This photograph provides further evidence of how Evans deliberately manipulated the Cheever bed photograph to show us an interior space more despondent than it really was. We know that Evans was capable of showing us a bedroom interior with a sense of respectability and privacy: for example, his photograph of a bedroom in the De Luze household depicts an uncannily similar iron bed, but one with bedding that is not rumpled. In this bedroom, objects and furniture are arranged with a sense of decorum; everything is in its place (figure 11). Even the patterned wallpaper, with its repeated design, creates as sense of 139 regularity and order in the image. Evans’s deliberate attempt to show us a private domestic space in disarray and with a sense of gloom in the Cheever photograph is all the more marked, then, when compared to the De Luze image. There is no single definitive, correct, or absolute interpretation for Degas’s Interior or Evans’s photograph of Cheever’s bed, and this is likely the point of these images: we are not meant to easily interpret them. In both images, the relationship of the viewer to these works remains unconsummated, and this is precisely the intent. Both Degas’s painting and Evans’s photographs show us intimate spaces that invite a kind of voyeurism: seeing what we are not meant to see. Evans’s photographs stage and actualize this type of encounter: capturing the sense of voyeurism inherent in the photographic gaze, his photographs are in dialog with previously established traditions of literary realism and estrangement as outlined above. Rather than providing us with fixed meanings, these images show rooms with arranged objects in interior spaces whose meanings remain elusive. * * * “To live is to leave traces,” wrote the cultural critic Walter Benjamin in his discussion of the birth of the interior. In the 1930s, Benjamin had much to say about the nineteenth-century bourgeois interior, especially in with the context of the social and political upheavals in Europe in the 1930s. Benjamin’s discussion of interiors was premised upon a historical materialist model of history, one that drew on past conceptions of interior spaces as means to critically analyze the politically present. This model of 140 history and influence was, in many ways, very close to what Evans was attempting to do with his photographs during the same period. Benjamin’s work, especially The Arcades Project, helps us to think about how we might conceptualize a history of the working class domestic interior of the 1930s through the lens of nineteenth century literature and its representations of the bourgeois interior. Benjamin’s writings on interiors are separated into two primary parts in The Arcades Project: the exposés (a documentary synopsis of the main components of The Arcades Project) and the convolutes204 (montage of literary fragments). One the one hand, the exposés of the project present a clear and concise account of the domestic interior’s historical emergence. The following is an excerpt of Benjamin’s discussion of the domestic interior space from one of his exposés: The interior is the asylum of art. … The interior is not just the universe but also the étui of the private individual. To dwell means to leave traces. In the interior, these are accentuated. Coverlets … cases and containers are devised in abundance; in these, the traces of the most ordinary objects of use are imprinted. In just the same way, the traces of the inhabitant are imprinted in the interior. Enter the detective story, which pursues these traces. Poe, in his “Philosophy of Furniture” as well as in his detective fiction, shows himself to be the first physiognomist of the domestic interior.205 204 The term “convolutes” (Konvolut) was not used by Benjamin himself. Rather it was Adorno’s term. Adorno sorted through the manuscript of “Aufzeichnungen und Materialen” after it had been hidden away by George Bataille in the Bibliotheque Nationale de France during WWII. The translators of Benjamin’s The Arcades Project write in German, “the term Konvolut has a common philological application: it refers to a larger or smaller assemblage — literally, a bundle — of manuscripts or printed materials that belong together.” Walker Benjamin, Rolf Tiedemann, ed. The Arcades Project. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002, p. xiv. 205 Walter Benjamin, 1935-1938, Volume 3, Boston: Harvard University Press, 2002, p. 38. This is from the Exposé of 1939 in Walker Benjamin, Rolf Tiedemann, ed., The Arcades Project. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002, p. 15. 141 Evans’s photographs capture the traces of working class individuals and families left imprinted on the interior space, and in this way the interior trace of the private individual becomes the subject of his photography. Benjamin’s other means of discussing interiors appears in his convolutes. One of these, entitled “The interior, the trace,” presents the interior through a montage of fragmentary accounts drawn from philosophical, historical, and popular literature, interspersed with Benjamin’s own observations.” In "The Interior, the Trace," Benjamin comments on how, in the bourgeois interior, "pieces of furniture take on and retain the character of fortifications," and that "to live in these interiors was to have woven a dense fabric about oneself, to have secluded oneself within a spider's web, in whose toils world events hang loosely suspended like so many insect bodies sucked dry. From this cavern, one does not like to stir.”206 This section of The Arcades Project is indebted to Adorno's book on Kierkegaard, which Benjamin cites several times. Kierkegaard’s conception of Intérieur, which defines Kierkegaard’s notion of the self, is the philosophical concept from which both Benjamin and Adorno draw their discussions of how interior spaces are constructed socially and how they inform notions of the subject. For Kierkegaard, the self is overwhelmed and threatened by an increasingly intrusive world, and retreats into the only place it can find refuge, the interior. The interior of the Kierkegaardian self is thus shaped by its failure to find itself at home in the modern world. Adorno’s first book, Kierkegaard: Construction of the 206 The Arcades Project, p. 215-16. 142 Aesthetic, argued that the heart of Kierkegaard's work concerned the melancholic response of subjectivity to an objectless condition, and that this objectless condition was a disheartened reflection of an empty bourgeois existence. In the section entitled “Intérieur,” Adorno considered Kierkegaardian interiority to be consistent with the ideology of the nineteenth-century bourgeois individual, noting the proliferation of metaphorical objects that litter the pages of Kierkegaard's texts: bell-ropes, red plush arm chairs, gas-lighting, parlours, living rooms, and other accoutrements of modern dwelling.207 Benjamin’s discussion of interiors in his exposés do not simply clarify or summarize the convolutes; rather, they “present the interior so that it is grasped as a dialectical image, a crystallization of the precise historical contours of the interior at the same moment that it is seen to be irrecoverable in the present.”208 For Benjamin, the present was the political crisis of the 1930s, a crisis brought about in part through a myth of historical continuity, a sleep of historical consciousness, which the dialectical image was supposed to break apart. The material of the interior presented in the convolute expands upon this logic of the historical being irrecoverable in, yet vital to, the present. Benjamin used the literary fragment as a device to help the reader recall in the present, in an almost dream-like manner, the historical past. 207 See Theodor Adorno, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic. Trans., R. Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989, p. 141. 208 Ibid. 143 Benjamin’s writings on interiors do much more than simply present the reader with a record of bourgeois domestic life in the nineteenth century. They provided a structure for his conception of historical time. Both Benjamin and Evans were working in the 1930s from within an understanding of history where the ideals of bourgeois existence had been socially and politically shattered by the social disparities of the 1930s. For Benjamin, writing as the Nazis were coming to power, this experience was even more profound. The type of bourgeois existence recalled in his memoirs, Berlin Childhood (1938), had been completely shattered, and was irrecoverable in the present. Like Benjamin’s Angel of History, all that was left to do was to sit upon the ruble of the past and gaze from the present backwards into time. Evans photographed the working class domestic interior through the lens of these fragments of nineteenth-century bourgeois traditions and literary realism, taking from this historical past an interest in the trace and reinterpreting these ideas in the twentieth century. In this way, the past continued to influence his present: time moved not in a linear fashion, but as a series of episodes, one influencing the next. Evans’s photographs visually echo this historical materialist model of history, according to which the past contributes to the formation of a new kind of (photographic) aesthetic in the present. The De Luze parlor interior photograph by Evans, with its conglomeration of objects from both the new and old worlds, could serve as a visual equivalent to Benjamin’s sentiments on interior space as outlined in his Arcades project. In one of his exposés, “Louis Philippe, or the Interior,” Benjamin historicized this shift towards interiority, and noted that after July Revolution of 1789, “In the interior, [the private 144 individual] brings together the far away and the long ago. His living room is a box in the theater of the world.”209 The presence of old and new world accoutrements in the De Luze photograph by Evans (books, perfume packaging, bullet cartridges, doilies, and American flags) is a visual equivalent to a working class “theater of the world” in Benjamin’s terms. Like their historical precedents, Evans’s photographs of Depression- era domestic interiors show us the inhabiting subjects’ material relationship to the world of material things. As a point of contrast, Evans’s photographs of the New York City salonneuse Muriel Draper’s apartment demonstrate an entirely different, and much more critical view of how one’s interior design sensibility reflects one’s social position (figures 27- 30). During the late 1920s and 1930s, Draper ran an artistic and literary salon from her Manhattan residence at 312 East Fifty-third Street, modeled after one she had run previously in Paris with her husband during and after WWI. Her London salon was frequented by Henry James, John Singer Sargent, and Eleanora Duse, and Draper was close with Gertrude Stein when Stein was writing her “Portraits” (1935).210 However, Draper soon divorced her husband, lost most of her money, and for the rest of her life lived an affected life of luxury—parroting the existence of a wealthy woman when in reality she was quite broke. When she returned New York in 1915, she began a new career as an interior designer, using her connections in New York society to build a 209 Walter Benjamin, 1935-1938, Volume 3, p. 37. 210 In "Portraits and Repetition," published in Lectures in America in 1934. Here Stein described her fascination with portraits. 145 business designing for wealthy clients. She wrote essays about fashion and culture for Vogue and Town and Country and became known as an expert in good taste. A smart and witty writer and talented public speaker, she lectured often on style, delivering talks entitled “Charm” and “We All Wear Clothes.” Draper also wrote Music at Midnight, a memoir of her years in Europe. Frequent guests to her Manhattan soirees included the writer and critic Edmund Wilson, Walker Evans, Lincoln Kirstein (where he and Evans likely first met), the photographer Carl Van Vechten, and her close friend Mabel Dodge Luhan,211 among many others. Draper was a great friend to many young gay men living in New York at the time, and although she was older than many of her male friends, they looked up to her as a kind of literary/artistic mother-figure. Kirstein referred to her salons as exemplary of Manhattan’s “high bohemia,” and Evans began attending her regular events sometime in 1931. It was Kirstein who introduced Walker Evans to the Draper salon. Evans characterized its convener as "the great Draper woman,” describing her as "completely artificial and phony to the fingertips."212 Even with his criticism, Evans was fascinated with the “meandering poetry” of Draper’s speech" and her “talent for monologue," which was "full of opinion and audacious metaphor." He sensed that her bombastic nature and 211 It was at Dodge's that Draper met Gertrude Stein, who evoked her in her triple word portrait, Portrait and Prayers (1934): "Muriel has made it has made it to be has made it more of an advantage to be Muriel." Gertrude Stein, Portraits and Prayers, New York: Random House, 1934, pp. 144-45. 212 See "Walker Evans," 1971 interview in Paul Cummings, Artists in Their Own Words. New York: St. Martin's, 1979, p. 8. 146 unique sense of fashion masked a "sadness and poverty beneath."213 Regarding her as "the great mother of all artists," Evans found her salons welcoming, albeit raucous environments: "It was an imitation French salon, indiscriminate, but the nearest thing we had. And that's necessary in a culture. A lot went on. A lot of it questionable. It was anything but a respectful house.”214 On the evening of May 29, 1934,215 Evans took a series of photographs of the interior of Draper’s white sitting room after a bachelor party thrown in honor of her son, Smudge Draper. These photographs, some taken with flash, show what the room looked like in its post-party state: champagne and wine bottles stand empty in the foreground, satin curtains are rumpled, candles are burnt down and broken; a general sense of the disorder following a Dionysian fête pervades the room. The place is clearly in need of a decent paint job. The furniture is carved, heavy, and thick. It is regal in its size and assertion but looks out of place in the confines of the untidy salon. On the marble mantle piece (in figure 28) sits a vase of bold white flowers. Twinned candelabras, opaque white goblets, and two men’s hats (one likely Evans’s own) sit on either side of the vase. The two hats function as markers of masculinity amid otherwise overtly feminine decorations. Above the mantle, nailed to the wall, was a cow’s skull—a clear homage to the recent work of Georgia O’Keeffe; an artist about whom Draper had recently written.216 Edmund 213 See Belinda Rathbone, Walker Evans: A Biography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1995, pp. 60, 71. 214 "Walker Evans," interview in Cummings. Evans photographed her dining room in 1931 after the bachelor party hosted by her son Paul before his brother's wedding. 215 The MET Walker Evans Archive dates these photographs to 1934. It is more likely that the date is 1931. 216 Draper nevertheless did not respond well to O'Keeffe's work, observing sharply 147 Wilson in his memoir, The Thirties, describes the ambiance of Draper’s apartment in a similar way. He recalls “stale white calla lilies in a big white vase, cameo china ashtrays with cupids on them, white skull of a cow hung on the wall.” The effect of these photographs is something of an overdone bourgeois vanitas; a memento mori of overconsumption and decadence. The images are harsh, not soft and inviting: gone is the quiet and respectful voyeurism of the De Luze photographs. In the Draper series, Evans shows us the remnants of upper class privilege after the glitter and glam have left the room. Draper’s salons reflected her difficult financial situation as did her living environment. Nevertheless, they were quite the raucous social scene, particularly for the queer, young, New York literary crowd, who thrived in them. Throughout this period, Draper lived in conditions characterized by the writer Virgil Thomson as "resplendent poverty."217 Lincoln Kirstein, who lived next door, described it as "a ragged salon in a bleak loft over a garage on East 40th Street.”218 The critic Henry McBride, who attended her New Year's Eve party in 1933, found the dilapidated state of her apartment alarming. At one point during the evening’s festivities he felt something fall on his shoulder: "I looked up to see several great yawning holes in that she "pursues her sensuous surgery with passionless penetration." (Muriel Draper, "Art," typescript, n.d. (after 1926), MDP/YC. As quoted in Betsy Fahlman, “The Great Draper Woman: Muriel Draper and the Art of the Salon.” Woman's Art Journal, Vol. 26, No. 2, Autumn 2005 - Winter 2006, pp. 33-37. 217 See Virgil Thomson, Virgil Thomson. New York: Knopf, 1966, p. 140. 218 See Lincoln Kirstein, Mosaic: Memoirs. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994, p. 17. 148 the ceiling. It was a bit of the plaster that had hit me. The condition of the ceiling seemed quite menacing.”219 However, amid the shambles, Draper continued to write and publish articles on interior design for The New Yorker, Harper's Bazaar, Town and Country, and Vogue and contributed a short prose piece, “America Deserta,” (a portion of an unfinished second novel) to Kirstein’s journal Hound & Horn.220 In addition to her salons and publications, Draper worked as an interior decorator. Some of her notable clients included Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, Helena Rubinstein, and Mabel Dodge Luhan. Despite her meager interior design business, Draper found herself disheartened by “the dullness, shabbiness and monotony”221 of Depression-era America. Her friend Edmund Wilson, wrote that in the 1930s she became “tarnished and stale ... a shell of her former self.”222 There is clearly something of this tarnished staleness apparent in Evans’s photographs. The shoddy décor of Draper’s apartment seems to have echoed the character of its inhabitant. Upon examination of these very different studies of private interior spaces – the De Luze household, Cheever’s boarding room, and Draper’s apartment – the question that is most important to ask about them is “why?” Why did Evans increasingly break 219 Henry McBride to Malcolm MacAdam, February 28, 1933, in Steven Watson and Catherine Morris, eds., An Eye on the Modern Century: Selected Letters of Henry McBride. New Haven: Yale University, 2000, p. 24. 220 Draper published a version of this as "America Deserta," in Hound & Horn (January-March 1933), p. 205-3. 221 Draper typescript, MDP/YCAL, p. 3, as noted in Betsy Fahlman, “The Great Draper Woman: Muriel Draper and the Art of the Salon.” Woman's Art Journal, Vol. 26, No. 2, Autumn 2005 - Winter 2006, pp. 33-37. 222 Leon Edel, ed., The Thirties: From [Edmund Wilson's] Notebooks and Diaries of the Period. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1980, p. 413. 149 from an avant-garde inflected photographic sensibility to one that focused on ideas of interiority, patina, surface, well-worn American architecture, and issues of how one’s personal trappings functioned as markers of class and social identity? The answer is a complicated one, and like a cube, has several sides that comprise the whole. One of these sides is the most obvious one: the Great Depression had struck America. After the crash of 1929, social and political issues were brought to the fore for everyone in a way that they had never been before. Day to day existence had changed so dramatically in the space of a few years that it made sense for Evans’s photographic style to shift away from a European influence to a more readily recognizable American style; he had become increasingly concerned with issues of his own country and social circles. In the early 1930s, Evans became more interested in the work of American artists working with vernacular-based practices. The photographer Paul Strand, the painter and photographer Charles Sheeler, and the painters Georgia O’Keeffe and Edward Hopper (who, like Shahn, resided in Truro, Massachusetts during the 1930s) were important artistic models for Evans at the time. In addition to the many interior images created by Walker Evans in the 1930s, he also made photographs documenting the exteriors of small homes and barns in and around Truro, Massachusetts, and regional New England. These photographs, made at the same time as his interior images, in combination demonstrate a larger shift in Evans’s photographic practice away from a European-influenced modernist aesthetic towards one that focused on American subjects. This gradual change in subject-matter (Evans continued in the early 1930s to photograph skyscrapers for commercial clients as 150 commissioned) reflected Evans’s increasing tendency throughout the 1930s to adopt literary models and devices in his photographic work. His style simultaneously drew on traditions of Realism (in art and literature), American vernacularism (barns, small towns, etc.), and literary modernism’s emphasis on interior states of being. The following section examines Evans’s burgeoning interest in regional New England architecture, a topic that will be explored in depth in chapter three. Charles Sheeler’s work was in many ways a model for Evans’s own early photographs, particularly his photographs of the Rouge River Ford plant which appeared in various publications in 1927.223 This series shows an engagement with the formal qualities of European avant-garde modernist photography and an underlying interest in a cubist construction of space (figure 32). They are, however, explicitly American in their subject matter: these are factories used by Ford to produce the icon of modernity, the American motorcar, and are therefore inseparable from a larger dialog about capitalist means of production. However, in the late 1920s and 1930s, Sheeler became increasingly interested in traditional forms of American art, including folk and Shaker traditions, echoes of which can be seen in his Bucks County barn series. Sheeler’s first series of barns were created in 1917 and demonstrated a keen analysis of planar abstraction. By 223 This image was widely reproduced in Ford Motor Company publications such as the Ford News. In addition to its promotional use by the corporation, it could be seen in the pages of Vanity Fair, Creative Art, Hound & Horn, and Arts et Métiers Graphiques. 151 1923, his work shifted and his barn drawings and paintings became more textured yet simultaneously more isolated from their surrounding contexts.224 Sheeler’s photographs of barns from this period explore similar themes of austerity, texture, and the effects of light and shadow on rooflines and architectural massing. Sheeler’s Side of White Barn, Bucks County (1915) (figure 33) reflects a sensibility which Evans would attempt to emulate in his architectural photographs from Truro in the 1930s, such as Church, Truro, Massachusetts, 1930, Barn Window Detail, Truro, Massachusetts, 1930-31 (figure 5), and Ben Shahn House, Truro, 1930-31 (figure 35). Sheeler’s series of interiors and staircases taken at his home in Doylestown, Pennsylvania (figure 36) may have spurred Evans’s initial interest in photographically recording the interiors of private homes. Evans could easily have seen Sheeler’s work reproduced in numerous publications and in galleries such as the Downtown Gallery in New York City. Generally, however, Sheeler was more concerned with underlying abstract structures and machine-age aesthetics in his photography than Evans would ultimately be, and so while Sheeler’s work certainly taught Evans important formal lessons, it would not ultimately be a model which he would directly emulate. 225 224 This shift was partly in response to criticism yielded by the art critic Henry McBride who found the earlier drawings too “ascetic” and suggested that Sheeler adopt his style to appeal to viewers who would “sigh for a few more vulgar details.” Henry McBride, “Charles Sheeler’s Bucks County Barnes,” Sun and New York Herald, Feb. 22, 1920 in Daniel Catton Rich, ed. The Flow of Art: Essay’s and Criticisms. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997, pp. 155-56. 225 Sheeler looked for “underlying abstract structures” in both his painting and photography: “It is also within the province of the photographer to seek the same underlying abstract structure and having found it to his satistfaction to record it with his camera with an exactitude not to be achieved through any other medium.” Quoted in Karen Tsujimoto, Images of America: Precisionist Painting and Modern 152 Many modern artists were experimenting with the formal components of barns and rural architecture during the late 1920s and 1930s. Georgia O’Keeffe was no exception to this trend. Her series of paintings from 1926-1927 of barns and architectural structures at Lake George, where she lived with her husband Alfred Stieglitz, demonstrate a more personalized vision of the rural landscape while maintaining an interest in plastic representation. Texture is subordinated in these works to form and color as exemplified in Lake George Barns (1926-27) (figure 37). Interestingly, Stieglitz’s own images of these same structures reflect a keener interest in texture and context; his photographs (from 1922 and 1925) show many more details of setting, including people and sometimes carriages. In many ways, Evans’s work assimilated O’Keeffe’s and Stieglitz’s examples in terms of form, but departed quite drastically from them in terms of content (figures 38-39). Edward Hopper’s idiomatic style of representing houses, interiors, couples, and figures in isolation may have informed Evans’s increasing turn towards the same visual trope in his photographs, especially his images of churches and barns in the surrounding Cape Cod area of Massachusetts. For instance, Evans’s Church with Picket Fence and Cemetery (1930-31) (figure 40), when compared with Hopper’s Highland Light, North Truro, Massachusetts (1930) (figure 41), reflects a similar tendency to capture New England architectural structures from slightly below, up — isolating the buildings from Photography. Seattle: Published for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art by University of Washington Press, 1982, p. 16. 153 their surrounding contexts and emphasizing the play of light and shadow over clapboard or wood-shingled surface. Another comparison even more overtly suggests that Evans had looked carefully at Hopper’s work from this period. Evans’s Field with Church in Distance, (1930-31) is almost the photographic equivalent of Hopper’s Corn Hill, North Truro (1930) (figure 43). However, while the subject matter is certainly shared between the two artists, the sentiment is not. Thus, these artists (Hopper, Stieglitz, O’Keeffe) provided a platform from which Evans departed photographically, rather than a direct line of influence. Hopper had a distinct personal vision of modern life, often hinting at an implied, albeit strained, narrative in his paintings. Evans, on the other hand, tended to “keep himself out” of his photographs, preferring instead to adopt a voyeuristic or flaneur-like removal of himself from the image and subject matter. In many ways, this reflected his interest in the work of Atget as well as his continued fascination with modernist writers such as Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and William Faulkner. LITERARY INTERIORS In addition to Walker Evans’s attempt to assimilate ideas of interior space from nineteenth-century realist traditions, he was simultaneously interested in literary modernism and its fascination with interior states of being. Many of Evans’s generation saw no a strict division between literary realism and modernism, and many realists (such as Flaubert and Baudelaire) were typically regarded as modernists by the 1930s avant- garde . Evans’s fascination with realist writers such as Flaubert, Zola, and James, the 154 symbolism of Baudelaire, and the stream of consciousness style of Joyce, placed him strongly with his peers and their taste for modernism and general distrust of Victorian positivism and certainty. Like so many of his generation, Evans rejected the Victorian idea that art was meant to be the interpretation of bourgeois taste and culture. Instead, like many in his milieu, he utilized subject matter of the worker, the everyday citizen, the farmer, and the small town habitant in his photography. In doing so, both he and the artists of his generation privileged “everyday” subject matter over lofty idealism and arty formalism. The modernist novel's turn away from the techniques of representation of nineteenth-century realism towards formal experimentation has left an ambiguous legacy. The increasing formalization of the novel was read as a movement away from mimesis and towards representing a new narrative experience of everyday life, including its attendant political, economical, social, gender, race, and class biases. Mass cultural experiences and modes of representation such as films, newspapers, popular entertainment and the popular press were forms of daily life that were adopted and readily used by artists, writers, musicians, and photographers. The authors understood as Realists and Modernists by Evans and his generation (including Flaubert, Baudelaire, Proust, Joyce, and Wolfe), were thought to be working against Victorian traditions, and therefore open to be celebrated by those in Evans’s generation. Although this categorization is still for the most part valid, today finer scholarly distinctions are made, which draw stricter lines between nineteenth-century realism and modernism. 155 Modernist writing, with its unprecedented interest in interiority and the texture of consciousness, is a key component that runs metaphorically “in the background” of much of Evans’s photography. Evans’s fascination with modern and realist writing was made explicit in the first chapter of this dissertation, but in the 1930s Evans synthesized the motives and ideals of modernist writing into his photographs in a radical new way. He became increasingly interested in the narrative experiments of Proust, Joyce, and Faulkner (among others) and how each of them utilized time, space, notions of inwardness, and the texture of consciousness in their novels, and he began to apply these ideas in his photography. These authors represented the pinnacle of “inaccessible” modernist writing, both in Evans’s time and, in many regards, in our own; modernist texts are often difficult to read, and sometimes notoriously so — as is the case with Joyce’s Ulysses, a book that baffled and offended readers to such an extent that it was censored and banned in the United States upon its publication in 1922. What these writers did, each in their own unique way, was stage the encounter between subject and environment in a bold new fashion. They reconfigured the idea of the novel and of what it should include and present to the reader. The radical component of their work was found in the proliferation of an exceeding amount of detail from everyday life, an emphasis on surface, texture, patina, and a bold new conception of time. In contrast to the traditional compressed time of nineteenth century novels such as Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities or Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, where the narrative stretches over days, months, and sometimes even decades, Joyce’s Ulysses, for instance, takes place over the period of just one day: June 16, 1904, popularly known as 156 Bloomsday (after the main protagonist of the novel, Leopold Bloom). Similarly, Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past and its many attendant volumes represent veritable tomes of uncompressed and non-linear time. The temporal and material condensing at work in this literature had an enormous appeal for Evans and was at the center of what he attempted to do in his photography from this period. The following well-known passage from Proust’s Swann’s Way is just one example of the many moments in the novel where the narrator describes in detail the space, furnishings, and “feel” (somatically) of a room (here a bedroom) in his family home: It always happened, when I would awaken like this, my mind struggling unsuccessfully to discover where I was, that everything would turn around me in the darkness: things, countries, years. My body, too heavy to move, would try, according to the form of its tiredness, to restore the position of its members in order to induce from that the direction of the wall, the place of the furniture, in order to restore and give a name to the house in which it lay. Its memory, the memory of its ribs, knees, shoulders, offered it in succession several of the rooms in which it had slept, while around it the invisible walls, changing positions according to the form of the imagined room, would whirl in the darkness. And even before my thought, which hesitated at the threshold of times and forms, had identified the house by bringing together the details, it—my body—would recall for each the type of the bed, the position of the doors, how the windows caught the light, the existence of a corridor, along with the thought that I had when I would fall asleep, and that I would find again when I would awaken.226 Proust’s novel is concerned primarily with the idea of Le temps retrouvé (involuntary memory), the rising up of memories as a result of a sensorial catalyst — best 226 See Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, Vol. I. New York: Vintage, 1982, p. 5. 157 exemplified in Proust’s madeleine scene, where the author experiences a sudden resurgence of memories from his adolescence after biting into a tea-soaked madeleine cookie. Throughout his writing, Proust’s dominant metaphor for involuntary memory is photography. For him, involuntary memory operates as an “optical illusion,” a confusion of sensory perception and a conflation of present and past.227 He compared one’s past explicitly to photography, noting that: “their past is like a photographic darkroom encumbered with innumerable negatives which remain useless because the intellect has not developed them.”228 Proust’s bedroom (both in life and in the novel) became itself a type of a camera, creating a series photographic images for the reader. The term “camera” is in fact Italian and Latin for “room,” and there is of course, the historical tradition of the camera obscura, wherein a room was literally made into a camera to capture views from the outside. Walker Evans’s photograph of Cheever’s bedroom and its bed replete with bodily traces, functions as an antidote to Proust’s mnemonic literary passage. Cheever’s later recollection of his possible sexual exploits with Evans widens the photographic trace in the photograph to include another medium, the written word. George Poulet’s important study of the phenomenology of space in Proust’s work, L’Espace Proustien (1963), was one of the first investigations into the relationship between time and space in the novel; at the center of Poulet’s account is the claim that “Proustian time is time spatialized.” Although Poulet primarily discusses metaphorical 227 See Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, Vol. II. New York: Vintage, 1982, p. 96. 228 Proust, Vol. II, p. 931. 158 inner space in A la recherche, his work did lead to later important analyses of Proust’s use of the domestic interior and its relationship to memory. One of the most important works in this regard is Diane Fuss’s The Sense of an Interior. Fuss devotes a chapter of her book explicitly to a discussion of Proust, memory, and the space of his bedroom in Paris. Speaking in architectural metaphors, Proust described his novel as an unfinished Gothic cathedral,229 and conversely pictured memory as a small country estate: “if our memories do indeed belong to us, they do so after the fashion of those country properties which have little hidden gates of which we ourselves are often unaware, and which someone in the neighborhood opens for us, so that from one direction at least which is new to us, we find ourselves back in our own house.” Our memories may be internal, but they need an external catalyst (like a gate keeper or a madeleine) to be “opened up.” If these memories are not jostled by external devices, then they remain inside of us “like the furniture placed in the semi-darkness of a gallery which, without being able to see, one avoids knocking into.”230 It would have been hard for Evans to escape the influence and work of Proust in the 1920s and 1930s, especially given that he spent a significant amount of time in Paris, had literary aspirations, and was able to read French. Harry and Caresse Crosby’s Black Sun Press, which published Hart Crane’s The Bridge in 1930 (with photographs by 229 Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, Vol. III, New York: Vintage, 1982, p. 1089. 230 Proust, Vol III. pp. 504, 554. 159 Walker Evans) also published the work of Ezra Pound, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, and Marcel Proust. These are the authors Evans was reading in the 1920s and 1930s and if through no other more popular channels he would have been exposed to Proust’s writing through the Black Sun Press. Evans’s photographs are not phenomenological studies of inner space in the sense of phenomenology defined by the philosopher Edmund Husserl, as the science of consciousness and its objects.231 They are instead literal explorations of interiority, interiors, the “thingness” of things, and their relation to subjectivity, class, history, and social position. Evans’s photographs therefore align more with ontological phenomenology as posited by Martin Heidegger in Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) (1927).232 Ontological phenomenology, as conceived by Heidegger, is concerned not 231 The central problem for Husserl is the problem of constitution: How, he asks, is the world as phenomenon constituted in our consciousness? 232 X, writing in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, offers the following account of Heidegger’s phenomenology: “Phenomenology thus receives in Heidegger a new meaning. He conceives it more broadly, and more etymologically, than Husserl, as “letting what shows itself to be seen from itself, just as it shows from itself.” Husserl applies the term “phenomenology” to a whole philosophy. Heidegger takes it rather to designate a method. Since in Being and Time philosophy is described as “ontology” and has being as its theme, it cannot adopt its method from any of the actual sciences. For Heidegger the method of ontology is phenomenology. “Phenomenology,” he says, “is the way of access to what is to become the theme of ontology.” Being is to be grasped by means of the phenomenological method. However, being is always the being of a being, and accordingly, it becomes accessible only indirectly through some existing entity. Therefore, “phenomenological reduction” is necessary. One must direct oneself toward an entity, but in such a way that its being is thereby brought out. It is Dasein which Heidegger chooses as the particular entity to access being. Hence, as the basic component of his phenomenology, Heidegger adopts the Husserlian phenomenological reduction, but gives it a completely different meaning. To sum up, Heidegger does not base his philosophy on consciousness as Husserl did. For him the phenomenological or theoretical attitude of consciousness, which Husserl makes the core of his doctrine, is only one possible mode of that which is more fundamental, namely, Dasein’s being. Although he agrees with Husserl that the transcendental constitution of the world cannot be unveiled by naturalistic or physical explanations, in his view it is not a descriptive analysis of consciousness that leads to this end, but the analysis of Dasein. Phenomenology for him is not a descriptive, detached analysis of consciousness. It is a method of access to 160 with consciousness but rather with Being; it is through phenomenology that we access our distinctively human way of being (sein) as well as Being itself, which is that which “ determines beings as beings, that in terms of which beings are already understood."233 Evans would have been familiar with traditions of representing bourgeois domestic interiors as metaphors for the unconscious, but he typically chose working class interiors and was more interested to record surfaces and object groupings than to engage in a deep exploration of psychological states, if one can think of his interest in interiors as phenomenological, then it is in the Heideggerian sense of the term, not the Husserlian. Evans was interested in memory, which is different than the unconscious. He understood these spaces as sites of memory, where he was able to photograph surfaces and traces of use. His photographs demonstrate a fascination with how we inhabit buildings and how they inhabit us. Domestic interiors are sites, our haunts, and we inhabit them with objects that leave behind a ghostly trace. These trappings of existence, for example in Evan’s photograph of the De Luze Kitchen or his later photographs of rural kitchens are not hierarchicalized (figures 8, 44-46). In his work they are simply recorded. They speak for their absent inhabitants, reminding them (and us) of events, places, and people from the past. They evoke memories as do the very walls of the rooms. Emily Dickinson famously wrote about human memory as the inner rooms of a house: being. For the Heidegger of Being and Time, philosophy is phenomenological ontology which takes its departure from the analysis of Dasein.” [As cited in: http://www.iep.utm.edu/heidegge/, accessed on 2-11- 2012] 233 In Martin Heidegger, Being and Time. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics; Reprint edition, 2008, p. 6. 161 Remembrance has a Rear and a Front. ‘Tis something like a House— It has a Garret also For Refuse and the Mouse— Besides the deepest Cellar That ever Mason laid— Look to it by it’s Fathoms Ourselves be not pursued— Dickinson wrote extensively about the relationship between home, interiority, domestic space, and memory in the mid nineteenth century. Her work emerged at the same time that American architecture was privatizing the residential dwelling, and her poetry “domesticates” the idea of our memory by suggesting its affinity with the spatial structure of the home.234 In this poem, memory is given a “rear and a front” as well as a “cellar” and is compared directly to a house. Jay Leyda, Evans’s close friend during this period, was interested in Dickinson’s work and its relationship to space and temporality. The two may have discussed her poetry, as it was formative for Leyda. He eventually wrote a book about her poetry: The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson, during his tenure at Yale University. 235 In 1890, William James (Henry James’s brother) wrote The Principles of Psychology, wherein he remarked that “It is surely subjectivity and interiority which are the notions latest acquired by the human mind.” William James eventually coined the term “stream of consciousness” to describe a character’s uncensored interior dialog and 234 For a more in-depth discussion of this point, see Diana Fuss, The Sense of an Interior. New York: Routledge, 2004, especially her chapter “Dickinson’s Eye.” 235 See Jay Leyda, The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1960. 162 the modern experience of interiority. His brother, Henry James, famously utilized this type of literary technique in chapter forty-two of Portrait of a Lady, where the reader is given privileged access to Isabel Archer’s intimate thoughts. Diana Fuss notes that the preface to Portrait of a Lady “offers no apology for the cultural ascendency of interiority and for the narrative turn toward solipsism,” and later remarks that “James’s densely populated ‘house of fiction,’ with each interior observer peering through the window of his own consciousness, quite nearly obliterates the exterior altogether.”236 Clearly, something drastic had happened culturally and socially, which spurned a relentless and driving turn towards interiority in art and literature: it was called modernism. Walter Benjamin called this cultural turn “the phantasmagoria of the interior” pointing to the modern fantasy of how interior furnishings contributed to the subjectivity of an individual. In Benjamin’s Exposé of 1939, he wrote that “phantasmagorias of the interior are constituted by man’s imperious need to leave the imprint of his private individual existence on the rooms he inhabits.”237 For Benjamin, the phantasmagoria of the interior is modernity: exteriority has been driven indoors by the bourgeois obsession with domestication. Susan Buck-Morss, the noted Benjamin scholar, pushed his argument even further, noting that all of Paris was a phantasmagoria, “a magic-lantern show of optical illusions.”238 The descriptive conflation by Buck-Morss of all of Paris with the pre-photographic magic-lantern is attractive for an analysis of Evans’s photography, 236 Fuss, p. 11. 237 Benjamin, p. 14, As quoted in Fuss, p. 12. 238 See Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, Walker Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989, p. 81. 163 which was predicated so much on his early formative experiences in the City of Light. The preponderance of images of interiors and domestic spaces in Evans’s photography of the 1930s, and his break from Stieglitz-inspired romanticism, suggests a deep familiarity with modern literature’s emphasis on interiority. In fact, it would have been very difficult for Evans to escape an awareness of this theme; he was a self-declared literary man. The etymological roots of the word “interior” point to a long-standing relationship of the term with ideas of something inside ourselves or our bodies. The proto-Indo- European interus (whence also intrā), híénteros (“inner, what is inside”) and the Ancient Greek enteron (“intestine, bowel”) both reference the body’s entrails or interior components. The English “interior” appeared for the first time in 1490 in an allusion to “entraylles Interiores.”239 During the Enlightenment, the term shifted from describing a somatic component to the more modern understanding of the term as it typically associated today with the self, mind, or imagination. In 1807, “interior decoration” first appeared as a term to describe a profession dedicated to the study of the décor of homes and interior spaces. John Lukacs, in his article “The Bourgeois Interior,” suggests that “the interior furniture of houses appeared together with the interior furniture of minds.”240 Sigmund Freud first described one’s interior state of unconsciousness as a bourgeois interior. In the “resistance and repression” section of Freud’s Introductory 239 Fuss, p. 16. 240 See John Lukacs, “The Bourgeois Interior.” American Scholar Vol. 39, No. 4, Autumn 1970, p. 623. As quoted in Fuss, p. 16. 164 Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, he describes the unconscious as something akin to an entrance hall and a drawing-room connected by a threshold: Let us therefore compare the system of the unconscious to a large entrance hall, in which the mental impulses jostle one another like separate individuals. Adjoining this entrance hall there is a second, narrower room — a kind of drawing-room — in which consciousness, too, resides. But on the threshold between these two rooms a watchman performs his function: he examines the different mental impulses, acts as a censor, and will not admit them into the drawing-room if they displease him.241 Freud’s description of the unconscious as a middle-class entrance hall and drawing room reflects a larger cultural interest in how ideas of the bourgeois home shaped, formed, and in some sense manipulated the subjects sequestered therein. Literature, states of (un)consciousness, poetry, and the architecture of one’s home increasingly came to define a complex modern existence in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Freud’s influence on the surrealists is well known, and his writing influenced, among many others, the work of Andre Breton and Belgian surrealist photographer/poet Paul Nouge. Surrealist photography was very popular in Paris when Evans was living there. It is likely that he would have seen work like this while abroad, perhaps through magazines and journals at the Shakespeare & Company bookstore, a store and lending library that he frequented. Although he may have been exposed to work that explored the relationship between interiority and unconsciousness, he deliberately moved away from this type of surrealist-style work in the 1930s in an effort to carve out his own 241 Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1917), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. trans. and ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. London: The Hogarth Press, 1953-74, vol. 16, p. 295. 