Modernism as Biography

In one of the often piquant asides addressed to his readers, Robert M. Crunden complains off-handedly that too much literary history has text speaking to text in a vacuum (p. 107). This unobtrusive homily is, in fact, the premise for Crunden's monumental kaleidoscope American Salons: Encounters with European Modernism, 1885-1917. For Crunden envisions modernism as a rich canvas of individual personalities, interacting and influencing each other in cities as provincial as Baltimore and as cosmopolitan as Paris. His work reflects his enthusiasm for the individual artist in his concrete contextual place, just as his ideological basis is a deliberate decision to avoid the pitfalls of poststructural theorizing. These choices are the focus for a very compelling, well peopled, and, at times, provocative book. But they bind Crunden's study as well. American Salons fails, in the end, to address the ambiguity of modernism itself, just as the book's actors often fail to fit into the parameters of Crunden's definition of a modernist. American Salons is based on the format of Crunden's Ministers of Reform: The Progressives' Achievement in American Civilization, 1889-1910 (1982), an analysis of progressivism as a climate of cultural creativity that is grounded on biographical sketches of the major Progressives. In Ministers of Reform, Crunden's affection for his cast and his propensity for the artist signals his inclusion of seemingly unaligned modernists in American Salons. Crunden creates a schema dictated by his definition of the modernist (chiefly the profile of the avant-garde iconoclast) and manipulates this profile to embrace figures as diverse as Harriet Monroe, editor of Poetry in Chicago; Jelly Roll Morton, the innovator of ragtime in New Orleans; Mack Sennett, the creator of slapstick comedy in Los Angeles; and Robert Frost, the New Hampshire poet. Crunden explores the late nineteenth century too, naming James Whistler, and William and Henry James as precursors, thus extending his thematic argument into the Victorian epoch. There are, of course, the stock

Art · Art history · Biography · Modernism (music · Poetry Analysis and Criticism

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