Quite soon after their arrival, Sloan and his fellow Philadelphia artists began organizing their own series of art exhibitions, hoping to attract gallery owners and buyers. They invited the San Francisco impressionist Ernest Lawson; a Boston postimpressionist named Maurice Prendergast; and Arthur B. Davies, a dapper young symbolist painter whose depictions of golden-haired children frolicking in fields were easily the most commercially appealing of the collection, to join them. To emphasize their preference for free artistic experimentation over any particular style, the group dubbed itself the Independents, or simply the Eight. Despite the group’s efforts, though, the city’s critics took direct aim at the Philadelphians’ urban-realist depictions of New York’s streetwalkers, barflies, and sweaty wrestlers in the ring, calling the artists “apostles of ugliness” and their work scandalous and even psychotic—certainly not images one would want in one’s parlor at home.
It was following one of these shows that Sloan happened to read in an arts journal, the Craftsman, a critic’s passing reference to “Sloan’s socialist painting” The Coffee Line. Curious about what the critic meant by the term, the penniless artist picked up a copy of the Call, the city’s socialist newspaper. Reading its essays and articles, he felt as though a veil had been lifted. Here were explanations for the economic cruelties he had both experienced and observed, along with real solutions for ending them. In the months that followed, he became an enthusiastic convert, subjecting his friends to nightly monologues on the evils of imperialism; joining the Socialist Party along with his wife; and, in 1911, becoming art director of the socialist magazine the Masses, where, with such artists as Robert Henri, Stuart Davis, and Rockwell Kent, he would create one of the most visually arresting journals in America, resonant with “all the variety and excitement of life in a time of social change.”
That had been Sloan’s Spoon River moment, as Masters understood it: until then, the shy, awkward painter had felt isolated and often hopeless beneath the twin burdens of poverty and his wife’s chronic alcoholism. But the joy of working with others in a common social cause had drawn Dolly out of her depression and had pushed Sloan into one of the most prolific periods of his career. In 1913, the Sloans worked in support of striking silk-mill workers in nearby Paterson, New Jersey; they got to know the strike organizers sent by the Industrial Workers of the World and were deeply impressed by the dramatic panache with which these Wobbly representatives—the glamorous “Don Carlo” Tresca in cape and slouch hat; the massive Bill Haywood, iron miner from the West; and the black-haired, blue-eyed Irish-American beauty Elizabeth Gurley Flynn—roused the poor immigrant workers to action.
Their gift was for theater, as the Sloans and their artist friends learned over dinners with the activists that year. Few could remain unmoved by Haywood’s vivid accounts of the Butte, Montana, iron mines, whose noxious gases poisoned trees and rotted the fibers of people’s clothes. Flynn’s experience—she was the daughter of socialist Irish immigrants and had been trained from childhood to preach the gospel of Edward Bellamy on Harlem street corners—had actually earned her an offer from David Belasco, the Lyceum theater’s former stage manager and now one of New York’s most prominent producers, to appear onstage in a “labor play.” Instead, Flynn had gone on her own “performance tour” for the labor movement, cheering on striking miners in Minnesota and getting arrested in Missoula and Spokane. It was then that this East Coast city girl discovered the communicative power of the old hymns, gospel, and Tin Pan Alley melodies, enhanced by the sardonic lyrics of such musician-agitators as Joe Hill and T-Bone Slim—“You’ll get the pie in the sky when you die” and “I pray, dear Lord, for Jesus’s sake / Give us this day a T-bone steak”—and sung by the workers in ramshackle Wobbly halls. If Haywood’s and her own dramatic proselytizing were necessary to galvanize an often illiterate, foreign-born factory population, she realized, then this primitive American music was equally essential to create a collective “voice of the people” that would instill a sense of common purpose among the widely scattered bands of miners, dockyard laborers, and other workers out west.