165 photographic explorations of the relationship between literature, memory, interiority, and architecture. Two important works that deal explicitly with the complicated relationship between literature and architecture are Martin Heidegger’s “Poetically Man Dwells” (1951), which argues that poetry and (one’s) dwelling are inextricably intertwined, and Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (1958), wherein Bachelard compares architecture to a type of poetry, “one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories and dreams of mankind.”242 Heidegger premises his essay based on a line of Hölderin’s poetry: Full of merit, yet poetically, man Dwells on this earth This poetic fragment makes the following argument for why two notions of space (figurative space: poetry, and literal space: architecture) are linked, Heidegger writes: “Poetry builds up the very nature of dwelling. Poetry and dwelling not only do not exclude each other; on the contrary, poetry and dwelling belong together, each calling for the other. ‘Poetically man dwells.’”243 Heidegger then asks if it is possible to dwell unpoetically, and the answer, for him, is yes. We can dwell unpoetically only because dwelling is poetic. If it was not poetic, then the poetry could never be “lost.” Notice how he brings up the notion of blindness in his explanation of this point: “for dwelling can be 242 See Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994, orig. pub. 1986, p. 6. 243 In Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought. trans. Albert Hofstadter, New York: Harper and Row, 1971, p. 227. 166 unpoetic only because it is in essence poetic. For a man to be blind, he must remain a being by nature endowed with sight. A piece of wood can never go blind. But when a man goes blind, there always remains a question whether his blindness derives from some defect and loss or lies in an abundance and excess.”244 Here Heidegger connects vision, space, poetry, and architecture, suggesting that architecture and literature are both visionary. This, of course, is a useful way to think about a photographic practice (i.e. a vision-based practice) such as Evans’s, which attempts to bridge the space between literature and photography. If Heidegger understands dwelling to be like poetry, Bachelard reverses the terms and posits that architecture is a type of poetry. In the Poetics of Space, Bachelard writes of a third space, one that exists between the public and the private; the “felicitous” space of the home and its attendant furnishings: chairs, tables, bookcases, and closets. He asserts that meaningful relationships with space take place in the domestic environment, specifically the intimate spaces of the home. Bachelard extends the metaphor of architecture as poetry to encompass the private spaces of the domestic home, writing that: “It [is] reasonable to say we ‘read a house,’ or ‘read a room,’ since both room and house are psychological diagrams that guide writers and poets in their analysis of intimacy.”245 Evans’s marked shift away from photographs of urbanity in the early 1930s and turn towards an increasing interest in photographing the inside of private homes and 244 Heidegger, p. 228. 245 Bachelard, Poetics of Space, p. 38. 167 apartments was a way to counter the violence and intensity of modern life. Interiority was a byproduct of industrialization, a need to turn inward in the face of increased anonymity. Proust, the notorious recluse writing in a cork-lined bedroom, embraced the interior as a way of countering a radical reorganization of urban space under Haussmannization. As cities became increasingly anxiety provoking, the interior became a soothing antidote to this. Interiors became sites where one could fine a refuge from the large, noisy, and impersonal metropolis. The photography historian Shelly Rice notes in her Parisian Views that, under Haussmanization, the space of the city was ruptured and time was suspended. This spatial and temporal loss signaled the onset of modernism. The open boulevards, vistas, and sweeping spaces of the Haussmannized metropolis destroyed the intimate spaces of the city and created new, modern ones, including kiosks, sidewalks, movie theaters, train cars and subways. This is the crucial context for understanding the move towards interiorization in the French novel. Interestingly, Proust’s famous second-story apartment building, where he sequestered and isolated himself during the writing of a la recherche, is located on Boulevard Haussmann; his nineteenth century building was constructed on the remnants of old Paris, the old medieval quarters of Paris that Atget photographed before they were forever lost. Proust, after the death of his mother, moved all his “fussy” family furniture into his new place at 102 Boulevard Haussmann.246 Edmund White, a fellow writer and friend of the author, called this furniture “shabby,” suggesting that Proust’s interest in 246 Fuss, p. 162. 168 these otherwise undesirable objects was a result of the memories they held: his decision to keep the heirlooms was not one of “taste.” Proust writes, “our obscure attachments to the dimensions, to the atmosphere of a bedroom” constitutes “a secret, partial and true aspect of our resistance to death, of the long, desperate, daily resistance to the fragmentary and continuous death that insinuates itself throughout the whole course of our life.”247 The past lies hidden in the objects in a room, and remnants and patinas of past use and history create distinct surfaces on everyday objects. The obsession here with objects in the domestic space functions as kind of tonic to lost time. Walker Evans’s personal experience of modernity both in Paris and New York City likely facilitated his own inward turn in his photographic work towards images of interior spaces and an increasing interest in rural American subjects. In the face of Hausmanization, Proust notoriously retreated into his home; in the face of the fall of Wall Street, Evans increasingly left the city to photograph non-urban subjects (photographing in Ossining, NY, Truro, MA, and, slightly later, the American South in 1934-1936). Both Proust and Evans made their respective “retreats” at a moment when the heimat of their lives as they had known them were threatened. When daily life in Paris was undergoing unprecedented change, Proust began to write about memory and lost time, and Eugène Atget began photographing streets of a city that were about to be lost forever. Walker Evans, in the face of the Great Depression, gave up photographing sleek city façades, and instead began to capture the interiors of the homes of immigrant families, white-washed 247 Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, Vol. II, New York: Vintage, 1982, p. 722. 169 barns in rural America, and the domestic interiors of working class Americans. In this context, a line can be drawn connecting Proust, Atget, and Evans: each of their projects searched for a means to capture a fading past while simultaneously commenting on their own elusive presents. ATGET’S INTÉRIEURS PARISIENS In 1910, Eugène Atget began work on an album of photographs meant to serve as documents for artists and illustrators. This photographic series, Intérieurs parisiens, début du XXe Siècle, artistiques, pittoresques et bourgeois, documented the private residences of different classes throughout the city of Paris. Atget made three slightly different albums, each consisting of sixty photographs of twelve different residential interiors (figures 47-51). Each image was accompanied by a short, handwritten caption noting the identity and occupation of the absent resident. Atget distributed the album to the Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris, the Musée Carnavalet, and the Bibliothèque Nationale that same year, and thus the images entered into larger archives of early twentieth century print and visual media where they could be accessed by general audiences.248 The images themselves are careful, almost obsessive catalogs of the décor of specific rooms in Parisian apartments where intimate views of furniture, bedding, 248 Molly Nesbit in Atget’s Seven Albums points out that this particular series of photographs was meant to be sold by Atget to humorists, or cartoonists, as background material for their cartoons and illustrations. See p. 118-119. See Molly Nesbit, Atget’s Seven Albums. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. 170 knickknacks, and individualized aesthetic taste are recorded in a voyeuristic, yet banal manner. There is no photographer present (mirrors do not reflect Atget and his camera, for instance), and no inhabitants are seen amidst their belongings. However, evidence of the residents’ recent departure is marked by the sleep-worn depressions of mattresses, stacks of reading materials recently thumbed, well-worn carpets, and distressed settees. In terms of the objects visible in these photographs, Nesbit notes that “bourgeois individuals liked to think that they had left the reflection of their personality on their fauteuils, wallpapers, and objets d’art.”249 There are surfaces of walls overloaded with prints and paintings, kitchen countertops crowded with china, assertive dried flowers sitting in vases, flora motifs hectically repeated on carpets and walls, and carved wood mirrors and headboards. To the contemporary eye, these rooms seem stuffy and overcrowded: almost neurasthenic in their patterned densities. Each room is clearly individual, yet maintains a tenor of similarity to all of the other rooms—apparently the décor was more standard than not for the early twentieth century, as Atget gives us a view of interiors across a multitude of social strata, demonstrating the relative ubiquity of these types of domestic styles. The objects in these domestic spaces provide evidence about each inhabitant’s gender, class, and national identity, perhaps prompting Walter Benjamin to refer to 249 Nesbit, p. 124. 171 Atget’s photographs as “scenes of a crime.”250 In Atget’s work there are repeated signs of social rank and economic status. For instance, the rooms of working class individuals have slightly less expensive versions of similar décor found in the parlors and bedrooms of more wealthy individuals.251 Additionally, as Nesbit points out, “Atget’s idea of putting together sixty views of ordinary, private apartments, identified by a few, unspecific facts and without any human presence, was altogether unusual in a public context. Normally portraits like these, of unpeopled rooms, were seen in private places, in family albums, alongside other views of the home and family life, each of which had a special personal significance.”252Atget’s interest in providing examples of domestic interiors across socio-economic boundaries was a type of visual politics that critics like Benjamin recognized and responded to. Benjamin emphatically stated that there was hidden political significance to Atget’s work. In 1931, he wrote: “With Atget, 250 Walter Benjamin, “A Short History of Photography,” pp. 50-51. “Not for nothing were pictures of Atget compared with those of the scene of a crime. But is not every spot of our cities the scene of a crime? Every passerby a perpetrator? Does not the photographer — descendent of augurers and haruspices — uncover guilt in this pictures?” This essay was part of Benjamin’s 1931 book review of Atget Lichtbilder in which Recht talks about how Atget’s photographs contain evidence, “perhaps social, perhaps ironical, perhaps criminal.” In Molly Nesbit, Atget’s Seven Albums, fn. 41, p. 230. Atget Lichtbilder, pp. 14-15. This 1930 monograph contained five photographs from the Intérieurs parisiens album (pp. 25, 27, 29, 43, 45). N.B.: In Roman and Etruscan religious practice, a haruspex (plural haruspices; Latin auspex, plural auspices) was a man trained to practice a form of divination called haruspicy, hepatoscopy or hepatomancy. Haruspicy is the inspection of the entrails of sacrificed animals, especially the livers of sacrificed sheep and poultry. The rites were paralleled by other rites of divination such as the interpretation of lightning strikes, of the flight of birds (augury), and of other natural omens. 251 For his introduction to the Salon d’Automne catalog in 1910, Leon Werth wrote: “one sees the same furniture everywhere, in the ministries, in the bourgeois homes, in the workers’ homes, in the brothels. The salon of le grande 16 resembles the boss’s office: the same armchairs, same consoles, same carpets, same Diane de Falguieres. An epoch without style? But it all holds together, goes together: stamped furniture from Saint-Antoine and paste jewels from the rue de la Paix.” Leon Werth, “Preface,” Salon d’Automne, 1910 (Paris: 1910), p. 47. As quoted in Nesbit, p. 120. 252 Nesbit, p. 124. 172 photographs become standard evidence for historical occurrences, and acquire a hidden political significance. They demand a specific kind of approach; free-floating contemplation is not appropriate to them. They stir the viewer; he feels challenged by them in a new way.”253 The politics at work here by Atget, a known supporter of leftist causes in Paris, was to be found in their representation of social class through the commodity. Intérieurs parisiens should be understood both as a part of and as significantly removed from a long-standing tradition of interior design etchings, photographs, and drawings popular from the early nineteenth century through the early twentieth. One of the most popular pattern/interior design books in Paris in the nineteenth century was Roger-Milès, Comment discerner les styles, which grouped etchings of multiple canonical motifs and styles together on each of its pages.254 Photography portfolios would have either been commissioned by individual bourgeois families to document their drawing rooms and parlors for posterity or would have been resource materials suggesting the most appropriate décor to employ in one’s home (in the United States, Edith Wharton wrote several popular books devoted to this subject). Atget’s work represents a departure from these traditions in that his photographs represent interiors based on class and occupation and therefore have a clear alignment with Marxist ideologies. Atget’s insistence throughout his career that he was a creator of 253 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Walter Benjamin, Illuminations. New York: Schocken Press, 1969, p. 226. 254 Roger-Milès, Comment discerner les styles. Paris: E. Rouveyre, 1896-1897. 173 “documents” and not an “artist” indicates his familiarity with ideas of commodity exchange (a sign hung on his door advertised his work as “Documents pour artistes”)— the overall emphasis on commodities in these photographs as markers of social class and status hints at the same.255 It is very likely that Evans would have seen these photographs reproduced in 1930 shortly before he wrote his own review of recent photo-book publications, “The Reappearance of Photography,” for Hound & Horn in 1931. By 1930 Evans had become acquainted with Berenice Abbott, who was one of the primary forces behind the publication of Atget’s photographs. Evans may have had access to the recently published Atget Lichtbilder (1930), which reproduced five of the photographs from Intériors parisiens. Both Benjamin and Evans, as well as many promoters of photography including the gallery owner Julian Levy, recognized in Atget’s work something particularly modern—modern in the sense of its attempt to archive a fading city rather than celebrate its growth and expansion. Indeed, Atget’s work was striking in its banality, its departure from pictorialist-inspired photography, and its refusal to celebrate the idea of modern “progress.” The formal, document-like qualities of Walker Evans’s De Luze interiors, his Cheever bed series, and his Draper interiors series likely stemmed from Atget’s influence. Like Atget’s Intériors parisiens, Walker Evans’s 1930s photographs of the interior domestic spaces of bourgeois and working-class homes as well as of 255 Several of the photographs in Intérieurs parisiens are known to be of Atget’s own apartment, thus making it clear that Atget knowingly and willingly implicated himself as a participant in these notions of modern exchange and commodity fetishism. 174 vernacular rural architecture in New England essentially repeat the classical Marxist division of capitalist society into “two great hostile camps, its two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.”256 In this way, both Atget and Evans’s projects can be understood as thoroughly modern in their intentions. Molly Nesbit, in her important work Atget’s Seven Albums, tells us that Atget was aware that he was creating in 1910 “a body of work all about modernity … [the albums] investigate[d] the stratification of modernity. They began to fixate on the way in which the lows of modernity established themselves, their details, their identity, their difference.”257 The emphasis in Atget’s work on the “low” of the everyday rather than the “high” of lofty artistic imagination exactly heeded to Baudelaire’s vision, articulated in 1859, for photography’s role in the modern era. Baudelaire’s essay entitled “The Modern Public and Photography,” from the salon of 1859, pointed to how photography was most useful for its ability to capture “factual exactitude” rather than “the impalpable and the imaginary”—the latter of which he understood as the domain of “high art” such as history painting. Baudelaire was explicit in his opinion that photography should not be used to explore the imaginaire. Photography’s place, he said, was the archive and photographers should work to make exact records of things that might otherwise disappear. Photography 256 See Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. Hammondsworth: Penguin, 1967, p. 80. 257 Nesbit, p. 116. 175 for Baudelaire was “modern” in that is was able to record the everyday, the stuff of daily existence in the modern city without the mediation of an artist’s hand.258 Evans learned from Atget’s example how to create photographically modern documents that presented scenes from everyday life. During the 1930s, Evans assimilated the lessons of Atget’s example and used his model of the archive to produce a wealth of images from his own time, reflecting the particularities and details of life in America in the 1930s. Atget’s Cuisine,1910 from Intériors parisiens (figure 48) was in Abbott’s personal collection in New York, and was likely seen by Evans. It is not difficult to see how his own images of working-class kitchens from the 1930s drew from Atget’s work. From his example, Evans learned how to create photographs that were critically, although not overtly, engaged with the politics of their time. The “politics” of both Atget’s and Evans’s work is in the form of the documents, in their straightforward style, and not in the presence of overt or immediately recognizable political imagery. Atget provided a framework for Evans to create a photographic practice that would be recognized as American in subject matter, modern in its engagement with the “everyday,” and radical in its formal simplicity and representation of class identities. In this way, the work of both photographers stood apart from and outside of dominant ideas of what it meant to be new and “modern,” deliberately eschewing avant-garde ideas of modernism and favoring instead a more complex language of social and political visual signs. 258 Of course, it is understood today that photography is completely mediated, but in Baudelaire’s time, he understood photography as in a tool or a document useful for artists because of its ability to record “actuality.” 176 Walker Evans’s photographs explore a powerful connectivity between “things” and text. His photographic imperative towards interiority in the 1930s was concerned in many ways with the aspirations of many young artists of his generation. He, like so many of his generation, was concerned with finding a specifically “American” art—one that in its individual formal qualities and specifically American subject matter could stand apart from European traditions. Evans’s explicit break from a European avant-garde style of photographing in the early 1930s tracks precisely this shift away from European cultural dominance. After this break, Evans’s photographic style shifted, and he began working with greater frequency in a stripped-down, straight-forward documentary style. Early on, this style focused on American domestic interiors, and showed viewers the trappings of daily American life in the 1930s. The straight-forward quality of the photographs from this period, with their indebtedness to both realist and modernist conceptions of space and fascination with objects, makes Evans’s work iconic even in the present day. In many ways it could be said that Evans’s early 1930s photographs discussed here dissolved the walls between literature and photography, creating a new, unique photographic style that attempted to bridge the two genres. 177 CHAPTER 3: AMERICAN HAUNTS: WALKER EVANS’S PHOTOGRAPHS OF NINETEENTH CENTURY ARCHITECTURE What was it like to see Walker Evans’s photographs of nineteenth-century American houses on view at the Museum of Modern Art in 1933? In a small annex gallery typically devoted to architecture, viewers would have encountered approximately thirty-nine black and white photographs of rather eccentric American homes and buildings from the previous century. This was Evans’s first exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. The show, Walker Evans: Photographs of Nineteenth-Century Houses (November 16 - December 8, 1933)259 displayed a variety of examples of American vernacular architecture in regional New England. Rather than celebrating modernism and International Style architecture, as one might expect at a museum dedicated to modernism, this exhibition examined nineteenth-century examples of architecture on the verge of ruin. The exhibition explored how these neglected structures represented decaying ideals of American nationalism and identity in the wake of severe fiscal and social crisis during the 1930s. Evans’s photographs, taken in and around New England between the years 1931-1932, represented a small portion of a much larger photographic project documenting American homes in a wide range of nineteenth-century vernacular 259 The MoMA officially lists the dates for the exhibition as November 16 - December 8, 1933. However, Lincoln Kirstein’s article in the first volume of The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art, notes that the exhibition was on view until January 1, 1934. See Lincoln Kirstein, “Walker Evans’ Photographs of Victorian Architecture.” The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art, Vol. 1, No. 4, December 1933, p. 4, appendix B. 178 architectural styles, including Gothic revival, Gingerbread, Carpenter Gothic, and Greek revival. During the 1930s, if viewers found photography in the museum context at all, they typically saw the soft-focused, romantic work of the pictorialists, including photographers in the circle of the father-figure of art photography, Alfred Stieglitz. However, in 1933, in the context of this exhibition, visitors were instead confronted with straight-forward images of architecture with seemingly no visible “artistic hand.” Evans’s photographs were low, not high “documents” of American vernacular architecture easily found in nearly every town in New England. The photographs were in sharp focus, not hazy romantic renditions of American homes. The very presence of these images on the walls of the gallery must have seemed odd to the contemporary viewer. Evans’s images, which displayed cobbled-together eccentric architectural motifs, were on view at an institution where the heights of artistic achievement were expected. In the gallery, viewers encountered examples of a variety of American architectural styles, many of which were labeled in the exhibition checklist as simply “House,” “Mansard House,” “Gingerbread House,” or “Gothic House,” accompanied by the location and date of the photograph.260 Some of these houses would have been the grand example of architectural eccentricity on the main street in a small New England town (the one you inevitably point to as you pass through for the first time, exclaiming: 260 See appendix A: “Exhibition of Photographs of Nineteenth Century American Houses by Walker Evans” MoMA checklist, 1933. MoMA exhibition archives. 179 “Look at that one!”) Other photographs in the exhibition were fairly non-descript, even staid examples of cottage, suburban, and urban architecture: some factories, a general store, a monument, and a few churches. Overall, the exhibition read as a compendium of the strangeness and uniqueness of American architecture from the past century. Rather than stressing the order, clarity, and balance of nineteenth century American architecture, this exhibition focused on the decadence of that architecture from the 1860s through roughly the 1890s. Evans’s work highlighted the irregularity, oddness, and quite often (especially in the photographs of homes no longer in use) the decay of nineteenth century American architecture. This series of photographs relished in the uniqueness of this period, focusing on its particularities rather than its conformities. Evans’s photographs quietly critiqued—and simultaneously created a space for a discussion of –America’s neglected architectural past. A sense of irony pervaded this show, especially in context with the popularity of the International Style exhibition of modern architecture that had been displayed the previous year at the museum. The nineteenth century houses in Evans’s show were the homes (and vacation homes) of the wealthy: the opulent preponderance of crenellation, imposing gates, and ill-proportioned façades hinted at a criticism on Evans’s behalf of a social class able to afford domestic structures that were often architecturally obscene — exhibiting facades that boasted of moneyed privilege at the expense of architectural quality and taste. Nevertheless, this exhibition showed viewers a history of American architecture that had not yet made its way into history books. The very ubiquity of these 180 architectural styles (present even today in many regional New England towns and cities) represented a common American language of class-based domestic architecture in the Northeast rather than modern architectural “masterpieces” of design. Examples of these types of architectural styles in Evans’s exhibition include: Folk Victorian Cottages at Oak Bluff's, Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts (1932), Second Empire House with Mansard Roof, Massachusetts, (1930-31), and Gingerbread House, Nyack, New York, (1932) (figures 1-3). Rather than resembling high art, these photographs looked to contemporary viewers more like images of their own family homes that they might have pasted into family photographic scrapbooks or sent as photographic postcards to family members: such examples of domestic architecture were a common visual currency by the 1930s (figures 4a-4b).261 The format of Evans’s photographs in this exhibition often echo the frontality and framing so prevalent in these types of snapshots. Evans even experimented at one point with a similar type of vignetting of the photograph that was a common visual trope in photography in the early twentieth century (figure 5). It is difficult to reconstruct the scale and sequencing of this exhibition, as no known installation photographs exist, but as Lincoln Kirstein wrote in an exhibition review in 1933, Evans’s photographs “provid[ed] illustrations for a monumental history of the American art of building in its most imaginative and impermanent period. These 261 See Jeff Rosenheim, “‘The Cruel Radiance of What Is’: Walker Evans and the South.” in Walker Evans. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art/Princeton University Press, 2000. 181 wooden houses disintegrate, almost, between snaps of the lens. Many shown in these photographs no longer stand.”262 As we look at these images, we can see their disintegration; we notice the moldering porches, boarded-up windows, and vegetative growth taking over wooden tracery. Even when the homes appear to be in outright “good” condition, still present is something decidedly strange, perhaps even uncanny, about the odd proportions, the intensity of steep-pitched gables, and the cobbled-together mix of architectural motifs. Some other photographs taken by Evans during this period fit this description even more accurately than those that appear on the exhibition checklist. For example, Evans’s Two Gothic Revival Houses with Decorative Vergeboards in Gables, Dorchester, Massachusetts, (1930-31), shows us two Victorian houses: one on the left has boarded-up windows and broken panes of glass (figure 6). Its porch is sagging and sinking before our eyes. The house on the left “leans” on its foundation precariously towards the house on the right, whose front door glass has been shattered. Unkempt shrubbery and vegetation threatens to take over the entranceway and side-porch of the house on the right; both houses look abandoned. The placement of Evans’s camera, tilted slightly backward from a parallel picture plane, gives the illusion that these houses are moving, perhaps even lumbering towards us. How can we begin to consider what photographs like this were meant to convey about American history in the 1930s? 262 See Lincoln Kirstein, “Walker Evans’ Photographs of Victorian Architecture” The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art, Vol. 1, No. 4, Dec., 1933, p. 4. See appendix B. 182 Evans’s work during this period engaged with a larger cultural tendency in painting, literature, and photography that explored the idea of America’s “usable past” during the Great Depression. The carpenter-gothic style house in particular became an iconic symbol of an ideological position that worked against notions of European modernism while emulating more traditional European architectural motifs. The most obvious example of this is Grant Wood’s American Gothic (1930) (figure 7), but the imagery extends as well to the literary works of American authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Faulkner, Sherwood Anderson, and John Steinbeck. This chapter will discuss specifically the prevalence of Gothic and Gothic-inspired motifs in many of these photographs in an effort to elucidate the connections between Evans’s photographs of American vernacular architecture and issues of national identity in the 1930s. To do this, I will investigate the intersections of literature, photography, and architecture in the 1930s, closely analyzing how Evans’s photographs engaged with metaphors of decay, ruin, and the uncanny and how all of these metaphors were in dialogue with the concept of America’s usable past. AMERICAN HAUNTS: VICTORIAN PHOTOGRAPHS IN CONTEXT Evans’s exhibition in 1933 represented the fruits of two years of sporadic photographic excursions taken throughout regional New England. Early in 1931, three young men—the photographer Walker Evans, the Harvard undergraduate and burgeoning cultural aesthete Lincoln Kirstein, and the writer and architectural critic John Brooks Wheelwright—embarked upon a journey to photographically capture American Victorian 183 houses on the verge of decay. The purpose of the trip was to gather photographs for Wheelwright’s proposed book on Victorian architecture. The book was never published, but for Evans the project of documenting this type of architecture became a significant moment in the development of his distinct photographic style. These excursions mark a defining point in Evans’s early career, when both he and Kirstein became aware of how photography could be used as a document to record a fading American past. As Kirstein noted in his press release for the exhibition, his ideas of what photography was and how it should be utilized in the 1930s worked against the grain of “arty” American photographic traditions popular at the time (especially those of Alfred Stieglitz). Instead, Kirstein posited that “photography is in essence a scientifically accurate process for the reproduction of objective appearances... Walker Evans’ photographs are such perfect documents that their excellence is not assertive.”263 Evans and Kirstein first met through mutual literary friends sometime in 1929. At that time, Evans had just begun to work as a photographer, dabbling in commissions for magazines and periodicals. Kirstein, several years younger than Evans, had recently founded the art and literary journal Hound & Horn, run out of Harvard University. Shortly after their meeting, Kirstein published some of Evans’s photographs and short essays in his journal, including Evans’s review essay, “The Reappearance of Photography” (1931), wherein he advocated a return to nineteenth-century photographic practices and styles best embodied in the work of the American Civil War era 263 Ibid. 184 photographer Mathew Brady (figure 8).264 The collaborative efforts between Evans and Kirstein ultimately led to what would become one of the most fruitful collaborations in modern photography—the 1938 exhibition and publication of American Photographs. The photographic journey undertaken by Evans, Kirstein, and Wheelwright in 1931 was in a certain respect oddly timed, at a moment when most of their colleagues were celebrating modernism and the modern skyscraper. (For context, the Empire State Building had just been completed in 1931) (figure 9). Kirstein and Wheelwright’s interest in Gothic revival architecture—a style typically constructed from about 1830 to 1880— was considered by many historians of the time to be decadent. Victorian domestic architecture (including Georgian, American Federal, Greek Revival, and some Gothic styles) was seen in contrast to “high” architecture of the period, including stripped down forms of neo-classically inspired urban architecture, and eventually modernism. Of the photographs displayed at the MoMA, several types of vernacular were represented: Carpenter Gothic style, which applied elements of the lofty architecture of European cathedrals (such as the pointed arch) to flimsy American frame houses, was one of the most prominently shown. Kirstein and Evans’s interest in these under-represented and under-valued styles demonstrated their commitment to popular American vernacular traditions over sleek, new, contemporary mass-produced structures. Like their literary 264 For more on Mathew Brady and Walker Evans, see Jeff Rosenheim, “‘The Cruel Radiance of What Is’: Walker Evans and the South,” in Walker Evans, New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art/Princeton University Press, 2000, and Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs. New York: Hill and Wang, 1989, especially the essays “Albums of War,” and “A Book Nearly Anonymous.” 185 champion Charles Baudelaire, Kirstein and Evans believed that the specificity of an age was best represented by the most common object rather than the rare work of “genius.”265 Evans’s photographs were displayed at the MoMA concurrent with a retrospective exhibition of Edward Hopper paintings and watercolors (figure 10).266 The catalog for the exhibition was written by Charles Burchfield, an American artist working in a visual idiom similar to Hopper’s (figure 11). Given their proximity, Evans’s photographs should be understood as being in dialogue with Hopper’s exhibition: Hopper had been creating paintings and drawings of architectural subjects from the same period since the mid- 1920s.267 Although the exhibition, Walker Evans: Photographs of Nineteenth-Century Houses, hung in New York for only three weeks, it eventually made its way to fourteen other venues across the United States.268 Evans’s photographs were hung in the Architecture Room of the MoMA, thus signaling their intended dialogue with 265 Robert O. Ware points out Charles Baudelaire’s influence on Lincoln Kirstein and Walker Evans. For more, see Robert O. Ware, unpublished master’s thesis, Walker Evans: The Victorian House Project. University of New Mexico, 1989, p. 18. 266 Evans’s exhibition was curated and put together very hastily by Lincoln Kirstein, and the works displayed were culled from a donation by Kirstein of a thirty-four photographs to MoMA’s permanent collection. This is discussed in Rebecca Suzanne Rahmlow’s MA Thesis, “Indigenous/Vernacular”: Negotiating an American History for Modernism Through the Lens of the Architectural Exhibition. MIT, 2008, pp. 59, 155. 267 The catalog for the Hopper exhibition was written by Charles Burchfield, a painter who worked with similar visual themes, including many images of American Victorian houses. 268 As noted in Judith Keller, Walker Evans: The Getty Museum Collection. London: Thames and Hudson, 1995, p. 11, the show “circulated to fourteen other venues from Vermont to Illinois to West Virginia.” The source for this information is likely a list of colleges, towns, and galleries where the show was on tour from May 1934 - June 1940. This is in the MoMA archives in the folder for the Nineteenth Century Houses exhibition. It is not clear whether this show actually toured to these venues or if it was simply a list of intended venues. 186 architecture, and not photography per se.269 The photography department at the MoMA was not founded until 1940. The popularity of Hopper, Burchfield, and eventually Evans’s work for American audiences in the mid to late 1930s signaled a larger cultural turn toward an engagement with American themes and American-based imagery, and a movement away from an interest in European art and artists. This change, referred to as The American Wave and discussed by the American art historian Matthew Baigell, happened abruptly, Baigell argues, during the 1931-1932 exhibition season in New York. The American Wave, he writes, “described all at once a state of mind, a type of subject, and hopefully, a style,” and it was “… a movement looking forward to the production of works of art that, avoiding foreign influence, actually expressed the spirit of the land.”270 Wanda Corn, in The Great American Thing, argues, in contrast, that this change happened more slowly and was largely a result of European artists moving to New York City.271 In the September 1930 issue of Creative Art, Guy Péne du Bois celebrated the work of Edward Hopper and Charles Burchfield, calling them “historical painters.”272 Du Bois called for photographers to capture the American scene in a similar way, drawing on nineteenth 269 As the caption for the Evans photograph appearing in Kirstein’s MoMA press release reads, “from the collection of photographs of 19th century American houses by Walker Evans, the gift of Lincoln Kirstein. On view in the Architecture Room, Nov. 16 to Jan. 1.” Lincoln Kirstein, “Walker Evans’ Photographs of Victorian Architecture.” The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art, Vol. 1, No. 4, Dec., 1933, p. 4. See appendix B. 270 See Matthew Baigell, “The Beginnings of the ‘American Wave’ and the Depression.” Art Journal, Vol. 27, No. 4 Summer, 1968, p. 387. 271 See Wanda Corn, The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. 272 Guy Péne du Bois, “The Palette Knife: America’s Curious Predicament in Art.” Creative Art 7. September 1930, supp. pp. 77-81. 187 century “relics” as sources of inspiration. In an era of industry and increasing mass production, he suggested that artists should seek out the outmoded for moments of native or indigenous expression “composed of relics,” whose “active life ceased not later than nineteen hundred.”273 Du Bois’s call for American photographers to draw on past or native traditions in their work was prompted by an earlier exchange between Edward Hopper and Charles Burchfield, established a few years earlier in the pages of The Arts. In 1928, Hopper said of the work of Charles Burchfield: “our native architecture with its hideous beauty, its fantastic roofs, pseudo-Gothic, French Mansard, Colonial, Mongrel or what not, with eye searing color or delicate harmonies of faded paint, shouldering one another along interminable streets that taper off into swamps or dump heaps — these appear again and again, as they should in any honest delineation of the American scene. The great realists of European painting have never been too fastidious to depict the architecture of their native lands in their pictures” (figure 12).274 The American Wave took as its principle subject the American Scene, understood at the time as best embodied in the work of Hopper, Burchfield and, in a different way, Thomas Hart Benton. The movement began a few years after the great stock market crash of 1929: the same years that were pivotal for Evans’s development as a photographer. During this time, Evans’s photographic approach shifted from a European, 273 Guy Pene du Bois, “The Palette Knife: America’s Curious Predicament in Art.” Creative Art 7, September 1930, supp. pp. 33-35. As quoted in Douglas Eklund, “Exile’s Return: The Early Work, 1928- 1934,” p. 37. 274 See Edward Hopper, “Charles Burchfield: American.” The Arts 14, July 1928, p. 7. 188 new-vision inspired style to a more documentary-inflected one. Evans’s subject matter changed at that time too: he slowly abandoned his photographs of skyscrapers and city life, and began photographing American vernacular architecture, particularly gothic- inspired wooden structures, with much greater frequency. His photographs created during the Depression began to consider how the medium could document America at a time when the meaning and identity of the nation was increasingly unstable. Not only was the idea of America being questioned during this period, so was the idea of the American home and of what it should look like. Contemporary with Evans’s exhibition at MoMA were several shows devoted exclusively to the idea of the home and issues of contemporary housing. These included Housing Exhibition (1934) and America Can’t Have Housing (1934) (figure 15).275 However, the element of wit or irony in Evans’s photographs should not be overlooked, as exemplified by what must be read as absurd examples of vernacular architecture.276 The strange, oddly proportioned structures visible in these photographs 275 Also of note is the Houses and Housing: Industrial Arts, [MoMA Exh. #87-88, May 10 - September 30, 1939]. The concept of the house or “home” itself has an etymological root (heimlich) from which derives unheimlich, or the uncanny: several authors, including Anthony Vidler in The Architectural Uncanny, have explored the relationship between the house and the uncanny. Vidler’s work remarks upon the prevalence of the haunted house in American literature citing examples in the work of Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Edgar Allan Poe. A passage from Freud’s “Uncanny” points to an idea of shifting temporalities and of things once hidden becoming unearthed: “In general we are reminded that the word ‘unheimlich’ is not unambiguous, but belongs to two sets of ideas, which, without being contradictory, are yet very different: on the one hand it means what is familiar and agreeable, and on the other, what is concealed and kept out of sight... everything is unheimlich that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light.” In Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny. Boston: MIT Press, 1992, pp. 224- 5. 276 e.g. Gothic Revival Watertower, Dorchester or Roxbury, Massachusetts (1932) and Main Water Pump (1933) (figures 13 and 14). 189 speak to an American excess or folly in architecture peculiar to the late nineteenth century. The ironic tendency in Evans’s photographs from this period should be seen as a continuation of a similar use of humor that appeared in his early work. Evans’s Damaged (1928-30), is a perfect example of the photographer’s witty handle on American daily life as it appeared in his images from the period (figure 15a). Like many artists, writers, and thinkers of his generation, Evans was fascinated by the past and by how the past had come to inform the present in the 1930s. Kirstein’s analysis of the photographic excursion he took with Evans and Wheelwright in his diary describes his interest in how Evans’s photographs captured photographic temporality, noting that Evans was working “as a surgeon on the body of time,” and describing his photographs as having an “airless” or temporally static nature, free from atmospheric haze.277 In Kirstein’s review of Evans’s exhibition, he noted that photography is “a stationary magic that fixes a second from time’s passage onto a single plane.”278 Kirstein was invested in the idea of photographs as keepers of cultural history, and Evans’s Gothic Gate near Poughkeepsie, New York (1931) formalizes this idea, depicting a gothic- 277 “Evans’ style is based on moral virtues of patience, surgical accuracy and self-effacement. In order to force details into their firmest relief, he could only work in brilliant sunlight, and the sun had to be on the correct side of the street. Often many trips to the same house were necessary to avoid shadows cast by trees or other houses; only the spring and fall were favorable seasons. The focus was sharpened until so precise and image was achieved, that many of the houses seem to exist in an airless nostalgia for the past to which Edward Hopper in his noble canvases pays a more personal tribute.” Lincoln Kirstein press release for Walker Evans’ Photographs of Victorian Architecture. One can deduce from Kirstein’s assertion that Evans’s photographs seem “airless” due to their documentary quality, which is “the greatest service” of the photograph. Hopper’s canvases, on the other hand, because they are mediated by the artist’s touch, are more personal or intimate “portraits” of Victorian architecture. 278 In Lincoln Kirstein, “Walker Evans’ Photographs of Victorian Architecture.” The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art, Vol. 1, No. 4, December 1933, p. 4. 190 inspired home sequestered away from the modern-world by an imposing iron gate (figure 16). In the 1930s, Evans became increasingly interested in creating photographs that alluded to a dynamic tension between the past and present; his photographs of Victorian houses are about the intersections of architecture, time, and history. During this period, both he and Kirstein were drawing heavily on the popular conception of the “usable past” as put forth by Van Wyck Brooks, whose essay, “On Creating a Usable Past” (1918), influenced a generation of artists and writers.279 Ultimately, however, Evans’s photographs of the 1930s were being made for the future (or so he later claimed): in a 1962 unpublished author’s note for American Photographs, Evans declared in third person that “Evans was, and is, interested in what any present time will look like in the past.”280 Evans’s photographs may have been made so that the past could be seen by future generations, but the architecture that appears in these photographs is a vernacularized amalgam of past, European styles. Kirstein spoke directly to this point in his summation of Evan’s architectural images as they appeared in American Photographs: In our architecture of the mid-nineteenth century our carpenters and builders made a human and widely acceptable familiarization of gothic 279 On the importance of the past for modern writers, Van Wyck Brooks writes, “The present is a void, and the American writer floats in that void because the past that survives in the common mind of the present is a past without living value. But is this the only possible past? If we need another past so badly, is it inconceivable that we might discover one, that we might even invent one?” Van Wyck Brooks, “On Creating a Usable Past,” The Dial, April 11, 1918, pp. 337-341. Brooks was a 1908 graduate of Harvard and became a renowned literary critic, arguing for the significance of American literary figures such as Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Washington Irving, and other nineteenth century American writers at a time before their work was appreciated by the academy. 280 From an unpublished “Author’s Introductory Note” for the reissue of American Photographs in 1962. In Walker Evans at Work. New York: Harper & Row, 1982, p. 151. 