New York Modern: The Arts and the City - Hardcover

Scott, Professor William B.; Rutkoff, Professor Peter M.

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9780801859984: New York Modern: The Arts and the City

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0801859980 ISBN 13: 9780801859984

Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999

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New York City's crowded streets and energetic people, its vast population and enormous extremes of wealth and poverty, its towering buildings and technological marvels have marked it as the quintessential modern city since the turn of the century. Artists in particular identified with New York's newness, believing that it embodied the future and celebrated the excitement of the modern urban lives they both witnessed and led. In New York Modern, William B. Scott and Peter M. Rutkoff explore how the varied features of the urban experience in New York inspired the works of artists such as Isadora Duncan, Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O'Keeffe, Eugene O'Neill, Duke Ellington, Clifford Odets, Elia Kazan, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Jackson Pollock, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Allen Ginsberg, Arthur Miller, James Baldwin, and Diane Arbus, who together shaped twentieth-century American culture.

In painting, sculpture, photography, film, music, dance, theater, and architecture, New York artists redefined what it meant to be "modern." Rooted in the urban realism of Walt Whitman, Thomas Eakins, and Edith Wharton, New York artists combined the revolutionary ideas and styles of European modernism with vernacular images drawn from American commercial, folk, and popular culture in their attempts to respond to the cacophony of voices and blur of images drawn from the city's bars and cafes, tenements and townhouses, skyscrapers and docks.

Handsomely illustrated and engagingly written, New York Modern documents the impressive collective legacy of New York's artists in capturing the energy and emotions of the urban experience.

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From the Publisher:

"This history is as lively as its subject, clarifying the genealogy of the successive rebellions that marked the unfolding of modernism. It pays particular attention to the contributions of African Americans, helping us see, for example, the link between bebop and Abstract Expressionism."—New Yorker

"Scott and Rutkoff . . . distill an enormous range of scholarly work . . . The authors' clear vision of New York as the center of a plurality of modern arts, particularly after WWII, is bolstered by their minute attention to the social structures and political ideals that undergirded the polis and supported the artistic community."—Publishers Weekly

About the Author:

William B. Scott and Peter M. Rutkoff teach history and American studies at Kenyon College, where they held the NEH Chair as Distinguished Teaching Professors from 1997 to 2000. Together, they are also the authors of New School: A History of the New School for Social Research, 1917-1970. In addition, Rutkoff is the author of Revanche and Revision: The Origins of the Radical Right in France, 1880-1900 and Scott the author of In Pursuit of Happiness: American Conceptions of Property.

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