Sloan came to love this music too, as did Masters. At the Chelsea, the two men frequently got together in the poet’s quarters after work to drink whiskey, compare notes on their current eccentric dietary fads, and listen to old gospel and fiddle tunes on the Victrola. Savoring their decades-old gripes like “an amphora of sour wine,” Masters would curse the city’s literary critics who “have not been off Manhattan Island all their lives,” while Sloan grumbled that the only way to drum up interest in American art was to make it illegal, like alcohol during Prohibition. But after a drink or two, the music was likely to prompt Sloan’s reminiscences of the “Pageant of the Paterson Strike”—a kind of Fourierist “people’s opera” cooked up by the New York artists in league with the Wobbly leaders back in 1913, aimed at bolstering the strikers’ morale while drumming up public support in New York. With the help of Masses journalist John Reed, the immigrant workers had rehearsed such scenes as “The Mills Alive, the Workers Dead” and “The Workers Begin to Think” before Sloan’s giant painted backdrop of a Paterson silk mill. When staged at Madison Square Garden, the pageant had drawn a crowd of more than fifteen thousand, but while the night of performances had inspired the audience, it had proved disastrous for the strikers: the factory owners negotiated a deal with a nonperforming faction of laborers, which left the entire work force no choice but to surrender.
Sloan, too, had left Madison Square Garden to find his world turned upside down. Months earlier, his colleague Arthur B. Davies, the most successful of the Independent artists, had lost patience with the group’s modest exhibitions and resolved to force American critics out of their stupid provincialism with an international exhibition of modern art on a grand scale that would show works by leading European artists alongside American pieces, much as the tonalist artists had tried to present their own paintings a generation before.
The impact of the 1913 Armory Show, backed by Davies’s patroness Lizzie Plummer Bliss and her friends Gertrude Whitney, Dorothy Whitney Straight, Abby Rockefeller, and Mabel Dodge, was nothing short of seismic. Held in the giant Sixty-Ninth Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue, it presented a veritable history of modern art, from Delacroix and Courbet to Picasso and Duchamp. New York’s newspaper critics predictably attacked the European works as “some of the most stupidly ugly pictures in the world,” but the American public was amused and fascinated by Duchamp’s bizarrely fractured Nude Descending a Staircase and the blobs of color in Kandinsky’s “pre-conscious” Garden of Love.
Sloan, who had never been to Europe, walked the galleries “awash in a mix of excitement, skepticism, curiosity, and vague unease.” Here was evidence of the energy and intellectual force that a population of artists could release in a mature, supportive culture. But the exhibition revealed all the more starkly the distance Americans had yet to travel. In fact, the show’s American works went almost unnoticed in the excitement generated by the European avant-garde. In the craze for modern art that followed, Sloan, like Masters, watched the ship of cultural progress sail past his own small island—in Sloan’s case, even before he had received recognition for his brilliant, humanist evocations of New York life.
Yet now, Sloan hardly cared, as the pleasure of living an engaged artistic life far exceeded the need for public recognition. At the Chelsea, he and Masters could look back with relish on those years following the Armory Show when suddenly, thanks largely to their and other New York artists’ and writers’ efforts, all of creative young America seemed compelled to immigrate to Greenwich Village to help build “an America alive, an America that was no longer a despised cultural foster-child of Europe.” Gathering together in Romany Marie’s café with the likes of Eugene O’Neill, Hart Crane, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, collaborating on such crusading new journals as the Seven Arts, this flood of regional poets, artists, and musicians declared it their mission to locate the “pulp and quick” of t
he nation’s consciousness in the experiences of immigrants, women, aspiring provincials, and the self-educated poor. Masters was delighted to reunite with such old friends from Chicago as Harriet Monroe, with her Poetry magazine; the essayist Floyd Dell; and Margaret Anderson, editor of the Little Review. Following in their wake came dark-haired Sherwood Anderson of Clyde, Ohio, who, like Masters, had abandoned the Midwest in order to experience the “deeper beauty of feeling” of a writer’s life, and whose own evocation of small-town America, Winesburg, Ohio, had coincidentally been conceived during an affair with Tennessee Mitchell, Masters’s former muse.
Everyone sensed it: America was awakening. A great cultural shift had occurred, and suddenly all of the nation’s disparate elements were “miraculously set beating together at the highest pitch.” What could possibly stop them?
Masters knew. “Right through history one can see these joyous periods come into being,” he wrote, “only to be quickly wiped out, and generally by war.”