191 and renaissance models... By 1850 we could afford ourselves the bold appropriation of every past style... Only Evans has completely caught the purest examples of this corrupt homage... Such ornament, logical in its place and its time, indigenous to Syracuse in Sicily, or London in England, was pure fantasy in Syracuse, New York, or New London, Connecticut.281 As it happens, these photographs of nineteenth-century houses on the verge of decay were in dialogue with literary practices of the 1930s. During this period, writing by so-called Southern Agrarians, including Allen Tate, were published in the pages of Hound & Horn. Tate was the southern regional editor for Hound & Horn from 1932- 1934 and his articles appeared frequently in the journal. The Southern Agrarians were a group of twelve American writers, poets, essayists, and novelists from the South who joined together to write a pro-Southern agrarian manifesto: a collection of essays published in 1930 entitled I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition. Their agenda was to halt what they perceived as a loss of Southern identity and culture to increasing industrialization. Although their politics were troubling, their writing did provide a model for Evans and his milieu of how to consider a pre-industrial American past in the face of the economic decline of the 1930s.282 During this time, Evans’s work raised important questions about what America was during the Great Depression, and what it looked like. For him, 1930s America was best represented by the well-worn surface, the small 281 See Lincoln Kirstein, essay, Walker Evans, American Photographs. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1938. 282 For more on Walker Evans and the Southern Agrarians see Douglas R. Nickel, “American Photographs Revisited.” American Art, Vol. 6, No. 2, Spring 1992, pp. 78-97. 192 Southern rural town, and the architectural structure on the verge of ruin: all of these were common themes in Southern Gothic and Southern Renaissance literature. In a similar fashion to Joyce’s use of Dublin in his novels, or the importance of New England to Hawthorne and Melville’s writings, Tate believed that the South inspired a type of American writing that had its own distinct and often dark tenor. Through conversation with Kirstein, Evans likely gleaned from the Southern Agrarian example a means of identifying with a version of America’s past, a period so attractive to him that in 1935 he embarked on a photographic excursion to the South bringing with him only his photographic equipment and Mathew Brady’s Illustrated History of the Civil War in the trunk of his car.283 In 1934, eleven Brady photographs had appeared in the pages of Hound & Horn, accompanied by an essay by Charles Flato, a literary critic and writer associated with the magazine. In his essay, Flato wrote that Brady’s work was primarily literary in spirit: “he placed object against contrasting object, ideas as opposed to idea, in closer proximity than a less literary-minded artist would have allowed proper.” 284 Perhaps Flato had in mind something like the photograph Ruins of Gallego Flour Mills, Richmond, VA (1965) from Brady’s studio (an image likely by Alexander Gardner), which juxtaposes an open, vista-like expanse of space with burnt-out distant buildings. The “poetry,” as it were, appears here in the discord between beauty and destruction (figure 16a). 283 As relayed in conversation with Jeff Rosenheim at the MET Walker Evans Archive, November 2011. 284 As quoted in Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs. p. 232 193 Throughout his life, Evans was a self-declared “literary man.” Because of these roots, and his lifelong commitment to literature, Evans was no doubt familiar with the literary and artistic traditions of the Gothic and its strong historical ties to ideas of nationalism. One need only look at how historically disparate writers and philosophers like Immanuel Kant, Horace Walpole, and William Faulkner utilized Gothic traditions and narratives in their writings to understand the prevalence of the Gothic’s links to ideas of nationalism. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Gothic castle, the long-standing emblem of the genre, began to give way in American art and literature to the old house or mansion, which, as Fred Botting remarks in his book Gothic, “became the site where fears and anxieties returned in the present.”285 The preponderance of Victorian and Gothic-inspired houses in the writings of Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Flannery O’Connor, and Eudora Welty, among many others, speaks directly to this point. LINCOLN KIRSTEIN When Kirstein and Evans first met, Kirstein was a Harvard undergraduate and was obsessed with the history of the American Civil War, the photographs of Mathew Brady, and the writings of historian Henry Adams. Kirstein’s fascination with the end of the nineteenth century extended to traditional American vernacular architecture, and he remarked that his interest was to create on film “a monumental history of the American 285 See Fred Botting, Gothic. London and New York: Routledge, 1996, p. 2. 194 art of building in its most imaginative and impermanent period.”286 During their excursions to various New England and small upstate New York towns, Kirstein and Wheelwright (both familiar with these regional areas) directed Evans to photograph homes in a wide range of architectural styles that reflected an emphasis on hand-made or ad hoc mail-order carpentry.287 The three drove around New England in a Ford coupe, documenting architecture on the verge of ruin with the objective of preserving these structures through the medium of photography and illustrating Wheelwright’s text. Such initiatives were not strictly new: the antiquarian journal Old Time New England, for instance, had been printing photographs of Colonial architecture for several years (figure 17). For the most part, however, architectural journals and magazines of the 1930s neglected printing images or discussing the merits of Victorian architecture. Kirstein had lived in Boston since 1912, and throughout his life he remained committed to the nineteenth century ideals over modern ones. Kirstein notes in the forward to Hound & Horn Letters, written forty-eight years after the first magazine was printed, that “I felt and feel I am a man of the nineteenth century,” and that he founded 286 Lincoln Kirstein, “Walker Evans’ Photographs of Victorian Architecture.” Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art Vol. 1, No. 4, December 1933, p. 4. 287 As Robert O. Ware points out in his thesis “‘Carpenter Gothic’ is one all encompassing label given to the Victorian period in which the decoration was given over to the whims of the occupant or to the architect. What might have been available in terms of style was certainly not universal. The house became instead a personal expression drawn from the impossibly numerous designs available in the mail order catalogues. One could order from these catalogues any style of trim and decoration, from simple curved volutes of the Italian Baroque to the most delicate and complex of gothic ‘lace.’” (See The Universal Design Book (1904), reprinted: Firefly Books, 1984.) Ware continues: “One catalogue offered the components of its staircases in no fewer than 47 different styles of baluster, 22 styles of railing, and 12 different styles of decorative brackets, each exemplifying Greek, Roman, Gothic, Rococo, Romanesque, Colonial as well as several innovative styles.” Robert O. Ware, unpublished master’s thesis, Walker Evans: The Victorian House Project. University of New Mexico, 1989 195 Hound & Horn as a “Harvard Miscellany,” intending it to be a kind of “historical or archaeological survey of a site, its buildings, traditions, and the men who made them.”288 The revival houses that Evans photographed with Kirstein by his side recalled the era of the American author Henry James, whose work Kirstein, Evans, and the writers contributing to Hound & Horn greatly admired. In fact, the final issue of Hound & Horn was devoted exclusively to James, who at the time was an American expatriate living in London. Evans’s personal library contained many books by and about James as well as publications focusing on the Victorian era. Today, much of Evans’s personal library is contained in his archive at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In the forward to Hound & Horn Letters, Kirstein retroactively asserts that his cultural and academic interests during these early years stemmed not from a “modernist” position but rather a Victorian one. He points out that the “minds I admired most were still under the influence of Charles William Eliot, Charles Eliot Norton, George Santayana, John Livingston Lowes, Alfred North Whitehead, Charles Grandgent, and Irving Babbitt.”289 Collectively, these names represent a veritable who’s-who of 288 Lincoln Kirstein, Forward, “Hound & Horn Forty-eight Years After.” In Mitzi Berger Hamovitch, Hound & Horn Letters, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1982, xi. 289 Hamovitch, p. xi. Charles William Eliot was serving as Harvard’s president in 1869, and is credited with transforming the provincial college into a preeminent American research university. He did this in part by careful study of European educational systems from the ground up. Charles Eliot Norton was appointed Professor of the History of Art at Harvard in 1875, a chair which he held until 1898. George Santayana, a professor of philosophy at Harvard, and is best known for coining the well-known phrase: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" (George Santayana (1905) Reason in Common Sense, volume 1 of The Life of Reason). Santayana taught at Harvard until 1912. Some of his Harvard students became famous in their own right, including T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Gertrude Stein, Walter Lippmann, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Harry Austryn Wolfson. John Livingston Lowes was an American professor of English Literature at Harvard from 1918 to 1939. Alfred North Whitehead was a English 196 nineteenth century American academics, social theorists, and philosophers.290 Thus, it makes sense that Kirstein’s interest in the early 1930s should have been to preserve the architectural markers of his intellectual past — these structures served as signifiers of the roots of his intellectual development. The Evans Victorian Houses series, then, can be understood to reflect, in part, the aims of the project described in Kirstein’s journal, “The Victorian houses that Jack [sic] Wheelwright and Walker Evans and I have been photographing are really remarkable. At least part of my life consists in filling up the ledger of the indigenous past, in recording these places, and in time which by accident and preference I know best.”291 One of the most important nineteenth century buildings for Kirstein was the Boston Public Library, where his father was president for many years. Kirstein wrote that the “visual taste and interest Hound & Horn manifested in painting, sculpture, and architecture … came from an intimacy with the magnificent palace of the Boston Public mathematician and taught philosophy at Harvard from 1924-1937. Charles Grandgent was Professor of Roman Languages at Harvard from 1899 to 1911 and served as Chair of the Romance Department. Irving Babbitt was a professor of French Literature at Harvard beginning in 1912. He is credited with introducing the study of comparative literature there. Babbitt is also credited as a founder of the New Humanism, a movement that had significant influence on literary discussion and conservative thought in the period from 1910 to 1930. 290 Kirstein’s loyalties to the nineteenth century stand in marked contrast to the interests of Varian Fry, a co-editor of the journal, who stated, “I was an admirer of Joyce, Kirstein of Eliot. We had both read Gertrude Stein, looked at Picasso, listened to Strawinski [sic]. They seemed to be important, and we felt that Harvard undergraduates ought to know more about them than they did. It was to hail the new and glittering world they and their influences were creating, and to bid farewell to the stodgy in the nineteenth century and its heavy hand on the twentieth, that I… wrote that first editorial.” As quoted in Hamovich, p. 6. 291 Lincoln Kirstein’s journal entry as quoted in James R. Mellow, Walker Evans, New York: Basic Books, 1999, p. 137. 197 Library.”292 Referring to this structure as the “greatest of many great buildings by Charles Follen McKim and Stanford White,” Kirstein noted that “while the library had been planned in the old century, it represented to me the apex of concrete perfection in a rational material plan, on the highest level of imaginative competence, from Edwin Austin Abbey’s series of Arthurian murals in the Delivery Room to Augustus Saint- Gaudens’s golden marble memorial lions on the grand staircase, the inlaid brass zodiac in the entrance hall, and the richness of the mahogany paneling in the Director’s Room.” 293 Kirstein’s father, he recalls, had discussions with the famous American painter John Singer Sargent regarding the completion of his vault paintings at the library that depicted scenes of comparative religion.294 Indeed, for a young man starting up an important literary journal (modeled on modernist versions such as those by Ezra pound’s The Dial), it is odd that these were the artists and architects Kirstein claimed to be invested in during this period. Their work was at a significant remove from modernism, and thus Kirstein’s interest in and consciousness of a living past forms the quiet undercurrent of Hound & Horn. However, this ideological position is not immediately apparent when one first reads the journal. Instead, Hound & Horn is filled with a mix of what we now consider to be progressive and conservative thinkers. On the one hand, the work of Tate and the Southern Agrarians appears several times in the journal. This group recognized that the 292 Hamovitch, p. xiv. 293 Ibid. 294 Ibid. 198 traditional roots of agrarian life in the United States dated back to the eighteenth century — they pointed out that many of America’s Founding Fathers were farmers — and opposed the rise of urbanism, industry, and the beginnings of an international economy, which they felt were responsible for the stock market crash and the Great Depression. Politically, many of the Southern Agrarians were explicitly anti-communist, and many were politically conservative, holding true to the ideas of the (now destroyed) Old South. Kirstein admired Tate’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead” and he was enamored with the Civil War, although he later claimed that the group’s “economics seemed childish.”295 As the literary critic G.A.M Janssens pointed out, Tate believed that the South “provided a usable myth, a frame of reference for his own poetry—some of the best of which, he was to admit later, was written during the Agrarian phase.”296 It is perhaps this interest in recognizing the importance of one’s own geographic region and its ability to shape an artistic or literary sensibility that inspired Kirstein to encourage Evans to photograph Victorian houses in his regional New England. The other end of the literary spectrum was also represented in Hound & Horn, as demonstrated by the appearance in its pages of radical, avant-garde writers such as e.e. cummings, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot.297 Hound & Horn was considered to be the 295 Ibid, p. vx. 296 Tate papers. Quoted from G.A.M. Janssens, The American Literary Review. The Hague: Mouton, 1968, p. 133, in Hamovitch, p. 14. 297 Politically, however, these writers remain quite distinct both from each other and from the Southern Agrarians. Ezra Pound’s alignment with fascist ideologies and his anti-Semitism have been often remarked upon in the secondary literature on his work. Similarly, T.S. Eliot’s conservative politics has often been discussed. E.E. Cummings is typically not associated with any particular political agenda. Instead, the 199 successor to Pound’s Dial, a journal in turn modeled on Eliot’s London-based Criterion. Eliot in particular, Kirstein writes, “more than any one person, was responsible in my mind, for the pattern of what a magazine might be. His magazine, Criterion, was indeed, for me and many of my generation, ‘a standard of judging; a rule or test by which anything is tried in forming a correct judgment respecting it… [The Waste Land] was magic; it seemed to fuse past and present [emphasis mine], to make certain assertions about renewal or repetition of seasons and epochs.”298 It is precisely this type of intellectual positioning (with one foot in the past, and the other in the present — or an interest in older, more conservative traditions as well as more contemporary ideas) that defined what it meant to be “contemporary” in America in the early 1930s, at least amongst the crowd of learned Harvard students that Kirstein moved in. Kirstein’s interest in how the past manifested itself in the present set up the ideological framework for the transcendental nature of his work had been pointed to by many literary critics. See Tim Redman, Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), Leon Surette, Pound in Purgatory, Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2003, and "Ezra Pound and Fascism" in Marianne Korn, ed., Ezra Pound and History, Ezra Pound Scholarship Series. Orono, ME.: National Poetry Foundation, University of Maine, 1985. For a critical examination of Eliot’s politics see Jed Esty, “Eliot's recessional: Four Quartets, National Allegory and the End of Empire.” Yale Journal of Criticism, Vol. 16, Issue 1, 2003, pp. 39-60. 298 The full passage by Kirstein is as follows: “I was fifteen years old, in boarding school, when an older friend, a senior on his way to Yale, gave me a copy, volume I, number I, of a new magazine. It had no pictures. Its contents included an essay on ‘Dullness’ by George Saintsbury, a sketch of a novel by F.M. Dostoevsky, an essay on Tristram and Isolt by T. Sturge Moore, and a longish poem entitled ‘The Waste Land’ by the magazine’s editor, T.S. Eliot. It is impossible to recapture the effect this work had on me, and my friend. We had no education in The Golden Bough or From Ritual to Romance; the poem then bore neither notes nor the dedication to Ezra Pound; it was quite unexplained and inexplicable. But it was magic; it seemed to fuse past and present, to make certain assertions about renewal or repetition of seasons and epochs. It became a text from which we quoted at increasingly frequent and appropriate moments.” Hamovitch, p. xvi. 200 nineteenth-century houses series. Kirstein wrote about how this type of thinking was particular to his social milieu in Boston and New England: In fact, my natural bent towards historicity, my consciousness of a living past, was reinforced by a very active and beautiful familial society which extended from Beacon Hill in Boston to Shady Hill (C.E. Norton’s old home), Cameron Forbes’s estate in Milton, and the lovely houses of Shaws, Lowells, and Ameses in Concord. In our late twenties, my nineteenth century was indeed alive. Identification with a society of living and thinking New England dynastic actors gave a security and assurance prompting freedom of action, a sense of inevitability of possibility achieved which I do not think any other locus in America then offered.299 Kirstein was aware of the contradictory nature of his aesthetic and intellectual interests, and during this period was very clear about making a distinction between his interests in “modern” art as opposed to “contemporary” art. Indeed, Kirstein’s other major artistic and intellectual undertaking during the late 1920s and early 1930s, outside of Hound & Horn, was his role as the primary founder of the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art in December, 1928. Kirstein, along with John Walker III and Edward Warburg (who came from a prominent banking family) founded the society, but it was really Kirstein who was at the helm of its organization.300 Kirstein provided intellectual and monetary support (given to him by his father) for the Society. He wrote in his memoirs that “Hound & Horn cost worry, hard labor, money, but there was still enough left over for the Harvard Society of Contemporary 299 Hamovitch, p. xv. 300 For more on Kirstein, Walker, Warburg, and the Harvard Society see “The Harvardites” in Nicolas Fox Weber, Patron Saints: Five Rebels who opened America to a New Art, 1928-1943. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992, pp. 1-132. 201 Art.”301 It is important to point to the use of the word “contemporary” rather than “modern” in the name of this society, as its selection was very deliberate and reflective of Kirstein’s interests in art at this time. As Sybil Kantor writes in her history of the founding of the MoMA: “Rather than the promotion of ‘modern’ art — which, for Alfred Barr, connoted a disciplined sense of history — Kirstein’s stated focus was on ‘contemporary’ art, which satisfied his own curiosity about ‘the difference between ‘originality,’ ‘personality,’ and ‘quality,’ and whatever connected these in the present context.”302 Or, to put it another way, Alfred Barr was more interested in a traditional, linear idea of history and artistic development, whereas Kirstein was concerned with aspects of the past that reemerged and influenced the present. In this way, Kirstein’s thinking reflects a historical-materialist notion of history popular among the philosophers and cultural theorists of this time. Eventually, Kirstein would speak out against the project of modernism altogether, but this would come only after he had served in the U.S. Army at Fort Dix during World War II.303 In October 1948, Kirstein published an article in Harper’s, “The State of Modern Painting,” in which 301 As quoted in Sybil Gordon Kantor, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002, p. 198. See also Lincoln Kirstein, Mosaic: Memoirs. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994, p. 109. 302 Kantor, p. 198. 303 During this period, Kirstein worked on a plan for a survey of United States “battle art.” He was stationed primarily at Fort Belvoir and conducted research at West Point, the Library of Congress, and the War College. Nine of the paintings and sculptures Kirstein worked on appeared in Life magazine in a color spread. Lincoln worked on several shows including an exhibition of American Battle Art at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and an exhibition of prints and lithographs at the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. During this time, Barr was asked by MoMA to step down as director and focus on research. Perhaps out of solidarity, Kirstein resigned as a consultant on Latin American Art at the MoMA. In 1944 Kirstein left the U.S. for England, and eventually ended up in Paris where he continued to write, published, and be engaged in artistic and political matters. 202 he overtly declared his opposition to modernism and called those who practiced abstraction an “Academy of decorative improvisation.”304 He dismissed Matisse as a “decorator in the French taste, the Boucher of his epoch.”305 In light of this later dismissal of modernism, it is all the more intriguing that in the 1930s Kirstein contributed the forward to one of the most formative “catalogues” of American modern photography, Walker Evans’s American Photographs, a text that accompanied the 1938 exhibition of his work at the Museum of Modern Art. This show — and more importantly, the book — informed an entire generation of photographers and continues to do so today.306 Remarking on his tense relationship with modernism, Kirstein noted the following about his aesthetic tastes when he was actively publishing the journal: “Sargent [who had painted the murals in the Boston Public Library, and whose work Kirstein admired] was the antithesis of painting that our Harvard Society of Contemporary Art fostered in an effort parallel and comparable to the magazine, it was neither Pablo Picasso nor Henri Matisse who were my models, but rather Hans Holbein, Corneille de Lyon, and Jean Auguste Ingres. As an adventurer, on a small scale, I embraced the advance-guard taste of Alfred Stieglitz and progressive Manhattan galleries.”307 This statement makes clear the ways in which Kirstein (even early on) was working against the grain of the dominant 304 See Lincoln Kirstein, “The State of Modern Painting.” Harper’s, October 1948, p. 51. 305 Ibid., p. 51. 306 Like so many of his generation, in the 1930s Kirstein did not consider photography “art” in the way he did painting and sculpture. For example, Kantor notes the following about Alfred Barr (Kirstein’s colleague): “Although from the beginning, for intellectual reasons, Barr included photography as one of the arts he wanted in the structure of the museum, according to Beaumont Newhall in an interview by the author in 1981, Barr was less than enthusiastic about the medium,” in Kantor, “Modernism Takes its Turn in America,” fn. 56, p. 416. 307 See Lincoln Kirstein “Hound & Horn: Forty-Eight Years After.” in Hamovitch, p. xiv. 203 taste for modernity of those involved with the Harvard Society of Contemporary Art. Additionally, it points to Kirstein’s early (also somewhat fringe) interest in photography, which he importantly understood to be an example of contemporary, rather than modern art. Kirstein, Evans, and Wheelwright embarked on several excursions together in their attempt to photograph fading examples of nineteenth-century architecture. From the beginning it was clear that Kirstein’s intentions for the project were to exhibit the photographs.308 One month before the project began, on March 17, 1931, Kirstein recorded the following hopes for the project in his journal: Took Walter Sturgis to see Jack Wheelwright to get suggestions for a proposed show at the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art in June. Romantic American Architecture & Industrial Contemporary work. I thought that Walter would like Jack more on closer acquaintance. We looked over various curious cultural Architectural Americana…Walter liked [John Brooks Wheelwright] but was firm in the belief that the age of such eccentric individuals is over. That one can only accomplish good work by the submergence of the individual, not by retreat into a James Garnder-Berenson ivory tower. 309 Kirstein noted that he was unsure of what exactly the project would entail and what should and should not be photographed. As he wrote in his journal later, on April 15, 1931: 308 In addition to the possible exhibition of these works at the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art and their use as illustrations for Wheelwright’s book, Kirstein also hoped to publish Evans’s images as accompaniment to Wheelwright’s articles in Hound & Horn and perhaps even as illustrations for Lewis Mumford’s The Brown Decades (first published in 1931). For more, see Belinda Rathbone, Walker Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1995, p. 68. 309 From Lincoln Kirstein, “October 14, 1930 - July 23, 1931 Diary, March 17, 1931 (p. 215),” Lincoln Kirstein Papers, ca. 1913-1994, Box 3, Folder 14—Diaries, Journals 1930-31, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, New York City. 204 Jack Wheelwright and Walker Evans and I started our photographic campaign to get all the good Victorian-era houses in the vicinity from New Greek, through the influence of Viollet le Duc through English Gothic and Italian and French Renaissance ending up in the McKinley period...We had some difficulty in keeping our impulses straight on this stuff, i.e., did we want the best of the Romantic stuff, or the best and most eccentric, or a historical survey of the whole period to be used as illustrations for Jack Wheelwright’s book, or for an Exhibition at the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art, where Hack wants to arrange a Victorian era & Industrial Architecture show? We also took a certain number of industrial subjects but I was more interested in getting the older things because they are all in mortal danger of imminent destruction [and] despair…310 Importantly, this latter passage points out how Kirstein, Evans, and Wheelwright were initially interested in photographing industrial architecture as well as Victorian vernacular architecture. However, by the time of the MoMA exhibition, most of the industrially- themed images were cut from the final checklist.311 After their initial excursions in 1931, Evans sent prints of the Victorian houses to Kirstein, and on May 13, 1931 Kirstein noted in his journal that he had received the photographs, which were “except for very few exceptions better than [he] had dared 310 As quoted in Rebecca Suzanne Rahmlow, “Indigenous/Vernacular”: Negotiating an American History for Modernism Through the Lens of the Architectural Exhibition, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008, p. 54. Rahmlow notes, “the ‘Hack’ Kirstein refers to is, either a nickname for Walter Sturgis who Kirstein refers to with regard to the possibility of this exhibition in another diary entry in March 1931; or a reference to Howard Hack.” (see fn. 116, p. 108). From Lincoln Kirstein, “October 14, 1930 - July 23, 1931 Diary, April 15, 1931 (pp. 278-79),” Lincoln Kirstein Papers, ca. 1913-1994, Box 3, Folder 14—Diaries, Journals 1930-31, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, New York City. Although I have viewed these diaries myself, I am indebted to Rebecca Rahmlow’s thesis for initially pointing to the importance of Kirstein’s diaries at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts for the purposes of this research. 311 Nevertheless, some of Evans’s industrial photographs were exhibited in smaller venues before the MoMA show, as discussed later in this chapter. 205 hope.”312 Within a few days, Kirstein had lunch with Parker-Lloyd Smith and Archibald MacLeish (editors of Fortune) to see if they would be interested in publishing an article on Walker Evans’s Victorian houses, thus suggesting Kirstein’s continued intentions for their publication and possible exhibition.313 Between May 1931 and October 1933, Kirstein, Evans, and Wheelwright made several more photographic excursions, including a trip to Boston in mid-June 1931,314 a late June 1931 trip to Ashfield, Massachusetts, and trips during the summer of 1931 to Greenfield and Northampton, Massachusetts and Poughkeepsie, New York.315 In preparation for the MoMA exhibition, the three took another trip on October 15, 1933 to Orange, New Jersey. Kirstein was clearly struck by this particular excursion, noting in his journal: 1879 community separated by a stream from Asbury Park, where prolonged religious conferences take place … A town of tent houses and wooden villas; today, deserted except for a few invalids in wheel chairs. A few dying cancerous old women immobile on deserted porches. The sun was very dramatic on some of the flat wooden Gothic detail. A large model under a wooden dome of the Holy City, with a few leaves blown in among the plaster mosques. We took six pictures with care and dispatch, momentarily expecting to be stopped, 312 Lincoln Kirstein, “October 14, 1930 - July 23, 1931 Diary, May 13, 1931 (p. 318),” Lincoln Kirstein Papers, ca. 1913-1994, Box 3, Folder 14—Diaries, Journals 1930-31, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, New York City. 313 Lincoln Kirstein, “October 14, 1930 - July 23, 1931 Diary, July 29, 1931 (pp. 389-90),” Lincoln Kirstein Papers, ca. 1913-1994, Box 3, Folder 14—Diaries, Journals 1930-31, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, New York City. As Kirstein wrote, he lunched with Parker-Lloyd Smith and “Archie” MacLeish to see “… whether or not they would want an article on the Victorian houses Walker Evans [was] collecting.” As quoted in Rahmlow, p. 56. 314 Lincoln Kirstein, “October 14, 1930 - July 23, 1931 Diary, June 13, 1931 (p. 370),” Lincoln Kirstein Papers, ca. 1913-1994, Box 3, Folder 14—Diaries, Journals 1930-31, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, New York City. 315 Lincoln Kirstein, “October 14, 1930 - July 23, 1931 Diary, June 21, 1931 (p. 379),” Lincoln Kirstein Papers, ca. 1913-1994, Box 3, Folder 14—Diaries, Journals 1930-31, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, New York City. 206 and working ourselves into a mild hysteria of expecting the lady at the window to come in and prevent us.316 This trip ended with Kirstein and Evans visiting their mutual friend Ben Shahn to see his sketch for a mural for a doctor’s office on Bethune Street in Ossining, New York. On November 9, 1933 Kirstein had lunch with Alfred Barr (presumably to discuss the upcoming Evans show at MoMA) and on November 12, 1933 had a dinner with Evans (presumably to discuss the same).317 JOHN BROOKS WHEELWRIGHT Although Kirstein’s interest in nineteenth century architecture was passionate, he was ultimately an amateur, and for this reason relied heavily upon his comrade, John Brooks Wheelwright, a critic and historian of architecture. As Wheelwright’s father was a fairly well-known architect in Boston, he had had exposure to the field from an early age. Wheelwright studied at Harvard from 1916 but was expelled in 1920. During these years and shortly thereafter, he became a central figure in the circle of Harvard Aesthetes that included poets such as e. e. cummings, John Dos Passos and Malcolm Cowley.318 316 Lincoln Kirstein, “May 26, 1933 - July 24, 1934 Diary, October 15, 1933 (p. 60),” Lincoln Kirstein Papers, ca. 1913-1994, Box 4, Folder 20—Diaries, Journals 1933-34, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, New York City. 317 Rahmlow, p. 58. 318 “The Harvard Aesthetes of 1916 were trying to create in Cambridge, Massachusetts, an after-image of Oxford in the 1890s. They read the Yellow Book, they read Casanova's memoirs and Les Liaisons Dangereuses, both in French, and Petronius in Latin; they gathered at teatime in one another's rooms, or at punches in the office of the Harvard Monthly; they drank, instead of weak punch, seidels of straight gin topped with a maraschino cherry; they discussed the harmonies of Pater, the rhythms of Aubrey Beardsley and, growing louder, the voluptuousness of the Church, the essential virtue of prostitution. They had 207 Wheelwright was closely associated with the circle of the so-called lost generation of writers in New York and Europe, and even though he would be best known as a socialist poet during the 1930s he remained a firm believer in Christianity. Wheelwright and T.S. Eliot were the figures through whom the Jewish Kirstein became interested in Christian theology. Much of Wheelwright’s work deals with the intersection of socialism, the church, and their dogmas. Politically, Wheelwright expressed sympathies for the Russian Revolution and the overthrow of Tsarism. He was outraged by the executions of the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti in the United States. Because of his radical politics, Wheelwright’s interest in the Victorian Houses project stemmed from a position different from Kirstein’s or Evans’s. His investment in the American vernacular was based on how styles were emblematic of a moment prior to what he saw as the decline of morality in the 1930s. Wheelwright found in the hand-made, cobbled-together artistic sensibility of nineteenth century American architecture a sense of morality and virtue which he felt had been lost in the presence of modernism. Wheelwright was a regular contributor to Hound & Horn, and like Kirstein was wont to idealize the American Civil War (Abraham Lincoln was Lincoln Kirstein’s namesake, reflecting Kirstein’s father’s admiration for the war as well). Wheelwright’s crucifixes in their bedrooms, and ticket stubs from last Saturday's burlesque show at the Old Howard. They wrote, too; dozens of them were prematurely decayed poets, each with his invocation to Antinoüs, his mournful descriptions of Venetian lagoons, his sonnets to a chorus girl in which he addressed her as 'little painted poem of God.' In spite of these beginnings, a few of them became good writers." From Malcolm Cowley and Donald W. Faulkner, eds., Exile's Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s. New York: Penguin Books, 1934, 1994, p. 35. 208 interest in the architecture of this period (roughly 1830-1880) stemmed from his belief that the architecture and politics of this time were ultimately the most productive in American history — they represented America’s “usable past.” Thus his intention was to devote an entire book to the architecture of this period, which he believed had been written out of American history. Though it was never completed, Wheelwright published his views in Hound & Horn in 1930, stating that “the fifty years between 1880 and 1930, those between 1780 and 1830, and the Colonial century and a half make up our canonical architectural history. Yet the apocryphal period of our ‘usable past’ (1830-1880, for the convenience of critics, cleft by the Civil War) is the more important.”319 This period, represented in the Victorian architecture photography project, was, Wheelwright claimed, a moment of great “aesthetic diversity”320 — a diversity that was, in his view, threatened by modernist conformity and claims of progress. In addition to his writing on architecture, Wheelwright’s verse also appeared in the pages of Hound & Horn. As Kirstein recalled, “Wheelwright was also a poet, although a very eccentric metrist. His architectural training, his residency in Florence, his assumption of authority as a man of the world as well as being heir of Adams Brooks and Chardons, kin to half of old Boston, and [his] attachment to the odd orthodoxy of the Cowley Fathers,”321 all made him appealing to Kirstein precisely because Wheelwright was everything Kirstein was not. Wheelwright’s particular interests in the intersections of 319 See John Brook Wheelwright, “Cinque Cento Charles.” Hound & Horn 4, Oct.-Dec. 1930, p. 138. 320 Ibid. 321 Hamovitch, p. xv. 209 poetry, religion, and architecture may account for the presence of several nineteenth- century churches in Evans’s 1933 exhibition: for example, Gothic Church, Boston Massachusetts, 1932, Greek Church, Beverly, Massachusetts, 1932, and Gothic Church, Ipswich, Massachusetts, 1932 (figures 18-20). In his memoirs published in 1991, Kirstein recalls his interactions with Wheelwright, “who helped us with his very professional if eccentric analyses of architectural styles. A properly improper Bostonian, an authentic Puritan combining extremes of High Episcopal liturgy, proto-Trotskyite metaphysic, and post-Ruskinian taste, he was both monk and dandy. An important, now ignored writer of verse, he was kin to Henry and Brooks Adams… I was also a friend of Walker Evans, the photographer; with Wheelwright, we found a hundred fine nineteenth-century houses in the Greater Boston area and published photographs of some in Hound & Horn.”322 Of course, photographing architecture in New England was nothing particularly new. What was new was the context in which these photographs were shown and their engagement with a larger discourse about American architecture and ideas of America’s past. There were several models for Wheelwright’s project on Victorian Architecture, each of which focused on a particular facet or style of nineteenth-century architecture, accompanied by straightforward and often banal photographs. The Domestic Architecture of the Early American Republic: The Greek Revival (1926), by Howard Major, an 322 In Bergman, David, Gay American autobiography: writings from Whitman to Sedaris. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009, p. 129 210 architect and historian, is one such example (figure 21). 323 Jeff Rosenheim, in his essay for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Evans catalog, points to this source as one that likely guided Evans’s choice of architectural structures to photograph while he was working in the South in 1934-1935. Major’s text was published in 1926, and so it is likely that this text informed the nineteenth century houses project; certainly the architectural historian Wheelwright would have been familiar with the publication by 1931-1932. As described by Rosenheim, “Major argued that the Greek Revival style was America’s foremost architectural contribution, and that since many of the finest buildings had already been demolished, it was important ‘to gather together [photographs of] all the extant examples possible.’” Those who did this, Major called “archaeologists.”324 Major’s emphasis on Greek Revival architecture as one of America’s greatest architectural contributions likely spurred the large volume of photographs of Greek Revival (or Greek Revival inspired) photographs in Evans’s series. Three of the works exhibited in the show were specifically categorized as “Greek.” However, a significantly greater number of the photographs in the the MoMA and MET collections, which were not exhibited, are of homes in the Greek Revival style. Major’s text examines examples of Greek Revival architecture in the North, Northwest, Southwest, and Southern United States, noting that Greek Revival 323 See Howard Major, The Domestic Architecture of the Early American Republic: The Greek Revival. Philadelphia: J.P. Lippincott Company, 1926. 324 See MET Evans catalog, especially Jeff Rosenheim, “‘The Cruel Radiance of What Is’: Walker Evans and the South.” 2000, pp. 59-60, and Howard Major, The Domestic Architecture of the Early American Republic: The Greek Revival. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1926, pp. 12, 7. 211 architecture had been neglected in histories of architecture because it was thought to be devoid of artistic expression. In the introduction, Major wrote that “it is the aim of this book to incorporate in as comprehensive a manner as possible all the various types of the domestic phase of this period in a volume companioning the vast amount of work published on the Georgian period in America, thereby complementing the subject of American architecture up to the year 1850.”325 Major furthered his argument for the necessity of his publication by stating his aim to “bring to light the fallacy of the impression that the nineteenth century was devoid of artistic expression and is a period to be shunned, as any text book on the history of architecture will indicate; secondly to place before the public irrefutable evidence that this Greek Revival is America’s national expression in architecture.”326 Through his use of photographs, Major intended to “bring before the public all of the various domestic phases included in this period” and, by photographing “actual buildings,” to make the public aware of buildings that will soon be demolished “to make way for those with more modern equipment.”327 Echoing Kirstein’s description of Evans’s photographs as “disintegrating between snaps of the lens,” Major noted that “within our time, many of these dignified Greek buildings have been torn down, so that is a propitious moment in which to gather together all of the extant examples possible.” 328 In his publication, Major 325 Major, p. 3 326 Ibid. 327 Ibid, p. 7. 328 Ibid. pp. 7-8. In terms of a shifting American understanding of wooden Greek Revival architecture, Wright writes the following, “The Greek Revival is emerging from its days of calumny and neglect, and 212 called the Greek Revival, “An American Style for Americans,” and his work should be understood as a representative voice demonstrating how nineteenth century American vernacular architecture began to hold sway as a legitimate architectural style in the late 1920s and 1930s. In essence, Major’s book, like Wheelwright, Evans, and Kirstein’s project, was a race against time — an attempt to photographically document a fading architectural past. Photographs in Major’s text such as Henry Codman House, Roxbury, Massachusetts; Hollenbeck House, Front Street, Owego, New York; Mills House, Tipton, Michigan, 1850, and a pairing of unnamed homes in Staten Island, New York, are each in varying states of decay (figures 22-24). Porches sag under heavy pediments, roofs molder, windows are dusty and occluded, and once-grand entranceways are now dark, damp, and foreboding. Major’s examples of architectural photography foreshadow the formal, straightforward qualities of Evans’s work; their relation to notions of the decay and decline of national identity and national memory form a foundation upon which Evans’s work — particularly as it was understood by Kirstein and Wheelwright — would later build (compare, for instance, Major’s photographs to Evans’s Two Gothic Revival Houses with Decorative Verge Boards in Gables, Dorchester, Massachusetts, 1930-31, and Gothic Revival House, Residence of W.H. Prescott, Swampscott, Massachusetts, 1931) (figures 25-26). Formally, there are many similarities: a majority of Major’s photographs now, a hundred years after its ascendency, its appreciation is manifest. But a few years ago we know of the wooden Greek temple under the sobriquet of ‘Carpenter’s Classic’; to-day we look at is with new interest and recognize it as the architecture of the Early American Republic.” 213 are taken from head-on or slightly oblique angles, and sometimes, as in Evans’s series, close-ups are taken of doors or other architectural details. Captioning is minimal. In general, Major’s work demonstrates that an interest in nineteenth century architecture and its photographic “documentation” was an approach typical of the period, helping to contextualize Evans’s work with other projects of the time. Perhaps with an aim to expand on Major’s emphasis of Greek Revival architecture, Wheelwright proposed instead to examine nineteenth-century American architecture through a slightly wider lens, i.e. including those houses and buildings that did not exclusively align with Greek Revival per se. Instead, he was interested in “Victorian Architecture” as an umbrella term meant to encompass and describe a wide- variety of vernacular styles, many of which were not easily classifiable. Within this wider understanding of American architecture, there are several earlier examples of books that examine American architecture thematically, including a popular book for Boston’s Brahmin elites (Wheelwright’s own ancestors), The Architecture of Country Houses: Designs for Cottages, Farm Houses and Villas (with remarks on interiors, furniture, and the best modes of warming and ventilating) (1850), by A. J. Downing, also author of Victorian Cottage Residences (1842) and Hints to Persons about Building (1859). This book contained 320 illustrations (some by Downing) of the facades of houses and their surrounding vegetative contexts, as well as architectural plans (figure 27). The book was meant to be didactic, a resource for the leisurely class interested in building a second (perhaps even third) home. Rather than using photographs of houses and cottages, the 214 hand-drawn illustrations relied on long-established motifs of the picturesque and traditions of imagery of the English cottage. Stylistically, many of Evans’s photographs from the nineteenth-century houses exhibition echo the types of cottages seen in the Downing book. For example, when one compares several plates from Downing’s book to Evans’s photographs, it becomes apparent that Evans was photographing the same kind of homes and cottages that were promoted in Downing’s text (see for example two pasted-in etchings that appear at the beginning of the book as well as several reproduced images of cottages and homes that appear later on) (figure 28). One of these illustrations notes that the use of wood in construction (as opposed to stone or brick) “… is essentially real. Its character is given by simplicity and fitness and construction” (figure 28).329 Downing’s claim that the materiality of wood in American architecture spoke closely to American ideas of truth and honesty aligns with larger discourses in American architecture active at the time and throughout the twentieth century. Wood construction and its importance for domestic, civic, and religious architecture was addressed again in 1938 at MoMA in the context of the exhibition, Three Centuries of American Art (May 24 - July 31, 1938). A portion of this show was devoted to the display of photographs that illustrated the prevalence of wood and carpentry in American nineteenth century architecture. The subtitle for this 329 See Downing, A. J. 1815-1852, and Harold L. Tinker Collection, Brown University. The Architecture of Country Houses: Including Designs for Cottages, Farm-houses, and Villas, With Remarks On Interiors, Furniture, and the Best Modes of Warming and Ventilating. With Three Hundred and Twenty Illustrations. New York: D. Appleton & company, 1853, pp. 1, 300. Copy consulted is in the John Hay Library, Special Collections, Brown University, NA7561.D79 1853 215 portion of the exhibition was “Wooden Temples House the Young Republic” (figure 29).330 Many of the wood-constructed templates in this book bear gothic arches or other gothic-inspired motifs, such as window tracery. Some of the cottages made of stone echo ecclesiastical architecture; others look very much like small country churches, bearing stained glass windows and large central doorways. Not only did Downing’s text provide a compendium of “acceptable” styles for cottage construction, it also provided a moral guide to the symbolic nature of specific styles and motifs. One can glean this moral position by a mere glance at the table of contents, which includes notable subtitles such as, “On the Real Meaning of Architecture,” “What a Cottage Should Be,” and “What a Country Home or Villa Should Be.”331 This lattermost subtitle is remarkable for its subset of contents (note the emphasis on sentimentality, exclusivity, and the importance of referencing old world models of estate architecture): -The definition of a villa in this country -The happy influences that surround it -In what its true beauty and interest consist -The kind of country-houses suited to persons of different tastes and character -The man of Imagination -The antiquarian and the adopted citizen -The villa considered with reference to our institutions, fortunes, and manners -Associations of the hereditary home abroad -The true meaning of the republican home…332 330 Installation view of exhibition Three Centuries of American Art, May 24-July 31, 1938, MoMA Exh. #76a, MoMA exhibition file. 331 Downing, Table of Contents, n.p. 332 Ibid. 216 In many ways, Downing’s book served as a model for Kirstein and Wheelwright of how to compile a “sourcebook” of nineteenth century vernacular architecture. However, because this book was so popular in the nineteenth century,333 it served also as a model of what not to do; that is to say, while the “documentary-like” style of Evans’s photographs deliberately eschews all sentimentality in favor of an “airless” quality, while the etchings and images of nineteenth century homes in Downing’s book are precisely the opposite: they flaunt whimsy by showing viewers homes with welcoming, tendril-like vegetation, cottage coziness, and an overabundance of flower-lined paths. While Evans may have photographed homes that resemble those in Downing’s book, he left out these types of extraneous details that feature so prominently in Downing’s illustrations. FORESHADOWING THE MoMA: THE HARVARD SOCIETY The founding of the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art in 1928 foreshadowed the founding of the Museum of Modern Art nine months later by Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Kirstein’s older classmate at Harvard. Russell Lynes, one of the first chroniclers of the history of the MoMA, quoted Monroe Wheeler (a museum trustee) on this very issue: 333 For more on the popularity of Downing’s work in the nineteenth century see: David Schuyler. Apostle of Taste: Andrew Jackson Downing, 1815-1852. