Good evening, my name is Olga Herrera,
and I'm the Chair of the Department of English here at St. Thomas.
I would like to welcome you to
our second annual Paul Hague Distinguished Writer Lecture this evening.
This lecture series was established last year through
the generous funding of our alumnus, James A.
Copious, who graduated 1960, in honor of Paul Hague,
a professor in the English Department from 1955 to 1990,
and the Professor of the Year in 1987.
I'm sorry to share that Paul Hague widow,
Jerry Lou Hague very recently passed away.
She was with us at last year's lecture,
and was proud to see Paul honored with the lecture series.
We are incredibly grateful for the support of the Hagan Copious families.
It is my distinct pleasure to introduce our invited speaker tonight, Liesl Olson.
Liesl is the Director of Chicago Studies of
the world-renowned independent research institution, the Newberry Library,
and the author of Chicago Renaissance Literature and
Art in the Midwest Metropolis, published in 2017.
As the Director of Chicago Studies,
her work helps to illuminate Chicago's dynamic history, literature, culture,
and politics through an array of
public and scholarly programs inspired by the library's unique archival collection.
In this year, the 100th anniversary of
the 1919 Chicago race riots ,she has helped to spearhead a year
of public conversations about the race riots organized
through the Newberry in partnership with other Chicago institutions.
These public programs are designed to activate audiences and encourage them to examine
the mechanisms through which segregation and inequality have been created,
solidified, and reinforced over the past 100 years.
I mentioned this latest programming as an example of
Liesl's commitment to engage in public and academic audiences alike,
both in her work at the Newberry and in her own scholarship.
Winner of the 2018 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism.
Her book Chicago Renaissance is academically rigorous and
excessively written in elegant prose, a rare combination.
This book traces Chicago's cultural development from the 1893 World's Fair,
through mid-century, illuminating how Chicago writers revolutionized
literary forms during the first half of the 20th century.
Writing about Harriet Monroe,
the founder of Poetry Magazine,
Carl Sandburg, Ernest Hemingway,
Richard Wright and Gwendolyn Brooks,
Liesl bridges the gap between the renaissance of primarily white authors of
the early teens and the creative ferment
of bronze fills African-American authors toward the mid-century.
As an engaging narrative and a work of outstanding scholarship this literary
in cultural history is the model I look to for inspiration in my own work.
No introduction of Liesl Olson would be complete without mentioning
her significant role as
the Director of the National Endowment of the Humanities Summer Institute for
higher education faculty members called Making Modernism:
Literature and Culture in Chicago from 1893 to 1955.
This will be the third year that she brings to the Newberry cohort
a faculty and graduate students from across the country to
engage in an intensive four-week interdisciplinary study of
this vibrant period of artistic and literary production in Chicago.
I was fortunate to participate in the first institute in 2013,
and was immediately taken by both Liesl's brilliance and generosity as she
directed her laser beam of
intellectual curiosity and interest toward our own research projects,
offering us feedback and resources.
In this way, she has brought together to announce soon to be three cohorts of
fellows that had grown into a network of colleagues with Liesl as her connecting thread.
Whenever we see each other at conferences,
we share our most recent interactions with her.
Now, I can proudly say that I've introduced Liesl
to St. Paul and to the University of St. Thomas.
We are fortunate to have her here today.
As our second Paul Hague distinguished writer,
please help me welcome Liesl Olson.
Thank you. That was amazing.
Can we just be done now?
That's the nicest introduction I've ever gotten.
Thank you so much, Olga.
It is such a pleasure to be here at the University of St. Thomas.
Thank you all for being here tonight.
I've never been to St. Paul before.
So this has been such a treat to see this very beautiful city.
I've been thinking a bit
about St. Paul and Minneapolis's relationship to Chicago while I've been here.
I've been thinking about that moment in The Great Gatsby when Nick Carraway comes back
home from his debached adventures out East and lands in Union Station in Chicago.
Says goodbye to his fellow Midwestern travelers as they
fan out to their other satellite cities,
I guess is what Carl Sandburg called these other Midwestern
cities that also bear some relationship to Chicago,
not just through train tracks,
but culturally as well and historically.
So it's such a pleasure to actually be here.
I grew up in Kansas City.
So I grew up in a satellite city in relationship to Chicago as well.
So what I thought I would do tonight
is give you an overall sense of what this book is about.
Both in terms of the artists and writers who I trace from around 1893,
so World's Fair in Chicago through around 1950
when Gwendolyn Brooks wins the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her second collection,
Annie Allen, the first African-American to win that prize.
That's historical sweep of the book.
But I also want to underscore some of the claims that I'm making
about style and aesthetic form,
experimental modernist forms that come out of Chicago during this period.