It was obvious, Masters and Sloan agreed: America’s involvement in the Great War in Europe was about money and markets and nothing more, and both had known it even back in 1917. Invited to pay a call on Theodore Roosevelt, Masters had used the time to rail against the former president’s imperialist adventures in Latin America, which had “changed the form of our government”—a change that would be solidified with the coming war. Sloan had expressed his own disgust in a Masses cartoon he called “A Medal and Maybe a Job,” in which a businessman presents a legless soldier with a medal and announces, “You’ve done well. Now what is left of you can go back to work.”
But unlike the earnest Progressives at the Chelsea and elsewhere who organized peace pageants, attended meetings, and published books criticizing America’s actions, Sloan and Masters did not imagine that they could change the course of international events. By spring, America had joined the war. That summer, in a nationalistic fever, Congress passed the Espionage Act, which made it illegal for citizens to publicly question the nation’s war aims and which led to the quick deaths of the Masses and the Seven Arts, followed by a new Sedition Act, which resulted in the arrest and imprisonment of American peace advocates and labor organizers, and finally a Deportation Act, which authorized the expulsion of thousands of immigrants. To defend them, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn helped organize a National Civil Liberties Bureau, later renamed the American Civil Liberties Union.
Some tried to make the best of a bad situation. Herbert Croly, founder of the New Republic and son of the Progressive journalist and Chelsea resident Jane Croly, threw his support behind the war effort in the belief that a wartime expansion of government agencies and services would pave the way for the federal takeover of industry that Bellamy had predicted. But Masters and Sloan considered Herbert nothing but “a child on the back of a mad elephant” who had allowed his magazine to become a mouthpiece for a misguided administration. The Great War had ruined America for years to come, Masters grumbled; the nation seemed to be marching on—but backwards, as far from revolution as it was from utopia.
Sherwood Anderson agreed. “In my country something had begun to shine out,” he wrote in 1917. “Now will come darkness. This kind of war is, I suppose, industrialism gone mad.” After marrying Tennessee, Anderson spent the war years back in Chicago, riding the same wave of celebrity with Winesburg, Ohio as Masters had with Spoon River. By 1922, his marriage had started to founder, and in April, he managed to escape to New York alone for an early glimpse of spring. When he stepped out onto his Hotel Chelsea balcony for a look at the city, he could see the results of war-empowered government expansion as promoted by Herbert Croly: a groundswell of corporate power facilitated by such industry-friendly agencies as the Department of Commerce and Labor and the Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce, eased by newly streamlined transport and communication systems, and financed by Lehman Brothers and Goldman, Sachs. Once again, New York, the nation’s commercial capital, was in a mad state of construction. Department-store windows presented splendid fantasies of Bellamy-like domestic bliss, available for purchase. Businesses boasted of sponsoring civic- beautification projects, which, incidentally, rerouted traffic past their front doors. Billboards gleamed with transcendent words and images co-opted from the Greenwich Village poets and artists—in some cases, co-opted by the poets and artists themselves in exchange for cash.
Undoubtedly, the nation’s greatest surge of creative energy in the 1920s was not in its art and literature but in business. It seemed to Anderson, gazing down on the Packards and Pierce-Arrows cruising like “rolling sculptures” along West Twenty-Third Street, that these corporate substitutes for the old utopian visions worked to isolate individuals rather than unite them. Their evasions and lies, wrote the young New Republic critic Edmund Wilson, contributed to “the deadening of feeling, the social insulation” of modern American life. Anderson found during this trip to New York that the human community he had known before the war had been replaced by high-powered socializing that felt like “a kind of violence.” He could see, he wrote, how “one might so easily get the most absurd and childish sense of power here.” But that life was for others. For him, the city had become a kind of madhouse.
The Chelsea, at least, stood as a reminder of the “old sweet things,” a reassuring antidote to the hard-boiled efficiency and commercialism of the city outside its doors. Within its quiet confines, one was reminded of the things that mattered: friendly neighbors, respect for privacy, and rents low enough to allow an artist a productive and fulfilling creative life.