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. “It would be difficult to overstate the impact of Andrew Jackson Downing (1815-52) on American life during the middle decades of the nineteenth century... Dover [Press] had already reprinted The Architecture of Country Houses in 1969 and an 1873 reissue of Cottage Residences as Victorian Cottage Residences in 1981.” p. 12. 217 “Make no mistake, the Museum of Modern Art began in Harvard.”334 In fact, many of the early exhibitions at the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art reappeared at the MoMA shortly thereafter. The Harvard Society shows established an important critical context for the appearance of Walker Evans’s first photographs at the MoMA in 1933. 335 The history of exhibitions at the Harvard Society thus may be seen as a conceptual model both for the institution of the MoMA and for the place of American photography within it during the 1930s. The first Harvard Society show, “An Exhibition of American Art,” opened on February 19, 1929 in the gallery space above what is now (and was then) the Harvard Coop bookstore near Harvard Square. Just short of a year later, a show modeled after this one would be the second major exhibition to take place at the MoMA: “Paintings by 19 Living Americans” opened on December 12, 1929 and ran through January 12, 1930. Both exhibitions aimed to promote what is now understood to have been the first wave of American modern art.The Harvard Society iteration of this exhibition, as Kantor points out, “show[ed] the surfacing of an American liberal tradition, primarily from the school of Robert Henri.”336 As the Harvard catalogue suggests, “The exhibition is an assertion of the importance of American art. It represents the works of men no longer young who 334 As quoted in Sybil Gordon Kantor, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002, p. 197. Originally in Russell Lynes, Good Old Modern. New York: Athenaeum, 1973, p. 26. Kantor includes the following in her footnote: “Before he joined the junior advisory committee of the Museum in 1935, Wheeler published art books in Paris. In 1939 he was director of publications; he added the job of director of exhibitions, which he held until 1967. 335 Kantor, p. 197. 336 Kantor, p. 202. 218 have helped to create a national tradition in emergence, stemming from Europe but nationally independent.”337 It is likely, but not certain, that Kirstein was the author of this catalogue text, as one finds his notations and signature on early drafts of it.338 Importantly, the author of the catalogue (hereafter presumed to be Kirstein) distinguished two distinct categories for the types of work displayed in the exhibition. First was the group that worked within a “tradition of visual poetry” and demonstrated a formal style of abstract lyricism. These included artists such as El Greco and William Blake, and more contemporary artists such as Thomas Benton, Arthur B. Davies, Rockwell Kent, Kenneth Hayes Miller, and Maurice Sterne. The second group represented a the show were the “realists.” According to Kirstein, the artist who began this tradition was Thomas Eakins, whose work was seen as having laid the groundwork for later generations of artists working in the realist vein. These included George Bellows, John Sloan, and Edward Hopper. It was, Kirstein wrote, “the clarity of [Eakins’s] serious vision, the directness of his optical approach” that made his work distinct from the first category of artists.339 Barr, who was an unofficial advisor at the planning sessions for the early Harvard Society shows, noted the following about the work that he had seen at the gallery that he felt was particularly strong: “Edward 337 As quoted in Kantor, p. 202. 338 Kantor points to this in a footnote in her text, “The brochure catalogues are in a scrapbook at the library of the Museum of Modern Art, a gift of Kirstein. Some of the essays were signed by Kirstein and some were unsigned. If Kirstein did not write them all, he had a hand in them and, unless otherwise noted, his authorship may be assumed.” From footnote 48, p. 416. 339 Ibid., p. 202. 219 Hopper’s row of toothless grimacing, patch-eyed ‘Garfield’ houses, their ugliness intensified until it is transformed.”340 “An Exhibition of American Art” included the work of two artists from Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 Gallery that did not fit into either of the two categories outlined by Kirstein: namely Georgia O’Keeffe and John Marin. O’Keeffe’s Lily (lent by Harvard Society trustee Paul Sachs, Barr’s teacher) was described in the catalog as “decorative formalism” and Marin’s Landscape as “analytic abstraction.”341 Stieglitz’s image of O’Keeffe’s hands, titled Hands (1920), was one of the few (if not the only) photographs exhibited. Barr called this image “one of the few really great photographs,”342 thus signaling his wariness in considering the medium of photography “art.” Although Barr included photography in the early exhibitions at the MoMA, he was, as Beaumont Newhall recalled in an interview in 1981, “less than enthusiastic about the medium.”343 Generally, the exhibition at the Harvard Society was criticized for its conservative understanding and presentation of contemporary art. In the April 1929 edition of the Harvard journal Arts, Barr made the following assessment of the Harvard Society’s exhibition: “Instead of the expected blare of brazen modernity, the first exhibition has been a most skillful ginoco piano admirably calculated not to offend even the most 340 Alfred Barr, “Contemporary Art at Harvard,” Arts 15, April 1929, p. 265. As quoted in Kantor, p. 204. 341 Ibid., 203. 342 As quoted in Kantor, p. 204. 343 Kantor notes this in a footnote, “Although from the beginning, for intellectual reasons, Barr included photography as one of the arts he wanted in the structure of the museum, according to Beaumont Newhall in an interview by author in 1981, Barr was less than enthusiastic about the medium.” Kantor, p. 416. 220 backward.”344 The exhibition’s deliberate disengagement with “modernism,” calculatingly arranged by Kirstein, made the Harvard Society’s agenda explicitly distinct from more radical exhibitions of European modernism — for example, the 1913 Armory show in New York. Kirstein’s role as a curator of the exhibition points to an attempt on his behalf (and those like-minded around him) to carve out a niche for American contemporary art as distinct from the European avant-garde. Other exhibitions at the Harvard Society included a small-scale exhibition of French art called the “School of Paris,” mounted to supplement a larger Fogg Museum exhibition of French painting in 1929. A third exhibition was a retrospective of the works of Maurice Prendergast, a local Bostonian. In May of 1929, an exhibition of a model of Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion House, “a machine for living in,” took place at the Harvard Society. This house, which could be mass-produced, represented an intriguing shift in the type of work shown at the Harvard Society. Especially in light of Kirstein’s support of Evans’s photographs of Victorian Houses, this exhibition of cutting-edge architectural modernism was unusual. It is unclear what Kirstein’s role (if any) may have been in the display of Buckminster Fuller’s work, but it is likely that Fuller’s popularity at Harvard at the time (he was a graduate of the university and a popular lecturer there) influenced the presence and display of this work.345 344 See Alfred H. Barr, Jr., “Contemporary Art at Harvard.” quoted in Kantor, p. 204. 345 The Fuller show at the Harvard Society may also indicate that Kirstein was more open to modernism than he later claimed. 221 The following academic year of exhibitions at the Harvard Society began with the exhibition “The School of New York,” whose mission was “to show the younger American artists, in some cases the students of the first group shown [the previous year in the “An Exhibition of American Art” show].”346 Again, Kirstein wrote the exhibition text for this show, and in it he included artists such as Isamu Noguchi, John Storrs, Alexander Calder, and Stuart Davis. Even though the early shows at the Harvard Society were relatively conservative in their aim and scope, they were nevertheless (especially after 1930) much more progressive than the early exhibitions at the MoMA. As Kantor writes, “The Harvard Society was always one step ahead of the Museum of Modern Art, showing work never before seen in exhibition in America; its size and the nature of the enterprise allowed it to present more radical artists.”347 By the winter of the Society’s second academic year (1930), there were several exhibitions put on which reflected a clear understanding of what was then seen as radical modernism—Mexican art, German art, work from the Bauhaus, and an exhibition of International photography.348 However, concurrent with these more overtly cutting-edge exhibitions was a show in October 1930 titled “Exhibition of American Folk Painting.” The catalogue, again written by Kirstein, suggested that the appeal of folk art was in its deliberate anti- academic nature: “By folk art we meant art, which springing from the common people is in essence unacademic, unrelated to established schools, and, generally speaking 346 Lincoln Kirstein, The School of New York. 1929. As quoted in Kantor, p. 207. 347 Kantor, p. 207. 348 Ibid., p. 208. 222 anonymous.”349 Many of Kirstein’s contemporaries began to consider the “direct quality” of folk art to be associated with modernism. Artists like Charles Sheeler, for example, created high modernist, Precisionist paintings of the exteriors of nineteenth century barns, or interiors full of Shaker furniture. The precedent of exhibitions, mounted in part by Kirstein, that examined the notion of American Art and questioned the identity of American artists would eventually come to inform both of Walker Evans’s exhibitions at MoMA in the 1930s: both Walker Evans: Photographs of Victorian-Houses (1933) and American Photographs (1938). These exhibitions explicitly revolved around the idea of American identity and national representation, suggesting an ideological alignment with ideas of American exceptionalism so prevalent in discourse of the 1930s.350 In contrast with the Harvard Society’s interest in promoting the work of American artists, in November 1930 Kirstein and the Harvard Society put on one of the earliest exhibitions of European and American photography in the United States. This show was modeled after the “Film und Foto” exhibition organized by the German Werkbund in 1929.351 Its American iteration at Harvard included the works of Berenice Abbott, Eugène Atget, Margaret Bourke-White, Walker Evans, Charles Sheeler, Ralph Steiner, and Edward Weston. The photographers associated with the American photography magazine Camera Work, Stieglitz, Steichen, and Strand, were also exhibited. The 349 Lincoln Kirstein, “American Folk Painting.” Cambridge: Harvard Society for Contemporary Art, 1930. As quoted in Kantor, p. 209. 350 For more on the notion of American exceptionalism during the 1920s and 1930s, see Wanda Corn, The Great American Thing. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. 351 Kantor, p. 209. 223 photography historian Maria Morris Hambourg describes Kirstein’s exhibition as “the first to demonstrate the confluence of European, utilitarian, and artistic trends that was beginning to occur in photography in the United States.”352 Kirstein’s continued interest in avant-garde photography would be demonstrated in the murals exhibition that he curated for MoMA in 1932 (“Murals by American Painters and Photographers”) as well as by his role in Evans’s photography exhibitions. In early 1931, Philip Johnson, the architect who became the first Director of the Architecture Department at the MoMA in the 1932, gave materials to Kirstein that he had gathered the previous year in Germany at the Bauhaus. These works, combined with the materials culled by Barr and Jere Abbott on their European art-collecting trips in 1927, became the basis for the first major exhibition of the Bauhaus and its works in the United States, put on by the Harvard Society. This catalog was again written by Kirstein, and Johnson provided a history of the Bauhaus. In the exhibition, Bauhaus, 1919-1923, Weimar; 1924, Dessau: January 10-February 10, 1931, Kirstein displayed photographs of views from the Bauhaus as well as 14 Bauhaus Bucher (Bauhaus books).353 In 1931, the Bauhaus had not yet been closed by the Nazis: this would happen in 1933 with Hitler’s official rise to power. In the 1930s, this type of architectural modernism was read primarily, although not exclusively, as German. The Bauhaus exhibition set up a precedent for the display of architectural photography explicitly tied to 352 See Maria Morris Hambourg and Christopher Phillips, The New Vision: Photography between the World Wars. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1989, p. 44. 353 Kantor, p. 210. 224 ideas of nationalism and cultural identity. It also established the tradition of creating photographically illustrated books to accompany exhibitions, a practice that Kirstein successfully continued with his promotion of the publication of American Photographs in 1938. Critically for Walker Evans, Kirstein was later appointed a member of the junior advisory board at the Museum of Modern Art. This led to the exhibition of Evans’s nineteenth century architecture photographs at the museum in the fall and winter of 1933.354 When examined in relation to Edward Hopper’s exhibition, viewers were able to see two similar, but formally very different treatments of the undeniable presence of American vernacular architecture in small-town America. Together, these two exhibitions can be seen as a part of the wave of cultural interest in the previous century’s architectural styles and American scenes in the face of the rise of twentieth century modernism. The exhibits also point to a general emerging cultural interest in American folk art, which was popular in some artistic circles in the 1930s, as well as a rising cultural interest in American art and history.355 Evans’s show took place concurrently with John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s funding of Colonial Williamsburg (1930s), the creation of Henry Ford’s Greenfield Village (1929), 354 November 16 - December 8, 1933 355 See for instance Elizabeth McCausland, as reprinted in Susan Dodge Peters, “Elizabeth McCausland on Photography.” Afterimage 12 , May 1985, p. 11. Janine A. Mileaf notes the following about McCausland, “Elizabeth McCausland, an art critic who knew the photographer Berenice Abbott and corresponded with the architectural historian Henry Hitchcock during this period, compared certain photographers (like Abbott) to folk artists and primitives, because they ‘worked directly and without artistic frill.’” Mileaf, p. 13. 225 and the establishment of the federally-funded Historic American Buildings Survey (1933). The show thus represents a larger cultural turn at the time towards an interest in preserving America’s architectural past at a moment when it was culturally threatened by the influence of European modernism. Although different in scope, the American preservation projects and Evans’s own project shared an interest in preserving a “vanishing heritage” before it was forever lost. In the 1930s, photography as a medium at best occupied a tenuous position within the institution of the museum, and the presence of photographs within such institutions was a rare occurrence. Despite its auxiliary status next to Hopper’s exhibition, Evans’s exhibition was one of the first one-person shows of photography in a major museum. Certainly Kirstein’s role as a junior board member of the MoMA, his friendship with its director Alfred Barr, and his subsequent donation of the photographs to the institution helped in the realization of this exhibition. However, most visitors to the show would have not seen or understood these photographs as the work of a “photographer” per se. Instead, they would have read the photographs as “documents” (i.e. having a utilitarian rather than strictly aesthetic value) and may not have conceived of them as “art” in the way we understand photographs on display in museums today. In December 1933, Kirstein wrote a short piece announcing and summarizing the aims of the Evans’s show in the MoMA Bulletin—a newsletter of sorts detailing museum exhibitions, acquisitions, and other announcements. Kirstein’s piece in the Bulletin, “Walker Evans: Photographs of Nineteenth-Century Houses,” called Evans’s photographs “perfect documents,” thus aligning them with a factually-based photographic 226 style rather than an artistic or pictorialist style. He summarized Evans’s artistic choices in his review of the show published in Bulletin as follows: Evans’ style is based on moral virtues of patience, surgical accuracy and self-effacement. In order to force details into their firmest relief, he could only work in brilliant sunlight, and the sun had to be on the correct side of the streets. Often many trips to the same house were necessary to avoid shadows cast by trees or other houses; only the spring and fall were favorable seasons. The forms were sharpened until so precise an image was achieved, that many of the houses seem to exist in an airless nostalgia for the past to which Edward Hopper in his noble canvases pays a more personal tribute.356 Evans’s shift towards a documentary-inflected style reflects the influence of the work of Charles Sheeler, whose photography of power plants, rural barns, and interiors had a profound effect on his own, what may be understood as an “unsentimental” approach to American nineteenth century architecture.357 THE RECEPTION OF EVANS’S VICTORIAN PHOTOGRAPHS The public reception of Evans’s Victorian house photographs in the 1930s was divided, and critics tended to fall into one of two camps: the first saw the photographs as celebrating Victorian architecture, and the other perceived the photographs as ironic commentaries on America’s architectural past in the face of emerging modernism.358 Before Evans’s photographs were exhibited at the MoMA, they saw an extended and 356 Lincoln Kirstein, “Walker Evans’ Photographs of Victorian Architecture,” The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art, Vol. 1, No. 4, Dec., 1933, p. 4. 357 By “unsentimental,” I mean in contrast to the more “personal” treatment of similar subjects by Edward Hopper as posited by Kirstein in the Bulletin text above. 358 For this point I am indebted to Rebecca Suzanne Rahmlow.“Indigenous/Vernacular”: Negotiating an American History for Modernism Through the Lens of the Architectural Exhibition,” p. 64. 227 varied tour to diverse venues including large and small-scale galleries. They also appeared in print, being reproduced in various newspapers and magazines. In both exhibition and in print, they received mixed receptions. This points to how difficult it was for audiences in the 1930s to interpret Evans’s photographs, and suggests a very complicated public understanding of their meaning. For example, in his biography of Evans, James Mellow points to a review in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle by Helen Appleton Read of the display of some of the Victorian photographs at the Julien Levy Gallery in February 1932. In her article, Appleton Read notes how Evans was able to “liberate his subjects from the taboos of his time”359 by focusing on an architectural style that had theretofore been neglected. She focuses on how Evans’s photographs record images from American daily life rather than grandiose, arty subject matter: “Without exaggeration or falsification, Mr. Evans gives his subject matter a quality of independent life. He goes to the life about him for his subject matter, but he sees and is interested in aspects of the visual universe which have hitherto been disregarded as ugly or negligible.”360 The title of Appleton Read’s article, “The New Photography: Aesthetics of the Camera and Modern Architecture Demonstrated at Julien Levy Gallery and Museum of Modern Art,” suggests that Evans’s photographs, as displayed at the Julien Levy Gallery alongside the work of George Platt Lynes, were seen 359 See James Mellow, Walker Evans. p. 165. 360 Ibid., p. 165. 228 as aesthetic images (i.e. not documents) in contrast to the images of modern architecture simultaneously on view at the MoMA in the International Style exhibition (1932).361 On display at the Levy gallery were likely several of Evans’s Victorian architecture images as well as some examples of nineteenth-century and early twentieth- century industrial and urban architectural structures taken by Evans while he was on his photographic excursions with Kirstein and Wheelwright. These would have been on view alongside several of George Platt Lynes’s images depicting similar subjects, including industrial imagery. Evans’s Victorian house photographs continued to tour the United States as part of a traveling exhibition organized by Kirstein for the Harvard Society of Contemporary Art.362 The Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York was on the list of recipients for the exhibition and seven of Evans’s photographs, four from the “New England architectural series,”363 appeared in a group exhibition there between February 7th -25th, 1932. Evans’s photographs were also shown at the John Becker Gallery (520 Madison Avenue, New York) along with works by two other photographers.364 In March 1932, 361 According to the article, both exhibitions were considered “modern”: “this week the pattern is distinctly contemporary… The blacks and grays of photography predominate — photography for itself as an art — in the exhibition of photographs by Walker Evans and George Lynes at the Julien Levy Gallery and photography as it is used in over 100 examples to illustrate the development of the modern movement in architecture as shown at the Modern Museum exhibitions of Modern Architecture which opens Wednesday.” Helen Appleton Read, “The New Photography: Aesthetics of the Camera and Modern Architecture Demonstrated at Julien Levy Gallery and Museum of Modern Art.” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Sunday, February 7, 1932. Melissa Rachleff, “Walker Evans: the J. Paul Getty Museum Collection - Book 362 Reviews.” Afterimage January-February 1996, p. 7. 363 James Mellow, Walker Evans. p. 166. 364 Rachleff, p. 7. 229 twelve of Evans’s photographs appeared in the Brooklyn Museum show “International Photographers Exhibition”; seven of these photographs were loaned from Charles Fuller and five from Julien Levy.365 As the exhibition catalog for this show points out, Evans’s prints could be purchased for fifteen dollars.366 In addition to these exhibitions, Kirstein’s letters indicate that he attempted to have Evans’s photographs published in book form by Joseph Brewer.367 These exhibitions of Evans’s photographic work that took place before his major show at the MoMA in 1933 indicate that by the time the work was shown at the MoMA, Evans was already an established exhibiting photographer, and had become one largely as a result of Kirstein’s influence. Other reviews written during and after the exhibition of Evans’s Victorian architecture photographs at the MoMA indicate a more critical reception and understanding of the intentions behind his images. An article in Architectural Forum (written in 1934) gives us a very different analysis of the intention of Evans’s work: Last month, [an] exhibition of 19th Century American house photographs by Walker Evans held up to ridicule the sins of the carpenters and architects who flourished in what is generally referred to as the General Grant era. As often as this period has been sarcastically damned by the critics, nothing has been so honest or so 365 Rahmlow, p. 62. Rahmlow notes that “All of the Walker Evans photographs were loaned by Charles Fuller by way of the John Becker Gallery (520 Madison Avenue).” “Communication with the John Becker Gallery,” 1220 Exhibition of International Photographers, Folder DIR 1931-32, Brooklyn Museum Archives, Brooklyn, New York. 366 “International Photographers Exhibition Catalog, 1932.” Brooklyn Museum Archives, Brooklyn, New York. As noted in Rahmlow, p. 62. 367 Lincoln Kirstein, “Letter from James Mellow to Lincoln Kirstein, November 20, 1991, p. 1,” Lincoln Kirstein Papers, ca. 1913-1994, Box 10, Folder 166—General M-P Correspondence, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, New York City. As noted in Rahmlow, fn. 149, p. 110. 230 cruel as Evans’ untitled pictures. His collection of gingerbread is not exaggerated by undue emphasis. Each photograph is a documentary record. There are no trick angles to his pictures, no distortions contributed by his own opinions.368 Another review in Home & Field (written in 1934), contemporary with Evans’s MoMA show, questioned how Evans’s images on view at the MoMA should be interpreted, concluding that they were meant to be understood as ironic: “[the photographs’] context, against the baize walls of the American Museum of Modern Art, the original prints hung desolately—phrases in an unspoken sermon the significance of which we have not the heart to analyze.”369 Perhaps in a gesture to make Home & Field’s perceived understanding of the irony of Evans’s work even more overt, the magazine created and printed valentines out of Evans’s photographs: a gesture likely meant to allude to the “frilly” or “doily-like” qualities of many of the decorative architectural motifs appearing in Evans’s images (figure 29b). As the traveling exhibition made its way in1936 to the Lyman Allyn Museum in New London, Connecticut, it was received very differently. Evans’s photographs were there seen as preserving a portion of American history that was soon to be gone. Winslow Ames, founding director of the Lyman Allyn Museum, echoed Kirstein’s 1934 press release when he wrote that “[t]hese… documentary photographs of great precision and clarity… are journalism of the liveliest sort through they report things that happened 368 Anonymous, “The Forum of Events.” The Architectural Forum 60, January 1934, p. 18. 369 Anonymous, “Valentines for an Architect.” Home & Field, February, 1934, pp. 14-15. 231 some time ago. [Walker Evans] [had] done wonders… in recording things which [were] just beginning to disappear, and in calling them to the attention of people who [had] been blinded to them… Yet the American nineteenth century house, particularly in its wooden phase, is a creature that belongs truly to this [American] soil, it still exists in enormous quantities, of which the majority is of no distinction, but at its best possesses style, resourcefulness, and an organic quality lacking in many other places and periods.”370 A HISTORY OF THE MoMA’S DEPARTMENT OF ARCHITECTURE The Department of Architecture was founded at the MoMA in 1932, and between then and 1933 there were no fewer than four exhibitions at the museum devoted exclusively to modern architecture.371 Among these shows was included an exhibition of the International Style of architecture titled Modern Architecture: International Exhibition, which took place between February and March, 1932 (figure 30). This show, curated by Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock, showed viewers a summary of the modern International Style by focusing on common formal architecture elements of the period: including an emphasis on volume, compositional regularity, technical perfection, dependence on the intrinsic elegance of materials, and an avoidance of applied 370 See Winslow Ames, “19th Century New London Houses Recalled in Exhibit at Lyman Allyn Museum.” New London Day, January 16, 1936. As quoted in Rahmlow, p. 66. 371 These include: Modern Architecture: International Exhibition [MoMA Exh. #15, February 9 - March 23, 1932], Early Modern Architecture: Chicago 1870-1910 [MoMA Exh. #23, January 18 - February 23, 1933], The Work of Young Architects in the Middle West [MoMA Exh. #28, April 3 - April 30, 1933], as well as Summer Exhibition: Project for a House in North Carolina by William T. Priestly [MoMA Exh. #30a, July 10 - September 30, 1933], and A House by Richard C. Wood [MoMA Exh. #30d, October 3 - October 27, 1933], the latter two not exclusively devoted to modernism. 232 ornament (figure 31). In this exhibition, these formal elements were privileged over a presentation of the political meaning of this architecture, leaving aside, as the architectural theorist Reyner Bahnam has noted, the “socialist, egalitarian, or utopian ideological connotations which actually informed architectural design in Europe.”372 Referring to the International Style exhibition of 1932, critic Brendan Gill called architectural exhibitions “something of a novelty at the time, especially in a museum.” 373 This exhibition caused as great a stir in architectural taste as did the Armory Show in the world of modern art. Not surprisingly, Alfred H. Barr was behind this exhibition and it was he who encouraged Hitchcock and Philip Johnson to co-curate the exhibition and publish a book together. The book they published, The International Style: Architecture Since 1922, argued that common formal and aesthetic motifs in contemporary architecture transcended national boundaries. In both Europe and America, modernism emerged “out of the chaotic, historicizing styles of the nineteenth century.”374 Interestingly, in light of the fact that much of Evans’s work appeared in collaboration and in book form, Terence Riley points out in his scholarly analysis of the exhibition that the International Style show was also originally conceived as a book and only later as an exhibition.375 372 See Reyner Banham, “Actual Monuments.” Art in America 76, October 1988, pp. 172-177, 213, 215. 373 See Brendan Gill, “1932.” The New Yorker, April 27, 1992, p. 94. 374 See Hitchcock, Henry Russell, and Philip Frederick Johnson. The International Style: Architecture Since 1922. first ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1932, p. 9. 375 In Terence Riley, International Style: Exhibition 15 and the Museum of Modern Art. New York: Rizzoli, 1992, p. 10. Riley notes that he discovered this through study of “previously unexamined correspondence” between Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock. 233 Additionally, Riley notes (in summary) the wide-ranging impact this exhibition had on the history of American architecture, “the substantive effects of the exhibition are many: the introduction of the European architectural avant-garde, particularly Mies van der Rohe, to America; the increased visibility and acceptance of modernist architects before the Second World War; and the postwar emergence of the “Harvard School” under the leadership of Walter Gropius.”376 The exhibition was so influential on the development of American modernism, Riley suggests, that the “International Style has come to be near analogous to the history of modernism in America.”377 Of course, our present understanding of modernism affords a more broad-based acceptance of the movement and its attendant styles and practitioners. However, in the 1930s there was a firm and inarguable, one-to-one correlation between the International Style and modernism. This is precisely the type of narrow understanding of modernism (that is to say modernism that was only represented by the European avant-garde) that Kirstein and Wheelwright, among others in their circle, were reacting against, and Evans’s nineteenth century houses exhibition must therefore be examined in this light. Curiously, this narrow understanding of modernism was questioned by Henry Hitchcock-Russell himself. By June of 1930, Hitchcock and Johnson had decided to write the International Style book together. Hitchcock had just completed a book on the same topic entitled Modern 376 Riley, p. 11. 377 Ibid., p. 11. 234 Architecture: Romanticism and Reintegration,378 but it “was badly illustrated” and so he was interested in “rewrit[ing] it in a more popular way paying close attention to the buildings illustrated… and incorporate about 150 full-page halftones.”379 Shortly before Hitchcock and Johnson traveled together through Europe to gather material for their book, Hitchcock wrote a letter to Lewis Mumford, in June 1929, professing his lack of interest in modernism and interest instead in working on a book of late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century architecture. He wrote, “My own next labors will be on Romantic architecture as I call that from 1750-1850 with which I have already dealt a little in my Modern Architecture book. I trust we may find ourselves nearer in accord in the past and in the future than in the immediate present…”380 Even as early as August 1928, Hitchcock expressed a similar sentiment against working on modern architecture in a letter to Barr: “My appetite for the avant-garde will carry me through the book I hope then back to the past. I have really enjoyed making analyses of late Gothic and Baroque, etc.”381 If this sounds oddly resonant with the sentiments about modernism expressed by Kirstein, as well as with both Kirstein’s and Wheelwright’s interest in finding a “useable past” in American art and architecture, it is no accident. Just before Hitchcock and Johnson left for their research trip to Europe, Barr published a review of Hitchcock’s book in Hound & Horn, in the spring of 1930. In the 378 See Henry Russell-Hitchcock, Modern Architecture: Romanticism and Reintegration. New York: Payson and Clarke, 1929, reprint, New York: Hacker, 1970. 379 See Philip Johnson (the Hague) to Mrs. Homer H. (Louise Pope) Johnson, 20 June 1930, Philip Johnson Papers, as quoted in Riley, fn. 1, p. 201. 380 As quoted in Riley, fn. 2, p. 202. 381 Henry Russell-Hitchcock to Alfred H. Barr Jr., August 12, 1928, Museum Archives, MoMA, NY. 235 review, Barr summarizes the three sections of Hitchcock’s book: “the Age of Romanticism,” the “New Tradition,” and finally the “New Pioneers.” In each of these sections (and their implied linear development), Hitchcock had suggested that the roots of modernism were to be found in the past. In the first section, “the Age of Romanticism,” Barr wrote of how Hitchcock found architectural similarities between historically disparate time periods: “Hitchcock lists architects, buildings, publications which mark the last years of the Baroque and Rococo and the development of the architecture which followed, from 1750 through the confusion of the 19th century. The Neo-classic revival of the Roman and Greek, and the antiquarian revival of Medieval architecture, bitterly opposite as they once were, are both seen as essentially and almost equally romantic… The disintegration of architecture through the development of an eclecticism of taste describes the actual condition of American building even in our own time.” 382 It was this “disintegration of architecture” in “our own time” that was addressed in the next section, which is most important to the discussion here. In this section, Hitchcock presented a criticism of the early twentieth century’s integration of “old with new and modern forms” rather than a “unification of past periods.” Hitchcock saw modernism’s lack of synthesis with its own historical traditions as ushering in period of decadence in architectural history. As Barr wrote, historically this moment was represented by “the decadence of the New Tradition” which was “seen in the buildings 382 Alfred Barr, “Modern Architecture.” in Hound & Horn, 3, no. 3, April- June 1930, p. 434. 236 for the Paris Exposition of 1925.”383 This type of style represented by the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes (International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts) was referred to in the United States as Art Deco, and it was the dominant modern architectural style (certainly in New York City) during the moment in which Hitchcock was writing. The icon of the period, the Chrysler building, had just been completed on May 20, 1930. Barr notes that “even he [Hitchcock] is somewhat disturbed by the puritanical austerity of this new style,” and as a result of this, Barr suggested that “the problem of future architects is nevertheless the development of ornament.”384 One of the major criticisms of Hitchcock’s book leveled by Barr was the lack of quality illustrations and photographs to illustrate his point, “one is tempted to find fault with the illustrations which seem parsimonious… the choice of photographs is obviously hampered by what was doubtless a necessary economy on the part of the publishers.” Barr then called for a successor to “publish a really sufficient corpus of plates.”385 Given that the driving force behind the original idea for Evans to photograph nineteenth century houses was to produce illustrations for Wheelwright’s book on architecture of the period, it could easily be construed that Wheelwright’s project was developed in part as a response to Barr’s criticisms of Hitchcock’s work. 383 Ibid., p. 435. 384 Ibid. 385 Ibid. 237 In order to make sense of Hitchcock’s strong interest in nineteenth century Victorian architectural traditions, it is useful to point out that he was a founding member and former president of the Victorian Society of America, and his books on Victorian architecture helped to rehabilitate this neglected field. As an architectural historian, his work remained outside the debates of post-modernism. Hitchcock was interested in how the individual was the shaper of architecture more than in broad social forces. His architectural histories focused on the formal aspects of buildings rather than on political, economic or social phenomena. Hitchcock's book, The Architecture of H. H. Richardson and His Times (1936) brought the career of American architect Henry Hobson Richardson out of obscurity (Richardson was known for creating the so-called “Richardsonian Romanesque” architectural style). In this book (as in his previous publications) Hitchcock argued that the distant roots of European Modernism were actually to be found in the United States. It is likely that Kirstein, Evans, and Wheelwright were influenced by Hitchcock’s career-long interest in finding a place for vernacular American architecture in the history of architecture. ARCHITECTURAL DEBATES IN THE PAGES OF HOUND & HORN Even as early as 1927, Hitchcock was writing about what he understood as the decadence of modern architecture. In an article from that year in Hound & Horn, "The Decline of Architecture," Hitchcock outlined the rationale behind his critique of modern and contemporary architecture. His writing is somewhat obtuse, but nevertheless forthright. 238 Standing, then, as we do, beyond the downslope of the nineteenth century and the apparent gap of the war, and regarding our architecture, we are led to demand whether the time of its discard is at hand or whether, after the superficially historical wastes of the last century, it may be reintegrated or has already been reintegrated as a sound organ in an aging body. For if what passes today for architecture is but a blonde wig and gold teeth; no ghost, rather, but a soulless imitation of its former body; it were better such illusions of second childhood were at once dispensed with, and the possibility of a future without architecture frankly faced.386 Hitchcock’s article touched off a debate in Hound & Horn. In the next issue, a response to Hitchcock’s article was published in the form of a critical letter by the architect Charles Crombie. There, Crombie wrote that Hitchcock’s “ideas” about modern architecture, “if regarded closely appear almost complete misconceptions.”387 He questioned what Hitchcock meant by his use of the term “modern taste” and the value of the term “modernist” altogether. He noted that “the time element in architecture has no importance,” meaning that the notion of modernism as being somehow separate from or a departure from a dominant architectural paradigm is fallacious. As he argued, “a Gothic cathedral of 1227 would be exactly as beautiful if it were duplicated in its outward appearance in 1927, providing we were able to do it.”388 In fact, Crombie, contrary to Hitchcock, questions the very premise of modernism instead of celebrating its allegedly unique ability to express “technical perfection.” Crombie wrote, “we may very well ask, 386 See Russell Hitchcock, Jr., "The Decline of Architecture." Hound & Horn, Vol. 1, September 1927, pp. 29-30. 387 Crombie, Charles. "Correspondence: The Decline of Architecture." Hound & Horn, vol. 1, no. 2, December 1927, pp. 140-143. 388 Ibid., p. 141. 239 when did we become ‘moderns?’ And if the answer is ‘When we began the construction of steel and concrete skeletons,’ then an equally good answer is “When we gave up the construction of brick and stone skeletons.’”389 He then went on to explain that modernism is really nothing new: “The ‘modernist’ says that new methods of construction call for a new symbolism and sweepingly denies all tradition. The fact remains that there are fundamentally no new methods of construction. At bottom a building is now exactly what it always has been — a structural skeleton faced with a new material or left plain according to the exigencies, aesthetic or economic, of the moment.”390 A bit later in the letter, Crombie questioned Hitchcock’s use of the idea of “technical perfection” as the ultimate aim of modern architecture, retorting that “as a matter of fact, I do not believe the modernists do place as much importance as he thinks on what Mr. Hitchcock has called ‘technical perfection.’ What he means by that term is apparently ‘functional perfection,’ which is not of primary interest to the modernist. Judging by the few articulate modernist theories they depend very largely on restatements and variations of the ‘Form follows Function’ theme.”391 In conclusion, Crombie summarized who, in his estimation, fit the bill as modernists: “the ‘modernists’ have been interested primarily in form, from the first insurgents like Louis Sullivan and the 389 Ibid. 390 Ibid. 391 Ibid. 240 Germans, to the architects of the recent Paris Exhibition.”392 And so, we can conclude that Evans’s photographs, which ironically present a preponderance of non-functional ornamentation, were very much engaged in this debate over architecture, modernism, and its meaning as it played out in the pages of Hound & Horn in the late 1920s. In fact, the exhibition of these photographs should be understood as a direct critique of the rise of modernist architecture as promoted by the MoMA in the 1932 International Style show. Towards the end of his letter, and most important for the purposes of the discussion here, Crombie pointed to the redemptive value to be found even in Victorian architecture. As he wrote, “even the despised Victorianism of the past generation had in it elements almost lewdly vigorous that are utterly lacking in the thin elegance of certain desiccated modern work.”393 Perhaps Crombie had in mind Victorian architecture of the sort represented in Evans’s photographs, such as in Row of Town Houses, South Boston, Massachusetts, 1932, or his later Folk Victorian House with Front-Gabled Roof, Fernandez, Florida, 1935-36, both of which demonstrate well-thought out, rhythmic and symmetrical architectural ornamentation (figures 32-33). Hitchcock’s terse response to Crombie’s letter responds directly to the two main criticisms lodged against his article: namely Crombie’s critique of Hitchcock’s use of the term “modern taste,” and claim that “Time” is an incidental element in the history of architecture. As to the first criticism, Hitchcock’s response is simply that he did not 392 Ibid. 393 Ibid, p. 143. 241 define the term “modern taste” because he did not need to —this “modern taste,” he wrote, was simply his own, but he felt that the term applied to many modern American and European architects who shared these ideas. With regard to the issue of “Time” in architecture, Hitchcock’s response was the following (and interestingly it similarly references the traditions of Gothic architecture): “…for me the engineering of the Gothic building masters is an important part of the total beauty that their works offer, and … the beauty of the great works of architecture of the past is never something sprayed on after the engineer has finished his part, as in the contemporary buildings most admired by Mr. Crombie.”394 In addition to having an interest in America’s architectural past, Hitchcock was also apparently one of the first architects to use photography in his architectural practice. He was an avid collector of photographs, many of which exist today in archives at the Smithsonian and the Institute of Fine Arts. The arguments for the American roots of modernism in nineteenth century architecture put forward in architectural exhibitions at the MoMA and within the pages of Hound & Horn, as well as Hitchcock’s own personal investment in the importance of architectural photography as a pedagogic tool, form the critical discourse out of which Kirstein, Wheelwright, and Evans’s project emerged. *** In addition to the many shows celebrating modernism on view at the MoMA, there were also a few exhibitions devoted to particularly American subjects or history. 394 See Hitchock, “Correspondence.” Hound & Horn, Vol. 1. No. 3, March 1928, p. 244. 242 Most notable in this regard was the show American Folk Art: The Art of the Common Man in America, 1750-1900 (November 30, 1932 - January 14, 1933), which appeared shortly after Evans’s exhibition. The folk art show was curated by Holger Cahill and looked to the American pre-industrial and pre-modern for “the simple and unaffected childlike expression of men and women who had little or no school training in art, and who did not even know that they were producing art.” In the 1940s, art critic and collector Jean Lipman pointed to folk art as the product of a great democracy. This exhibition represented a counter-strain of American history – one which celebrated vernacular traditions and untrained hands – and saw within this type of production a deeply democratic impulse. Cahill’s exhibition demonstrates that around the time of Evans’s first photography exhibition at the MoMA there was a burgeoning interest in vernacular and folk art, and Evans’s work should be understood in this context.395 HOUSING IN CRISIS In 1934, one year after Evan’s first show, the MoMA put on the Housing Exhibition of the City of New York sponsored by the New York City Housing Authority, Columbia University Orientation Study, the Lavanburg Foundation, the Housing Section of the Welfare Council, and the Museum of Modern Art. A press release published in The New York Times in 1934, included in the clipping file for the exhibition at the MoMA, 395 For more on this topic see: Douglas R. Nickel. "Walker Evans and the Art of the Common Man" (forthcoming). 