Byzantium By The Hudson: "New Art City" by Jed Perl

New Art City: Manhattan at Mid-Century by Jed Perl. 641 pp. Vintage. $18.95 (paperback)

A renaissance took place during the 1950s in downtown Manhattan, when the abstract expressionists held sway. Jed Perl captures a period when artists painted and exhibited in Greenwich Village; drank at the Cedar Tavern; argued at their forum, The Club; and found success at uptown galleries and the Museum of Modern Art.

Younger painters came to New York to learn from older abstract artists and teachers such as Hans Hoffman and from each other. Painter Willem de Kooning said that that New York was “really like a Byzantine city.” Perl describes the atmosphere: “Tenth Street… was a village within the metropolis, and artists and writers… could go for days and weeks without setting foot outside their own sometimes overstimulating neighborhood.”

Perl emphasizes the artists’ sense of individuality. They were part of a movement, but they refused “to accept any style… that had been thrust upon them.” These artistic rebels were ambivalent about their eventual commercial success and new public roles. They worried about a loss of independence and wondered if the museums had more influence over the direction of modern art than they did.

Qualms about commercialism did not bother the Pop artists who came along in the 1960s. In Andy Warhol’s paintings of celebrities, dollar bills and Campbell’s soup cans, we instead see a deadpan reflection of American commercialism. Painter Al Held spoke for others when he rejected the earlier painters’ subjectivity: “The Abstract Expressionists covered everything up with this sensibility and feeling…” For Held, there was to be “No spiritual overlay.”

A book of this breadth takes in more than Abstract Expressionism and Pop; there are realists, collagists, minimalists and assemblage sculptors, along with the influential critics Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg. Perl’s emphases are sometimes questionable; he treats Hoffman and de Kooning in depth, while giving short shrift to Pollock, Rothko and Kline. The closing chapter on the empiricism of painter Fairfield Porter and minimalist sculptor Donald Judd seems too narrowly focused. These reservations, however, are set against the strength of this study as a whole; in New Art City, Jed Perl fully lives up to his ambitious goal, to depict the artistic excitement, crosscurrents and innovation that made New York the artistic capital of the world for two decades.

"The Postmodern Turn": Explaining the Loss of Explanations

The Postmodern Turn by Steven Best and Douglas Kellner. Illustrated. 306 pp. Guilford. $18.95 (paperback)

For readers new to postmodernism, the last chapter of "The Postmodern Turn" should have been the first. True, the first chapter refers to the end of grand narratives and the loss of faith in universal explanations found in postmodern theory. It is in the last chapter, however, that the major themes of postmodernism are fully outlined: the rejection of unification in favor of complexity; the renunciation of fixed meaning for ambiguity; the abandonment of truth for relativity, and the breakdown of rigid boundaries of knowledge for interdisciplinary study.

"The Postmodern Turn" delineates the difference between the modern and the postmodern, while asserting that we are living in a transitional period between the two. Modernism saw the artist as an isolated genius whose creations were original and monumental and whose purity of style was rooted in the "high arts." These pillars of modernism are denied in postmodern literature: "Instead of deep content, grand themes and moral lessons...postmodernists...are primarily concerned with the form and play of language..." 

The grand spiritual and emotional themes in the modernist abstract expressionist painting of the 1950s were forsaken by pop artist Andy Warhol, who emphasized commercial culture, and by Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, who appropriated everyday objects and broke the barriers between "high" and "low" art. In architecture, the purity of the International Style, characterized by minimalist glass and steel boxes, gave way to buildings that eclectically borrowed from different periods. In the sciences, quantum physics and chaos theory introduced a measure of indeterminacy in place of a mechanistic view of the universe.

Politically, the rejection of universal schemes to save humanity resulted in a fragmentation of social movements. In identity politics, previously marginalized groups, such as gays, minorities and women, asserted their own historical narrative: "Identity politics bears the influence of postmodern theory, which is evident in its critique of modern reductionism, abstract universalism, and essentialism, as well as in its use of multiperspectival strategies that legitimate multiple political voices."

Best and Kellner also emphasize how the existentialists, with their attack on absolutism in philosophy, were precursors to the postmodern thinkers. The authors provide illuminating insights into the ways in which postmodernism evolved into a contemporary cultural force.

"The Mayor of MacDougal Street" by Dave Van Ronk

The Mayor of MacDougal Street by Dave Van Ronk. 246 pp. DaCapo Press

Years ago, I was listening to a folksinger play in Washington Square Park and noticed a sign on his guitar, "This Machine Kills Fascists." An adolescent, I wondered what that meant. In "The Mayor of MacDougal Street," the late folk and blues artist Dave Van Ronk wrote that this sign was famously placed on the guitar of Woody Guthrie. While I highly doubt that I actually saw Guthrie, the anecdote reflects the fact that anyone who had the slightest connection to the Greenwich Village folk music scene of the late 1950s to the mid 1960s will find something to spark a memory in this finely detailed book.

The book sat on my shelves for too many years until I was inspired to read it after seeing the film "Inside Llewyn Davis." The Coen brothers, who directed the film, adapted a number of scenes from this account of the life of Van Ronk, who remained a prominent member of the Village folk scene for decades. He earned his moniker, "The Mayor of MacDougal Street," and there is now a Dave Van Ronk Street, dedicated in 2004, in Greenwich Village. His autobiography, written with Elijah Wald, reflects the fact that, as Bob Dylan put it, "In Greenwich Village, Van Ronk was king of the street, he reigned supreme." Van Ronk's deep involvement in the folk scene is reflected in the fact that he knew everyone: Dylan; the recently departed Pete Seeger; Joan Baez; Tom Paxton; Joni Mitchell; Ramblin' Jack Elliot, Peter, Paul and Mary; Phil Ochs, and more. Concomitant with the folk scene was an acoustic blues revival, and Van Ronk formed friendships with its prominent African-American artists: the Reverend Gary Davis, Sonnie Terry and Brownie McGhee, Josh White and Mississippi John Hurt. And, of course, Van Ronk performed and attended concerts at all of the legendary Village folk clubs and coffee houses: the Kettle of Fish, Gerde's Folk City, the Cafe Bizarre,  the Cafe Wha? and the Bitter End.

