Review: ALL THAT JAZZ: NEW YORK, MODERNISM AND ADVERTISING

Reviewed Work(s): Metropolitan Lives: The Ashcan Artists and Their New York by
Rebecca Zurier, Robert W. Snyder and Virginia M. Mecklenburg: Terrible Honesty:
Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s by Ann Douglas: Fables of Abundance: A Cultural
History of Advertising in America by Jackson Lears
Review by: IAN GORDON
Source: Australasian Journal of American Studies , July, 1997, Vol. 16, No. 1 (July,
1997), pp. 83-90
Published by: Australia New Zealand American Studies Association

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41415911

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Australasian Journal of American Studies 83

ALL THAT JAZZ:

NEW YORK, MODERNISM AND ADVERTISING

IAN GORDON

Metropolitan Lives: The Ashcan Artists and Their New York. By Rebecca
Zurier, Robert W. Snyder, and Virginia M. Mecklenburg, Norton, New
York, 1995, pp. 232, A$100.

Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s. By Ann Douglas,

Picador, London, 1996, pp. xiii + 606, A$49.95.

Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America. By

Jackson Lears, Basic Books, New York, 1994, pp. xiv + 492, A$55.

Modern life is fragmented, discordant, jarring, and dissonant, or at least

this is a common way of depicting the twentieth century. The blame for
such dissonance is often laid at America's door, particularly New York
City, and one of its major industries, advertising. Labelling the 1920s
The Jazz Age' is an associated rhetorical move that neatly periodises a
burgeoning American Modernism and couples it with postwar anxiety
and the flowering of a musical form. However, in various accounts it is
never quite clear whether 'Jazz' is a metonym or a synecdoche because
it is never made clear whether Jazz is a part that sums up a whole, or
somehow an attribute that runs deeper than an affinity between terse
prose stylists, flappers, bootleggers, and black musicians. In other
words, were Modernists simply booze-hounds who lived life fast and
hard and liked racy music, or were there deeper connections? Ann
Douglas maintains the latter view.

Terrible Honesty, fifteen years in the making, is a big book with a broad
sweep. Douglas argues that the Manhattan of her subtitle enacted a
Modernism in which the feminised America of her earlier work (The
Feminization of American Culture ) was killed off through the slaying of a
matriarchal God. Matricida! Manhattanites appropriated whatever came
into their orbit, becoming mongrels marching to the beat of Modern-
ism. Douglas' Manhattan is not geographical, or even social, but a
Weltanschauung created through reordering the beat of American life in
the syncopated fashion of Jazz. Her Manhattan takes in Freud, William
James, Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, Nancy Cunard, as well

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84 Australasian Journal of American Studies

as residents such as Längstem Hughes, Doro

Hurston, James Thurber, and Wallace Thurman

Douglas reads Freud against himself and finds h

determined and masking a masculine desire to
crime of killing the father (p. 237). Moderni
and Fitzgerald, engaged in cultural matricide
selves of overbearing mothers and generally
the Victorian matriarchy of Mary Baker Eddy,
Harriet Beecher Stowe. However, 'American modernism was not an
affair of a horde of sons but a bi-gendered venture of siblings intent on
decimating the mother and reinventing the father', since women such
as Peggy Guggenheim, Nancy Cunard, Olive Higgins Prouty (author of
Stella Dallas ), and playwright Sophie Treadwell also slew the Titaness
(p. 252). Modernism then was an 'adrenalin rush' that gave access to
an 'uninhibited self-expression' but with little thought for the conse-
quential damage (p. 253).

Douglas describes herself as 'by trade and calling an Americanist' (p. 3)

and her practice is that of an unreconstructed American exceptionalist.
Moreover, like the tee-shirts that depict Manhattan as a focal point
with the rest of the world starting at the termination of the Brooklyn
Bridge and writ small, Douglas' world is Manhattan and Manhattan is
the world. For instance she describes New York as 'the first, and to
date last American city to become ... a World City' (p. 4), a statement
that historians of Philadelphia would find extraordinary as would most
people with a passing familiarity with Los Angeles. Nonetheless,
Douglas' presentation of the centrality of New York to Modernism, and
the pivotal role of African-Americans in its creation, and even her
argument about matricide, command attention. At the same time
though, Douglas' mongrel Manhattan of the 1920s seems too ready-
made and too narrowly black and white. Looking back a little it is
possible to discover the ground zero of American Modernism at the
turn of the century.