I'll also come back to that word renaissance,
which is in the title of my book,
which most people associate with the early modern period.
Why do we use that word renaissance to describe Chicago?
Really, for a couple of reasons.
Because I'm trying to as Olga suggested,
really connect two distinct moments,
or two moments in Chicago that had been treated distinctly,
which I think are much more related than the criticism has suggested.
Secondly, because that word renaissance also
evokes a strong strain of cultural boosterism in the city of Chicago
that has always really characterized the
literary in cultural communities there as well as the cultural institutions in that city.
So I'll come back to that word as well.
Now, of course Chicago.
Let's see if I can get this. There we go.
Chicago has a long history of being treated with some indifference by the coasts.
So consider this cartoon map of our country in which Chicago simply does not appear.
You probably can't read it very well,
but every single one of those dots except for a few says Dubuque,
except for New York City,
Atlantic City, Palm Beach Reno and Hollywood.
Now, this cartoon was making fun of the elitism of New York City,
and specifically of The New Yorker magazine,
whose editor in the 1920's said that
his magazine was not for that little old lady from Dubuque.
So very much looked down upon the hinterland beyond
these central places where you could gamble or get some sun or reside,
which would be New York, including Chicago.
Now, what's interesting is this cartoon actually appeared in a Chicago publication,
a magazine called The Chicagoan.
Let's see, next, sorry.
See if I can get this. There we go.
The Chicagoan was a magazine that ran in the 1920's
in Chicago which actually modeled itself on the New Yorker,
but very much made fun of the New Yorker at the same time.
So that's a New Yorker's view of Chicago.
The New Yorker's view of United States was at
that cartoon was calling it came this magazine,
which was really only recently discovered,
a few years ago by University of Chicago professor who
discovered a full Ron and the stacks of the library there.
What's so amazing about the magazine is its visual arts.
It's very art deco, it's very stylized,
very colorful covers as well as a lot of the visual art inside.
Thinking about Chicago's relationship to other cities,
I thought I would tell a story that I tell in the book that focuses on the year 1913.
In which gives you some sense of Chicago as
something other than a city with the second city mentality.
So 1913 in history of modernism,
especially if you're an art historian is
an extremely important year because it was the year of the infamous Armory Show.
Now, most people associate the Armory Show with New York City,
which is where it originated,
but what most people don't know is that it actually had a second incarnation in
Chicago and then it moved on in a much smaller showing to Boston.
So in thinking about how that Armory Show
was received in New York and Chicago and Boston,
you'll get a sense of how each of these cities responded to what was new.
So let's just take a look.
I should not click, I should roll. There we go.
Sorry. There we go.
All right. I'm going to click next time.
Here we see the outside and inside of
the 69th Street Regiment army on Lexington Avenue between 25th and 26th streets,
where The Armory Show was held in New York City.
That's why it was called The Armory Show was held in an old armory massive.
Over 1200 works of art,
sculpture painting, drawings that were on display.
The reason it had to be held at the armory with
painting shown between these burlap partitions,
because the Metropolitan Museum of Art had turned it down.
It basically said this is not art.
The reason they thought it was not art is because it was by
the most experimental avant-garde artists in both Europe and America.
So these are also very well known to us now,
but we're pretty radical at the time.
The Fobs, the Cubists in particular really upset audience or viewers.
We have works by Paul Gauguin,
by Marcel Duchamp, by many others.
By Van Gogh who was particularly radical as depictions
of the female nude for a lot of art critics and a lot of viewers.
So this show drew thousands of people,
and lots of ink has been spilled on
its effect on both artists and writers in New York City.
But what's really striking is that,
it was then brought to the Art Institute of Chicago.
The man in charge of the museum in Chicago went out,
saw the show in New York City,
thought it was quote ''humburg'' and ''rubbish'',
but nonetheless thought that they should bring the show to
Chicago to let Chicagoan's decide for themselves.
Roll, there we go. All right.
So here we see the outside of the Art Institute of Chicago right on Michigan Avenue,
right around the time of The Armory Show in 1913.
You see crowds leaving the museum.
They came in thousands,
they're were double the number of visitors to
The Armory Show in Chicago as there were in New York.
The museum actually had to open its doors on Sundays and extend its hours.
So those were the only days that working class citizens could actually come to the show,
they stayed open till 10:00 PM.
Then this is the piece on the right that was the most radical at the time that
people waited up to an hour to view
and it's Marcel Duchamp's nude descending a staircase.
Maybe pretty familiar to us now or doesn't seem all that radical.
Why was it so radical then?
