Synopsis
Discusses how these individuals brought modern painting, sculpture, and dance to America
Reviews
In an arresting, gossipy, lavishly illustrated group portrait of visionaries who changed the cultural landscape of America, Weber depicts re-creates in previous review the interwoven activities of five arts patrons blessed with connections, money and a driving passion for the modern. Lincoln Kirstein and Edward Warburg, while students at Harvard, gave the public its first look at Bauhaus design and Calder's Circus ; they later brought George Balanchine to America and gave key support to Igor Stravinsky and Philip Johnson. Harvard art historian Agnes Mongan, an associate of Bernard Berenson, championed fine drawing and extended women's influence in the male-dominated museum world. James Thrall Soby, a "paradigmatic New England gentleman," enlarged the audience for Balthus and de Chirico as curator of New York's Museum of Modern Art. A. Everett "Chick" Austin Jr., director of the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Conn., organized pioneering exhibitions of work by Picasso and the surrealists. Weber is director of the Josef Albers Foundation and author of books on Albers and Leland Bell.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Art critic Weber (The Drawings of Josef Albers, etc.--not reviewed) offers vivid, laudatory portraits of five individuals who helped revolutionize American artistic sensibilities in the 1920's and 30's. The best-known figure here is Lincoln Kirstein, prolific author and a founder of the New York City Ballet, who, as an undergraduate in 1928, started, along with the ``animated,'' well- connected Edward M.M. Warburg, the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art. Kirstein and Warburg showed staid New England the wonders of Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion House, Calder's Circus, and design from the Bauhaus. They regularly had lunch with Agnes Mongan, who, at the Fogg Museum, was beginning the scholarship that ``fostered an unprecedented appreciation of drawings.'' In Hartford, Wadsworth Atheneum director A. Everett Austin was picking up some of the Harvard group's avant-garde shows, while James Thrall Soby began collecting modern paintings and shocked the insurance city with a living-room showing of Bu¤uel and Dali's film, L'Age d'Or. In 1933, Kirstein enlisted Austin, Soby, and especially Warburg to bring choreographer George Balanchine to this country. Certainly Weber achieves his stated purpose of conveying ``something of the spirit'' of these privileged and complicated five, but it's hard not to want even more on Kirstein and Warburg--who both became disillusioned with the art world--and, above all, on Mongan, not a modernist yet in some ways the most pioneering. We get a glimpse of the passions that drove this distinguished woman (who finally became head of the Fogg in her 60s) when she writes to Bernard Berenson of ``the magic and unearthly beauty which you led me into when we emerged from the grove in darkness.'' A welcome inside look at a loose circle of patrons in an era when money, taste, and risk-taking could steer the progress of art in America. (Seventy-seven illustrations.)ica. (Seventy-seven illustrations.) -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Weber deftly interweaves the lives of five extraordinary individuals whose intelligence, wealth (despite the Depression), social ties, and courage revolutionized the cultural arts by bringing modernism to the American public. In 1928, as founders of the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art, undergraduates Lincoln Kirstein and Edward Warburg rented two rooms above the Harvard Coop and staged bold exhibitions of the works of Buckminster Fuller, Alexander Calder, Brancusi, and the Bauhaus School. They wreaked havoc in the established art world. Later, they brought Balanchine here to organize a ballet school. Agnes Mongan, a scholar at the Fogg Art Museum, gave new significance to drawings and paved the way for women to become art curators and directors. A. Everett Austin, the Wadsworth Atheneum's director, introduced Surrealism. James Soby was a discerning collector and curator of new art. A brilliant tribute to pioneers of our cultural history. Highly recommended.
- Joan Levin, MLS, Chicago
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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