243 offers a description of the exhibition. I quote here at length, because this description of the “work” on view at this exhibition strikingly foreshadows descriptions of Evans’s work for the FSA in the mid-thirties. [the exhibition] presents with crystal clarity the dramatic fervor a picture of housing conditions in the slums of New York… the [tenement] flat has been lifted almost intact, furniture and all, from an old-law tenement recently demolished. The entire length of the three-room flat is twenty-eight feet and its width thirteen feet. One room has windows on an outside court… In this actual apartment, know as a ‘dumb-bell,’ because of its shape, in indiscernable filth and squalor, eight persons lived recently. Transplanted to the Museum of Modern Art, it is furnished with the rickety, dirty chairs and tables of the occupants, the very beds on [which] they slept.396 In contrast to the shabby, overcrowded, and well-worn tenement flat, also displayed was a modern three-room low cost apartment. Its cleanliness and open space stood in stark ontrast to the horrors of tenement housing. Obviously, this contrast was the point, and the argument was easy to make, especially within the context of the Museum of Modern Art; a space that privileged the “new.” However, one wonders what type of audience would have seen this exhibition; it is unlikely that those who would have benefited most from viewing it were able to visit the museum at all.397 Interestingly, photographs played an important role in this exhibition, suggesting the increasing acceptance of the medium within the museum walls. As noted in the article: “Elsewhere in the museum is a battery of models, photographs, charts, plans and photomurals 396 As in anonymous, “City Housing Exhibition Shows Slum Conditions: Possibility of Better Tenement Homes Depicted in Contrasting Furnished Flats.” The New York Times, October 27, 1934, n.p. (as found in the MoMA exhibition file, CVR 34D) 397 A press release for the exhibition suggests that many school children were able to view the exhibition”: During the three weeks of its run, seventeen thousand people visited the museum. This included several hundred school children on tours arranged for them.” MoMA press release, 11/27/1934. 244 organized to prove beyond refutation not only that better housing is a human but an economic necessity.” The emphasis on photography in this show was a key component of the pedagogic initiative of the exhibition, which was “designed primarily as an experiment in public education.”398 As the MoMA press release further details, the exhibition was sponsored in part by the New York City Housing Authority, with much of the materials and labor supplied by the Works Division of the Emergency Relief Bureau. The press release goes on to note, “… about twenty of the men assigned by the Works Division to the Housing Orientation Study of Columbia University were engaged in the preparation of the special panels. A very large part of the photographic work was done in the dark room of the Tenement House Department, with the assistance of Works Division photographers. This photographic work was under the direction of Mr. Walker Evans [italics mine].”399 In a New York Times article about the exhibition published on October 19, 1934, the following is noted about Evans’s role in the show: “Walker Evans… assistance with the selection and display of photographs,” suggesting that Evans played a role both in curating and organizing the photographs on display. This would suggest that by 1934, Evans was already something of a “go-to” person for photography at the MoMA and was looked to as someone with both technical skills and professional knowledge.400 398 MoMA press release, 11/27/1934. 399 Ibid. 400 Jewell, Edward Alden. “HOUSING EXHIBITION HAS OPENING TODAY: Preview of Display at Museum of Modern Art Discloses Anti-Slums Crusade,” Special to The New York Times, October 19, 1934. 245 Importantly, Evans’s participation as a photographer for this exhibition suggests that by 1935-1936, when he decided to work for the Farm Security Administration, he was already familiar with working for large bureaucratic groups interested in using photography for social aims. OTHER PHOTOGRAPHY EXHIBITIONS AT THE MoMA For purposes of comparison with Evan’s 1933 show, it is useful to examine an exhibition that took place in 1934 entitled The Urban Vernacular of the Thirties, Forties, and Fifties: American Cities before the Civil War, curated by the American architectural historian Henry Russell Hitchcock and with photographs by Berenice Abbott. The overarching motivation for this exhibition stemmed from an understanding that American nineteenth century architecture was under-appreciated and under-studied in modernist architectural history; a view aligned with Hitchcock’s architectural history writings discussed above. This exhibition was meant to be didactic: its original impetus was to encourage museum viewers of the 1930s to “appreciate antebellum architecture as a model for coherent contemporary city building.”401 Importantly — and this is where this exhibition departs radically from the Evans exhibition — Hitchcock found a relationship (rather than an opposition) between the formal qualities of simple, unadorned nineteenth 401 See Janine A. Mileaf, Berenice Abbott and Henry-Russell Hitchcock : a recreation of the 1934 exhibition, the Urban vernacular of the thirties, forties, and fifties: American cities before the Civil War. Davison Art Center, Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT, October 28 - December 10, 1993, p. 7. 246 century urban American architecture and the emergent International Style and work of H.H. Richardson. Berenice Abbott’s photographs and Hitchcock’s accompanying text showed viewers quiet, unadorned façades — wherein one could find, it was suggested, the roots of American modernism. The thesis of Hitchcock’s exhibition, as stated in the concluding label, was that “simple vernacular style, stripped of columns, ornament and archaeological quotations, flourished in America at the same time as the Greek Revival.”402 In this simplicity, Hitchcock (and perhaps even Abbott) found what they considered to be a “European” style, which they believed led ultimately to the development of modernism in the United States. Hitchcock’s intention in this exhibition was to prove that American urban vernacular architecture in its noble simplicity had more to do with the ideals of Greek classical architecture than did the American Greek Revival. Janine A. Mileaf, who helped organize the recreation of this 1934 exhibition at Wesleyan University in 1993, states in the catalog that “while the two styles at first appeared to be antithetical, the real, underlying principles of the Greek Revival — discipline of proportions and simple expanses of the best available materials — were fundamental to both. Indeed, even ordinary urban building expressed the highest aesthetic achievement of the Greek Revival.”403 402 Ibid. 403 Ibid., p. 8. 247 Hitchcock’s original text from the exhibition helps to clarify his aims for the show: In these decades American urban building was comparable in its high general level of excellence to that of European cities in a way that it never has been since. American cities when they first became generally conscious of their difference from the small towns and the country expressed that difference in a sense of communal ordering of design which may well be a model to us today. In the thirties, forties, and fifties, architects built churches and single houses in every type of design that whim could ask; but fortunately in ordinary city building they preserved a sense of responsibility which must be regained if our cities are ever again to achieve architectural amenity. The chaos of the years since the Civil War was a great price to pay architecturally even for the individual fine buildings of Richardson, White, Sullivan, Wright, and Hood. The schemes for “Cities Beautiful” of the last fifty years rarely projected anything beyond public monuments; whereas the real architectural quality of a fine city lies in the general consistency and order of its vernacular building.404 One of Abbott’s photographs from the show, 70-73 Beacon Street (Boston 14) (1934) (figure 34) demonstrated an attempt to photographically capture an ideal urban street view, unified and regular. However, upon a more careful look we notice that Abbott placed her camera behind a tree and blocked out a house that did not fit the neat, regular sequence of the street’s profile. Perhaps this was an ironic gesture on Abbott’s part, or perhaps it was an attempt to call attention to the lack of continuity among the façades on Beacon Street. Regardless of Abbott’s intentions, her photographs in this exhibit focused on harbingers of modernism in nineteenth century American urban architecture. 404 Ibid,. p. 64. 248 In all these ways, this series of photographs stood in direct contrast to Evans’s work. Abbott’s photographs show us the unadorned architectural opposite of American Victorian architecture — an urban vernacular which was popular at the same historical moment. Her photographs celebrated the roots of modernism in European-influenced urban American architecture, while Evans’s work critiqued the concept of modernism altogether. The opposing views represented in these two exhibitions demonstrate the ways in which photography was utilized as a “document” (a method of “proof”) to promote two very different understandings of what American vernacular was (stylistically) and what it meant in the 1930s. The Hitchcock and Abbot exhibition is a useful contrast to the Evans exhibit because it further indicates how politically and ideologically complicated the display of American vernacular photography at the MoMA actually was. Exhibitions at the MoMA in the 1930s took place during a period of great social turmoil in both the United States and Europe, and curators felt that this necessitated a “quieting down” of the political valence of art and architecture. Therefore, much of the work displayed at this time was stripped down and decontextualized of any kind of social or political message that might have seemed too “communist.” It was in this complicated space that Walker Evans’s first one-person show took place. In the context of an onslaught of modernist exhibitions such as those described here, the very presence of Evans’s photographs of a “low” American architecture that relished in ornament represented a radical departure from the dominant visual idiom. Kirstein, whose loyalties lay with nineteenth century American architecture, was interested in displaying Evans’s 249 work for precisely this reason. Evans’s photographs represented an alternative history of American architecture — one which Kirstein, Wheelwright, and Evans felt was being written out of American history. The dual presence of these very different types of exhibitions at the MoMA in the 1930s suggests a more complicated presentation of modernism through photographs than has previously been appreciated. In this context, Evans’s work points to a complex debate about what the history of American architecture should include and how photography could be used to further these arguments. This series, which emphasized America’s neglected but usable past, presents an alternative history of American architecture — where looking backward towards a forgotten past became a method of critically engaging with the present. WALKER EVANS: AMERICAN HAUNTS The Victorian house project gave Evans an opportunity to move towards a new photographic style: “It’s something I wouldn’t have done myself, it was interesting chiefly because of Kirstein, and it was a perfectly respectable thing to do, that is, documenting architecture. And it taught me a lot. In fact, it introduced me to a knowledge of how to appreciate and love and respond to various kinds of architecture and architectural styles.”405 For Evans, this project marked a stylistic and ideological shift from an avant-garde inflected style to a more documentary one. Evans’s interest in this 405 Oral history interview with Walker Evans, 1971 Oct. 13 - Dec. 23, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 250 subject matter stemmed from his passion for collecting quirky, strange and unusual objects and images with his camera. As he rode through New England in a Model-T Ford with Kirstein and Wheelwright, he was keenly aware that he was not photographing American modernism (although he did take some images of skyscrapers earlier on for commercial purposes). Instead, he understood that this project was working very much against the modernist grain. Although Evans began photographing in a straight-forward “documentary” style shortly before his excursions with Kirstein and Wheelwright, it was during these trips that he was able to perfect his use of the large-format camera, impersonal viewpoint, sharp- focused detail, and frontal position.406 Many of his photographs from this time depict formal elements that would become central to Evans’s signature style, including the isolating of individual structures within the photographic frame, a dense filling of the foreground, and an interest in showing objects and surfaces with a palpable sense of “wear.” His photograph Two Folk Victorian Cottages at Ossining Camp Woods, New York, 1930-31, and Bedford Village, Westchester County, 1931, foreshadow the type and 406 Evans was also given a lesson in how to use a view camera by his friend and colleague the photographer Ralph Steiner likely in early 1930. “Steiner loaned Evans his British view camera together with a set of first-rate lenses in a fancy velvet-lined case. By May of 1930 Evans was using Steiner’s camera (which used 6 1/2 x 8 1/2-inch glass negatives) to make studies of ‘crumbling gravestones’ in Boston. He later wrote, ‘Ralph Steiner the photographer has turned out to be most generous, and has offered to teach me photography. He is a bitter little Jew, intelligent, whose limitations are skillfully blurred. Probably not clear in his own mind about what he is doing (he can make money with tragic ease). I will let him work on me as much as he likes. He has made a few of the best street snapshots of people I have seen, but doesn’t show them...’Aside from being a by-no-means-isolated expression of Evans’s anti-Semitism, the passage reveals that Steiner encouraged Evans more than Evans later remembered and that his rarely seen street photographs had an impact on the younger artist.” As quoted in Jeff L. Rosenheim, Maria Morris Hambourg, Douglas Eklund, Mia Fineman, Walker Evans. Princeton University Press, 2000, p. 37. 251 style of photography that would be prominently featured in American Photographs a few years later (figures 35-36). Evans’s trained eye was already fascinated by the early 1930s with the texture and surface of architecture beginning to decay. For instance, Two Folk Victorian Cottages at Ossining Camp Woods, New York, 1930 (made before his excursions with Wheelwright and Kirstein) features an unkempt Victorian cottage with boarded up windows. These cottages seem well-worn, even in their isolation. Throughout his life, Evans claimed that his political position was “no politics whatever” and that his photographs were better seen as poetic or “lyric” documents. He claimed to have eschewed an interest in politics even when he was working for and with overtly leftist groups and individuals such as the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera and Carleton Beals, author of The Crime of Cuba (1933). However, one must be wary of trusting such post-facto statements by Evans, as he was notorious for making contradictory remarks about his work throughout his life. Although Evans’s photographs of this period may at first seem to be anything but political, and indeed look very much like documents, when examined in context with the type of exhibitions taking place at the MoMA in the 1930s, a clear political message surfaces. These documents suddenly emerge as a critique of a dominant architectural interest in modernism in the museum specifically, and in American culture generally: Evans’s politics was a politics of representation. The straightforward execution and banality of presentation seen in this series stands in marked contrast to the celebratory images of modernism on view at the MoMA in the 1930s. WALKER EVANS, ORNAMENT AS CRIME 252 The question of ornament was a pressing one in the 1920s and 1930s, particularly in the context of the MoMA and among art and architectural historians of the period. Barr neatly summarized the issue in the following passage from his review of Hitchcock’s book: Any contemporary architectural ornament is intolerable, and…our present period of ‘sterilization’ was inevitable. Yet [it is tempting] to propose that the ornament of the future will derive not from geometry, not from modern painting, nor from any of the other sources of ‘modernist’ decoration, but rather from mechanical devices such as steam radiators, electric bulbs, hydrants, mailing chutes, radio dials, electric fans, neon tubes. These objects are at present merely utilitarian but already it is fashionable to consider them ornamental. The Gothic arch was for several decades used only for a structural purpose though it became eventually the fundamental motive of Gothic ornament. The analog is not exact, yet future ornament of ‘gadgetry’ seems not improbable.407 The Gothic arch appeared as a primary decorative motif in many of Evans’s images (see for instance, Victorian Architecture Pair of Houses with Peaked Roofs, South Boston, Massachusetts, 1932 or Wooden Gothic Revival House, Seen from Across Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1930-31). For the most part, however, Evans used visual references to the Gothic in what often feels like a humorous or vaguely critical fashion (figures 37-39). Evans’s darkly humored acknowledgement of the decadence of American culture as he saw it was made apparent in 1931, when he wrote the following to his friend and confidante Hans Skolle: “Provincetown excellent. I was there a month, with side trip to Martha’s Vineyard, which I think I told you about. If I didn’t, know ye 407 Barr, “Modern Architecture,” p. 434. 253 that there is on the island a tabernacle in the center of little village of cottages wood built in 70’s about, jigsaw-gothic and completely god damn nuts and very funny to see. Naturally there will be photographs and will send some.”408 The photograph that Evans references here might be Folk Victorian Gazebo, 1930-31, but this work is by no means a unique instance of such over-the-top ornamentation (figure 39b). His photographs Folk Victorian Cottage at Oak Bluffs, Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, September, 1931, as well as Jigsaw Canopy over Water Pump of Wedding Cake House, Kennebunk, Maine, 1930-31, similarly depict Victorian ornamentation with a sense of irony (figures 40-41). Perhaps most ironic is Evans’s photograph of an outhouse decorated with wood trellis: Trellised Gingerbread Trim Privy, 1930-31 (figure 41b) — an unmistakenly absurd image. Evans’s photographs seem to delight in the absurdity of ornamentation in small- town America. Evans’s Gothic Revival Outbuildings, 1930-33, engaged both with this tongue- and-cheek critique of ornamentation as well as larger ongoing debates about the “criminality” of architectural ornamentation prevalent in the 1920s and 1930s (figure 42). Evans’s photographs of these structures seem to mock elite class taste, which found it necessary (however “criminal,” in Evans’s estimation) to decorate their outbuildings and/or storage facilities in a quasi-ecclesiastical manner with Gothic motifs including pinnacles, turrets, and tracery-laced windows. The humor and decadence of this kind of 408 Jeff L. Rosenheim, ed. Unclassified, A Walker Evans Anthology: Selections from the Walker Evans Archive. New York: Scalo Publishers, 2000, p. 157. 254 design was not lost on Evans, and this work, like so many of his photographs from this period, echoes a popular critique of ornamentation as it was discussed in modernist circles at the time. The architect Adolf Loos’s essay, Ornament and Crime (1908), translated into English, 1913),409 wherein Loos claimed that "The evolution of culture marches with the elimination of ornament from useful objects," became by the 1930s a well-known argument for the “smooth and precious surfaces"410 of modern architecture and Art Deco. Loos’s essay described how ornamentation had the effect of causing objects to go out of style and thus become obsolete. For him, it was a crime to waste the effort needed to add ornamentation, when the ornamentation would cause the object to soon go out of style. Loos introduced a sense of the "immorality" of ornament, describing it as "degenerate," and regarded its suppression as necessary for the regulation of modern society. Problematically, he tied the cultural presence of ornamentation to “primitive peoples,” such as the Papua New Guineans who, he believed, had not evolved to the moral and civilized circumstances of modern man and whose cultural tradition of ornamental body tattoos rendered them savages, criminals, or degenerates. Although Evans did not subscribe to this argument for sleek, stripped down modernism (and never did), his work certainly incorporated (and perhaps even lightly mocked) Loos’s arguments. 409 Adolf Loos, A. (1908). Ornament and Crime. Innsbruck, reprint Vienna, 1930. 410 Joseph Rykwert, “Adolf Loos: the New Vision.” Studio International Archive, Vol. 186, No. 957, 1973, online archive, http://www.studio-international.co.uk/archive/loos_1973_186_957.asp, accessed 8/12/2012. 255 In this way, Evans’s work again drew on the traditions already established by artists from the generation previous to his. Other artists formative to Evans’s development such as Edward Hopper and Charles Burchfield continued to exert influence on Evans’s work throughout the 1930s. In an interview with these two artists published as Some Documentary Notes, in the Archives of American Art, July-October, 1967, the following was noted about these artists’ use of old homes and architecture as prominent themes and motifs in their work: The first showing of Hopper’s water colors, while quite favorable, dwelt on what was regarded as a very curious subject matter. Gingerbread houses of the 1880s and 90s seemed as strange a subject to reviewers of the 1920s as soup cans and hamburgers did to the public of a more recent day. ‘Edward Hopper…seems to be opposed to ‘charm.’’ One writer said. ‘His subjects, all from Gloucester, are often ugly; his paintings have beauty.’ Describing a view of an old house, one critic wrote that ‘in subject matter the picture is what we have been taught to consider as utterly inartistic. And it requires, therefore, some ingenuity and originality on the part of Mr. Hopper to overcome the prejudices against his selection of subject.’ According to McBride, Hopper could be forcefully eloquent upon the hitherto concealed beauty of some supposedly hideous buildings built during the Garfield administration.’ Frank Rehn himself wrote that Hopper, ‘using the most treacherous of mediums—watercolors in pure wash, and without clever brushstroke or ‘washes,’ he builds an astoundingly superb design out of subject matter a lesser vision would consider hopeless.’411 Evans’s photographs of “hopeless” ornamentation and architecture, such as one finds in Victorian Garden Statuary on Lawn Outside Clapboard House (1928-33) or See Garnett McCoy, John D Morse, and Charles Burchfield, “Charles Burchfield and 411 Edward Hopper, Some Documentary Notes.” Archives of American Art Journal, Vol 7, No. ¾, Jul-Oct., 1967, pp. 1-15, 12. 256 Greek Revival House with Recessed Entry Porch, New York, (1931), evidence a deliberate attempt on his part to engage with these discourses of beauty versus ruin in American art of the 1920s and 1930s, and especially the modern view that any ornament not directly related to function was decadent and distasteful (figures 43-44).412 UNCANNY ARCHITECTURE 412 Here is Hitchcock writing about his views in Hound & Horn (1927) “In the general consideration of our architecture, it is this technical perfection which is the central dilemma. Despite Alain, it has not been the habit of our aesthetic to consider technics as in themselves art: Suger would have been one with Roxy in the belief that technics alone did not make a cathedral, be it for the celebration of the mass or the projection of the moving picture. Yet not sophistries about good and bad ornament can dispose of the fact that “modern taste” tends to find the virtues of contemporary architecture solely in the perfection of its technics. Of the immediate results of this preference, the inversion of the traditional hierarchy by which the average factory becomes more aesthetically significant than the average church and the average bathroom more beautiful that its accompanying boudoir, the importance is very slight and finds a simple explanation in the more or less unconscious replacement of the older symbolism which established the hierarchies by a symbolism which fits the life of the moment. The interest of these changes is undeniable, but similar instances many be found at any period when one symbolism replaces another. However, in this admiration for technical perfection, which is already far more widely spread than it is consciously formulated, there reposes the danger that by it architecture may shortly come to be pronounced dead. Yet even that is perhaps preferable to having the corpse continue, like Jeremy Bentham among us, attired like a superannuated prostitute in the finery of her various periods of youth and glory. The danger is that the surrealist theory of contemporary architecture may be correct, and that all conscious aesthetic additions to technical perfection are ‘embellishment’ in as evil a sense as the scagliola of Mr. Lowe’s palaces or the American Beauty capitals of Dr. Manning’s Metropolitan. If indeed this theory be correct, there can be no such thing as a ‘modernist’ – hat is, aesthetically-conscious-contemporary — architect, and the very presence of an architect in our civilization is an anachronism: Mendelssohn or Le Corbusier were then worse shams than Cram or Lutyens, who display their skill as embalmers rather than pretending to galvanize the corpse.” Russell Hitchcock, Jr. "The Decline of Architecture." Hound & Horn, vol. 1, September 1927, pp. 29-31. 257 This section examines Evans’s Victorian Architecture series in relation to notions of the uncanny particularly as manifested in the literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In addition to contextualizing the nineteenth century American houses show within the context of museum exhibition practices and policies of the 1930s, these photographs were also in dialogue with a longstanding tradition of representing “the house” in nineteenth and early twentieth century American literature. Before delving into an analysis of literature, it will be useful to briefly outline the concept of the uncanny as it would have been understood by Kirstein and Evans’s cultural milieu in the 1930s. In 1919, Sigmund Freud published his influential essay, “The Uncanny,”413 wherein he defined the concept as “that class of the terrifying that leads back to something known to us, at once very familiar… The German word unheimlich is obviously the opposite of heimlich, heimisch, meaning “familiar,” “native,” “belonging to the home.”414 Throughout the English translation of this essay, “[the] uncanny” is used as the English translation of “unheimlich,” literally “unhomely” 415 Therefore, the associative meanings between unheimlich and the idea of the home would not have been lost on the contemporary American reading audience. In his essay, Freud relied heavily upon literature to explain his concept of the uncanny. He utilized a close reading of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s short story “The Sandman” (1816) to outline the major precepts of the term. Hoffmann’s story revolves around a 413 Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” first published in Imago, Bd. V., 1919; reprinted in Sammlung, FünfteFolge. [Translated by Alix Strachey.] 414 Ibid., p. 2. 415 Ibid. Translators note. 258 main character, Nathaniel, who was haunted by childhood tales of The Sandman, a creature who ate the eyes of children. In his adult life, Nathaniel fell in love with a woman named Olimpia who, as it turns out, was an automaton (a minor detail of which Nathaniel was not originally aware). Eventually, Nathaniel went mad believing that Olimpia’s “creator” (Coppelius) was the Sandman himself, the ever-present figure from his childhood. At the end of the tale, Nathaniel, seeing Coppelius once again, cried out “pretty eyes, pretty eyes!” and then threw himself over a railing, falling to his death. Hoffmann was strongly influenced by Gothic literature, and Freud saw the story’s confusions between human and automaton as emblematic of the uncanny. Equally compelling for Freud was the setting of Hoffmann’s tale: the story took place in and around a strange, “uncanny” architectural space. Hoffmann, himself an amateur architect, set designer, and admirer of the architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel, often relied on architecture in his work and stage performances to explore the physical and psychological relationships between the home and the unhomely.416 “The Sandman” was no exception to this. 416 As Vidler points out, “there are numerous haunted houses in the tales of Hoffmann. The house of the archivist Lindhorst in ‘The Golden Pot’ (Der Goldne Topf), for example, is to all intents and purposes a house like any other on its street. Only its door knocker displays signs of the uncanny within. But inside, what might seem to be the familiar spaces of libraries, greenhouse, and studies might turn at any moment into fantastic, semiorganic environments: rooms formed of palms, their gilded leaves covering the ceiling, their bronze trunks standing like organic columns; tropical gardens lit by non outside source of light. Less fantastic but more uncanny, the uninhabited dwelling described in ‘The Deserted House’ (das öde Haus) presents itself to the street, like Hugo’s ruin, with its openings blocked; its dilapidation strange in comparison with its magnificent boulevard setting, the house was like ‘a square block of stone pierced by four windows, forming tow stories only, a ground floor and a first floor; …cracked and decayed… the four windows were fast shut. Those belonging to the ground floor had been walled up.’ Finally, Rossitten Castle in ‘The Deed of Entail’ (Das Majorat) seems only romantic from the outside, a gloomy ruin cursed by the 259 As the architectural historian Anthony Vidler noted in his important study, The Architectural Uncanny (1992), “… the place of architecture in Hoffmann’s idea of the uncanny was secured by more than simple allegiance to a talented designer. For romantics of Hoffmann’s generation, architecture was central to the task of representing nature, a veritable microcosm of the social and natural world. Kant, after all, had turned it into a metaphor for his entire philosophy, explaining by means of the architectonic the structural relations of thought. For the Germans, then, after Goethe, architecture was, in its Gothic or classical incarnations, a vision of aesthetic perfection—classical as a norm, Gothic as witness to the birth of the nation.”417 In this context, Wheelwright and Kirstein would certainly have understood the aesthetic relationship between architecture and the uncanny, especially as they had both been exposed to the traditions of German Romanticism and the writings of Kant and Goethe during their time at Harvard. Clearly, some of the photographs in the nineteenth century houses series are in dialogue with the history of Gothic architecture’s ties to issues of nationalism. Of the thirty-nine photographs exhibited and listed on the MoMA checklist for Evans’s exhibition, twelve were listed explicitly as “Gothic” style architecture. It would be hard to overlook the implied and perhaps ironic commentary at work here by Evans on the relationship between Gothic architecture and an emergent American nationalism. Grant Wood’s recent and popular painting, American Gothic fate of its owners; inside, the rapid transitions from comfortable and secure to uncomfortable and insecure produce a semi-dream effect similar to that of the familiar turned strange.” Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny. Boston, MIT Press, 1992, pp. 28-29. 417 Vidler, p. 28. 260 (1930), makes a similarly ironic use of carpenter gothic architecture as emblematic of American nationalism. Because the term uncanny has within its German root a reference to the home, it is difficult to separate the term from a certain image of the home, particularly one that is run down, boarded up, and “haunted” by the past, as are many of Evans’s photographs (figure 6). Evans, Kirstein, and Wheelwright selected and photographed homes that were part of the vernacular past of colonial New England, and their presence in the MoMA exhibition, especially in their often dilapidated states, served a mnemonic function of reminding audiences of the roots of American architecture, as well as of its demise in the face of a modernist threat. These photographs, if understood as capturing architecture in the process of moving from the “homely” to the “unhomely,” help to contextualize Kirstein’s sentiments about the show as detailed in the MoMA Bulletin, “These wooden houses disintegrate, almost, between snaps of the lens. Many shown in these photographs no longer stand.”418 This is the “tender cruelty”419 of Evans’s camera that Kirstein mentions in his review: “tender” (and perhaps with a touch of nostalgia) because Evans’s photographs show us architectural structures that will soon no longer exist, and “cruel” because of their straightforward, unsentimental execution.420 418 Lincoln Kirstein, “Walker Evans’ Photographs of Victorian Architecture.” The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art, Vol. 1, No. 4, Dec. 1933, p. 4. 419 Ibid. Additionally, Evans’s photographs reference the idea of the American home, 420 especially the nostalgic idea of the veillée, or “cottage.” The veillée as a concept would have been particularly poignant for Boston Brahmin’s such as Wheelwright and Kirstein who were dismayed by the sudden emphasis on modern architecture in their traditionally 261 American nineteenth century literature is fraught with examples of uncanny domestic architecture. One of the most famous examples is the American gothic novel, The House of the Seven Gables (1851) by Nathaniel Hawthorne. In his novel, Hawthorne explored themes of guilt, retribution, and atonement in a New England family, addressing themes such as witchcraft and the presence of the supernatural. The story was inspired by a gabled house in Salem, Massachusetts that once belonged to Hawthorne's cousin Susanna Ingersoll and by certain of Hawthorne's ancestors who had played a part in the Salem Witch Trials of 1692. Another lesser known, but equally poignant example of uncanny architecture in American literature is Herman Melville’s short story “I and my Chimney,” published in Putnam’s Monthly Magazine in 1856. Melville’s work is a short story about a narrator who is oddly comforted and simultaneously tormented by his home, particularly its oddly designed and centrally located chimney, and its potential destruction. The chimney, throughout the tale, is the object of a kind of obsession for the narrator and the family. It awkwardly and assertively delimits the family’s domestic space and their daily discussions. The narrator’s wife, in particular, is adamantly for the chimney’s removal, as are her daughters. The narrator, however, insists on the chimney’s preservation even as it incessantly smokes and its very presence causes his family distress. One day an inspector colonial city. They were from a social class that owned such “second-homes,” many of which were elaborately decorated, and some of which, as Kirstein mentions in his diaries, were photographed for the Nineteenth Century Houses show (although he does not provide information as to which photographs in the show these were). 262 comes to the home, suggesting that the chimney likely contains a “hidden chamber” because of its large and awkward construction. The wife and children excitedly call for the destruction of the chimney hoping to find the famed treasure of the former owner of the house — a wealthy pirate who died with very little left in his will (it is assumed that the missing treasure lay behind the looming and cumbersome brick structure). Not surprisingly, the narrator refuses to support tearing down of the chimney, and instead spends the rest of his waking days sitting beside its massive presence, protecting it, and never leaving the house. Throughout the story, Melville gives the chimney an uncanny “voice” and presence, collapsing the fates of the narrator and the chimney into one. Like the doomed, reclusive narrator, whose only solace is to sit and smoke next to the chimney, the chimney, too, incessantly smokes. The collapse of narrator and chimney into one is so pronounced that the title, “I and my Chimney,” is, as the narrator points out, a deliberate attempt to win back something of the power that the chimney holds over him: “though I always say, I and my Chimney, as Cardinal Wolsey used to say, “I and my King,” yet this egoistic way of speaking, wherein I take precedence of my chimney, is hereby borne out of the facts; in everything, except the above phrase, my chimney taking precedence over me.”421 In this way, narrator and chimney, architecture and domestic life, collapse into one another and are inseparable. 421 http://www.online-literature.com/melville/160/, accessed 12/29/11. 263 Melville’s detailed descriptions of the uncanny chimney and of the home, built awkwardly around the chimney itself, appeared at length in the tale. The following passage, for example, highlights the domineering quality of the chimney in the household. Melville writes: My chimney is grand seignior here — the one great domineering object, not more of the landscape, than of the house; all the rest of the house, in each architectural arrangement, as may shortly appear, is, in the most marked manner, accommodated, not to my wants, but to my chimney’s, which, among other things, has the center of the house to himself, leaving but the odd holes and corners to me.422 This description, among many others in Melville’s story, could easily serve as a caption beneath one of Evans’s most quixotic photographs from his nineteenth century houses series (Left Wing façade of Queen Anne House with Patterned Masonry Chimney, figure 45) and it is likely, given Evans and Kirstein’s interest in literature during this time, that this photograph is in dialogue with Melville’s tale. In both Evans’s photograph and Melville’s short story, the chimney dictates the form of the cobbled-together vernacular design of the house. Although not exhibited in the MoMA show, the image stands out in this series from those exhibited because of its peculiar vernacularism. This photograph is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and was donated, along with many other photographs from this series, by Kirstein in 1951.423 Just as in Melville’s tale the chimney is given the power of a strong, dominant character, in Evans’s 422 Ibid. 423 At the MET this work is entitled, Left Wing façade of Queen Anne House with Patterned Masonry Chimney, although it is unclear whether this is an original or museum-given title. If the title is original, it is also unclear whether it was given by Evans or Kirstein. 264 photograph the chimney (and its attendant eccentricities of pattern and design) stands strong in front of a whimsical façade. In contrast to many of the other more staid examples of New England vernacular architecture, this house and its photograph function like a character in a novel — one who is simultaneously welcoming and off-putting in his or her strangeness; we stare when we know we should look away. * * * In contrast to Freud’s use of the term, Walter Benjamin’s discussion of the uncanny (unheimlich) was born out of the rise of the crowded metropolis. The scale of the modern city, its daunting crowds, and the soaring architectural structures that dominated it led to the “fear, revulsion, and horror”; “emotions which the big city crowd aroused in those who first observed it.”424 Nineteenth and early twentieth century literature had plenty to say about this estrangement, and Vidler points to how the main characters in the literature of this genre tended to have a “privileged point of view” or a position of dominance over the cities and urban landscapes in which they found themselves. For instance, Vidler notes how Hoffmann’s observer kept his “careful distance from the marketplace, looking through ‘The Cousins’s Corner Widow’ with opera glasses; he points to Poe and Dickens watching the crowd; of Baudelaire losing himself in the swarming boulevards.”425 Each of these characters “attempted to preserve a sense of individual security that was only precariously sustained by the endless quest of 424 See Walter Benjamin and Harry Zohn, trans. Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. London: New Left Books, 1973, p. 131. 425 Vidler, p. 4. 265 the detective tracking his clue through the apparent chaos of modern urban life.”426 We know that Evans thought about his practice as a photographer in a similar fashion, often remaining deliberately outside of or removed from the group of people or individuals whom he was photographing. Perhaps in a larger sense, Evans’s deliberate turn to suburban and rural architectural subjects in his photographs during the 1930s was a response to these discussions of the estrangement of life in the modern city in nineteenth and early twentieth century literature. The alienation of the individual from his or her environments was addressed at length by writers ranging from Rousseau to Baudelaire, from Simmel to Faulkner, and this, as Vidler reminds us, was “reinforced by the real economic and social estrangement experienced by the majority of its [the city’s] inhabitants.”427 In this space of urban estrangement, the idea of the “home” was further complicated in the nineteenth century by the development of the rent system. As Karl Marx noted in his Economic and Philosophical Notebooks (1844), the idea of renting (as opposed to owning) left one in “a dwelling which he cannot regard as his own hearth — where he might at last exclaim: ‘Here I am at home’ — but where instead he finds himself in someone else’s house, in the house of a stranger who always watches him and throws him out if he does not pay his 426 Ibid. 427 Ibid. 266 rent.”428 Like Melville’s character, who rents the home with the strange chimney, the individual never quite feels at ease without a room or a home of one’s own. Marx’s point about personal estrangement from the domestic space of the home was particularly poignant in the 1930s during the Depression, as evidenced by the near cultural obsession during this time with the idea of housing and the home in the popular press, media, literature, and even within cultural institutions such as the MoMA. The idea of urban estrangement, coupled with a rising acceptance of American nineteenth century literature that addressed notions of uncanny domestic architecture (due in no small part to Van Wyck Brook’s championing of authors such as Melville, Hawthorne, Twain, and Whitman) and the 1930s housing crisis, provided a platform for Evans’s turn towards photographing the rural domestic home during the Depression and into the 1940s. A HOUSE DIVIDED: WALKER EVANS AND WILLIAM FAULKNER Hand in hand with the uncanny and the turn towards the rural vernacular, the Gothic — particularly the American Gothic in art and literature — enjoyed something of a renaissance during the 1930s in America and was another dimension of the background out of which Evans’s photographs emerged. The iconic painting of this era, Grant Wood’s American Gothic (1930), is still for many Americans one of the most instantly recognizable artworks from the Great Depression. As the historian Steven Biel explained 428 Karl Marx, as quoted in Vidler, 5. Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.” In Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, vol. 3, Marx and Engels, 1843-1844. New York: International Publishers, 2007, p. 314. 267 in American Gothic: A Life of America's Most Famous Painting, Wood’s American Gothic “appeared to its first viewers as the visual equivalent of the revolt-against-the- provinces genre in 1910s and 1920s American literature"429 — a critique of provincialism akin to Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (1919), Sinclair Lewis's Main Street (1920) and Carl Van Vechten's The Tattooed Countess (1924). However, as the devastating effects of the Depression worsened, audiences began to see Wood's painting in a different light, and its interpretation shifted. Wood’s American Gothic was no longer understood as satirical, but instead as a celebratory expression of populist nationalism. Critics extolled the farmer and his wife as steadfast embodiments of American virtue and the pioneer spirit: one caption for the painting in 1935 read, “American democracy was built upon the labors of men and women of stout hearts and firm jaws, such people as those above." 430 The Carpenter Gothic house in the background of Wood’s painting had become emblematic of American hard work, diligence, and ingenuity. The connection between the Gothic, Gothic revival and literary connections is vast — in English literature, the architectural Gothic Revival and classical Romanticism gave rise to the Gothic novel genre, beginning with Castle of Otranto (1764) by Horace Walpole, and inspired a nineteenth century genre of medieval 429 See Steven Biel, American Gothic: A Life of America's Most Famous Painting. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005, p. 70. 430 Ibid, p. 70. 268 poetry influenced by the bardic-esque poetry of "Ossian."431 Poems like "Idylls of the King" by Alfred Tennyson, recast specifically modern themes in the medieval settings of Arthurian romance. In German literature, the Gothic Revival saw a resurgence in the Sturm und Drang and Romantik movements. When Evans began to photograph American Victorian Gothic architecture in the early 1930s, he was likely aware of the historical precedent for linking architecture and literature, particularly in times of national crisis. Evans’s interest in photographing the American Gothic home or the Gothic- inspired ruin continued throughout the late 1930s and 1940s. His book American Photographs and the MoMA exhibition of 1938 contained numerous instances of decrepit interiors and exteriors that draw on metaphors of decay and ruin while simultaneously remarking upon the rugged spirit of independence and individualism so prevalent in American discourse during the Great Depression. Several of the photographs of architectural interiors and exteriors either bear obvious Gothic signifiers (gothic arches, for instance) or draw upon the idea of the Gothic in a broader way by depicting the ruin or the relic. For example, we notice the gothic trappings in a photograph like Boarding House with Two Men seated on Porch, Birmingham, Alabama (1936), especially in the decorative porch designs, where a preponderance of gothic arches repeat above the heads of two men starting out from the porch, frontally meeting the camera’s gaze (figure 46). Notice as well the ghost-like figure looming in the window from the 431 Ossian is the narrator and purported author of a cycle of poems which the Scottish poet James Macpherson published. 