Well, by the standards of premier art academies,
the nude was really the highest form of aesthetic beauty.
The nude was a she,
she was usually reclining.
She was not mechanical,
she was not machine-like,
and she was certainly not emotion, right?
Here she's pretty androgynous as well.
So all of these kind of affronts to the ideals and standards of
premiere art academies were some of the reasons that
played into why this particular piece was so controversial.
Now think about the attendance at the Art Institute at The Armory Show;
15,000 people per day went through the show.
Even if people didn't like the show or didn't think it was art,
the show was powerfully understood as the way the art world was going,
of things to come.
Since Chicago really didn't have a fine arts tradition of its own at the time,
in some ways it was more open to what the future might look like.
It was held at the most prestigious cultural institution in the city, right?
It was not held off-site at an armory.
There was a sense from the philanthropists,
civic leaders, and the man who ran the museum,
that even if they weren't sure what this nude was all about,
they had to have it,
and partly too there was a sense that because it came from abroad,
we were going to have it in Chicago, right?
We wanted to bring it to the Midwest.
So not only does The Armory Show's incarnation in
Chicago differ from what was happening in New York,
but also from a much smaller version of this show which then
traveled to Boston in it's third and final stop,
which was held at a local arts organization.
The John Copley Society held
The Armory Show with a much smaller collection of around 400 paintings.
It was essentially a non-event there.
It was barely covered in the papers.
Boston felt like it had its own art tradition of its own.
There was a sense of we're not interested in what's coming from elsewhere,
were established here, we'd like Copley in fact,
and we're just not interested in the news.
So if you think about New York and you have that kind of origins of this show
and avant-garde that's very much built in opposition to institutional forces in Chicago,
you see how the city itself was hungry
for any kind of art that came through, whatever it might be,
and it's boosters we're going to back it
with institutional support and a whole lot of money,
and a democratizing tendency a sense that anybody and
everybody should come to the show and decide what it was about for them.
Then in Boston a critical indifference to the show itself.
So that's where we are in 1913,
when you think about those different cities.
One of the arguments I make in the book,
in some ways Chicago was much more open to the new,
because it didn't have older traditions,
artistic traditions, and literary traditions of its own.
So in the book in thinking about 1913,
my focus is as much about the show itself and the art that was on display as it
is about also the writers who passed through that show and saw what was on the walls,
and how The Armory Show influenced the literary community in Chicago.
So for instance, the writer Sherwood Anderson,
who is most famous for his short story collection Winesburg Ohio.
There was just a piece in The New York Times yesterday about the 100th anniversary
of the publication of Winesburg Ohio which is pretty astonishing, really good piece.
He visited the show every single day for it's 24-day run while it was in Chicago.
Chicago and Harriet Monroe who Olga mentioned,
who started poetry magazine.
She was actually working as an art critic at the time and she reviewed
The Armory Show nine or 10 times for Chicago and New York City publications,
and she was one of the few champions of the show.
She didn't really understand the art, she didn't really like it,
but she really loved that it was happening and she supported it.
You see her dawning awareness of The Armory
show's importance in her writing on the paintings that she saw.
So I treat these writers,
Sherwood Anderson and Harriet Monroe along with many others.
Looking at both what was written in Chicago, and about Chicago,
and also like The Armory Show what passed through Chicago,
and what influenced the artistic communities there.
I try to answer these questions.
Is there such thing as a Chicago style?
A set of formal tendencies that characterizes its art and literature.
I explore the question of how Chicago journalism influenced its writers,
and I ask how and why artists and writers collaborated in Chicago,
and if there was a sense of camaraderie or
cohort affiliation in Chicago then was different in other cities.
I look hard at whether the interracial collaborations in Chicago
were more promising or more significant than they were in other places,
and perhaps most importantly I dramatically amplified
Chicago's literary history by accounting for many more women who were part of the story;
who were important writers and artists themselves,
but who were also the editors,
the bookstore owners, the gallerists,
the patrons, and the arbiters in the city.
So consider what, just think for a minute about what you
know about Chicago's literary history and the writers who may come to mind.
Maybe it looks something like this, maybe it doesn't.
But generally, certainly in the critical scholarship,
it's this lineage of writers who might be called
social realists that we associate most with Chicago,
starting with Theodore Dreiser, Henry Blake Fuller,
Sherwood Anderson, Carl Sandburg,
Ernest Hemingway, Nelson Algren, and Richard Wright.
Now, all of these writers are writers whose works I treat with some focus in my book.
In various ways, the modes of social realism that come out of
Chicago are really a key component to understanding its culture.
Which is to say that one really strong trend in the literature of
the Chicago is a style that rejects ornament,
which aims to see clearly and to reach a wide audience,
and which is infused with what we might call a documentary impulse.