To be sure, Douglas' project is the flowering of American Modernism,

particularly its literary incarnation, and not the making of that
Modernism. Nonetheless, since she uses Dorothy Parker's bon mot
about New Jersey-born Alexander Woollcott's life journey - 'Then he
came to New York. Don't we all?' (p. 17) - as an organising principle of

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Australasian Journal of American Studies 85

the work, it seems fair to compare her vie

Modernist Manhattan with other perspectives.
at the fore of Terrible Honesty. Other artists
mentioned and then only if they practis
neighbourhood of New York - Paris. Dougla
Stearns who wrote that in Paris 'You could h
in a transplanted Greenwich Village' but
'stubbornly persisted in talking French' (p
look, the art of Picasso and other Modernist f
seamlessly becomes the art of Manhattan, whi
not a geographical location. It might be fair
artifacts of a culture and some of its mentalit
but some account of how it plays out locally i

Rebecca Zurier, Robert W. Snyder, and Vir

exhibition catalogue, Metropolitan Lives: The As
York, presents an account of another group of
York. George Bellows, William Glackens, Ro
Everett Shinn, and John Sloan, collective
School, were a group of artists who arrived in
Philadelphia, around the turn of the century.
the Ashcan artists' New York in such a fashion that we understand
their art not simply as a response to a rapidly expanding metropolis,
but as an engagement with the life of the city. Metropolitan Lives
recovers this New York through the Ashcan School's art. The authors
show how this art addressed the economic consolidation of capital in
New York and the diversification of culture brought on by immigrants
from within and without the United States. The Ashcan School did not
view America from a fixed high art position. They practised their art
both as painters and illustrators for mass market magazines. Both
Glackens and Luks were frequent contributors to the comic sections of
the New York World and Journal, the most successful purveyors of a
new mass culture. As Zurier and Snyder note in their introduction, the
artists 'spoke to contemporary viewers' and made 'images that gave the
transitory experience of the city memorable form' (p. 14).1

The authors help us comprehend the system of signs within these

paintings and illustrations, signs contemporaneous New Yorkers would
have understood. Zurier and Snyder show us when, how, and why the
artists chose to conform to aesthetic standards and likewise what it

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86 Australasian Journal of American Studies

meant when they transcended and subverted

reveals the Ashcan School as hopeful participan
Furthermore, the artists' knowledge of the
gave them an appreciation of human foibles
the excesses of optimistic Progressive visions o

By establishing that the Ashcan artists engaged

and Snyder show that they constituted a
response to modernity. But unlike Modernist p
representation in the Ashcan artists' work is
an aesthetic stance. Looking at Metropolitan
think the Ashcan artists displayed an exuberan
that grew from unabated hopefulness. The arti
distance between themselves, their subjects,
sense they tried to deliver an art that co
American life. At the same time they realised t
promise. Their work, then, is a kind of a
Although not making such a bold claim, Zuri
see this possibility.

What happened to this alternative Modernis

notes that the Ashcan School artists 'moved toward more formal
concerns in response to the modern art they saw at the Armory Show'
in 1913 (p. 83). Indeed Glackens organised the American section of the
show. By the 1920s the Ashcan School representational aesthetic found
expression almost solely in its highly commercialised form in magazine
illustration, advertising, and comic strips. The heir to the School's
tradition Edward Hopper (Robert Henri's student) made his living in
these years as a commercial artist.

Douglas' broad sweep leaves little room for variations on American

Modernism of this sort. For instance for her the 1920s were:

a particular historical crossroads, an early phase in which mass

media were still subject to real, if partial, forms of control other
than corporate and technological necessity, a time when the forces
responsible for their development were open to innovation and
creativity, a moment when artistic achievement and mass
distribution were not yet in conflict but worked together and
invigorated one another. ...The 1920s were the first and perhaps

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Australasian Journal of American Studies 87

the last moment when something like the prac

possible in the consumer society and entertainm
was fast becoming. The decade witnessed a co
the older forms of performance, on the one hand,
and the advertising industry that backed them o
elite and popular, more and less prestigious purv
collaboration that was possible because the b
media fare, popular craft work, and elite art wer
(pp. 69-70)

Douglas treats the 1920s as a Modernist high p

follows is a declension. The first part o
convincing. In the newspaper business innov
ment had mostly given way to corporate an
with newspaper chains and syndicates chur
mass product. Douglas follows Gilbert Seldes in
strip Krazy Kat as an example of the liveliness
Kat was an exception to the formulaic prod
artists in those years. It is hard to think how
system, more or less in place throughout t
collaboration beyond corporate control. Lik
ment of commercial radio networks and the involvement of vaudeville
stars pans out as much as a rout of vaudeville by Hollywood, and of
local non-commercial interests by corporate America (General Electric
and the advertising industry), as a successful partnership between old
and new forms of culture.2 Regarding the advertising industry in the
1920s as somehow open to innovative collaborations with artists, and
then later closed to such practices, is fraught with all the difficulties
that declension raises. How for instance can advertising not be open to
innovation?