269 room on the upper right. This woman lurks behind clothes laid out to dry, and makes direct eye contact with the camera. An awkwardly nailed-up window screen slightly occludes her face, making her simultaneously both hidden and visible. Everything about this boarding house seems about to fall down: the roof, the siding, and the surfaces of the exterior walls. This photograph focuses on the shabby, worn, and run-down architectural structure, as did so many of the photographs Evans made in the American South. Throughout his life, Evans maintained a photographic affinity for and sensitivity to the region, which is easily gleaned from the preponderance of photographs he made of its people, objects, and architecture. Between the years 1935-1936, Evans photographed many areas of the rural South, including portions of Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi. He did this both independently and for the Farm Security Administration. In November 1934, Gifford Cochran, a wealthy colleague of Kirstein’s, commissioned Evans to photograph his Greek Revival Home in Croton Falls, New York. Later, Cochran financed a much larger project that took Evans to the South to photograph surviving examples of Greek Revival architecture in the region. Beginning in February 1935, Evans and Cochran (driven by Cochran’s butler) departed on their trip. On his first day in Savannah, Evans photographed a row of former slave cabins on the grounds of the 1830 plantation home, The Hermitage (figure 47). During this excursion, Evans made photographs of Southern plantation homes, outbuildings, urban architecture, and city streets in small-town America, photographing more Greek Revival than Gothic Revival style architecture because there were simply more examples of this around him. Greek Revival’s 270 prominence in the region reflects a long-standing regional taste for the Neo-Classical (which, as in Europe, was more prevalent in the South where Classical—as opposed to Gothic—ideals were culturally dominant). Throughout the 1930s, Evans continued to photograph this part of the United States, and his work was explicitly tied to the literature of the Southern Renaissance later in his life when he was commissioned by Vogue in 1948 to contribute photographs to an upcoming spread on William Faulkner. In 1948, Faulkner had just published his new book Intruder in the Dust. The author’s work had recently seen something of a revival after Malcolm Cowley edited a career-salvaging collection of his work entitled The Portable Faulkner (1946). 432 During the 1940s, writers such as Allen Tate and his circle began to celebrate Faulkner’s work, finding in it a particularly southern sensibility that aligned with the group’s intellectual investments. Tate and Crowley were long-standing friends and both regularly published in Hound and Horn during the 1930s. With the appearance of Crowley’s edition of Faulkner’s work, his work gained broader public attention, eventually making its way into the pages of popular magazines such as Vogue. The term “Southern Gothic” was first used by the novelist Ellen Glasgow in 1936 to describe Faulkner’s work.433 The old, ruined house functioned in Faulkner’s writings as a spatial signifier of this cultural decay and simultaneously pointed to a mourning for 432 See Malcolm Cowley, ed., William Faulkner, The Portable Faulkner. New York: The Viking press, 1946. 433 Glasgow used the term pejoratively to describe what she perceived as “a new and disturbing trend in Southern fiction” in the work of writers such as Erskine Caldwell and William Faulkner. The lecture was delivered at the University of Virginia in 1936. 271 antebellum American “golden age” that had been lost in the face of modernity. This photograph and the thirteen others that accompany it are a continuation of themes that by 1948 had become familiar tropes for Evans. His photographs are clearly an homage to Faulkner’s Gothic South, and thus point to the ways in which his and Faulkner’s projects had come to ideologically overlap during the 1930s and 1940s. For instance, Faulkner’s use of jumps in narrative time, especially in The Sound and the Fury (1929), point to an interest in shifting temporalities similar to those evident in Evans’s photographs, which engage with ideas of the “usuable past” and its presence in the 1930s present. In 1936, Evans photographed for the FSA in Faulkner’s hometown of Oxford, Mississippi, making it logical that Vogue should have called upon him for photographs for “Faulkner’s Mississippi,” an article that appeared as a six-page spread in magazine’s October 1, 1948 edition (Figure 48, 49). Feature editor Allene Talmey was assigned a six-page article based on Faulkner’s novels and stories (including Intruder, Light in August, and Sanctuary), to accompany Evans’s photographs. Evans traveled to the South again for this assignment and with his Rolleiflex took seventy-one photographs. He took many photographs of neo-classically inspired plantation houses in states of decay, and continued to work within this Gothic idiom, even if his photographs were not of gothic architecture per se. Fourteen photographs from Evans’s trip appeared in the Vogue spread, including an image captioned “Ruin Rising Gaunt,” which was accompanied by the following text: “Symbolically, historically a plantation house is always important in Faulkner; sometimes gutted, sometimes burned, with only four chimneys standing, sometimes half- 272 ruined, it raises its paintless face in Intruder in the Dust, in The Hamlet, [and] in Sanctuary” (figures 49-50). Faulkner’s indebtedness to gothic traditions in literature is well known. The author’s work, which many consider to be emblematic of American Gothic, absorbed much of the European literary tradition of the genre and used these traditions to explore the transformation of the American dream into the American nightmare. A passage from Faulkner’s novel Sanctuary (1931) exemplifies the palpable presence of the crumbling mansion in his writing: … a plantation house set in the middle of a tract of land; of cotton fields, and gardens and lawns long since gone back to jungle, which the people of the neighborhood had been pulling down piecemeal for firewood for fifty years or digging with secret and sporadic optimism for the gold which the builder was reputed to have buried somewhere about the place when Grant came through the country…434 This passage describes the tearing down of an old mansion, with wooden architecture of the past (itself emblematic of “Americaness”) here being used as literal fodder for the fires of new generations. It is not difficult to read into this passage the haunting presence of the Civil War, which divided a nation over race and eventually led to the crumbling state of these former plantation homes in the twentieth century. Nineteenth century wooden antebellum architecture, like its New England iteration, once symbolic of American ingenuity, hard-work, and a unified nation, here slowly burns and crumbles. Perhaps an even more haunting example of Faulkner’s use of decaying architecture in his writing occurs in this passage from his first short story, “A Rose for 434 William Faulkner, Sanctuary [1931]. New York: Vintage Books, 1958, pp. 7-8. 273 Emily,” originally published in the April 30, 1930 issue of Forum. This story takes place within and around a prominent, excessive Victorian house (the most elaborate in town), which throughout the tale falls ever deeper into a state of ruin (as does its primary inhabitant, Emily Grierson). In this tale, where, as the Mississippi writer Elizabeth Spencer put it: a sweet little Southern lady, Miss Emily Grierson, poisoned her lover and "kept his corpse around as a playmate,"435 Faulkner used the style, setting, and condition of a building to evoke the condition of its inhabitants: “It was a big, squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies, set on what had once been our most select street. But garages and cotton gins had encroached and obliterated even the august names of that neighborhood; only Miss Emily's house was left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and gasoline pumps — an eyesore among eyesores.”436 Evans’s photograph, Folk Victorian House (1930-33) (figure 50b) resembles Faulkner’s description of Emily’s house in its excess of decoration and surface ornamentation. Although it is not the elaborately decorated house that Faulkner describes in “A Rose for Emily,” Evans’s photograph, Belle Helene Plantation House with Uprooted Tree in Foreground (March, 1935) (figure 51), draws in a similar way upon the Southern Gothic metaphor of ruined mansion as societal ruin. In the foreground of this once-grand Greek Revival plantation house we see a tree, uprooted, gnarly and hideous, lying almost 435 As quoted in Thomas S. Hines, William Faulkner and the Tangible Past. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996, p. 101. 436 http://xroads.virginia.edu/~drbr/wf_rose.html, accessed 6/1/2012. 274 defiantly in front of a white, calm, and repetitive (albeit crumbing) Doric columned façade. Here, nature, in the form of the uprooted tree, lies prostrate before an equally decaying wooden, human-made structure. One of the more prominent forerunners of the photographic practice of documenting Louisiana plantation houses was Robert W. Tebbs, who in 1926 created a photographic taxonomy of America’s architectural cultural heritage in the South. Tebbs’s work can be understood as part of a larger cultural movement in the United States beginning with the American Institute of Architects (AIA). In 1869, the AIA, under the direction of Richard Upjohn, suggested that architects “make careful studies of some of the old houses yet remaining” in order to “gain a valuable lesson.”437 By 1926, Tebbs, following a long line of predecessors (including works like George Barnard’s Photographic Views of Sherwood’s Campaign (c. 1866), which documented American architecture and ruins through drawings and photography) (figure 51b), decided to photograph Louisiana plantation houses on the verge of collapse. Tebbs’s photographs, including Belle Chasse Plantation (1926) and Hickory Hill Plantation (1926), were some of the earliest in-depth studies of Louisiana Creole type and Greek Revival architecture made in the twentieth century (figures 52-53). Many of his photographs, as Richard A. 437 Richard A. Lewis, Robert W. Tebbs: Photographer to Architects, Louisiana Plantations in 1926. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011, p. x. 275 Lewis, author of a recent monograph on his work writes, “have an elegiac character borne of attention to aspects of decay, neglect, and loss.”438 During the Depression, Tebbs worked occasionally for the Historic American Building Survey (HABS), a division of the Works Progress Administration. At the time of his death in 1945, The New York Times reported that Tebbs had one of the largest personal collections of architectural photographs in the country.439 While Tebbs’s intentions were to document Louisiana's historic rural architecture, Lewis maintained that “the resulting photographs, through probably taken for purely commercial intent, often posses a poetic quality that transcends the documentary function. ... Tebbs’s seemingly deliberate emphasis on cropped framing, oblique perspective, dilapidation, and extraneous details sounds a curious note amid the otherwise diligent attention to composing crisp and legible images.”440 Some of the plantation homes Tebbs photographed were also photographed by Walker Evans, including a series of images of Belle Grove plantation (figure 53b). At this same site, Evans made a well-known interior view of the plantation’s interior, Room in Louisiana Plantation House, 1935 (figure 55, for exterior see 54). Evans described Belle Grove as “the most sophisticated example of classic revival private dwelling in the country,” making for, as Jeff Rosenheim has described it, “a haunting photograph about 438 Lewis, p. 2. 439 Ibid., p. 3. 440 Ibid., p. 4. 276 absence.”441 Rosenheim continues: “The room is bereft of life — yet filled with capitals and columns made from cypress trees that slaves had harvested on the plantation. Wet rot stains the dentils. Graffiti of previous trespassers decorate the once-pristine plaster walls. Life is a relic here. In a single image Evans summed up his understanding of the history of classical architecture in the antebellum South: grand of design and crafted by true artisans, the house was nevertheless built upon an untenable social structure.”442 The pervasiveness of architecture in Faulkner’s writing is also strongly apparent in Absalom! Absalom! (1936), a novel written the same year as Margaret Mitchell’s categorically different Gone with the Wind (1936). Faulkner’s Absalom! Absalom! created a cultural consciousness of plantation houses in the American South as did Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), one hundred years prior. Faulkner’s interest in architecture is deep-seated and provides the foundation for many of his works. In fact, Faulkner gave five of his novels architecturally resonant titles: Sanctuary, Pylon, The Hamlet, The Mansion, and The Town (in fact, the original title for Absalom! Absalom! was Dark House). Faulkner’s ability to evoke and translate details of the lived environment into writing, creating a sense of space — a genus loci — was rivaled only by the work of Henry James and James Joyce. As Malcolm Cowley observed in his introduction to The Portable Faulkner (1946), “it sometimes seems to me that every 441 See Jeff Rosenheim, “‘The Cruel Radiance of What Is’: Walker Evans and the South.” In Walker Evans. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art/Princeton University Press, 2000, p. 65. 442 Ibid. 277 house has been described in one of Faulkner’s novels.”443 This type of “novelistic architecture,” as critic William Ruzicka has called it, “has much to say about the way that characters view the world they inhabit, the effect of the fictive environment upon those who live within it, the image and significance of a fictive place, and the meaning of dwelling there.”444 Historian Joel Williamson noted that for Faulkner, “buildings stood for artificial man-made institutions and the ‘outdoors’ stood for the natural order. In his stories, doors and door frames, windows and window frames became especially important. His characters were forever looking in or looking out, crawling in or crawling out of windows. They passed in and out of doors, faced closed doors and looked doors, and plunged through, paused, rested, or sat in doorways. Very often to go into a house or building was to attempt to enter the modern world and deal with it on its own terms, to go out was to abandon that effort and seek salvation in nature.”445 Faulkner’s epic story Absalom! Absalom! focuses on the life of Thomas Sutpen, a plantation owner with dynastic ambitions. There are many examples of important houses in Absalom! Absalom! including sprawling plantation mansions, small cabins, and prison- like houses. Which characters were allowed to enter a house, and through which door, is of enormous importance in this novel. In fact, for Sutpen, his prohibition from entering 443 See Malcolm Cowley, “Introduction.” The Portable Faulkner, New York: Viking Press, 1946, p. 5. 444 As quoted in Thomas S. Hines, William Faulkner and the Tangible Past. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996, p. 2. 445 As quoted in Hines, p. 4. 278 the Pettibone mansion as a young, poor man is a pivotal moment in the text: it is what sets his whole ambitious plan of becoming a plantation owner in motion. As we learn Sutpen’s story, and progress through the novel, we come to understand that he has put everything into building “Sutpen's Hundred” (the name of his one hundred acre estate, problematically acquired from regional Native Americans). This land, and the plantation house he built upon it, serves as a symbol of his dynastic achievement throughout the novel. Sutpen’s massive plantation house, with its "formal gardens and promenades, its slave quarters and stables and smokehouses,"446 reflects his stature and wealth, showing how far he has come from his humble, lower-class beginnings. Meanwhile, Sutpen’s slaves, who built the house, often slept outside with no roof over their heads or blankets to keep them warm. The following passage is one the earliest extended descriptions of Sutpen’s plantation home as it appears in the novel: …and so into the house (somehow smaller than its actual size – it was of two storeys – unpainted and a little shabby, yet with an air, a quality of grim endurance as though it had been created to fit into and complement a world in all ways a little smaller than the one in which it found itself) where in the gloom of the shuttered hallway whose air was even hotter than outside, as if there were prisoned in it like in a tomb all the suspiration of slow heat-laden time which had recurred during the forty-three years…447 Notice how in this passage, Faulkner is early-on in his novel conflating architectural space with the long durational, and “slow heat-laden” passing of time. One 446 See William Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom! New York: Vintage International Edition, 1936, 1990, p. 29. 447 William Faulkner, Absalom! Absalom!, p. 6. 279 might compare this to the long duration of exposure needed in order to properly capture the interior of the grand room in Evans’s Room in Louisiana Plantation House (1935): in both instances, time literally seeps into and out of the architectural structure, the thickness of time creating the exposure in Evans’s photograph. Later in the novel, Faulkner remarks on how Sutpen’s presence had “compelled” the house to “accept and retain human life” by the mere fact that it was he who had built it: [Sutpen's] presence alone compelled that house to accept and retain human life; as though houses actually possess a sentience, a personality and character acquired not from the people who breathe or have breathed in them so much as rather inherent in the wood and brick or begotten upon the wood and brick by the man or men who connived and built them – in this one an incontrovertible affirmation for emptiness, desertion; an insurmountable resistance to occupancy save when sanctioned and protected by the ruthless and the strong.448 Just as Sutpen’s plantation house is given human characteristics, later in the novel, Quentin Compson, the reluctant historian (and sometimes narrator) burdened with this heavy Southern Gothic tale, is himself transformed into “architecture”: “His very body was an empty hall echoing with sonorous defeated names; he was not a being, entity, he was a commonwealth.” 449 Faulkner’s continual conflation of architecture, time, body, and space and his obsession with a long-decayed cultural past resonates strongly with much of Evans’s work from the 1930s. After surviving the Civil War but not the collisions of Sutpen and his heirs, Sutpen's Hundred, before its ultimate destruction by fire, suffered a decline more ruinous 448 Ibid., p. 67. 449 Ibid., p. 69. 280 and symbolic even than that of the Old Frenchman Place: “Rotting portico and scaling walls, it stood . . . not invaded, marked by no bullet nor soldier's iron heel, but rather as though reserved for something more: some desolation more profound than ruin . . . that barren hall with its naked stair . . . rising into the dim upper hallway, where an echo spoke which was not mine, but rather that of the lost, irrevocable might-have-been which haunts all houses.”450 Two photographs by Evans may allude to the ultimate demise of Sutpen’s plantation house by fire at the end of the novel — a fate shared by many wooden frame houses in the nineteenth century. These photographs, both entitled Fire Ruin in Ossining, New York (1930) show us a literal ruin: the moment of and aftereffects of a fire that raged in a nineteenth century home (figures 56-57). Evans’s images may be an ironic homage to the idea of the Romantic ruin, but they allude to the famous ending of Faulkner’s novel, where all of Sutpen’s Hundred eventually burns to the ground: ‘It’s on fire!’ though she would not have cried that; she would have said, ‘Faster. Faster’… the monstrous tinder-dry rotten shell seeping smoke through the warped cracks in the weather-boarding as if it were made of gauze wire and filled with roaring and beyond which somewhere something lurked which bellowed, something human since the bellowing was in human speech, even though the reason for it would not have seemed to be. They ran onto the gallery too, into the seeping smoke, Miss Coldfield screaming harshly, ‘The window! The window!’…but the door was not locked; it swung inward; the blast of heat struck them. The entire staircase was on fire…the draft created by the open door seemed to explode like powder among the flames as the whole lower hall vanished.451 450 Ibid., pp. 166-67. 451 Ibid., p. 300. 281 Walker Evans’s Burning House (1930-31) (figure 57a), likely made during one of his Cape Cod summers spent in Truro, Massachusetts with Ralph Steiner, may be an even more overt reference to the dramatic ending of Faulkner’s Absalom! Absalom! By the time he had written about it, the South where Faulkner grew up and the South that appeared in his novels had already a vanished. Faulkner’s South is a haunted place — its once-splendid grandeurs had become a thing of the past, destroyed by the Civil War, the collapse of the antebellum system, and Reconstruction efforts. The region, as many historians have noted, was the only part of the United States to have witnessed military defeat and occupation. This helps to explain Faulkner’s dark obsession with an (almost-mythic) past; a society and culture ruined and ravaged by war. Abraham Lincoln’s famous speech, delivered on the cusp of the Civil War in 1858, included the line, “a house divided against itself cannot stand,”452 which foreshadowed a country ravaged by a horrible Civil War in which literally thousands of houses would be divided over the issue and the very idea of slavery. The phrase also forecasted an entire discourse of the crumbling, dilapidated American home and the equally decaying idea of America that emerged so strongly in the 1930s during the Great Depression. Both of these historical moments, the Civil War and the Great Depression, 452 On June 16, 1858, more than 1,000 Republican delegates met in the Springfield, Illinois, statehouse for the Republican State Convention. At 5:00 p.m. they chose Abraham Lincoln as their candidate for the U.S. Senate, running against Democrat Stephen A. Douglas. At 8:00 p.m. Lincoln delivered this address to his Republican colleagues in the Hall of Representatives. The title reflects part of the speech's introduction, "A house divided against itself cannot stand.” The phrase was originally spoken by Jesus and is recorded in all three gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke. 282 provided the ideological frameworks for Evans’s and Faulkner’s works as I have discussed them here, and their works should be understood as equally in conversation with both of these historical periods. CONCLUSION Walker Evans’s turn towards documentary photography and documentary style in the late 1920s and early 1930s is compelling. Although documentary style photography was adopted by many photographers in the 1930s (e.g. Ralph Steiner, Berenice Abbott, Dorothea Lang), Evans’s work remained unique and even today is recognized as being iconic in its depiction of 1930s America. During this period, each of these photographers increasingly saw their camera as a documentary tool. This chapter has examined Evans’s personal turn towards a new visual idiom, one which would become his trademark style. According to Evans, what made his documentary photographic style different from that of others was that it was “lyric documentary” (lyric as in poetry) rather than “documentary” (as in a specific document); that is to say, what made Evans’s photographs individual were their strong associations with literature. While Evans’ work may appear to be simple and straightforward, at times even banal, his formal presentation was decidedly deceptive. Indeed, what was not immediately perceptible in these photographs was how tightly interwoven these photographs in fact were with literature, 1930s political discourse, and criticisms of modernism. As complicated responses to modernism and modernist photography, Evans’s photographs first adopted, then eventually eschewed, modern formal aesthetics. His work 283 did not, however, leave aside a complicated engagement with the idea of what modern photography in America could look like in the 1930s. Indeed, Evans’s photographs embodied a documentary-inspired modern aesthetic, one which broke from the formal modalities of sleek modernist (read European) formalism. In this, Evans was not alone, but rather joined the ranks of many modern writers. As Thomas S. Hines notes in William Faulkner and the Tangible Past: William Faulkner, the literary modernist, was generally unsympathetic to the modern movement in architecture, a phenomenon not unique in the history of twentieth century modernist culture. Though certain avant-garde writers, painters, sculptors, composers, and architects eagerly embraced parallel developments in related fields, others were unable or unwilling to make the connections. To a certain extent, this antipathy was true for such writers as James Joyce and T. S. Eliot, and it was even more markedly the case with Faulkner. Like them, Faulkner seemed unable to identify his own literary experiments in cubistic simultaneity with related revolutions in painting, sculpture, and architecture.453 Evans, too, seemed unable to reconcile his unique modernist aesthetic with modernist art. In this way, his work very neatly aligned with the literary quandaries of Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and Faulkner as outlined above. Evans’s fascination with and interest in capturing photographically a fading and crumbling American architectural history continued throughout his career. The intersections presented here between the work of Evans, exhibitions at the MoMA, American literature, and work of Southern Renaissance writers and thinkers represent an institutionalization of a particular American variant of modernism in the 1930s — one that was predicated upon a confrontation with the burden of history on the 453 Hines, p. 103. 284 one hand, and an emergent modernism on the other. In Evans’s photographs, the architectural remains of another era — a haunting past — are uncannily echoed in the barren present of the 1930s, and again now, for us today. Much later in life, in July 1963, Evans published an article in Life magazine calling for the preservation of New York City’s Pennsylvania Station, which was to be (and has been) replaced by a new building. Evans was among many to raise his voice against this pending (and inevitable) demolition. Included in his article is a discussion of several other buildings in New York City slated for destruction and replacement. On this point, Evans noted that “unless citizens and officials act to halt the holocaust, the noble, the picturesque and all that is beautiful in America’s architectural heritage will be memories and a handful of dust.”454 Evans’s nineteenth century architecture photographs from the 1930s began his lifelong interest in capturing American architecture on the verge of ruin. His work preserved architectural structures soon to be destroyed. Evans’s photographs, which captured these fading structures, have today become like architecture, standing in for homes and buildings that no longer exist: his images are the foundation for our visual understanding of a now distant 1930s American past. It was perhaps Kirstein who best expressed what was distinctive about Evans’s photographic legacy in 454 Evans, “Doomed, America’s Architectural Heritage Must be Saved,” Life, 55, 5 July 1963, p. 52. The tone here in this article is preservationist, as are many of Evans’s articles after he created the Victorian series. For example, see Fortune “The Wreckers” (May 1951), “Downtown, a Last Look Backward” (October 1956), “Vintage Office Furniture,” (August 1953), and “Before They Disappear” (March 1957). 285 this regard, noting that when he captured Americas’ disappearing architectural past “his lens imitated the eye of architects.”455 455 See Lincoln Kirstein, Flesh is Heir. New York: Popular Library, 1977, p. 251. 286 CHAPTER 4: CONTEXTUALIZING AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPHS “We have a great desire,” Calvin Coolidge remarked, “to be supremely American.” Architecture will no longer be the social, the collective, the dominant art. The great poem, the great building, the great work of mankind will no longer be built, it will be printed. Victor Hugo Walker Evans’s tendency towards collaboration was informed by the communal atmosphere among artists working in the 1930s. As capitalist economics weakened during the Great Depression, critics and artists became more oppositional in their work, reflecting on and critiquing the harsh fiscal and social conditions of the period. Many identified with workers, farmers, and labor issues, and collaborated on public art projects, posters, murals, film, and other civic projects funded largely by WPA (Works Progress Administration) initiatives. As the idea of the artist as an isolated genius was abandoned, artists, writers, and critics began to consider how art and politics could be combined to help effect social change. These questions appealed not only to card-carrying Communists during the 1930s: Americanists, modernists, Socialists, agrarians, and many other social and political factions frequently and openly stated their political positions in this period. Were one to reduce the decade of the 1930s in American art to one primary theme or organizing principle, it would be an interest among artists in the power of art to enact social change. In this era, the divisions between social and political factions were often difficult to comprehend, and the distinctions between political lines and parties were not 287 always clear. By the mid-1930s, Marxism, Americanism, and modernism had mixed in with the Popular Front, Americanism had played a major role in New Deal ideologies, and modernism (both American and European) was strongly represented at the Museum of Modern Art. By 1934, after the destruction of Diego Rivera’s murals at Rockefeller Center, Americanists, Communists, Marxists, modernists, and even academic artists joined forces to condemn capitalist obstructions of artistic freedom. Walker Evans created some of his strongest and best-known photographs in this social and political context, and his work cannot be accurately understood outside of it. Even so, Evans’s position in this context is difficult to parse out. He never fully committed to a clear political position, yet collaborated most often with politically progressive artists, writers, and thinkers of the period. Evans maintained close friendships with many leftist artists and writers including Ben Shahn, Jay Leyda, Berenice Abbott, Ralph Steiner, Helen Levitt, and Ben Shahn, even though he personally remained outside of any specific political commitment and involvement. Nevertheless, the question of “What is American art?” occupied the thoughts of many writers, thinkers, and artists of Evans’s generation, and Evans’s photographic projects actively participated in this discourse. Americanism, an early twentieth century political ideology frequently referenced in opposition to Communism or Fascism, was on the rise during the Great Depression, and represented a complicated convergence of both conservative and liberal political thinking. Although typically understood in relation to conservatism, “Americanism” in the 1930s did not simply refer to those on the political right. Rather, 288 the term called to mind a combination of several different political and ideological positions on both the right and the left. AMERICANISM Americanism was a term with a complicated and multi-faceted meaning in the 1930s. Many advocates of Americanism, including the Marxist activist Suzanne La Follett and Elizabeth McCausland (Berenice Abbott’s partner) were from the Western United States and their values reflected ideas of democracy, the land, the local, and the small town.456 Other proponents of Americanism, including the philosopher John Dewey and Roy Stryker, head of the government-funded Resettlement Administration under FDR, wanted to subvert the idea of art as a luxury economy for museums and private collections and regard it instead as a product and reflection of everyday American life. More conservative positions on Americanism, especially nationalism, were held by Thomas Hart Benton and Thomas Craven.457 Although Benton initially supported some tenets of Marxism, he eventually spoke out actively against Communism and Stalinism in the mid-1930s. Both Craven and Benton were seen by their contemporaries as anti-modernist, anti-Communist, and anti-urban (i.e. pro-agrarian), and in the extreme were viewed as fascist due to their extremely right-wing political views. However, it was extremely difficult to parse out where political and social loyalties lay during this period, 456 See Susan Platt, Art & Politics in the 1930s: Americanism, Marxism & Modernism, New York. Midmarch Arts Press,1999, p. xiii. 457 For a useful overview of the complicated politics of these artists see Erika Doss, Benton, Pollock, and the Politics of Modernism: From Regionalism to Abstract Expressionism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. 289 and there was much overlap and even collaboration between far left and far right leaning artists and writers. As the 1930s progressed, artwork departed from a strong critical engagement with social and political issues as it was subjected to increasing censorship. By 1938, the House Un-American Activities Committee began its investigation into artists and political groups, especially those with Communist leanings. The trend of creating politically resonant and critical artwork was further dampened by the McCarthy hearings in the late 1940s and early 1950s. However, before this period of censorship began, artists and writers had been critically engaged with American foreign policy, particularly during the early 1930s in Cuba. WALKER EVANS IN CUBA In 1933, the American photographer Walker Evans was commissioned to produce photographs for a book by the radical American journalist Carleton Beals (figure 1). This book, The Crime of Cuba (1933), exposed the corruption of the Cuban dictator Gerardo Machado as well as the exploitative relationship between the United States and Cuba. Beals, a well-known defender of the oppressed in Latin America, had previously published three books on Mexico and spent the fall of 1932 in Havana. The Crime of Cuba, published just two weeks after the fall of Machado’s regime, is a treatise on Cuban history, an argument for the Cuban people and their freedom, as well as an often problematic stereotyping of the races and peoples of a nation under oppression. In 1933, Cuba was on the brink of revolution, and Evans’s photographs reflect this political 290 turmoil in a unique way that runs counter to the overt discussions of violence in Beals’s text. Evans’s photographs, rather than showing only hardship, instead record economic and racial disparity in a manner that foreshadows Evans’s more overt documentary-style photography of the later 1930s. Evans spent three weeks in Cuba, arriving in May and departing in June 1933. When he arrived he was armed with his camera, a small stipend, and letters of introduction from Beals to important social and political contacts in Havana. During his time in Cuba, Evans became friends with the American author Ernest Hemingway, who loaned him twenty-five dollars so he could stay a week longer in the city. Evans and Hemingway got along very well, and it is easy to find hints of Evans’s photographs in Hemingway’s writing (and vice versa) from this period, especially in Hemingway’s book, To Have and Have Not (1937), which features passages whose simple, stark descriptions share many similarities with Evans’s photographs: You know how it is there early in the morning in Havana with the bums still asleep against the walls of the buildings; before even the ice wagons come by with ice for the bars? Well, we came across the square from the dock to the Pearl of San Francisco Cafe to get coffee and there was only one beggar awake in the square and he was getting a drink out of the fountain. But when we got inside the cafe and sat down, there were the three of them waiting for us.458 When Evans departed Cuba he left forty or so photographic prints with Hemingway for safe-keeping, fearing that his images might be confiscated when he reentered the United States. 458 In Ernest Hemingway, To Have and Have Not. New York: Scribner, 1937, 1996, p. 1. 291 During this period, Evans had a strong relationship to the artistic and political culture of New York City, particularly the circle surrounding the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, whose work provided a model for Evans of how to represent a volatile political situation through easily “readable” imagery. Although Evans ultimately worked in a different medium, his exposure to Rivera’s work shortly before he departed for Cuba structured how he thought about the potentiality of photography to represent politics and convey narratives. Though a close examination of select photographs from his Cuba series, Evans’s work will be considered in relationship with how it represented the social and political situation on the streets of Havana. The Crime of Cuba was published for an American audience, and this section will shed critical light on what it meant to create and publish images of Latin America and Latin American subjects for audiences in the United States in the 1930s. What type of the images did an American traveling abroad create of Cuba at a moment of great political upheaval and change? What did Walker Evans’s Cuba photographs reveal about what “America” was in the 1930s? How were these photographs subsequently received by an American audience? The first edition of The Crime of Cuba contained twenty-eight black and white aquatone (photogravure) photographs by Walker Evans (figure 2). Beals’s publisher, J.B. Lippincott, tempered the text’s rhetorical excesses with Evans’s photographic images, which he hoped would strengthen the book’s political message (figures 3-6). The photographs were separated from the text, and appeared at the back of the book. Twenty- five of these photographs were taken by Evans, and three were appropriated from the modern news press. The three images not taken by Evans were labeled as “anonymous 292 photograph(s)”; two represented murdered victims of the Machado regime, one was by Gonzalez Rubiera (figure 7). Evans insisted upon the right to select which images were to be published and the order of their appearance, as an extant letter from Evans to Beals makes clear: “the number of prints and order and titles seems not to bear any changing at all,”459 Evans wrote. He was convinced that the chosen sequence of the photographs would make “something noticeable, and that ought to help the book.”460 With these statements in mind, it is likely that Evans specifically selected the anonymous press photographs for their jarring imagery and the way that they starkly punctuated his own images. Before Evans created the Cuban photographs, his photography had been in a period of transition. By 1930, he had moved away from a New-Vision style of photography (figure 8) based on European avant-garde traditions, and increasingly begun to work in a more straight-forward, documentary style influenced by the civil war photographer Mathew Brady, the French photographic chronicler of medieval Paris, Eugène Atget, and the American photographer Paul Strand. Evans at this time was becoming more interested in film, including newsreels and popular movies. His friendships in the 1930s were with leftist writers, artists, and filmmakers, all of whom were engaged with the question of how art and literature could serve politics. It was from 459 In James R. Mellow, Walker Evans. New York: Basic Books, 2008, p. 190. 460 Mellow, p. 190. 293 within this milieu that Evans began his photographic turn towards what would develop into his signature documentary-style of photography (figure 9). Just before Evans left the United States for Cuba, and shortly after his return, he photographed Diego Rivera’s murals as they were being created in Manhattan at Rockefeller Center (figure 10). The deliberate destruction of Rivera’s murals by J.D. Rockefeller’s conservative initiatives proved to be one of the major art world scandals of the early 1930s. Rivera’s infamous works, including a piece entitled Man at the Crossroads (1932), were destroyed shortly before Evans departed for Cuba because of their perceived socialist messages and representation of figures such as Vladimir Lenin, Karl Marx, and workers, farmers, peasants, and soldiers. Rivera was the most visible figure in Mexican muralism, a movement that emerged in the 1920s after the Mexican Revolution, and his work shaped debates about what public art could and should be during the Great Depression. Rivera’s influence on the New York art world and the circles in which Evans moved during the 1930s was enormous, and Evans’s proximity to Rivera and his work was formative for his artistic development and likely informed his photographic approach in Cuba. After Rivera’s first exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1931, which broke museum attendance records, the art world was ignited with talk of his work and the surrounding Rockefeller Center controversy. After Evans returned from Havana, he photographed Rivera’s work for a second set of (no-less politically radical) murals for the New Worker's School in New York, thus demonstrating his continued interest in the project (figure 11). This series of photographs appeared in Vanity Fair in 1933. Ben 294 Shahn, Rivera’s assistant and a politically conscious artist in his own right, was a close friend of Evans’s at the time, and it is likely though Shahn that Evans received the commission to photograph the murals. Evans learned from Rivera’s example how to distill revolutionary images and documentation of social change, street life, and poverty into easily “readable” images that could be made available for public consumption (figure 12). He applied Rivera’s example in his Cuban work, and created a series of images which, through their proximity and ordering, suggested narratives and presented politicized imagery. Evans eventually mastered this idea of sequencing in 1938 in American Photographs, a book noted for the deliberate ordering of its images. Although Evans perfected the art of photographic sequencing by 1938, he first used the technique in The Crime of Cuba. Because of the deliberate sequencing of these photographs, it is difficult not to see an evolving narrative as we look at one image, then the next (figures 13-15). The idea of sequencing used in The Crime of Cuba (we may even call it montage) developed as well out of Evans’s long-standing interest in film and its potentiality as socially useful medium (figures 16 and 17). Before visiting Cuba, in 1932, Evans had tried his hand (unsuccessfully) at a short film, shot on location in the South Seas. His journals from the 1930s are filled with references to viewing news reels. Evans was actively involved with a crowd of leftist filmmakers in New York City, and was familiar with the films of Sergei Eisenstein. In Cuba, he successfully combined Rivera’s use of narrative-driven, easily readable political images with a filmic interest in sequencing and montage to make photographs that to this day are patently recognizable as “Evans Photographs” (figure 18). 295 The title The Crime of Cuba sounds like the name of a film noir murder mystery, but the book’s subject is really the “crimes” that American foreign policy and big- business initiatives committed in the country. Before he wrote the book, Beals lived in Cuba for three months at the end of 1932. By the time Evans arrived, several students had been murdered, many journalists had been assassinated, union militants were being slaughtered almost daily, poverty was rampant, and police brutality was extreme. Contradiction, race, and conflict were the very essence of Cuba’s existence during this period. Evans’s deliberate choice not to photograph this violence was premised on the fact that such images were simply too dangerous to photograph. As noted on the dust jacket to the first edition of Beals’s text, Evans “was stopped and searched by soldiers everywhere and once stoned by ‘toughs.’” The Cuba that Evans visited was not the tropical paradise depicted on the tourist postcards he had collected (figure 19), nor was it the American stereotype of Cuba as summarized in 1933 by Mildred Adams in her New York Times article “The Cuban Scene: Behind the Glamour.” Adams relays to us this stereotypical vision: …Cuba vanishing beyond the midnight white and black of a ship’s wake. Always a place to go to or come away from. It is a sugar bin, a market for motor cars and cream, a playground for grown-ups. It is a land of romance lying under brilliant tropical stars, a theatre of drama — passionate, beautiful or terrible, but almost never crossing the footlights into reality… Only when revolution rears its head or when sugar gums up the financial machinery do many American’s begin to think seriously about Cuba.461 461 See Mildred Adams, “The Cuban Scene: Behind the Glamour.” New York Times, August 27, 1933, p. SM4. 296 Certainly in 1933, on the eve of political revolution, the time was ripe for an American reconsideration of Cuba, and Beals’s text, written for an American audience, was intended as a violent criticism of the American capitalist interests that kept in place Machado’s reign of terror. Evans’s photographs critiqued the political situation in Cuba, but did so quietly, presenting the harshness of life in Havana at a remove. Evans’s photographs are unlike the anonymous press photographs in this regard; through his photographs we are witness to street life and poverty, but as viewers we are always observers looking in — we are always slightly removed from the scene (figure 15). Yet Evans did not photograph Cuba through the eyes of an unlearned tourist; his Cuba reflects an interest in politics, street life, mass culture, and sympathy with the impoverished. We are not looking at the photographs of a photojournalist interested only in a heavily-charged political image. Instead, Evans’s photographic interests lay more in capturing the often heavy-handed, sometimes more subtle, but always omnipresent imperialist influence of American culture on the Cuban people, their way of life, and their leisurely interests. Evans was not after the dramatic, press-style photograph, and this distinction is brought clearly to our attention when we are faced with press images such as the anonymous photograph, A Document of the Terror (figure 20). Carleton Beals’s text remarks at length about the Americanization of Cuba (there is an entire section of the book entitled “American Penetration”) and America’s presence is most visible in Evans’s images of the urban fabric of Havana proper: a tropical city whose architecture and very conception were premised on colonial reign. Most of Evans’s views of the city are taken from street level, though some are taken from the 297 second or third story of a building (figure 21). He noted that "None of the pictures with people are posed,”462 which, upon careful examination, we find to be patently untrue. Nevertheless, Evans’s use of a right-angle view finder in his camera afforded him more intimate access to the gestures and subtleties of urban street life while still maintaining something of the critical distance of an obvious cultural outsider. For example, the photograph captioned, “City People,” as it appeared in The Crime of Cuba, reflects both the proximity and the distance Evans maintained in many of his Havana photographs. Unlike many of Evans’s images from this set, the photograph, “City People,” shows middle class Cubans in what is really a commentary about racial and class differences in Cuba. When contextualized with the other photographs in the book, the obvious disparity between classes is made manifest. One can glean these differences by noticing the trappings of middle-class existence as they appear here in this photograph: new leather shoes; clean white dresses; the presence of jewelry and watches; and a sense of leisureliness embodied in the poses of the two men leaning against the white column on the right. Most of the women look off to the left: their faces are inquisitive and express concern; we wonder what has captured their attention. The figures are standing in a group that appears to be at leisure (in contrast, Evans often depicted impoverished Cubans lying or sitting down) and all are wearing typically American-style 1930s clothing. Discretely, above the crowd looms a sign reading “Yale,” here referring to the industrial 462 Quote from dust jacket of Carleton Beals, The Crime of Cuba. New York: Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1933. 