The reasons for these modes of realism have something to do with the fact that
exposing the city has some really charged urgency in Chicago.
Remember that Chicago quintupled its population
between 1870 and 1900, which is astonishing.
When you remember that this city was just a swampy marsh land in
the early 1860s and that it burnt down in 1871.
Here's the City right after the fire of 1871 which engulfed most of the city,
300 people died, a third of the city was left homeless.
Yet the city was built backup with astonishing rapidity.
It became a transportation hub and a destination for millions of immigrants and
migrants from the late 19th century really
through the demographic shifts of the great migration.
So here's a fact,
no American city grew as fast as Chicago.
It was a classic boom town,
it was unbelievably quick in its rise.
So from 1871, this is 1893, right?
This is an image from the Chicago World's Fair,
Daniel Burnham's White City.
Can you believe that so quickly it rebuilt itself.
There was this real urgency to rebuild, to rise,
to have this rebirth or renaissance,
and to express it for all the world to see in a great World's Fair.
So in 1893, this was the world's Colombian Exposition,
officially marking the 400th anniversary of Columbus's arrival to the new world,
not something we celebrate much anymore, right?
Nearly 27 million visitors came through the White City and passed
through these neoclassical buildings designed by Daniel Burnham.
They were enormous and yet they were to some extent a femoral.
They were built with white plaster,
they were not meant to last forever.
They were dedicated to such subjects as electricity, transportation, machinery,
and they were all gracefully linked by canals and lagoons to harken back to Venice.
But just outside this White City,
lay city that looked more like this.
This is a little bit later in 1909,
but I think it gives you a pretty good sense of the industry, the stench,
the traffic, and the extensive poverty of
Chicago which was a city that really lacked an aesthetic plan.
Daniel Burnham had his great plan but then beyond the walls,
there wasn't much of a sense of how to deal with this massive growth.
So the density and confusion of the city was something
that sometimes writers often feel like they needed to reflect back to the world.
There was a sense, a desire to take a mirror to it really.
They wanted to bring to light the industrial brutality of the city,
it's racial violence, it's materialism,
its exploitation of the working classes,
and the visibility of the city's capitalism out the stockyards,
and really on the trading floor.
So from Dreiser's sister Carrie,
to the murals of the Works Progress Administration,
to Richard Wright's native son,
it's a necessary function of art and literature in
Chicago to lay bare the harsh conditions of the city.
I think you could even say that there is a key component of
Chicago's literary and artistic legacy which is
the historic intersection between art and activism in the city.
So this is part of the argument that I make in the book while also
trying to expand the lineage of social realist.
Because when you think back to that lineup of social realist writers,
obviously it's all men.
So where do the women fit there?
And then for me a key question was,
where do stylistic innovation fit in all of this?
We think about social realism,
is that the experimental style of Chicago?
Is it a realist mode,
or is there a more avant garde, experimental,
non-narrative mode that also develops in the city,
a more modernist mode,
more classically modernist mode?
That was one of the big questions that sparked this book.
Now there's no one quite like Gertrude Stein in Chicago.
Which is to say Chicago did not have the same internationally renowned creator,
a gatekeeper of modernism,
someone to whom so many 20th century artists
and writers needed to seek out and pay homage.
The many Chicago artists and writers did in fact
make pilgrimages to meet Gertrude Stein in Paris,
and interestingly enough, Sherwood Anderson,
Ernest Hemingway, and Richard Wright each had a period of time when they were working
under the influence of Gertrude Stein and actually wrote in a style very much like hers.
When they produced sentences like Gertrude Stein's,
when they imitated her style
actually and you see this doing a lot of kind of close work in
the archive and looking at unpublished early material from all three of these writers.
Interestingly enough to, Gertrude Stein did come to Chicago.
So Gertrude Stein plays a role in this book,
Chicago Renaissance and many people have asked me,
"What does Gertrude Stein doing in your book about Chicago,
right?" She never lived there.
But in 1934, she came to Chicago on her American lecture tour.
Here she is arriving with her partner, Alice B Toklas,
and they're holding these little voodoo amulets
which Carl Van Vechten gave them to calm their fears of flying.
This was Stein's very first time on an airplane.
Was arriving into midway for her time here in Chicago.
So she's holding the voodoo amulet with her partner, Alice B Toklas.
So one of the stories I tell in the book is about Stein's obsession,
obsession might be too strong,
fascination, interest in Chicago.
She passed through four or five times,
she stayed for a month at one point.
She gave lectures at the University of Chicago where she
wrote specifically for her Chicago audience.