Jackson Lears' Fables of Abundance sets American advertising in the

broader context of efforts to respond to a material copiousness that
stretched from the fertility of the land to the products of Fordism. Lears
presents advertising as walking a line between its origins in a
carnivalesque tradition and the changes brought on by the profession-
alisation of the industry as part of the managerial efficiency movement
in the early twentieth century. In this latter incarnation advertising
agents had to heed plain speech criticism of their calling. Lears places
advertising:

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88 Australasian Journal of American Studies

within wider transatlantic currents of cultu

disenchantment of an animistic worldview with t
science; the spread of market exchange be
boundaries of time and place; the growing d
individualistic model of controlled, unified selfho
bureaucratic rationality in the factory system
corporation; and the persistence of irrationa
counter-tendencies in the popular and avant-
nineteenth and twentieth century, (p. 2)

Lears also finds advertising to be not as much a

tradition as generally regarded. He sees the e
sumption as a 'balance of tensions ... roote
Protestant tradition, which nurtured an
alongside a drive for control' (p. 46). In an
Protestant Ethic', which unleashed the tigh
Calvinism, consumption represents a kind
momentary satisfaction', followed by 'dissat
longing' (p. 47). Following this perspective Le
vitalism of the 1920s as paralleling 'the move
liberal models of Protestant self-development'

Lears' take on advertising makes it a key

American psyche. He tries to escape, although
the familiar rhetorical division of binary op
image, depth/surface, temperance/hedonism, b
ising presented opportunities to explore 'bey
divide' (p.263). Instead of animating goods wi
Lears argues, strips the solidness of mate
Advertising then becomes the language of a
abundance' (p. 113). Lears seems to argue that whereas in a
producerist culture things obtain their meaning through an immediacy
of use, in a culture of consumption that meaning slips away into
abstractions (language) in which a symbolic representation has greater
meaning than the thing itself (p. 215). These abstractions were not
simply the magic symbolism of the carnivalesque but also incorporated
the Victorian plain-speech tradition. Using a little magic of his own,
Lears argues that 'a naive faith in the referentiality of language'
collapsed distinctions between word and deed and fed American
economic expansion (p. 85). Advertisers helped stabilise market

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Australasian Journal of American Studies 89

relations around the turn of the century

'commercial reality by recognizing the open-en
in manipulating appearances, winning confid
(p. 215).

Lears' interest in language allows some comparison with Douglas'

moderns. Both authors' moderns sought an authenticity in the notion
that something thrilling and vivid would happen in the normal course
of their lives. Lears insists that 'modernist notions of authenticity
tended to assume that language was not a transparent representation of
an unproblematic reality, but rather a somewhat arbitrary code'.
Moreover he sees their puns as severing 'any immutable tie between
words and their referents' (p. 361). Douglas on the other hand presents
the 'legendary wit of the 1920s [as] the product of a group of writers
obsessed with reality and fact checking'. Douglas gives us Dorothy
Parker labouring for months 'over a three page sketch because ... every
word had to be true' (p. 35). At the same time Douglas' moderns were
'given to theatricalizing their lives at every turn' (p. 55). Lears suggests
that the pursuit of authenticity might have been caused by a romantic
disdain of everyday life (p. 357). Douglas gives us this disdain as a no-
way-out mentality of performance in that 'what can't be solved as a
problem can be enjoyed as theatre' (p. 58).

In Fables of Abundance and Terrible Honesty the hopefulness and exuber-

ance of Zurier and Snyder's Ashcan artists disappears into a Modernist
culture of performance. Lears slips out of his book with hopes that
Joseph Cornell's work of the 1930s might help us collapse work and
play, and subject and object, into a clearing of playfulness (p. 414). At
the end of Douglas' book one discovers the work itself to have been a
performance since 'the men and women of the urban 1920s remain, as
they wished and aimed to be, in some sense culturally invulnerable,
impervious to historical insight' (p. 483). In the post-modern age it
would seem the play must go on.

NOTES

1 The inclusion of Mecklenburg's essay in this catalogue seems like

afterthought. Her competent account of the Ashcan School's eventu
acceptance by New York's cultural poohbahs comes from a different p

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9 0 Australasian J ournal of American Studies

spective than Zurier and Snyder's social art histor

probably * results from the collaborative nature of the e
* Erik Barnouw's Tube of Plenty , Oxford Universit
gives details of the early days of radio. Robert Snyd
Oxford University Press, New York, 1989, is th
vaudeville. Thomas Schatz, The Genius of the System
gives details of the studio system.

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