Van Ronk was both an entertaining raconteur and a contrarian. A lifelong leftist, he viewed the New Left of the 1960s as "a petty bourgeois movement that had no connection with what was really going on." He disparaged Dylan's lyrics when the latter went electric for their "unintelligibility." Van Ronk's assessment of the music of the 1960s, however, was too dismissive. He allowed that the Beatles were "sweet and amusing and had some very interesting ideas." Regarding the folk period itself, he wrote, "...very little of what got put down had much permanent value." If that is the case, why write this book? He also wrote, "...we produced a Bob Dylan, a Tom Paxton, a Phil Ochs, a bit later a Joni Mitchell–but we did not produce a Johann Sebastian Bach or a Duke Ellington." In the folk genre, such artists are indeed comparable to the classical and jazz greats. Regardless, "The Mayor of MacDougal Street is incomparable as a portrait of a folk music era and scene that, despite Van Ronk's dissension, produced artists and music of lasting influence.

New York's Artistic Rebels Of The 1920s

Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan In The 1920s by Ann Douglas. 606 pp. Farrar, Straus and Giroux (paperback)

While the 1960s are associated with the counterculture, Ann Douglas makes the case in “Terrible Honesty” for the cultural breakthroughs that took place during the 1920s. Leading the charge were prominent black and white artists, a “mongrel” group that shook off a Victorian matriarchal culture and replaced it with a “terrible honesty.”

According to Douglas, the artists of the 1920s turned away from middle class piety, racism, and sexual repression. Freudian psychoanalysis, with its insistence on uncovering dark, unconscious forces, was a major influence on the era's moderns in their rejection of convention and flowery language.

These artists embraced an egalitarian, popular culture and recognized that African-Americans made major contributions to the nation’s original folk heritage. The figures in the Harlem Renaissance, including Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston and others, hoped that artistic accomplishment would pave the way toward greater acceptance of African Americans. While such hopes proved too idealistic, black achievements in literature, drama, jazz and the blues could not be denied. Blues music in particular was a reaction against societal niceties–and they were paralleled by the tough-minded literature of such white artists as Ernest Hemingway, Eugene O'Neill and Dorothy Parker.

Douglas makes the connection between the cultural figures of the 1920s and later artistic innovations: bebop, jazz, early rock 'n' roll, Chicago electric blues, Beat literature, method acting and the New Journalism. "Terrible Honesty" is a detailed work, and at times it seems as if it loses the Manhattan focus and, instead, ranges over the entirety of American culture. But it presents a convincing, often fascinating study of the ways in which artists of varied backgrounds had a profound influence on each other and on the cultural life of the nation to this day.

The Past Recaptured, The Present Apprehended In A Fleeting Life

The Womb of Memory by Dibakar Barua. 64 pp. World Parade Books. $12.95 (paperback)

Reading Dibakar Barua's poetry collection "The Womb of Memory" put me in mind of the French novelist Marcel Proust. Proust's exploration of the power of memory to spark long-buried experience had its most famous treatment when he recalled his entire childhood village upon eating a madeleine cake. Barua, a native of Bangladesh and a professor of English at Golden West College in Huntington Beach, California, depicts moments of sudden memory evoked by everyday sights and sounds. 

In "Monsoon," the tapping of a keyboard brings to mind rainstorms, with the poet "reliving scenes that put me inside a hum/of quiet explosions–a slant rain or a burning house popping like twigs..." Food from the past brings forth a stream of associations: "Chopping the chichinga/picked today from an Asian market/a touch of something so close and so forgotten for decades..." Sometimes he has to tease out the past, as he writes in "Sleepwalk," "with buried things that burrow/up to the rim." Barua possesses a keen recollection of figures from the past, whether it's his father whom he imitated "with a matchstick in my lips/for your Capstain cigarette" or his Aunt Lina who "died still young" and for whom he felt "a sly love" at 11 years old. 

Not every poem in the volume is devoted to the past; those taking place in the present show a sensuous apprehension of the world: "This seasonal profusion of pale purple/so luminous in the sun/stains the tar pavement below." The beauty of the world is paralleled by a sense of empathy for all creatures. Viewing a crushed, bloodied rattlesnake from a tour bus window brings forth a "self-conscious shame" that "no one will come/to greet or help him; no one stirs/from the mirror like windows." He imagines a victim who disappeared during a war: "...I often imagine your last fear and pain/see your round face and lively eyes/bloom quietly a moment among bayonets." Human aggression, passed from generation to generation, is lamented: "...young men contract a blindness from their Rough-riding feckless fathers; raw carnage/Etches, in acid, the crimson clouds of history."

This sensitivity toward all beings is made all the more acute by an awareness of the impermanence of life. In "Hospital Roommate," a dying young man makes a deep impression with his "laser like gaze/coming at me from the wall mirror--/a curious and unflinching look." Recovering from illness, the poet, after a fitful night, is fanned by his wife "cooling a bilious fire inside" as "A hum in my ears now sinks/into the skin of memory and time; an enveloping calm drops like silk./I begin to stir in the astonishing silence/of knowing this life will end." This realization, obvious yet startling, closes this powerful collection.