I also detail Stein's experience one night slumming on the South side,
and her love affair with American vernacular.
She wanted to hear the sound of the American language in her words,
and she felt like Chicago was the place where she heard it fast.
She had been away from America for 25 years.
So this was her first return back to her home country,
and there was something about Chicago and particularly American vernacular in Chicago,
and vernacular on the South side which is to say for
an African-American communities that she wanted to soak up,
and you see this influencing her prowess.
It partly explains her deep interest in the work of
Richard Wright and there's a really fascinating rapport between these two writers,
the influence really goes both ways.
So in thinking about Stein and Wright,
or just thinking about Stein more generally,
let's look at the opening page of Richard Wright's 1940 novel,
bestselling novel, Native Son.
This is the sound of an alarm clock that opens the novel,
and you get a picture in this first page of a tiny crowded kitchen at apartment,
where an African-American family is living all in one space,
and they are waking up to that alarm clock,
and there's a rat that is scurrying around this very cramped space.
Now, that long ring of the alarm clock is a pretty striking way to open a novel.
One of the questions I had about Native Son in particular,
which is always been called a Social Realist Novel was about that opening bring,
is some form of my nieces so taking sound and putting it into language?
Or is it a pretty bold form of typographical and linguistic experimentation?
So to my mind, it's both,
it's modernism and its social realism,
and that's a very distinct Chicago style.
That blend really of social realism is something highly experimental.
Now Richard Wright is often considered a genius figure
who moved up to Chicago in 1927 from Mississippi.
He schooled himself in the work of
the Chicago School of Sociology in communism in the literary Canon,
and he picked up those books here at the local hall branch library in Bronzeville,
here's an image of the exterior and interior of that library.
One of the recurring impulses in my book is to come to terms with how genius is formed.
How does it emerge,
that is where do we get our big ideas?
How do social and political and economic environments influence our thinking?
Do ideas come to us when we are alone or in conversation with others?
I explore the idea that many people not
just a writer contribute to the making of a literary work.
So if an individual writer is a creative force on his or her own,
then what else is going into that work, that novel.
As Virginia Woolf claims in her 1929 manifesto,
"A room of one's own," For masterpieces are not singular and solitary births.
They are the outcome of many years of thinking in common,
of thinking by the body of the people so that the experience
of the mass is behind the single voice.
The experience of the mass as behind the single boys.
So in the case of Chicago,
I found that this thinking in common often included people
whose contributions to the currents of modernism had not been recognized,
and most of the time these people were women.
So consider Vivian G Harsh,
the first African-American librarian in the Chicago Public Library system,
who is sitting right there at the center of the desk.
That's Vivian Harsh surrounded by her cohort of female librarians.
She's the one giving Richard Wright all of his books.
So it was this woman who ran Hall Branch,
who oversaw what was really the intellectual hub of Bronzeville,
and who really spearheaded an important lecture forum for writers intellectuals,
sociologists for African-Americans from all over the country,
who would come to Hall Branch on Wednesday nights
at 08:00 pm after everybody had gotten off work,
and who would take up a topic or would take up a book and discuss it,
it was a really lively forum for ideas.
Then she would often ask those individuals for their papers.
So here's a picture,
I think it's next of Richard Wright actually
donated a copy of Native Son to Vivian Harsh,
Langston Hughes's manuscripts are at the hall branch.
So she massed this huge archive.
So largest repository of materials by and about African-Americans in the Midwest,
it's called the Harsh Collection.
Hugely influential as I was writing this book,
and it came out of this lecture forum that she ran at hall branch.
Nearly nothing has been written about Vivian Harsh.
So she's truly fascinating individual.
Another key figure in the larger cultural community in Chicago
is somebody who has come up a few times,
and that's Harriet Monroe.
So she launches Poetry Magazine in 1912,
a magazine that still publishing today.
She edited some of the most important poems of
the 20th century from the work of Ezra Pound and WB Yeats to HD and Marion Moore.
So here we see her sitting at her desk and the poetry offices on
caste street with this wicker rot Walker in the corner,
which she called her poets share she put poets in there
when you talk to them when they came to visit.
In the book, I look closely at her work is both a writer
and an editor for many years before
launching Poetry Magazine as I said before she was an art critic,
she was a champion of the Armory Show.
She also was a poet herself.
She wrote a poem that was recited at the World's Fair in 1893,
she was commissioned to write it and it's over 1200 lines.
It was the inaugural poem that open to the events of the World's Fair.
So she's super fascinating and important figure,
and also really interesting writer herself.
Margaret Anderson too was inspired to combine art and politics.
She launched another periodical out of Chicago called The Little Review.
