A cultural history of a famous collaboration, Virgil Thomson's and Gertrude Stein's making of the modernist opera, Four Saints in Three Acts. Watson explores the transatlantic, commercial, racial, gay, and artistic aspects of this story (NewYork/Paris, with Kansas City thrown in for fun; Thomson's score echoes the very American rhythms of his youth). Juicy, smart, and sophisticated writing and analysis.
Examines the roles played by photography in the 1934 opera "4 saints in 3 acts", incluing photographs by Lee Miller, Carl Van Vechten, George Platt Lynes, White Studio and others.
Tender Buttons is a 1914 book by American writer Gertrude Stein consisting of three sections titled "Objects", "Food", and "Rooms". While the short book consists of multiple poems covering the everyday mundane, Stein's experimental use of language renders the poems unorthodox and their subjects unfamiliar.Stein began composition of the book in 1912 with multiple short prose poems in an effort to "create a word relationship between the word and the things seen" using a "realist" perspective. She then published it in three sections as her second book in 1914
Virgil Thomson and Gertrude SteinFour Saints in Three ActsEdited by H. Wiley Hitchcock MU18 / A 64 ISBN (2008) lv + 447 pp. $250.00 ISBN 978-0-89579-629-5 Rental parts available from Schirmer only. With music by Virgil Thomson and a libretto by Gertrude Stein, Four Saints in Three Acts was completed in 1928 but waited almost six years for its first performances. After a week¿s run in Hartford, Connecticut, in February 1934, it moved to New York where--with some sixty performances in six weeks--it became the longest-running opera that Broadway up to that time had experienced.This critical edition by H. Wiley Hitchcock and Charles Fussell features the scenario by Maurice Grosser and is based on the full score that Thomson commissioned from copyist Ben Weber for his 1947-48 revision; it includes the 32-measure orchestral prelude to the Act II "Dance of the Angels," and it makes comparisons primarily to the manuscript scores held at the Library of Congress and Yale University. The critical apparatus applies as much to the music as to the Stein text, the principal source for which is the 1929 first publication.
Published to accompany an exhibition held at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, May 21-Sept. 6, 2011, the Reunion des Musees Nationaux-Grand Palais, Paris, Oct. 3, 2011-Jan. 16, 2012, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Feb. 21-June 3, 2012.
Written in 1927, this libretto was set to music by Virgil Thomson the following year. In 1934 it was produced, with an all-Black cast, by the Friends and Enemies of Modern Music. In 1952 the American National Theatre Association chose it to represent the United States as an international festival in Paris.
The story of Chick Austin is the story, in Virgil Thomson's words, of "a whole cultural movement in one man." Becoming director of Hartford's Wadsworth Atheneum at the age of twenty-six, Austin immediately set about to introduce modern art to America and to transform this conservative insurance capital into a cultural mecca that would become the talk of the art world during the yeasty years between the two world wars. The first in the United States to mount a major Picasso retrospective, Austin was soon acquiring works by Dalí, Mondrian, Miró, Balthus, Max Ernst, and Alexander Calder. In the museum's new theater (which he designed), he staged the premiere of the revolutionary Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson opera Four Saints in Three Acts (with an all-black cast). At Lincoln Kirstein's instigation, he brought Balanchine to America. And he embraced all the new art forms, making film, photography, architecture, and contemporary music part of the life of his museum. For his own family he built a Palladian villa (now a recently restored national historic landmark), filling it with the baroque and the Bauhaus and inviting all the locals in to see how it felt to be modern. Austin's instinct for quality proved infallible. Whether acquiring a matchless Caravaggio or a startling Dalí, he balanced the old masters with the modern. Mounting provocative shows that linked the past to the present, he created dramatic installations--and he threw himself into everything, hanging fabrics, creating backdrops, stitching up costumes. He loved to teach, to paint, to act, to give lavish costume balls, and to dazzle audiences of all ages with his performances as a magician, the Great Osram. Brilliant at using his magician's sleight of hand, he could manipulate his conservative trustees to get what he wanted--but only up to a point. One more purchase of an incomprehensible abstract canvas, one outrageous party too many, one more shocking theatrical role, eventually led to a crisis. Never one to be idle for long, Austin left Hartford and took on a new challenge--to make an artistic triumph of the pink-and-white palace in Sarasota, Florida, known as the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, which housed the circus king's moldering but magnificent collection. Here is the colorful life of Chick Austin, and as we relish his audacious career--the risks he took, the successes he enjoyed along with the inevitable setbacks--we understand what a far-reaching influence he had on the way Americans look at and think about art. Not only a brilliant portrait of an extraordinary man, this wonderfully American story gives us a fascinating behind-the-scenes glimpse into the art world as it was then--and in many ways still is today.