298 manufacturing company, but in Evans’s eye, a likely ironic reference to the American university, certainly unattainable to this class of Cubans. As a point of contrast, Evans’s photograph “Bread Line” (figure 22) appears five pages after “City People” at the end of Beals’s text. Here we see a group of impoverished children and adults waiting in line for a meal. The women in the group on the right peer anxiously through a gate which separates them from what is likely their only daily ration. A young girl stands in the foreground wearing a simple floral print dress. She glances expectantly off to the right. Her spine protrudes disturbingly from her back. There is a sense of crowding; a result of Evans’s close cropping of this photograph. A banner which refers to the distribution of food rations hangs just beyond iron bars that separate the hungry men, women, and children from the institution that provides their sustenance. The motif of bars, jails, and confinement is pronounced in many of Evans’s photographs in this book (figure 23). This imagery points to the obvious visual metaphor of Cubans as people trapped by their country’s disastrous political situation and by years of imperialist oppression, first from Spain and then from the United States. We see this imagery at work in “Woman,” the second image reproduced in the set—one is made to wonder, as she displays herself: is she being kept in, or hoping that others are kept out? We see a similar motif in “Newsboys” (figure 24) and in “Terrorists Students in Jail” (figure 25) (an anonymous photograph, not by Evans). Each image uses a recurrent iron bar motif: one group clamors to get in, the other, out. Another strong visual undercurrent running through many of Evans’s Cuba photographs (including many of those not reproduced in Beals’s text) are the traces of 299 American influence visible throughout the streets of Havana (figure 14). The idea of America and its commodity-based culture is present very clearly in images like “Cinema,” in which movie posters, white suits, and expensive cars loom large on the streets of the city. This photograph is an early example of Evans beginning to explore the relationship between social subjects and the signs/details of their lived environments: a motif which would become one of his major photographic tropes in the 1930s and 1940s. What can this photograph can tell us about the influence of American commodity and mass culture on urban life in Cuba? In contrast to many of the images in this series, this photograph depicts one of the few examples of a leisurely, modern space instead of an image of poverty. Here we see several film posters for upcoming screenings, with their attendant over-the-top images of romance and typical gender stereotypes. The large-scale posters and advertised films point to the types of audience the theater was likely to attract: American tourists and Cubans of the leisure class (the text appears on them in both English and Spanish). In the foreground, several well-dressed men stand with their backs to us, suggesting that this is a gendered space, and in fact many urban social spaces in Havana typically catered to men during this period. Evans took several photographs of movie theaters during his stay in Cuba (figure 26). In a photograph not reproduced in the book, we see a poster for the film “A Farewell to Arms,” the movie adaptation of Hemingway’s book by the same title, and a clear homage to the author by Evans. The titles and themes of the posters we see here speak to the popularity of American popular culture in Cuba, the desire of many Cubans to emulate American tastes, and the effort of advertisers to appeal to wealthy American tourists and 300 expatriates. The presence of the Rolls Royce (an almost mythic object for most Cubans) parked assertively in front of the theater speaks to the social status of those who frequented these venues. In general, these photographs suggest that American cultural influence was very much present in Cuba in the 1930s, though it could only really be enjoyed by the few. Most other Cubans, as we have seen in this series, suffered under America’s fiscal and political dominance. Even though Evans stated that he “never read [Beals’s] book,” his photographs nevertheless add a dimension of humanity and a sense of the flavor of daily Cuban life to the historical and political tenor of Beals’s text. When several of Evans’s Cuba photographs reappeared in his book American Photographs (1938), their meaning decidedly shifted (figure 27). No longer did these images seem strictly concerned with Machado’s repressive regime. Instead, they entered into a new dialog about what America was and what it looked like in the 1930s. The photographs made during Evans’s 1933 visit to Cuba can be compared to those he made between 1934 and 1936 in the American South, of the effects of the Depression in the United States (figure 28). What does the proximity of work from two countries in American Photographs (one of which imperialistically dominated the other) tell us about the conception of what America was in the 1930s? For one thing, their juxtaposition points to the fact that Evans’s understanding of America in the 1930s was more complicated and indeed much more political than has up to now been recognized. Evans always maintained that he wanted to create photographs that would convey to the future what America “looked like” in the present. His 301 photographs of the effects of the Great Depression on small-town ways of life, when coupled with his Cuban street photographs, suggest continuity between the two countries; their closeness in the pages of American Photographs implies a commentary on how the social communities in both countries were affected by economic disaster and turbulent government rule. Reproducing photographs of Cuba in the same book as photographs taken in the United States, and placing these equally under the title American Photographs, points to a loss of Cuban identity as such and an unbalanced power dynamic between the two countries, as laid out so explicitly in The Crime of Cuba. While the pairings suggest a continuity between the Cuba and the United States, there is also a marked difference: many of the Cuban photographs are exoticized in a way that the American photographs are not. Undoubtedly, Evans was aware of the ways in which his sequencing of American and Cuban photographs together in American Photographs brought to the fore questions of American identity and politics: his photographs are a trace of the difficult relationship between the two countries. The multiplicity of images, subjects, races, sites, architectural structures and styles that appear in The Crime of Cuba suggest that, for Evans, the idea of Cuba was not a clearly definable and distinct category, but rather one that thrived on its composite-like status. Cuba was multivalent and complicated. Beals’s texts points to this directly in its many discussions of the racial, cultural, and political dimensions of the country, and Evans’s photographs echo this plurality Evans’s photographs represent a type of street photography that functioned at the level of the document, leaving aside traditional notions of aesthetic beauty. His photographs shaped an American understanding of what 302 Cuba was and what it looked like in the 1930s through their critically engaged imagery, yet ultimately left the interpretation of these images up to the viewer. AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPHS: WALKER EVANS’S ARCHITECTURE OF AMERICAN HISTORY A crisis in American modernism was triggered by the Wall Street crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed shortly thereafter. In his account of the “literary consequences of the crash,” the critic Edmund Wilson wrote, “The stock market crash was to count for us [the modernist writers, artists, and intellectuals] almost like a rending of the earth in preparation for the Day of Judgement.”463 Michel Denning, who has written extensively on the role of the cultural front after the crash of 1929, made the following summary of the art that was produced during the Great Depression: “For the attempt to imagine the crash and the depression, to figure that rending of the earth, to narrate the crisis of the new, produced a series of powerful meditations on the history of the United States, including works of social and literary history, a new ‘history painting’ in the visual arts, and several vast fictional trilogies.”464 Running somewhat counter to standard readings of American Photographs, I want to explore the relationship of this book to Evans’s interest in literature, especially his self- proclaimed indebtedness to the work of Gustave Flaubert, Honoré de Balzac, T.S. Eliot, and other modernist American writers such as John Dos Passos, Sherwood Anderson, and 463 As quoted in Michael Denning, The Cultural Front. New York: Verso, 1997, p. 163. 464 Denning, p. 163. 303 William Carlos Williams. I would like to “read” American Photographs through the lens of realist and modernist literature, and consider how Evans’s work can be considered both as a kind of episodic realist novel constructed in a modernist format as well as a project thoroughly engaged with the idea of assembling a material history of American culture in the 1930s. Evans described photography as “the most literary of the graphic arts,”465 suggesting that photography makes use of the literary devices of “restraint, exactness, coherence; paradox and play and oxymoron.”466 In a 1934 letter to his friend, Ernestine Evans (no relation), Evans summarized his ambition to create a photobook exploring the idea of what constitutes a typical American city. He wrote: “What do I want to do? ... I know now is the time for picture books. An American city is the best.”467 He asked whether it should be Pittsburgh or a smaller city like Toledo, and continued: “... I’m not sure a book of photos should be identified locally. American city is what I’m after. So [I] might use several, keeping things typical.”468 The letter continues with a list of categories and ideas for photographs, reflecting an irony by then standard for Evans. People, all classes, surrounded by bunches of the new down-and-out. Automobiles and the automobile landscape. Architecture, American urban taste, commerce, small scale, large scale, the city street atmosphere, the street smell, the hateful smell, women’s clubs, fake culture, bad education, religion in decay. The movies. 465 “Photography,” in Louis Kronenberger, ed., Quality: Its Image in the Arts. New York: Atheneum, 1969, p. 170. 466 Kronenberger, p. 170. 467 “Unfinished letter to Ernestine Evans.” February, 1934. Walker Evans at Work, p. 98. 468 Ibid., p. 98. 304 Evidence of what people of the city read, eat, see for amusement, do for relaxation and not get it. Sex. Advertising. A lot else, you see what I mean.469 American Photographs was first published in 1938 in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title at the Museum of Modern Art, three years before Evans and Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Lincoln Kirstein, in his afterward to American Photographs,referred to the strong historical relationship between literature and photography beginning with the late nineteenth century photographers Eugène Atget and Mathew Brady. Kirstein wrote that: “Always however, certain photographers with a creative attitude and a clean eye have continued to catalogue the facts of their epoch. Atget is surely the complement of Proust; Brady of Stephen Crane.”470 Kirstein pointed to the formal aspects of Evans’s work, suggesting that Evans’s so-called “puritanical eye” set his photographs distinctly apart from the then popular arty journalism or advertising photography of the late 1930s, best embodied in the work of Edward Steichen. “The most characteristic single feature of Evans’s work,” Kirstein wrote, “is its purity, or even its puritanism.”471 Evans’s “puritanical eye” will thus be examined here in relation to realist and modernist literature from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries in order to expand upon Evans’s simultaneous indebtedness to literature and quest for an identifiable “American photography.” 469 Ibid. 470 Lincoln Kirstein, “Afterward.” American Photographs, 2013, p. 193. 471 Lincoln Kirstein, p. 194. 305 The first edition of American Photographs contained several images of the rural American South, some of which also appeared in Evans and Agee’s later work. In general, however, American Photographs is far more encompassing both geographically and culturally than Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, containing pictures from New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New Orleans, and even Havana, Cuba. While both books show us photographic records of a distinct time and place, American Photographs presents a compendium of a broadly defined American scene, showing us its cultural artifacts and symbolic imagery as well as scenes from everyday life. This is done in contrast to a more typical, popular parochial understanding of the visual nature of the deep South—instead of cotton-based agricultural imagery, we see more broadly defined versions of the small American town during the Great Depression. Like John Dos Passos’s U.S.A Trilogy (1938), William Carlos Williams’s In the American Grain (1925), Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans (1925, 1934), or Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time (1924), American Photographs, in its very title, indicates its broad inclusiveness and a topical treatment of the subject matter.472 Indeed, Evans’s photographs echo these literary examples quite strongly. As a medium, photography gained a very significant place in American life during this period, reflecting a shift during the 1920s and 1930s from a culture of reading to a culture of “reading” images; to a visually-based culture.473 American Photographs 472 See J.A Ward, American Silences, The Realism of James Agee, Walker Evans, and Edward Hopper. Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, 1985, p. 115. 473 See Peter Danier et al., Official Images — New Deal Photography. Washington, D.C./London, 1987. 306 represents Evans’s work created during a ten year period (the years between 1928-1938), a span during which he created many of his best-known images. While at first American Photographs appears to be a series of eighty-seven ordinary pictures of American life, the more careful viewer will notice that the publication is really a clever sequencing of images divided into two sections: part one, and part two. In the book, Evans’s photographs appear to be arranged contrapuntally, with pairings on separate pages utilizing similar imagery or motifs that are in “conversation” with each other. For instance, in part one, we encounter a photograph of a striped barbershop facade: Sidewalk and Shopfront, New Orleans, 1935 (figure 29). Here we see a similarly stripe-clad white woman standing in a doorway slightly outside of the shop. This photograph is followed by Negro Barber Shop, Interior, Atlanta, 1936 (figure 30), which shows us a well-worn interior space, apparently meant for African American customers. In many regards these two barber shops represent polar opposite social spaces and their juxtaposition comments vividly on the real class and racial differences in the American South during the 1930s. The next image we encounter is a field of decrepit automobiles, Joe’s Auto Graveyard, Pennsylvania, 1936 (figure 31), which is followed by a close-up of an advertising poster spray painted with the word “gas,” Roadside Gas Sign, 1929 (figure 32). The ghost-like shells of automobiles are contrasted with a hand-painted sign for a product these junked cars no longer need: gas. Such a pattern of point/counterpoint images, which were often vaguely ironic, is apparent throughout much of American Photographs. This suggests Evans’s keen awareness of the tendency of viewers to find 307 patterns or a repetition of motifs in photographs, “reading” them and searching for a continuity or message. Evans’s message, however, if one was ever intended, was a subtle one — relying more on a filmic understanding of sequencing and juxtaposition474 than a strict traditional narrative. In general, regardless of whether it is valid to read one’s own personal meta-narrative into Evans’s sequencing, it does appear that each of Evans’s individual photographs synthesize with the previous to form a series of images representing the essence of American life during the Great Depression. Similarly to how T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg Ohio, and William Faulkner’s As I lay Dying present a collage of voices, Evans’s American Photographs is a collage of perceptions—a compendium of images from small town America during the 1930s. There is a wealth of scholarly literature written about Walker Evans’s American Photographs. Rather than summarizing the books and articles devoted to Evans’s work from the Security Administration and Farm Security Administration periods (such a task would be enormous and not particularly useful for an integrative reading of Evans’s work in the context of literature and transnationalism of the 1920s and 1930s), I shall here instead point readers to a few important publications that successfully addresses this 474 Here I am thinking of the films and writings of Sergei Eisenstein, whose theory of montage originates in the "collision" between different shots, each representing thesis and antithesis respectively. This basis allowed him to argue that montage is inherently dialectical, and should thus be considered a demonstration of Marxism and Hegelian philosophy. 308 period in Evans’s life, with the understanding that the broad array of material on Evans’s work that is available is vast and widely variant in its approaches.475 Gustave Flaubert in particular was a writer for whom Evans expressed great admiration throughout his life. Early on, he looked to Flaubert’s writing as a model for his own developing aesthetic and literary sensibilities, especially his realist-inspired photographic practice. In an interview, Evans noted his indebtedness to Flaubert’s descriptive realist style: “... the non-appearance of author, the non-subjectivity. That is literally applicable to the way I want to use a camera and do.”476 In Flaubert’s work, especially Madame Bovary, Evans found a model for how to emphasize minute details over idealism or romanticism. As Michael Brix points out in his essay in Walker Evans — America, Evans, “encouraged by Flaubert … committed himself to a realism which was to find its artistic expression in a fanatic immersion in the material: the greatest articulation was to be given to that which in everyday perception and, according to traditional cultural values, had not been represented.”477 Even much later in his life, Evans claimed he would read passages from Madame Bovary before leaving his house to 475 See for instance:Keller, Judith, and Walker Evans. Walker Evans: the Getty Museum Collection. Malibu, CA: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1995; Evans, Walker, and Maria Morris Hambourg. Walker Evans. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art in association with Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2000; Evans, Walker, and Lincoln Kirstein. American Photographs. New York: East River Press, 1975. John T. Hill. Walker Evans: Lyric Documentary. New York, Steidl, 2006; Corwin, Sharon, Jessica May, and Terri Weissman. American Modern: Documentary Photography by Abbott, Evans, and Bourke-White. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010; John Szarkowski, Walker Evans. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1971; Evans, Walker, and Jerry L Thompson. Walker Evans At Work: 745 Photographs Together with Documents Selected From Letters, Memoranda, Interviews, Notes. New York: Harper & Row, 1982. Galassi, Peter. Walker Evans & Company. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2000. 476 Katz, “Interview with Walker Evans,” p. 84. 477 See Michael Brix and Birgit Mayer, eds., Walker Evans — America. New York: Rizzoli, 1990, p. 19. 309 go photograph.478 Passages like the one below, with its extensive descriptive analysis of the interior of the home of Charles Bovary (Emma Bovary’s new husband) is nearly a literary equivalent of an Evans photograph: The brick house-front was exactly flush with the street, or rather the road. Behind the door hung a coat with a short cape, a bridle, and a black leather cap. And on the floor in a corner lay a pair of gaiters still caked with mud. To the right was the parlor, which served as both dining and sitting room. A canary-yellow wallpaper, set off at the top by a border of pale flowers, rippled everywhere on its loose canvas lining. White calico curtains edged with red braid hung crosswise down the length of the windows. And on the narrow mantelpiece a clock ornamented with a head of Hippocrates stood proudly between two silver-plated candlesticks under oval glass domes. Across the hall was Charles' small consulting room, about eighteen feet wide, with a table, three straight chairs and an office armchair. There was a fir bookcase with six shelves, occupied almost exclusively by a set of the Dictionary of the Medical Sciences, its pages uncut but its binding battered by a long succession of owners. Cooking smells seeped through the wall during office hours, and the patient's coughs and confidences were quite audible in the kitchen. In the rear, opening directly into the yard, which contained the stables, was a big ramshackle room with an oven, now serving as woodshed, wine bin and store room. It was filled with old junk, empty barrels, broken tools, and a quantity of other objects, all dusty and nondescript.479 Pierre Bourdieu described the contemporary reception of Flaubert’s work in Paris in the 1850s in a way that makes clear the reasons for Evans’s admiration of him. Young writers, Bourdieu explains, “had to invent that social personage without precedent — the modern artist, full-time professional, dedicated to his work indifferent to the exigencies of politics as to the injunctions of morality, and recognizing no jurisdiction other than the 478 As noted in Brix, p. 19. 479 In Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary. New York: Random House, 1985, p. 37. 310 specific norms of art.”480 Alan Trachtenberg expands upon the similarities between Flaubert’s and Evans’s work, noting that, “Flaubert helped Evans see himself in a similar plight: a young artist-desperado, breaking with his class and his provincial upbringing, yet retaining good taste and urbanity, banding together with similar rebels in the metropolis, willing to suffer deprivation for the sake of foreign a new art. What Flaubert did for the novel, then a despised form, Evans would do for photography.”481 Evans’s project sought to prove that photography, especially “lyric documentary” photography, as he termed it, could be just as complex and rewarding as a great piece of writing. For Walker Evans, literary inspiration was decisive. Flaubert was his aesthetic authority and Charles Baudelaire he saw as “... a kind of god”482; he identified with the flaneur’s role as an outside observer of society. The work of American poets and writers such as Walt Whitman and Henry James each contributed in distinct ways to the development of Evans’s photographic sensibility. The 1971 catalog for Evans’s major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art was prefaced with a Whitman quote: “I do not doubt there is far more in trivialities, insects, vulgar persons, slaves, dwarfs, weeds, 483 rejected refuse, than I have supposed.” In conversations with Alan Trachtenberg, Evans often pointed to the following passage by Henry James in The American Scene as one of the closest corollaries to how photography functioned for him: 480 In Pierre Bourdieu, “Flaubert’s Point of View.” Critical Inquiry 14, spring, 1988, p. 551. As quoted in Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs. New York: Hill and Wang, 1989, p. 239. 481 Trachtenberg, p. 239. Emphasis mine. 482 Katz “Interview with Walker Evans,” p. 89. 483 From Walt Whitman, “Faith Poem,” Leaves of Grass. 1855, p. 265. 311 To be at all critically, or as we have been fond of calling it, analytically, minded — over and beyond and inherent love of the general many-coloured picture of things — is to be subject to the superstition that objects and places, coherently grouped, disposed for human use and addressed to it, must have a sense of their own, a mystic meaning proper to themselves to give out, that is, to the participant at once so interested and so detached as to be moved to a report of the matter.484 Trachtenberg wrote in Reading American Photographs that Evans was “like Henry James in The American Scene in the acute skepticism with which he gathers impressions and assembles them into an order.”485 Throughout his life, Evans’s goal was to translate the sensitivity of the poet into a type of photographic practice he called “lyric documentary.” By “lyric,” Evans was referring to the poetic style of lyricism (i.e. a sensitive descriptive analysis); by “documentary,” to the realist-inspired attempt to record an unflourished account of the objects, people, or scene in front of the camera. Evans believed that photography should be literary and transcendent: “in this sense photography’s a very difficult art…”486 In Evans’s own description of Corrugated Tin Facade, Moundville (?), Alabama, 1936 (figure 33), one of his pictures that appeared in American Photographs, he described what he meant by the transcendent aspect of photography, noting the presence of light raking over corrugated metal on the structure before him: “I knew in a flash I wanted that, and found out a lot more afterward, editing it. You’re trying for something, and if it’s wrong you know later on. But first you get in on the film, you garner it in. It’s 484 In Henry James, from The American Scene, as quoted in Kendall Johnson, Henry James and the Visual. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, p. 160. 485 See Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs. New York: Hill and Wang, 1989, p. 284. 486 Katz “Interview with Walker Evans,” p. 85. 312 transcendent, you feel it. It’s there, the vanished transcendent... It’s there and you can’t unfeel it.”487 Many of Evans’s images in American Photographs depict ordinary objects and people in a similarly transcendent manner, making the everyday, the vernacular, into an image of simple beauty. One of the most emblematic examples of this is Evans’s Interior Detail, West Virginia Coal Miner’s House, 1935 (figure 34), wherein we see a simple upturned broom, a tattered carpet, a handmade rocking chair, and a series of disjointed advertisements functioning as “wall paper.” Nothing about the objects in this image is extraordinary. Evans’s keen focusing in on these details of everyday life and their combination is what makes this a transcendent photograph. T.S. ELIOT, WALTER BENJAMIN, AND WALKER EVANS T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land was an important model for Evans’s American Photographs in several respects. The Waste Land was first published in Ezra Pound’s little magazine, The Dial. Eliot was born in Saint Louis, like Evans, and went on to become one of the most influential poets of his day, profoundly influencing Evans. In his poetry, Eliot remained (like Flaubert) a distant observer of people, things, and emotions. He expressed intense emotion impersonally, and the ideas of “country” and of the (often 487 Ibid., p. 82. 313 negative) experience of modern life were more important to him than self-expression. Evans was drawn to writers who exhibited this type of emotional distance from their subjects, and this technique would later become essential to his own photographic practice. Although James Joyce was Evans’s literary hero, he felt he could never live up to the quality and intensity of James’s work. In Eliot’s verse, Evans simultaneously found the epic, the heroic, and the decadence of modern culture. Eliot’s was a type of writing that appealed to his burgeoning aesthetic sensibility. Notably, Kirstein, in the afterword to American Photographs, pointed to how T.S. Eliot’s work shaped Evans’s vision of small town American during the Great Depression: “Here are the records of the age before an imminent collapse. [Evans’s] pictures exist to testify to the symptoms of waste and selfishness that caused the ruin and to salvage whatever was splendid for the future reference of the survivors... Walker Evans’ eye is a poet’s eye. It finds its corroboration in the poet’s voice.””488 Evans later encountered a more positive example of a mythic history of modern civilization in Hart Crane’s The Bridge, which in many respects can be understood as a direct, more explicitly American response to Eliot’s The Waste Land (the mythical emphasis of The Bridge is about the birth and epic development of America).489 488 See Lincoln Kirstein, “Afterword.” In Walker Evans, American Photographs. New York: MoMA, 2012, p. 198. 489 Kirstein importantly notes that, “It is no chance that, after Crane, Walker Evans should have worked with James Agee, the author of Permit Me Voyage, whose verse, springing at once from Catholic liturgy, moving pictures, music and spoken language, is our purest diction since Eliot.” Kirstein, “Afterword.” p. 196. 314 Evans owned a copy of a second edition printing of The Waste Land published in New York by Boni and Liveright Press in 1923. This particular copy bears the penciled ownership signature of Evans himself, with the note “New York/March, 1926" in his hand, signaling that Evans acquired this particular copy of The Waste Land shortly before he departed for Paris. When he returned, Evans began applying the lessons of Flaubert, Atget, Eliot, and Joyce to American scenes, cityscapes, and architecture. Evans’s first publication, a group of four images reproduced in Creative Arts in 1930 entitled, “Mr. Walker Evans records a City’s scene,” contains a direct reference to Eliot’s The Waste Land. Evan’s final photograph in the sequence was captioned “Hurry up please, it's time"; the insistent last call of Eliot's bartender in Part II of The Waste Land490 (figure 35). “These fragments I have shored against my ruins,”491 says a nameless voice in Eliot's The Waste Land. Eliot’s fragments are a collage of quotations, non-linear remembrances of a world now lost. A similar gathering of images, fragments, bits of text, and glimpses of a way of living now lost to us form the “architecture” of American Photographs. In the late 1920s and 1930s many artists, writers, and cultural critics began to think about history from a materialist perspective. For the German Frankfurt School writer and critic Walter Benjamin, this was the motive of cultural history: he, too, salvaged scraps from the wreckage of culture, anthologized quotes in the hopes of 490 Other photographs in the spread allude to the work of the poet Hart Crane, particularly Evans’s S.S. Leviathan, which echoes the “Cutty Sark” section of Crane’s poem The Bridge. 491 See T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land. New York: Barnes and Noble Classics, 1922, 2004, p. 81. The line, “These fragments I have shored against my ruin,” is taken from the section “What the Thunder Said.” 315 reconstructing a past that he knew to be irretrievable. Benjamin’s best-known example of his theory of material cultural history appeared in his unfinished work later published as The Arcades Project, written between 1927 and 1940. One of the most significant cultural documents of the Weimar Republic and Nazi era, The Arcades Project explored the nature of collecting, the flâneur, the physiognomy of ruins, the dialectical image, Benjamin's relation to Baudelaire, the practice of history- writing, and modernity and architecture. Originally designed as a panoramic study chronicling the rise and decline of the Parisian shopping arcades, Benjamin's work combines imaginative fragmented observations of the changing city-scape of nineteenth- century Paris, and reads like a map for a new cultural theory of modernity in the twentieth century. Benjamin’s method of cultural analysis was centered on the activity of the flâneur, who wandered through the streets of the modern city passively taking in observations of people, mass culture, events, and general city life. In The Arcades Project, Benjamin described a critic-flâneur, who “from the pictorial and photographic annals of the past and from the remnants of almost forgotten topographies, the Parisian arcades, would seek to release the dialectical image.”492 In his analysis of modernity, particularly its state of alienation, Benjamin made explicit connections between the modern condition and a collective state of homelessness, or no longer being heimisch or 492 See Beatrice Hanssen, ed., Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought. Cambridge,MA: MIT Press, 1989, p. 2. 316 at home.493 As the noted Benjamin scholar Beatrice Hanssen has written, “seeking to remedy this condition of homelessness, [Benjamin] charted the changed urban habitat required of new historical subjects.”494 In the United States, during roughly the same period, Walker Evans set out to do the same. The Arcades Project was originally conceived of as a picture book, a Bilberbuch, and Benjamin spent many hours compiling images for this projected text in the Cabinet des Estampes in the basement of the Bibliotheque Nationale.495 Like Evans in American Photographs, Benjamin sought to understand history as a complex dialectic of images. Also like Evans, Benjamin visited Paris for the first time in 1926, arriving in France with his friend Franz Hessel, with whom he was translating Marcel Proust. Only a few years earlier, Benjamin himself had translated Charles Baudelaire’s Tablaeux Parisiens. Hanssen has written that, “By the time of his first Paris visit, Benjamin had already learned to turn city-scapes and urban topographies into texts and physiognomies.496 Walter Benjamin’s and Walker Evans’s materialist conceptions of history are remarkably similar in their scope and intent. Evans’s materialist history of America, as presented in American Photographs, suggests a culture in ruin (with clear overtones of Eliot) where home, habitat, industry, and material existence are all in a state of crisis. And, like Benjamin, Evans was an obsessive collector of ephemera — both men created 493 Hanssen, p. 2. 494 Ibid., p. 2. 495 Beatrice Hanssen, ed., Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, p. 7. 496 Hanssen, p. 2. 317 obsessive archives of notes, text fragments, postcards, books, and clippings.497 Evans’s personal collection of signs and hand-painted signage, for instance, is well-known among Evans scholars.498 Benjamin wrote extensively on photography’s role in modern culture, often discussing his positive hopes for the medium’s use in an increasingly politicized European continent. In his essay “A Short History of Photography,” Benjamin discussed the work of the German photographer August Sander, who, he suggested, had discovered “a new, immeasurable significance” in the human face. Evans probably encountered Benjamin’s essay at some point in 1931. Around this time, Evans was living with German roommates, Paul Grotz and Hans Skolle, both avid readers of German periodicals and newspapers. Benjamin first published his “A Short History of Photography” in Literarische Welt in 1931.499 Like many of Sander’s photographs, several of Evan’s photographs taken in Hale County, Alabama, Cuba, and for the Resettlement Administration focused in on the faces of individuals whom he tended to observe through his camera in head-on, straightforward shots. These (often anonymous) portraits resemble the photographs of tradespeople in Sander’s occupational compendium, Antlitz der Zeit (The Faces of our Time) (1929). 497 For more on Walter Benjamin’s archive, see Ursula Marx, Walter Benjamin’s Archive: Images, Texts, Signs. Walter Benjamin Archive: Verso, 2007. 498 For more on Evans’s obsessive collecting and photographing of signs, see Andrei Codrescu, Walker Evans: Signs. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1998. 499 In the MET’s Walker Evans Archive there are many letters from Skolle to Evans (and vice versa) wherein the two discuss the periodicals and literature they are reading. 318 Evans reviewed Sander’s book in his essay “The Reappearance of Photography,”500 noting that Sander’s work shows us “a photographic editing of society, a clinical process; even enough of a cultural necessity to make one wonder why other so-called advanced countries of the world have not also been examined and recorded.”501 This is, he continues, was “one of the futures of photography foretold by Atget.”502 Indeed, Evans’s approach in American Photographs and in his work from the 1930s more broadly is an examination and recording of the “so-called advanced” country of the United States during the Great Depression. SHERWOOD ANDERSON, WINESBURG, OHIO Following the models of Edgar Lee Master’s Spoon River Anthology (1915) and Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives (1909), Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919) is an account of the lives of characters in a fictional 1890s American small town. Anderson’s characters, whom he characterized as “grotesques,” offer readers a glimpse into the raw, often troubling existence of a town and the interconnected lives of its residents. In 1984, John Updike wrote the following in a review of Anderson’s work in Harper’s Magazine: Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio is one of those books so well known by title that we imagine we know what is inside it: a sketch of the population, seen more of less in a cross section, of a small Midwestern town. It is this as much as Edvard Munch’s paintings are portraits of the Norwegian middle class around the turn of the century. The important thing, for Anderson and 500 See Walker Evans, “The Reappearance of Photography.” Hound & Horn 5, no. 1, October–December 1931, pp. 125-28. 501 Evans, p. 126. 502 Evans, p. 128. 319 Munch, is not the costumes and the furniture or even the bodies but the howl they conceal-the psychic pressure and warp underneath the social scene.503 Certainly a photographer like Evans, fascinated by the surface and the “underneath” of everyday objects and vernacular architecture, would have found Anderson’s work particularly appealing, especially as it did not emphasize the quainter, “nicer” side of small town life. The following two passages from Winesburg, Ohio convey a sense of the dingy flavor of Anderson’s writing, wherein one can sense its appeal for Evans: Upon the half decayed veranda of a small frame house that stood near the edge of a ravine near the town of Winesburg, Ohio, a fat little old man walked nervously up and down. Across a long field that had been seeded for clover but that had produced only a dense crop of yellow mustard weeds, he could see the public highway along which went a wagon filled with berry pickers returning from the fields. The berry pickers, youths and maidens, laughed and shouted boisterously. A boy clad in a blue shirt leaped from the wagon and attempted to drag after him one of the maidens who screamed and protested shrilly. The feet of the boy in the road kicked up a cloud of dust that floated across the face of the departing sun.504 Later in Anderson’s work we are presented with a description of a character whose visage seems to be lifted directly out of a Walker Evans image from American Photographs: Doctor Reefy was a tall man who had worn one suit of clothes for ten years. It was frayed at the sleeves and little holes had appeared at the knees and elbows. In the office he wore also a linen duster with huge pockets into which he continually stuffed scraps of paper. After some weeks the scraps of paper became little hard round balls, and when the pockets were filled he dumped them out upon the floor. For ten years he had but one friend, another man named John Spainard who owned a tree nursery. Sometimes, in a playful mood, old Doctor Reefy took from his pockets a handful of the paper 503 From John Updike, “Twisted Apples” Harper’s Magazine, 268, March 1984, pp. 95-97. 504 In Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio. New York: Norton and Company, 1996, p. 9. 320 balls and threw them at the nursery man. “That is to confound you, you blithering old sentimentalist,” he cried, shaking with laughter.505 The literary critic Walter B. Rideout in his essay “The Simplicity of Winesburg, Ohio,” recounts the following assessment that Evans’s friend and collaborator, Hart Crane, made of Anderson’s work in the early 1920s: “[Anderson] has a humanity and simplicity that is quite baffling in depth and suggestiveness.”506 Yet many other contemporary writers and critics came down much more harshly on Anderson’s book when it was first released. An anonymous reviewer in the New York Evening Post, writing in 1919, said, “Apart from the moral objections to the book, and from the distorted, depressing view it gives of life, there is much more to be said of its artistic shortcomings than of its merits... In all these stories there is not a single memorable character and there are only two or three which strike us as true to life... the book almost totally disregards the kindlier, humaner, clearer side of small-town life…”507 In a similar spirit, when Ansel Adams saw Evans’s American Photographs, he wrote to fellow photographer Edward Weston, complaining that: “Walker Evans's book gives me a hernia. I am so goddamn mad over what people from the left tier think America is.”508 On the other hand, writers similarly engaged with Southern Gothic themes and literary sensibilities found Sherwood Anderson’s work rewarding. William Faulkner 505 Anderson, p. 14. 506 See Hart Crane, “Sherwood Anderson.” Double Dealer 2, July 1921, p. 45. 507 Anonymous, Review of Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio, New York Evening Post, 19 July 1919, III, 3. 508 Ansel Adams to Edward Weston, quoted in Nancy Newhall, Ansel Adams: The Eloquent Light. San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1963, p. 163. 321 wrote the following in his review of Winesburg, Ohio: “The simplicity of this title! And the stories are as simply done: short, he tells the story and stops... These people live and breathe; they are beautiful...And behind all of them a ground of fecund earth and corn in the green spring and the slow, full hot summer and the rigorous masculine winter that hurts it not, but makes it stronger.”509 JOHN DOS PASSOS, U.S.A. John Dos Passos’s trilogy, U.S.A.(1938), and the influence the book had in bringing modernism to the American novel, functioned as another model for Walker Evans for how to create a photographic practice steeped in the everyday, vernacular small-town American aesthetic while simultaneously drawing from montage techniques and filmic sequencing. Evans likely encountered Dos Passos’s work through his friends e.e. cummings and Hart Crane, both of whom were in the same literary circles as Dos Passos during the 1930s.510 The trilogy U.S.A. is made up of The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932) and The Big Money (1936), all three of which were collected in one volume as U.S.A. in 1938 (coincidently the same year that American Photographs appeared). Structurally, U.S.A. is composed, broadly, of four components: long sequences of more or less straightforward narrative; much shorter ''biographies'' of prominent Americans, namely Woodrow Wilson, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison; ''Newsreels,'' or collages of 509 See William Faulkner, “Sherwood Anderson.” Dallas Morning News, April 26, 1925, part 3, p. 7. 510 Dos Passos’s work also appeared in Hound & Horn and other left-wing publications of the period such as The New Masses and Pagany. 322 newspaper clippings, fragments of songs, bits of advertisements; and sections of autobiographical stream of consciousness writing labeled "Camera Eye.” In total, this series of interconnected stories (in four narrative modes) presents a panoramic view of the United States from the start of the Great War to the end of the 1920s, covering the historical development of American society during the first three decades of the twentieth century. In Dos Passos’s novel, the main characters are scenes and settings, not people. Because of this, his writing has been considered as an “architecture” of American history in the early modern period, providing a structural and locational basis to which other later American modernist writing would respond.511 Dos Passos’s assessment of American culture in the late 1920s and early 1930s was pointed and critical. A review of a later, reissued edition of U.S.A. in The New York Times noted that: Dos Passos was basically a reporter on a mission, wielding a style whose chief virtue was efficiency. The job at hand, as he saw it in the 30's, was to encompass in literature the whole wrongly organized communal life of America, the betrayal of ‘our storybook democracy.’ It was no accident that he bulked so large in the 30's, with its unrest and savagery, while Fitzgerald and Hemingway suffered relative declines. For they were essentially ''private'' writers and the 30's were an especially public time. ''U.S.A.'' filled a need -- for a ‘collective’ novel, whose real protagonist, as Cowley said, was a ‘social group,’ the entire nation. And bringing this off — at any level — called less for the talents of a true novelist than for those of a reporter, a sharp observer.512 511 See Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. New York: Verso, 2011, p. 169. 512 Richard Gilman, “Dos Passos and the Many Lives of 'U.S.A.'” The New York Times, March 16, 1997. 323 Perhaps more than any other modernist work, U.S.A. makes use of the fundamentally modern trope of the fragment and simultaneously insists on a totalizing synthesis of these fragments. The literary critic Wesley Beal has noted that “the distinction of U.S.A.’s fragmentation lies in its experimental technique of employing four discrete modes for this historical narrative.”513 Michael Denning argued convincingly in The Cultural Front that Dos Passos’s architectural narration was designed as "a series of formal solutions to the problem of building a novel that culminates in the magical unity of the title itself, U.S.A."514 Beal points to Denning’s use of the term “aesthetic Taylorism” in this context to demonstrate how Dos Passos utilized the individual components of his novel to serve as “specialized task[s] in the service of that narration.”515 The reference here to a post-World War I means of industrial production via the term “aesthetic Taylorism” is a useful occasion to consider the many instances of industrial imagery as they appear in American Photographs, although Taylorism is critiqued in Evans’s work, not celebrated.516 In this context, Evans’s photographs of 513 Wesley Beal, “Network Narration in John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. Trilogy.” from http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/5/2/000094/000094.html, accessed June 10, 2013. 514 Denning, p. 169. 515 Denning, p. 170. 516 The relationship between Taylorism and Dos Passos’ work is complicated. Dos Passos’ politics changed dramatically throughout his life. In 1928, he studied socialism in Russia, later becoming involved in the First Americans Writers Congress sponsored by the Communist-leaning League of American Writers (April 1935). He was in Spain in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War, where he witnessed the murder of his good friend José Robles. This changed his attitude toward communism and he ended his relationship with fellow writer Ernest Hemingway. By the 1950s his political views had changed dramatically. In the 1960s, Dos Passos actively campaigned for presidential candidates Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon. For a useful discussion of Dos Passos’s politics, see Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. New York: Verso, 2011. 