She was inspired by the Armory Show,
she was inspired by Harriet Monroe,
she was super mesmerizing presence.
It seems like every man and woman who encountered her fell in love with her,
and she published not only literature and poetry,
but also editorials, a lot of essays around political issues of the time,
times she was an ardent feminist,
she became very close to Emma Goldman,
the anarchist, but she's most famous for
serializing nearly half of James Joyce's Ulysses.
So this is how the novel first appeared in
the United States was through the magazine that she started.
But she would publish the whole thing,
because she was put on trial for publishing obscenity, and she lost.
But essentially a very wealthy philanthropists from
Chicago foot all of the legal bills for the trial,
the obscenity trial that she was put on the Little Review kept publishing.
So there's another woman,
who I want to talk a little bit about, who I talked about.
Kelly Larson's Hemingway class earlier today which was such a pleasure to visit,
and that's this woman, Fanny Butcher,
was a longtime literary editor at the Chicago Tribune.
She worked there for nearly 50 years, which is astonishing.
She was probably the most important influence
over what books were bought and read not just in Chicago,
but in the larger Midwest.
She was incredibly close to many of the most important writers of the 20th century
American writers from Hemingway with whom she shared
a interesting friendship to Riley Catheter,
she titled one of Riley Catheters novels one of ours,
she was very close to Cather,
who stayed with her every time she came to Chicago,
she was very close to Mencken to Carl Sandburg to Sinclair Lewis and many others.
She also ran a bookstore, which is astonishing,
you think it's a literary critic also selling books,
but there's a really interesting alliance between commerce and culture in Chicago,
and she brings that to light.
She was very good at making the experiments of high modernism,
very accessible to a mainstream reading public.
In her reviews for the Chicago Tribune,
she would often try to translate and tell you what these books we're going to be about,
and how they would make you feel.
So I've put a brief quotation from
one of her reviews of Gertrude Steins making of Americans,
which is not an easy work as many of you who read it before,
it's quite a Tom.
You as reader have something of the feeling of a rock against
which the sea of her words beats constantly in random, inflow and hub.
That's how I feel when I read "Making of The Americans," but she's
basically bringing you in through an effective,
telling you how you're going to feel when you read
this novel is a very characteristic way in which she write.
I just want to underscore again
this democratizing impulse that we see in a larger literary culture in Chicago,
Butcher is part of that,
you too can read Gertrude Stein.
Then I'll mention to some of the women,
who ran the Arts Club of Chicago,
which was launched in 1916 as a venue to
showcase contemporary avant-garde art mostly from abroad,
and they decided that Chicago really needed a gallery space to show work,
that was like the work that had been on display at the Armory Show.
So they brought in Brancusi and Duchamp and ledge and Picasso,
the first US show to vote it to Picasso's work was at the Arts Club of Chicago.
Keep in mind that the Museum of Modern Art in New York didn't open until 1929.
For solid years they're,
the Arts Club of Chicago was really
the pre-eminent venue for avant garde art especially from abroad.
So the woman on left is Alice Reeds,
she was exhibitions coordinator at
the Arts Club of Chicago extremely important half French.
So she was very good at negotiating with some of the artists who came from France.
Ru carpenter was the director of the club,
it's very hard to find photographs of her,
but I think this amazing sketch of Brancusi pretty compelling,
and then Elizabeth Bobsy Goodspeed,
who ran the club in the 1930s,
and who was the reason that Gertrude Stein came to Chicago to.
When Gertrude Stein was in Chicago,
she spoke at the Arts Club actually on a couple of occasions.
She was also an amateur filmmaker,
her films are really interesting.
So I'll also mention again on this focus on some of the women of Chicago Ins Stark,
who is the woman here who's only partly visible.
She's got the netting over her hat.
She is teaching a poetry class at the South Side Community Art Center,
which is in Bronzeville 38th in South Michigan.
In this poetry class was Gwendolyn Brooks,
who at that time was working on the poems that would become a street in Bronzeville,
Inez Stark was her teacher.
Brooks looks back very lovingly,
this mentor of hers who helped shape her and helped shaped her poems.
It was an interracial group.
It was run out of this community center which was set up under
the auspices of the Works Progress Administration and which is still there in Chicago.
It's the only continuously surviving Community Arts Center
that was set up in the '30s and '40s.
So again, I should go
back to that earlier image too of them George Cleveland Hall Branch Library,
because Brooks writes her first volume of poetry in this poetry writing class.
When she receives the call 1950 that she's won the poetry prize,
they call her at Hall Branch Library knowing
that that's where she's going to be because she didn't have a telephone.
So is incredibly vital institutions,
and they're still operating in Chicago,
that helped to create really the literary infrastructure of the city.