There was something uncanny in the physical layout of the building, in its many floors riddled with narrow labyrinthine passageways leading to single rooms that had once been part of much larger apartments. The sounds of laughter and music sifted down so mysteriously that even when you knew where you were, you weren’t sure when. Anderson had experienced this sensation before. In Chicago, in the early days of his affair with Tennessee, when he was casting about for inspiration, his brother had taken him to see part of Arthur Davies’s Armory Show, which had come to their city on tour. Anderson had responded strongly to the abstract works, grasping at once, on a visceral level, the artists’ courage in deliberately making their paintings obscure in defiance of the patrons and collectors who wanted merely pretty commodities they could purchase and own. Looking at some of the artworks, he experienced a subtle inner shift, a slight altering of consciousness, as though the paintings had forcibly changed his point of view.
This was especially true of the paintings of Cézanne. Anderson was astonished by how the images on Cézanne’s canvases suddenly seemed to shift as one looked at them, from an objective representation to the artist’s subjective view. He experienced a similar sensation some time later with Gertrude Stein’s 1915 book of verse Tender Buttons; its fractured language sounded like nursery babble—“A shallow hole rose on red, a shallow hole in and in this makes ale less”—but somehow, in its abstraction, it created a subjective experience within the reader, sparking personal associations and evoking private emotions, as opposed to simply depicting an idea on the page. Masters’s Spoon River Anthology had affected him in the same way, with its stark rhythms and slow accumulation of detail that re-created an entire subjective world. This dreamlike sense of union—an integration of past and present, an expansion of the self beyond the confines of the body—was what Anderson had tried to produce in the intricate mesh of impulses and desires and the brooding interplay of isolated individuals, whom Anderson called his “grotesques,” in Winesburg, Ohio.
There were grotesques in the Chelsea as well—such as Etelka Graf, the young wife of a concert pianist, who severed her left hand at the wrist with a large pair of shears, left the hand in her bedroom for her daughter to find, and leaped to her death from her fifth-floor window just weeks before Anderson’s arrival in the spring of 1922. With its living layers of human history—aging association members, abandoned mistresses, and silent, watchful children—the Hotel Chelsea was becom
ing something other than a convenient stopover near the subway lines. It was becoming a place for secrets. Perhaps the presence of this dark undercurrent was what inspired Anderson to come to the conclusion during his solitary stay there that it was time to leave his marriage and begin a new phase of his life.
Arthur B. Davies, who arrived at the Chelsea five years later, responded to its aura of mystery as well—perhaps because he had so many secrets of his own. Supported by his wife, a country physician at their upstate farm, he had long maintained a clandestine second marriage in the city with his favorite model, a red-haired dancer named Edna Potter. It was Edna’s unexpected pregnancy, and the expense it represented, that had prompted Davies to organize the career-boosting Armory Show. But after the baby was born, Davies found the strain of hiding his second family increasingly burdensome. In 1926, he moved Edna and their child to Europe, out of sight. Taking a corner studio on the Chelsea’s top floor, he filled it with works by Picasso, Cézanne, and Seurat, as well as his collections of Coptic textiles and ancient gold rings. In the midst of these treasures, Davies set up an easel on which to create his visual fantasies—now featuring Wreath McIntyre, a lithesome singer who at age fourteen replaced Edna as model and companion.
Certainly, these Arabian Nights surroundings soothed the sensibilities of the symbolist painter. More important, Lizzie Bliss and Abby Rockefeller, the patrons on whom he depended most, found the setting irresistibly romantic and intriguing. Riding the creaky old elevator up to Davies’s studio, inhaling Wreath’s lingering scent as Davies welcomed them inside, Bliss and Rockefeller felt that they, too, had been ushered behind the veil. Here, their gratifyingly handsome, sensitive host taught them how to interpret the works of Picabia, Man Ray, and Duchamp. His willingness to share his life as an artist enabled these upper-class women, whose enforced idleness Fourier and Bellamy had so frequently decried, to vicariously experience the sense of self-fulfillment and integration that was the natural result of the creative life, and to make their mark as art speculators just as the men in their social set created empires from oil and steel. “I owe to him a very great deal,” Abby Rockefeller later wrote. “Without the confidence which his approval gave me I should never have dared venture into the field of modern art.”
Inside the Dream Palace: The Life and Times of New York's Legendary Chelsea Hotel Page 10