324 American towns function similarly to the different sections of Dos Passos’ novel; each contributes to the function of the larger machine of American Photographs. For example, part two of American Photographs focuses explicitly on the presence of industrial decay and decline in the small American town. Beginning with Evans’s Stamped Tin Relic, 1929 (figure 36) and moving through six other photographs of small industrial steel and coal towns in Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey, we see recurring motifs of how the decline in industrial production during the Great Depression led to the increased poverty of the surrounding neighborhoods and the unraveling of their urban fabrics. Evans’s View of Easton, Pennsylvania, 1936 (figure 37) gives us a glimpse of the densely-settled town and housing that existed in the shadows of factory chimneys, many of which do not smoke and appear to be out of use. The prevalence of this type of imagery throughout Evans’s book signals his engagement with contemporary discussions of the role of industry in small town America and his implicit critique of the capitalist driven, Taylorist-based factory system and its decline so ubiquitous in the so-called rust belt of 1930s America. Several scholars have pointed to Dos Passos’s debt to film in the structural organization of his novels and of the U.S.A. trilogy in particular. The film and literary critic David Kadlec has written about the formal resemblance of Dos Passos’s “Newsreels” to those of the Russian filmmaker Dziga Vertov’s Kino-Pravda series (1922-1925). Dos Passos’s use of the section title “The Camera Eye” additionally suggests an homage to Vertov, whose term “Kino-Eye” refers to an avant-garde philosophy of montage as famously used in his well-known film, Man with a Movie 325 Camera (1929). Kadlec suggests that by the mid-1930s, Dos Passos was open in his admiration and emulation of Vertov’s work, and that Vertov was happy to acknowledge his influence on Dos Passos.517 References to Dos Passos’s use of montage techniques and theory in U.S.A. has been the subject of much scholarly discussion. Caren Irr, for example, has pointed to the many instances of collision within Dos Passos’s narratives, between automobiles, planes, etc., and claimed that Dos Passos "constructs montages whose organizing principle is the collision between these equally inadequate modes of writing"518 Christopher Phillips argues that, in contrast to the European and Russian experiments with montage, by the late 1930s in the United States "montage was more and more recognized not as a means to evoke the flux and discontinuity of the modern world, but as a way to represent a dominant social theme in late-Depression America: the idea of the 'unity in diversity' of all classes and ethnic groups.”519 517 Kadlec, David. "Early Soviet Cinema and American Poetry." Modernism/modernity. Vol. 11, No. 2, 2004, p. 307. Kadlec notes that many critics have established Dos Passos’s debt to Vertov in his 1928 tour of Moscow and Leningrad, when he attended some of Vertov’s screenings, which he preferred to "the grander, state-backed productions of [Sergei] Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin." Kadlec, p. 307; cf. Wesley Beal, “Network Narration in John Dos Passos’ U.S.A. Trilogy.” Digital Humanities Quarterly, 2011, Vol. 5, No. 2. 518 Caren Irr, The Suburb of Dissent: Cultural Politics in the United States and Canada during the 1930s. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1998, p. 64. Other scholars have argued against a straightforward adoption of montage theory on Dos Passos’s behalf: Celia Tichi, for example, has written that "the filmic montage is a figure that does not go far enough to capture the full sense of Dos Passos’ innovation […] Though Dos Passos identified his fiction with film and cinema and called his own writing an intrinsically satisfying craft, his omniscient fictional form comes from the contemporary model of machine and structural technology.” Celia Tichi. "Opportunity: Imagination Ex Machina I." In Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature, Culture in Modernist America. Chapel Hill, NC: University North Carolina Press, 1987, p. 216. 519 See Phillips, Christopher. "Introduction." Montage and Modern Life. 1919-1942. Ed. Matthew Teitelbaum. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992, p. 35. 326 In July 1936, when Evans took a break from working under Roy Stryker for the Resettlement Administration, he worked closely with James Agee and created a series of well-known photographs of tenant farmers in Hale County, Alabama. The series was originally to be published in Fortune magazine, but this fell through and the work appeared instead in book form as Let Us Now Praise Famous Men in 1941. Part of the stipulation for the leave, as mandated by Stryker, was that Evans had to provide the Resettlement Administration with negatives and prints from the Hale Country project. After he returned from his photographic excursion with Agee, Evans sent Stryker an interesting set of images from the series which, as Beverly Brannan and Judith Keller have convincingly argued,520 represented a preliminary layout for a film that Evans wanted to make. This collection of still photographs, submitted in notebook form to Stryker, makes use of techniques that explore the relationship between movement, stasis, and montage in photography (and presumably also in film). These studies formed the basis for the visual structure and sequencing of American Photographs, which, like Dos Passos’s U.S.A., makes use of a multi-layered structural method and montage-like aesthetic (figure 38). Throughout the 1930s Evans remained interested in film — particularly newsreels — creating a short film about the South Seas in 1932, and producing outlines for films 520 See Beverly Brannan and Judith Keller, “Walker Evans: Two Albums in the Library of Congress,” History of Photography 19, no. 1 (Spring 1995): pp. 60-66. For a more extended discussion of Evans’s interest in film, see Jenna Webster, “Ben Shahn and the Master Medium,” in Deborah Martin Kao, Laura Katzman, and Jenna Webster, Ben Shahn’s New York: The Photography of Modern Times. exh. cat., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Art Museums, 2000, pp. 75-95. 327 throughout the 1930s. In “A Dialectical Approach to Film Form” (1929), the Russian filmmaker and theorist Sergei Eisenstein pointed to a connection between cinema and language which may help to explain Evans’s interest in the dialectical juxtaposition of images. Eisenstein wrote: “Now why should the cinema follow the forms of theater and painting rather than the methodology of language, which allows wholly new concepts or ideas to arise from the combination of two concrete denotations of two concrete objects? Language is much closer to film than painting is.”521 For Evans, equally fascinated with film, photography, and writing, his interest in montage effects translated to his own particular brand of photography: American Photographs is full of examples that place thesis next to anti-thesis, together producing a unstated synthesis. Alan Trachtenberg, in Reading American Photographs, provides a useful extended analysis of this technique in the book.522 However, even in his own time, as early as 1938, Kirstein pointed to Evans’s use of dialectics: “In choosing as his subject-matter disintegration and its contrasts, [Evans] has managed to elevate fortuitous accidents of juxtaposition into ordained design. A clumsy ‘For Sale’ sign clamped on a delicate pillar, a junk pile before a splendid gate, are living citations of the Hegelian theory of opposites.”523 521 For more see Sergei Eisenstein, “A Dialectal Approach to Film Form.” In Jay Leyda, ed. and tr., Film Form, New York: 1949, p. 60. 522 See Alan Trachtenberg, “A Book Nearly Anonymous.” in Reading American Photographs. New York: Hill and Wang, 1989. See especially pp. 258-285. 523 Kirstein, “Afterword” American Photographs, p. 197. 328 According to the Dos Passos scholar Michael Denning, the lack of a cohesive, unified plot and character development is what made U.S.A. so modern and striking in the 1930s: Perhaps the most striking thing and unsettling aspect of U.S.A. is the lack of any coherent connection between the characters: no family or set of families constitutes the world of the novel; no town, no neighborhood, or city serves as a knowable community; no industry of business, no university or film colony unites public and private lives; and no plot, murder, or inheritance links the separate destinies.524 One can find a similar type of disconnect between people as they appear in Evans’s American Photographs: between urban and rural subjects, blacks and whites, Cubans and Americans, photographer and subjects, and so on. Perhaps this apparent lack of connection between people and places is one of the primary lessons Evans’s gleaned from Dos Passos’s example and indeed from modernist writing in general, particularly the work of Flaubert.525 NON-FICTION MODELS FOR AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPHS Along with the various literary models for Evans’s work during the late 1920s and 1930s, several works of non-fiction published during this era also helped to shape a broad cultural understanding of this period in American history. In publications such as the 524 See Michael Denning. "The Decline and Fall of the Lincoln Republic: Dos Passos’ U.S.A." The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. New York: Verso, 1998, p. 182. 525 For example, Ernest Hemingway (and Walker Evans) biographer James Mellow believes In Our Time to be Hemingway's most experimental book in that it transcends a mere collection of stories, and that it presents a "narrative form in which seemingly disconnected episodes and events made up a chronicle of events." In James Mellow, Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1992, p. 266. 329 sociological study of an American small city, Middletown: A Study of Modern American Culture by Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, published in two editions (1929 and 1935), the daily life of a small American city was closely studied by two cultural anthropologists. This same city (in actuality Muncie, Indiana) was researched again in 1935 after the Great Depression in a sequel project entitled Middletown in Transition. Perhaps the most striking feature of Middletown was the continued emphasis both editions of the book placed on the emergence and popularity of the American automobile. As relayed by one of the town’s residents, “Why on earth do you need to study what’s changing this country?” Said a lifelong resident and shrewd observer of the Middle West, “I can tell you what’s happening in just four letters: A-U-T-O!”526 In Evans’s American Photographs, which can be understood as something of a photographic equivalent of Middletown (but on a larger regional scale) there are a great number of photographs featuring the automobile or providing a reference to one. Certainly, both Evans and the authors of Middletown found the ubiquity of the automobile impossible to overlook. In 1932, the book America as Americans See It, edited by Fred J. Ringel, was published as a compendium of ideas, thoughts, images, and essays that represented a panoramic view of America for (primarily) European audiences. Ringel, himself an immigrant to the United States, saw the need for a more honest and accurate history of contemporary America for Europeans who, if they had not traveled to the United States 526 For more see Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown: A Study of Modern American Culture. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 1929, 1957, p. 251. 330 themselves, “depended for their information about America on the sensational articles in newspapers and magazines and on the flood of impressionistic travel books by casual visitors.”527 Consisting of short essays by notable writers and figures such as Sherwood Anderson, Muriel Draper, Upton Sinclair, Malcolm Cowley, Holger Cahill, Edward Steichen, and with artwork and photographs by Walker Evans (whose Sixth Avenue appears as a frontispiece below a photograph by Paul Grotz), George Bellows, Gaston Lachaise, Georgia O’Keeffe and a number of contemporary cartoonists, the book was meant to present a slice of American cultural life that was as accurate as possible. Although America as Americans See It was “intended and edited for publication in European countries,” the editor and publisher soon realized, somewhat ironically, that “the book when assembled promised to be equally interesting at least, to American readers. So, strangely enough, it is being published first in this country.”528 Additionally, the editor noticed that the stripped-down, decidedly frank assessment of America by Americans was particularly remarkable for its ability to cut through to the core of American ideas and values during the Great Depression. Ringel, the editor, wrote that, “perhaps the fact that each of these articles was written expressly for this book—and for Europeans— with the avowed purpose of making America more intelligible to them, has made it possible to secure such frankly informative and unself- 527 In Fred J. Ringel, ed., America as Americans See It. Rahway, New Jersey: Quinn and Boden Company, 1932, forward. 528 Ibid. 331 conscious opinions.”529 Many of the artists and writers from Evans’s circle appeared in this book, as did of course Evans himself. Because of this, it is easy to imagine how America as Americans See It could have begun to catalyze Evans’s own thinking about his photographs: “[An] American city is what I’m after. So [I] might use several, keeping things typical.”530 Indeed, the purported “distance” of Americans writing for a European audience about their own culture, as pointed to by Ringel, resonates with Evans’s own attempts to distance himself from his subject matter in American Photographs, and present “objective” photographs of American scenes. Ringel, summarizing this approach, wrote that “... a man who addresses a strange public is likely to be more lucid in his approach than a man who is speaking to his own familiar group of people.”531 Another important precursor to Evans’s American Photographs was the Portrait of America by Diego Rivera, published in 1934. This book reproduces several of Rivera’s major mural projects completed and/or destroyed in the United States by 1934 including the New School Murals, the Detroit murals at the Institute of Fine Arts, and the doomed Rockefeller Center murals. A forward by Rivera, and texts throughout the book, point to the overt political program of Rivera’s work and summarizes the ruthless censorship of his murals by capitalist interests. Evans’s work appears in this publication as well, and indeed Rivera thanked Evans on the acknowledgements page “for his photographs of 529 Ibid. 530 “Unfinished letter to Ernestine Evans,” February 1934 in Jerry L Thompson. Walker Evans At Work : 745 Photographs Together with Documents Selected From Letters, Memoranda, Interviews, Notes. New York: Harper & Row, 1982, p. 98. 531 Ibid. 332 many details”532 of Rivera’s murals in New York, including those at Rockefeller Center and the New School. For Evans, Portrait of America likely represented the potentiality of photography to reach the masses in a way not possible by means of any other medium; his photographs of Rivera’s murals found a much wider circulation in the context of this book and the surrounding Rockefeller Center controversy than he could have imagined possible when he made them. However, Evans was weary of the intense political component of Rivera’s work, and his continual reference to “no politics whatever” in the context of his photographic practice suggests how uncomfortable his alignment with Rivera would later become for him. As Michael Brix summarized in Walker Evans America, “[Evans] wanted to have nothing to do with the political and societal changes that accompanied the New Deal. And yet it was precisely these circumstances of the times that inspired Evans’s cultural criticism and promoted his most creative phase.”533 By 1938, when Evans was completing the layout of American Photographs, he had decidedly moved away from the representation of any overt political references in his images. Instead his politics became one of representation. His work during this period attempted to break new photographic ground with regard to realism and photographic distanciation rather than the depiction of key political figures, party events, or propaganda. Alan Trachtenberg notably summarized Evans’s (photographic) politics in 532 Diego Rivera, Portrait of America. New York: J.J. Little and Ives Company, 1934, acknowledgements. 533 See Michael Brix, Walker Evans America. New York: Rizzoli,1991, p. 11. 333 this regard: “By making us perceive in each successive image the presence of a changing society and its history, and our implication in what and how we perceive, Evans practiced a political art of the photograph, not a program of reform but of social observation and critical intelligence.”534 CONCLUSION Walker Evans’s work in American Photographs represents a ten year span of photographic practice, from roughly 1928-1938. During this time, Evans learned how to make a certain type of picture, which even today is recognizable as an “Evans” photograph. His time in Paris and exposure to the European photographic avant-garde helped him to develop his photographic style earlier than most scholarship suggests. His exposure to the transatlantic avant-garde and association with artists and writers whose work addressed issues of nationalism and transnationalism placed Evans within a social milieu that was engaged with questions of American identity in the 1920s and 1930s. In many respects, Evans’s American Photographs can be read and understood as a primer on early transnationalism during the Great Depression, especially as it reproduces images he made while in Cuba and incorporates lessons of European photographers such as Eugène Atget. While the concept existed earlier in various forms, Robert Gross is generally credited with coining the phrase “the transnational turn” in a 2000 article in the Journal of American Studies. In that article, Gross underlined the pressing need for 534 See Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs. p. 285. 334 understanding and incorporating foreign perspectives on American life in an increasingly globalized economy. He wrote, “The immediate import of transnational thinking lies in the scholarly arena. For American Studies, the effect is akin to looking through the reverse lens of a telescope. What once loomed large has shrunk to insignificance.”535 Later, in 2004, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, in her Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, asserted that the proper role of American studies was to examine critically the place of the United States in the international realm.536 Fishkin stated that studying the United States “from vantage points beyond its borders” would “not only displace the hegemony of American self-regard, but would also permit scholars to gain a more nuanced, fluid, and multicultural understanding of what was (or could be defined as) ‘American.’”537 Evans’s work can be considered an early attempt to open up the question of “What is America, and how should it be represented?” long before such inquiries were made by American Studies scholars. Overall, whether we choose to read American Photographs as a treatise on American life during the Great Depression or as an early critical inquiry into America’s role on the global stage (or both), Evans undoubtedly created the “idea” of what America looked like during the 1930s. As the curator John Szarkowski wrote in a 1971 press release for an Evans exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, "It is difficult to know 535 See Robert Gross, “The Transnational Turn: Rediscovering American Studies in a Wider World.” Journal of American Studies, Vol. 34, No. 3, December 2000, p. 384. 536 See Shelley Fisher Fishkin. “Presidential Address to the American Studies Association.” American Quarterly, Vol. 57, No. 1 (March 2005), Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 17-57. 537 Fisher, p. 37. 335 now with certainty whether Evans recorded the America of his youth, or invented it. Beyond doubt, the accepted myth of our recent past is in some measure the creation of this photographer, whose work has persuaded us of the validity of a new set of clues and symbols, bearing on the question of who we are. Whether that work and its judgment was fact or artifice, or half of each, is now part of our history.”538 Evans’s unique combination of native traditions with literary and artistic modernism makes American Photographs the powerful work that it still is today. 538 John Szarkowski, Walker Evans. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1971, p. 20. 336 IMAGES, CHAPTER 1: BECOMING WALKER EVANS Figure 1: Walker Evans, Gas Station Façade in the Bronx, New York City, 1928-33, MET 1994.251.882. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 337 Figure 2: Walker Evans, Signs, New York, ca.1928–30, gelatin silver print, MET 1987.1100.147. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 338 Figure 3: Walker Evans in the Luxembourg Gardens, Paris, Christmas Day, 1926. MET 1999.246.4. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 339 Figure 4: Walker Evans Paris itinerary, MET Walker Evans Archive, c.1926. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 340 Figure 5: Sylvia Beach and James Joyce in front of Shakespeare & Company, 8 rue Dupuytren, Paris, c.1922. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 341 Figure 6: Cover, La Revolution Surrealiste, 1926 342 Figure 7: Eugène Atget, Paris Street Scene, c. 1920s 343 Figure 8: Berenice Abbott, Eugène Atget, 1927 344 Figures 9 and 10: Eugène Atget, Paris Street, n.d., and Walker Evans, View of Courtyard at 5, rue de la Santé, Paris, Showing Walker Evans’s Room, August 1926, MET 1994.261.2. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 345 Figures 11 and 12: Eugène Atget, Church of St Gervais, Paris, about 1903, albumen print from gelatin dry plate negative. Museum no. Ph.224-1903, © Victoria and Albert Museum, London Walker Evans, Cobblestone Street, Paris, 1926-1927, MET 1994.251.12. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 346 Figure 13: Walker Evans, Villa Les Cypres de St-Jean, Juan-les-Pins France, 1927, MET 1994.251.19. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 347 Figure 14: Sylvia Beach, Shakespeare & Company Bookstore, c. late 1920s, Paris 348 Figure 15: Sylvia Beach, Shakespeare & Company Bookstore, c.1930, Paris Figure 16: Gisele Freund, James Joyce, Adrienne Monnier, and Sylvia Beach in Shakespeare & Company, c. 1938 349 Figure 17: Man Ray, Ernest Hemingway, 1923 350 Figure 18: Man Ray, James Joyce, 1924 351 Figure 19: Berenice Abbott, James Joyce, 1926 352 Figure 20: Berenice Abbot, Sylvia Beach, 1926 353 Figure 21: Sylvia Beach, Ernest Hemingway, c. 1921 354 Figure 22: Walker Evans, Self-portrait, 5 rue de le Sante, Paris, September 1926, MET 1999.246.5. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 355 Figure 23: Man Ray, Berenice Abbott, 1922 356 Figure 24: Walker Evans, Shadow Self-Portraits, 1927. MET 1994.251.13, 1994.251.14, 1994.251.15. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 357 Figure 25: Walker Evans, Paul Grotz, Darien, Connecticut, 1929, MET 1994.251.897. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 358 Figure 26: Walker Evans, Lindbergh Day Parade, 1927, MET 1994.251.57. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 359 Figure 27: Walker Evans, Policemen on Street From Behind, Lindbergh Day Parade, New York City, June 13, 1927. MET 1994.251.56. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 360 Figure 28: Erich Mendelsohn, Amerika, Bilderbuch eines Architekten, Mit 77 photographischen, Berlin: Rudolf Mosse 1926 361 Figure 29: Erich Mendelsohn, Amerika, Bilderbuch eines Architekten, Mit 77 photographischen, Berlin: Rudolf Mosse 1926 362 Figure 30: Walker Evans, Graybar Building, c.1928-1930, film negative, MET 1994.255.12. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 363 Figure 31: Walker Evans, Graybar Building, New York City, 1929, film negative. MET 1994.251.81. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 364 Figure 32: Walker Evans, Chrysler Building, 1929, film negative, MET 1994.251.383. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 365 Figure 33: Walker Evans, Brooklyn Bridge, Cover, USA, summer 1930. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 366 Figure 34: Walker Evans, Broadway Composition, 1930, gelatin silver print. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 367 Figure 35: Walker Evans, New York City’s Quick Lunch, [Lunchroom Window], 1929, gelatin silver print, MET 1971.646.35. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Figure 36: Walker Evans, Sixth Avenue, 1929, MET 1994.253.13.1. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 368 Figure 37: Cover, Hart Crane, The Bridge, The Black Sun Press, 1930 and photograph of the canceled title page of the Black Sun Press edition. 369 Figure 38: Hart Crane and Walker Evans, The Bridge, The Black Sun Press,1930 Figure 39: Hart Crane and Walker Evans, The Bridge, The Black Sun Press, 1930 370 Figures 40-41: Walker Evans, Brooklyn Bridge, Tug and Container Barge on East River, From Brooklyn Bridge, New York City, MET 1994.251.42, and Brooklyn Bridge, New York, MET 1972.742.3. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 371 Figures 42 and 43: Hart Crane, The Bridge, second edition, with Walker Evans photographs on cover and frontispiece, 1930. 372 Figure 44: Joseph Stella, Brooklyn Bridge, from his series New York Interpreted, 1922 373 IMAGES, CHAPTER 2: INTIMATE INTERIORS: WALKER EVANS’S PHOTOGRAPHS OF 1930s DOMESTIC SPACES Figure 1: Paul Strand, Blind, Negative 1916; printed June 1917, Photogravure 374 Figures 2-3: Paul Strand, Porch Shadows, and White Fence, both 1916, Silver gelatin prints. 375 Figure 4: Paul Strand, Ghost Town, Red River, New Mexico, 1930 Figure 5: Walker Evans, Barn Window Detail, Truro Massachusetts, 1930, MET 1994.255.95. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 376 Figures 6-7: Ben Shahn, Captain Dreyfus, lithograph, 1930s and Labori et Picquart, lithograph, 1930s. From the Dreyfus Affair portfolio Figure 8: Walker Evans, Kitchen, De Luze House, Truro, Massachusetts, 1931, silver gelatin print, MET 1994.256.634. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 377 Figure 9: Walker Evans, Interior Detail of Cactus Plant and Family Photographs in De Luze House, Truro, Massachusetts, 1930-31, silver gelatin print, MET 1994.256.628. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 378 Figure 10: Walker Evans, Interior Showing Plants and Family Photographs on Mantle and Wall in De Luze House, (wider cropping) Truro, Massachusetts, 1930-32, silver gelatin print, MET 256.630. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Figure 11: Walker Evans, Bedroom with Wood Stove in De Luze House, Truro, Massachusetts, 1931, silver gelatin print, MET 1994.256.633. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 379 Figure 12: Cover, Tom Swift and his Motor Boat, n.d. Figure 13-14: Charles Sheeler, Cactus, 1931, oil on canvas and gelatin silver print, c. 1931. 380 Figures 15-17: Charles Sheeler, Interior (1926), Americana (1931), and Home Sweet Home (1931), all oil on canvas. 381 Figure 18: Edgar Degas, Interior (Le Viol), 1868-69, Oil on canvas. Figure 19: Walker Evans, Bedroom in Boarding House on Hudson Street, Residence of John Cheever, New York City, 1931-33, film negative, MET 1994.256.642, possibly MoMA version. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 382 Figure 20: Walker Evans, Bedroom in Boarding House on Hudson Street, Residence of John Cheever, New York City, 1931-33, film negative, MET 1994.256.352. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Figure 21: Walker Evans, Bedroom in Boarding House on Hudson Street, Residence of John Cheever, New York City, 1931-33, film negative, MET 1994.256.354. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 383 Figure 22: Walker Evans, Bedroom in Boarding House on Hudson Street, Residence of John Cheever, New York City, 1931-33, film negative, MET 1994.256.572. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Figure 23: Walker Evans, Bedroom in Boarding House on Hudson Street, Residence of John Cheever, New York City, 1931-33, film negative, MET 1994.256.353. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 384 Figure 24: Walker Evans, Bedroom Interior with Table and Chair in Boarding House on Hudson Street, Residence of John Cheever, New York City, 1931-33, negative, MET 1994.256.542. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 385 Figure 25: Edgar Degas, Study for Interior, 1868. Paris, Musée d’Orsay (Photo: Réunion des Musées Nationaux) as appeared in Sidlauskas, p. 686. Figure 26: Edgar Degas, study for Interior, location unknown, (photo, as appears in Sidlauskas, p. 686) 386 Figures 27: Walker Evans, Table Setting and Throne Chair in Muriel Draper's Apartment, New York City, MET 1994.256.531. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 387 Figure 28: Walker Evans, Fireplace Mantle and Table Settings in Muriel Draper's Drawing Room, New York City, MET 1994.256.412, May 29, 1934. Film negative. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 388 Figure 29: Walker Evans, Table Setting and Chairs in Muriel Draper's Apartment, New York City, MET 1994.256.543, May 29, 1934. Film negative. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 389 Figure 30: Walker Evans, Interior of Muriel Draper's Apartment Showing Vase of Flowers and Chairs, New York City, MET 1994.256.594, May 29, 1934. Film negative. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 390 Figure 31: Photographer unknown, Muriel Draper, n.d., Muriel Draper papers 391 Figure 32: Charles Sheeler, Criss-Crossed Conveyors, Ford Plant, 1927, gelatin silver print 392 Figure 33: Charles Sheeler, Side of White Barn, 1915, gelatin silver print Figure 34: Walker Evans, Church, Truro, Massachusetts, 1930, film negative. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 393 Figure 35: Walker Evans, Ben Shahn House, Truro, 1930-31, film negative, MET 1994.251. 4445. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Figure 36: Charles Sheeler, Doylestown House--The Stove, 1916, gelatin silver print. 394 Figure 37: Georgia O’Keeffe, Lake George Barns, 1926-27, oil on canvas Figure 38: Alfred Stieglitz, Barn, Lake George, c.1925, silver gelatin print 395 Figure 39: Alfred Siteglitz, Barn, Lake George, 1922, silver gelatin print Figure 40: Walker Evans, Church with Picket Fence and Cemetery, 1930-31, film negative, MET 1994.255.249. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 396 Figure 41: Edward Hopper Highland Light, North Truro, Massachusetts, 1930, watercolor over graphite on rough white paper Figure 42: Walker Evans Field with Church in Distance, 1930-31, glass negative, MET 1994.256.170. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 397 Figure 43: Edward Hopper, Corn Hill, North Truro, 1930, oil on canvas 398 Figure 44: Kitchen Interior Showing Stove and Doorway to Pantry, 1930-34 MET 1994.256.258, film negative. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 399 Figure 45: Walker Evans, Outdoor Kitchen, Havana, MET 1933 1994.251.601, film negative. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 400 Figure 46: Walker Evans, Alabama Tenant Farmer's Kitchen, 1936, MET 2007.458.4, film negative. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 401 Figure 47 Eugène Atget, Intérieur Rue de Vaugirard, 1910, Albumen silver print from glass negative 402 Figure 48: Eugène Atget, Cuisine, 1910, Albumen silver print from glass negative. Inscription: Stamped in ink on mount, verso C: "PHOTO E. ATGET//COLLECTION BERENICE ABBOTT//1 W. 67th ST.//, COPYRIGHT"; inscribed in pencil on print, verso UC: "Cg. Inv.//(1976-20)", UC[below former]: "Atget//Cuisine[underlined]//#710", LC: "Atget's Kitchen [underlined]", MET Museum, 1990.1026.2. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 403 Figure 49: Eugène Atget, Petit Intérieur d'un artiste dramatique, 1910, albumen print 404 Figure 50: Eugène Atget, Intérieur de Mr A., Indutriel : rue Lepic, 1910, Albumen print 405 Figure 51: Eugène Atget Atget, intérieur parisien (chambre à coucher), 1910, albumen print 406 IMAGES, CHAPTER 3: WALKER EVANS’S PHOTOGRAPHS OF NINETEENTH CENTURY ARCHITECTURE Figure 1: Walker Evans, Folk Victorian Cottages at Oak Bluff's, Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts 1932, MET 1994.235.257. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Figure 2: Walker Evans, Second Empire House with Mansard Roof, Massachusetts, 1930-31, film negative, MET 1994. 255. 31. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 407 Figure 3: Walker Evans, Gingerbread House, Nyack, New York, 1932, MET 1994.256.197. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 408 Figures 4a, 4b: photo-postcards, collection of the author 409 Figure 5: vignette photograph: Walker Evans, Hermitage Plantation House near Savannah, Georgia, February 5, 1935, MET 1994.258.523. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 410 Figure 6: Walker Evans, Two Gothic Revival Houses with Decorative Vergeboards in Gables, Dorchester, Massachusetts, 1930-31, MET 1994.255.271. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Figure 7: Grant Wood, American Gothic, 1930, Oil on beaver board. 411 Figure 8: Matthew B. Brady, Unidentified Camp with Ruined Chimneys in Background, 1861-65, albumen silver print from glass negative. Figure 9: Empire State Building, 1931 412 Figure 10: Edward Hopper, House by the Railroad, Oil on canvas, 1925 Figure 11: Charles Burchfield, Study No.1 for Church Bells Ringing, Rainy Winter Night, pen, ink, wash, and pastel on paper, 1917 413 Figure 12: Edward Hopper, Gloucester Mansion, and Anderson’s House, Glouchester Massachusetts, watercolor on paper, 1924 414 Error! Figures 13-14: Walker Evans, Gothic Revival Watertower, Dorchester or Roxbury, Massachusetts, 1932, and Main Water Pump, 1933, MET 1994.256.135, 1994.253.63. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 415 Figure 15: Cover, MoMA ex. cat, America Can’t Have Housing, 1934 Figure 15a: Walker Evans, Damaged, 1928-30, MET 1994.252.283. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 416 Figure 16: Walker Evans, Gothic Gate near Poughkeepsie, New York, 1931, negative, MET 1994.256.196. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Figure 16a: Mathew B. Brady studio (Alexander Gardner), Ruins of Gallego Flour Mills, Richmond, VA, 1865 417 Figure 17: Examples of photographs as printed in Old-Time New England, October1929 Figure 18: Walker Evans, Gothic Church, Boston Massachusetts, 1932, MET 52.562.20. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 418 Figure 19: Walker Evans, Greek Church, Beverly, Massachusetts, 1932, MET 1994.255.206. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Figure 20: Walker Evans, Gothic Church, Ipswich, Massachusetts, 1932, MET 1994.255.34. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 419 Figure 21: Howard Major, The Domestic Architecture of the Early American Republic: The Greek Revival, 1926 Figure 22: Henry Codman House, Roxbury, Massachusetts in The Domestic Architecture of the Early American Republic: The Greek Revival, 1926, by Howard Major 420 Figure 23: Hollenbeck House, Front Street, Owego, New York (top), in The Domestic Architecture of the Early American Republic: The Greek Revival, 1926, by Howard Major Figure 24: Mills House, Tipton, Michigan, 1850, in The Domestic Architecture of the Early American Republic: The Greek Revival, 1926, by Howard Major 421 Figure 25: Walker Evans, Two Gothic Revival Houses with Decorative Verge Boards in Gables, Dorchester, Massachusetts, 1930-31, MET 1994.255.227. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Figure 26: Walker Evans, Gothic Revival House, Residence of W.H. Prescott, Swampscott, Massachusetts, 1931, MET 1994.255.199. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 422 Figure 27: The Architecture of Country Houses: Designs for Cottages, Farm Houses and Villas (with remarks on interiors, furniture, and the best modes of warming and ventilating), 1850, by A. J. Downing Figure 28: Cottage Villa, in The Architecture of Country Houses: Designs for Cottages, Farm Houses and Villas (with remarks on interiors, furniture, and the best modes of warming and ventilating), 1850, by A. J. Downing 423 Figure 29: “Wooden Temples House the Young Republic.” From MoMA exhibition, Three Centuries of American Art, May 24-July 31, 1938. Figure 29b: “Valentines for an Architect,” in Home & Field, February, 1934. 424 Figure 30: Modern Architecture: International Exhibition, February-March, MoMA, New York, 1932 Figure 31: Installation view: Model of Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye displayed in Hitchcock and Johnson's Modern Architecture - International Exhibition show at MoMA, New York, 1932 425 Figure 32: Walker Evans, Row of Town Houses, South Boston, Massachusetts, 1932, film negative, MET 1994. 255.171. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Figure 33: Walker Evans, Folk Victorian House with Front-Gabled Roof, Fernandez, Florida, 1935-36, MET 1994.258.23. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 426 Figure 34: Berenice Abbott, 70-73 Beacon Street, 1934 Figure 35: Walker Evans, Two Folk Victorian Cottages as Ossining Camp Woods, New York, 1930-31, MET 1994.256.576. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 427 Figure 36: Walker Evans, Bedford Village, Westchester County, 1931, MET 2005.100.592. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Figure 37: Walker Evans, Victorian Architecture Pair of Houses with Peaked Roofs, South Boston, Massachusetts, 1932, MET 51.561.11. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 428 Figure 38: Walker Evans, Wooden Gothic Revival House, Seen from Across Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1930-31, MET 1994.251.427. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Figure 39: Walker Evans, Folk Victorian Gazebo, 1930-31, MET 1994.256.183. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 429 Figure 39b: Walker Evans, Folk Victorian Gazebo, Near Ossining, New York, 1933-34, MET 1994.253.219.1. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Figure 40: Walker Evans, Folk Victorian Cottage at Oak Bluffs, Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, September, 1931, MET 1994.255.237, © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 430 Figure 41: Walker Evans, Jigsaw Canopy over Water Pump of Wedding Cake House, Kennebunk, Maine, 1930-31, MET 1994.256.135. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Figure 41b: Walker Evans, Trellised Gingerbread Trim Privy, 1930-31, MET 1994.257.25. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 431 Figure 42: Walker Evans, Gothic Revival Outbuildings, 1930-33, MET 1994.255.253. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Figure 43: Walker Evans, Victorian Garden Statuary on Lawn Outside Clapboard House, 1928-33, MET 1994.251.848. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 432 Figure 44: Walker Evans, Greek Revival House with Recessed Entry Porch, New York, 1931, MET 1994.255.26. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Figure 45: Walker Evans, Left Wing façade of Queen Anne House with Patterned Masonry Chimney, 1931, MET 1994.256.186. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 433 Figure 46: Walker Evans, Boarding House with Two Men seated on Porch, Birmingham, Alabama, 1936, MET 1994.258.31. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Figure 47: Walker Evans, Slave Cabins, Hermitage Plantation, Savannah, 1935, MET 1994.25.8.518. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 434 Figure 48: Walker Evans, “Faulkner’s Mississippi,” Vogue spread, October 1, 1948 435 Figure 49: Walker Evans, “Faulkner’s Mississippi,” Vogue spread, October 1, 1948 436 Figure 50: Walker Evans, “Faulkner’s Mississippi,” Vogue spread, October 1, 1948 Figure 50b: Walker Evans, Folk Victorian House, 1930-33, MET 1994.255.163. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 437 Figure 51: Walker Evans, Belle Helene Plantation House with Uprooted Tree in Foreground, March 1935, MET 1994.258.87. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 438 Figure 51b: George Bernard, The Potter House, Atlanta, in Photographic Views of Sherwood’s Campaign, (c. 1866) Figure 52: Robert W. Tebbs, Belle Chasse Plantation, (1926) 439 Figure 53: Robert W. Tebbs, Hickory Hill Plantation, (1926) Figure 53a: Robert W. Tebbs, Elmwood Plantation, (1926) 440 Figure 53b: Robert W. Tebbs, Belle Grove Plantation, (1926) 441 Figure 53c: Walker Evans, Brick Greek Revival House with Pine Tree in Front, New York, 1931, MET 1994.256.219. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 442 Figure 54: Walker Evans, Belle Grove Plantation, 1935, MET 1994.258.679, 1994.254.865. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 443 Figure 55: Walker Evans, Room in Louisiana Plantation House, 1935, MET 2005.100.322. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Figure 56: Walker Evans, Fire Ruin in Ossining, New York, 1930, MET 1994.256.153. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 444 Figure 57: Walker Evans, Fire Ruin in Scarborough, New York, 1930, MET 1994.256.177. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Figure 57a: Walker Evans, Burning House, 1930-31, MET 1994.251.145. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 445 APPENDIX A: “Exhibition of Photographs of Nineteenth Century American Houses by Walker Evans” MoMA checklist, 1933. MoMA exhibition archives. 446 APPENDIX B: Lincoln Kirstein, “Walker Evans’ Photographs of Victorian Architecture,” The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art, vol. 1, No. 4 (Dec., 1933), p. 4. 447 Images, Chapter 4: CONTEXTUALIZING AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPHS Figure 1: Walker Evans, cover, Carleton Beals, The Crime of Cuba, New York: Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1933 448 Figure 2: Title Page, Carleton Beals, The Crime of Cuba, New York: Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1933 449 Figure 3: Walker Evans, Havana Street, in Carleton Beals, The Crime of Cuba, New York: Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1933 450 Figure 4: Walker Evans, Woman, in Carleton Beals, The Crime of Cuba, New York: Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1933 451 Figure 5: Walker Evans, Public Square, in Carleton Beals, The Crime of Cuba, New York: Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1933 452 Figure 6: Walker Evans, Family, in Carleton Beals, The Crime of Cuba, New York: Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1933 453 Figure 7: Gonzalez Rubiera, Anonymous Photograph, in Carleton Beals, The Crime of Cuba, New York: Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1933 454 Figure 8: Walker Evans, Construction Site Timbers, New York City, c. 1928-29, MET 1994.251.48. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 455 Figure 9: Walker Evans, Tenant Farmer Child [Laura Minnie Lee Tingle],1936. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 456 Figure 10: Details of Expansion and Labor Movement, Panels of Diego Rivera’s Murals for the New Worker’s School, New York City, as photographed by Walker Evans, July-August 1933, MET 1994.256.289, 1994.256.334. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 457 Figure 11: Walker Evans, The American Revolution Panel of Diego Rivera's Mural for the New Worker's School, New York City, film negative, MET 1994.256.333, In Vanity Fair, October 1933. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 458 Figure 12: Diego Rivera, The Making of a Fresco, Showing the Building of a City, San Francisco Art Institute, 1931 459 Figure 13: Walker Evans, Parque Central II, in Carleton Beals, The Crime of Cuba, New York: Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1933 460 Figure 14: Walker Evans, Cinema, in Carleton Beals, The Crime of Cuba, New York: Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1933 461 Figure 15: Walker Evans, Beggar, in Carleton Beals, The Crime of Cuba, New York: Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1933 462 Figure 16: Walker Evans, Street Vendors, in Carleton Beals, The Crime of Cuba, New York: Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1933 463 Figure 17: Walker Evans, Havana: Country Family, in Carleton Beals, The Crime of Cuba, New York: Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1933 464 Figure 18: Walker Evans, Family, in Carleton Beals, The Crime of Cuba, New York: Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1933 465 Figure 19: Anonymous Cuban Postcards, c. 1930s 466 Figure 20: Anonymous Photograph, A Document of the Terror, in Carleton Beals, The Crime of Cuba, New York: Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1933 467 Figure 21: Walker Evans, City People, in Carleton Beals, The Crime of Cuba, New York: Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1933 468 Figure 22: Walker Evans, Breadline, in Carleton Beals, The Crime of Cuba, New York: Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1933 469 Figure 23: Walker Evans, Woman, in Carleton Beals, The Crime of Cuba, New York: Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1933 470 Figure 24: Walker Evans, Newsboys, in Carleton Beals, The Crime of Cuba, New York: Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1933 471 Figure 25: Walker Evans, Terrorist Students in Jail, in Carleton Beals, The Crime of Cuba, New York: Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1933 Figure 26: Walker Evans, Movie Theater, Cuba 1933 472 Figure 27: Selection of Cuba photographs in Walker Evans, American Photographs, 1938: Citizen in Downtown Havana, 1933 and Coal Dock Worker, 1933. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 473 Figure 28: Walker Evans, Stevedore, 1933 and Alabama Cotton Tenant Farmer's Wife (Allie Mae Burroughs), 1936. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 474 Figure 29: Walker Evans, Sidewalk and Shopfront, New Orleans, 1935. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 475 Figure 30: Walker Evans, Negro Barber Shop, Interior, Atlanta, 1936. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 476 Figure 31: Walker Evans, Joe’s Auto Graveyard, Pennsylvania, 1936, reprinted 1971, MET 1972.555.1. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 477 Figure 32: Walker Evans, Roadside Gas Sign, 1929 ["Gas A" Scrawled on Torn Posters, Vicinity Truro, Massachusetts], film negative, MET 1994.255.87. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 478 Figure 33: Walker Evans, Corrugated Tin Facade, Moundville (?), Alabama, 1936, [Corrugated Tin Façade of Contracter's Office, Moundville, Alabama], film negative, MET 1994.258.290. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 479 Figure 34: Walker Evans, Interior Detail, West Virginia Coal Miner’s House, 1935, [Interior of Coal Miner's Home with Rocking Chair and Advertisements on Wall, West Virginia], film negative, MET 1994.258.365. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 480 Figure 35: Walker Evans, New York City’s Quick Lunch, [Lunchroom Window], 1929, gelatin silver print, MET 1971.646.35. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 481 Figure 36: Walker Evans, Stamped Tin Relic, 1929, [Tin Relic], gelatin silver print, MET 2007.458.1 © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 482 Figure 37: Walker Evans, View of Easton, Pennsylvania, 1936, [View of Houses and Factory Buildings on Lehigh River, From Elevated Position, Easton, Pennsylvania], film negative, MET 1994.258.376. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 483 Figure 38: Walker Evans, “Three Tenant Families” [vol. I, page 40]. 1936. Gelatin silver prints in bound notebook. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Lot 991, (OH) as appears in Sharon Corwin, Jessica May, and Terri Weissman, American Modern: Documentary Photography by Abbott, Evans, and Bourke-White, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011, p. 67 484 BIBLIOGRAPHY Abrahams, Edward. The Lyrical Left : Randolph Bourne, Alfred Stieglitz, and the Origins of Cultural Radicalism in America. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1986. Adams, Mildred. “The Cuban Scene: Behind the Glamour,” New York Times, August 27, 1933. Adorno, Theodor W., and Robert Hullot-Kentor. Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic. Theory and History of Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Agee, James, and Walker Evans. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Boston,: Houghton Mifflin company, 1941. ---. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families. The Southern Classics Library. Special ed. Birmingham, Ala.: Southern Living Gallery, 1984. ---. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988. ---. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men; Three Tenant Families. Boston,: Houghton Mifflin, 1960. Agee, James, et al. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Sound recording. Caedmon TC 1324. 1970, n.p. Aguilar, Luis E. Cuba 1933; Prologue to Revolution. The Norton Library, New York: Norton, 1974. Alexander, William. Film on the Left : American Documentary Film from 1931 to 1942. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981. Amberg, George. Hound and Horn, Essays on Cinema. The Literature of Cinema. New York Arno Press Inc. Ames, Winslow. “19th Century New London Houses Recalled in Exhibit at Lyman Allyn Museum,” New London Day, January 16, 1936. Anderson, Sherwood. Winesburg, Ohio : A Group of Tales of Ohio Small Town Life. New York: B.W. Huebsch, 1919. Anonymous. “Valentines for an Architect,” Home & Field, February, 1934. 485 ---. 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