So Brooks also briefly worked as a secretary at the South Side Community Art Center,
she was deeply connected to her community in Bronzeville including its visual artists.
One of my very favorite artists,
Chicago artist, is an artist named,
maybe his works not here Eldzier Cortor is his name,
whose work is shown at the South Side Community Art Center.
What I'm showing you here though,
is the inside of the South Side Community Art Center
which was designed by the new Bauhaus actually who renovated this old brownstone.
This is the outside of that as South Side Community Art Center just two years ago,
2017 during one of these NEH summer seminars and we went down to take a visit.
That's Cortor that I wanted to talk about.
He's standing up on the left the artist Cortor teaching in art class
that's Gordon Parks who had a darkroom in
the basement of the South Side Community Art Center.
Then this is his very large and very dazzling work
called the room number seven it's enormous,
and it's art that we looked at it during our NIH institute I think yeah.
I think it takes us back to that early that passage from
Native Son thinking about cramped spaces in particular in crowded kitchenette buildings.
He's unknown for these elongated female nudes.
But you have a masterful technique in this painting and
color that just comes out you at you and also
multi-dimensionality to because there are parts of this painting that are
literally 3D as if the painting itself is
defined constriction or define I mean the limbs are
literally coming out of the frame really, really stunning.
It's worth just also
noting that Eldzier Cortor trained at the School of the art institute.
In many ways, the visual art scene in Chicago was less
segregated because the art institute admitted
African-American students as early as the 1890's.
It was an always an interracial space.
This was very unlike other premiere art academies across United States.
So here's another image of
the Art Institute of Chicago with the train tracks running next to it,
which I think is so stunning is kind of the commercial aspects of Chicago right behind,
it's cultural pinnacle that was the Art Institute at the time.
I think in some ways the city of Chicago has
been defined much more historically by its industrial ambitions,
by its networks of transportation,
and by its commerce.
Now, to think about how the art and literature Chicago response to that,
comes out of that, is supported by that.
That's also the relationships that I looked at closely in the book.
So that word renaissance,
the ways in which Chicago comes in is born out of the fire,
and that word is which I use in the title of my book.
Really really kind of invokes this idea of rebirth or revival.
The Art Institute in some ways is a symbol of that because it's one of
the only buildings that actually remains from the 1893 Fair,
and there's a strong strain of boosterism behind other Fairs.
Chicago is very known for its Fairs it's always trying to Fair.
So it's the 1893 Fair,
the 1933 Century of Progress Fair,
and then the 1940 Fair of
the Negro Exposition which was looking at 75 years of emancipation.
It was a spectacular celebration of uplift and progress.
So my point is that boosterism lies behind
that word renaissance now and then during the first half of the 20th century.
The word renaissance also allows me to connect two different periods of
Chicago's cultural history which I hope have shown here are pretty intimately connected.
So I want to conclude with a few more thoughts about Chicago and
geography really and then open it up to some questions and feedback that you might have.
I'm anxious to hear from what you think about this presentation,
this book and also more broadly about Chicago and
maybe Chicago's relationship to the larger Midwest.
So let me just speculate a little bit about how my history of
artists and writers and Chicago can tell us anything about Chicago now.
So in the book I tried to show that Chicago modernism was not
a provincial phenomenon with peculiar inter energies.
It was not just about the regional but very international in scope.
I tried to think about Chicago as a nexus rather than a terminus,
a place where people came and often left or a place where people returned to,
a place where ideas circulated,
and a place that was connected to other modernists metropoles.
I keep coming back to a strikingly apt image from the Chicago writer Floyd Dell.
I don't know how many people have heard about Floyd Dell.
But in 1920, he was writing bestsellers including
a semi autobiographical novel called "Moon-Calf."
He would later go on to be one of the founding editors of
the New Masses he was part of the Greenwich Village set and moved to New York.
In some ways has that more classic journey from small town to Chicago,
to New York and onward.
But at the end of his 1920 best-selling novel Moon-Calf,
you have this dreamy I,
protagonist looking at a map of Chicago on the wall.
He said, "Davenport,
I'm going to say at the time the protagonist and he's trying to get out.
He's trying to make it, and he's looking at this map on the wall.
He sees Chicago as in his words a dark blotch of radiating train tracks.
There's the map you see all the lines of track coming into Chicago from 1898,
and this quotation from him cafeteria laughs it's hard to read.
He saw again in his mind's eye,
he tramped the road a picture of the map on the wall of the railway station.
The map with a picture of iron roads from all over the middle west
centering in a dark blotch in the corner Chicago he said to himself.
"So that dark blotch is literally like a magnet
pulling artists and writers from around the Midwest into its center.
If more lines of track fan in and out of Chicago than in any other city,
then let this fact about the city also serve as a metaphor,
that Chicago literature is about being in the middle
a multi spoked modernism and mainstream modernism.
It's not about being stuck in the middle but about
the middle as a thoroughfare connected to
places and you really across the country but also across the world.
So no doubt riders in Chicago often felt the distinctiveness of the Midwest,
a region that was overlooked and patronized by the rest of the country,
but they very rarely worked in isolation.
What they often felt most strongly was a sense of the city's newness, it's rawness,
both its brutality but also its potential which gave
some that feeling of being liberated from the past
and really freed from aesthetic standards.
So the depth and diversity of the literature produced in
Chicago during the first decades of the 20th century might
be explained in part by the fact that very little
was at stake and laying claim to your own literary endeavor.
Certainly, the city's cultural institutions played
an important role in advocating the arts.
But cultural boosterism often lacks discrimination
which is to say the city civic leaders often supported art for the sake of art,
they were less discriminating and
maybe even a little bit less conservative than in other places.
Because during the first decades of the 20th century they
simply wanted to build up Chicago and cultural stature,
which is why you get something like the Armory Show
being hosted at the Art Institute of Chicago.
The industrial and commercial ambitions of Chicago it's novelty and its radical growth.
These defining features of the city created a climate in which artists
and writers they sometimes felt untethered to critical expectation.
They worked in a climate in which they felt uniquely free.
Thank you.
So I'm happy to further the conversation to hear your thoughts on
anything I presented or otherwise thoughts that come to mind even,
take your questions too.
I guess, I'm really interested in your [inaudible] World Fair-
Yeah.
-because it's hard way to think that the World Fair without
the shadow of the Haymarket riots.
Yeah.
Which was what? Seven years before then?
Yeah.
This celebration of American capitalism and Americans walking onto the world stage-
Imperialism, yeah.
Spanish-American war around the corner,
and yet there's, as you say,
there's democratic impulse which reduces this exciting the play and all the scene.
Right.
But also there is this kind of oppressive climate, right?
Yeah, and I think actually those forces
are one of the reasons why Chicago is at the center of the Labor Movement,
why the IWW is founded in Chicago.
The political radicalism that is at the heart of the city's origins and continues,
really, I think gets at those competing forces.
That's the sense that the cultural milieu of the city,
it's hard for the working classes,
and this comes out of both Bronzeville and it comes out,
I mean, it comes out of all the different neighborhoods of Chicago.
This sense that we have to write for people,
and we have to make it accessible and
understandable for anything to be politically effective.
But yeah, I think you're right about the World's Fair,
in some ways it's like one big cover up for all the ills of the city,
and its at a time when Chicago is known for those ills, first and foremost.
So there's this sense of, "We must proclaim that we have culture too."
A high culture, and the whiteness of Daniel Burnham's city it's not just a color.
I mean, the World's Fair completely excluded the African-American community.
I. W Wells writes an incredibly
important to moving pamphlet which she distributes outside of the fairgrounds,
why the Negro was not part of the Colombian's World Exposition,
and that's a very important aspect of the fair as well.
What it proclaims about Chicago,
and what it completely white washes and elides.
Certainly, the exploitation of the working classes,
the riots in the city.
I mean, I was trying to get out a little bit that with that image of
just the reality of what lay outside the fairgrounds,
and the sense that no one's taking care of the population of Chicago with
any kind of urban planning that addresses these ills.
What we're going to focus on is this gorgeous,
beautifully designed white city.
I should say too that Harriet Monroe, I mean,
it's really interesting to track her realization of what the World's Fair was.
She writes this ode to launch the ceremonies,
she's very, she's in her 30s.
She's in love with John Root,
who was Daniel Burnham's architectural partner and designer in the city,
and then he died before the fair was finished.
So Burnham gets all the credit,
but her older sister was married to John Root.
So she's totally part of the civic planning of the fair,
and is commissioned to write this ode,
and it's called the Colombian Ode,
and it's about the way that it attracts the female persona of the America's Colombia,
as she makes her way to the new world and moves across the landscape of this country,
and it's manifest destiny, is what it is.
With the sense, we are bringing civilization to the raw, to the indigenous.
She later really steps back from that.
She steps back from all of that,
and she's very self-critical actually about where she was at that point.
She's also really critical of the architect,
Burnham's architecture which looks to the past,
the neoclassical past, and she's all for the skyscraper and the new.
So she's in some ways one foot in the past and one foot in the new.
That's a long way to go to answer your question, but I think it's all there.
I think it's actually part of the motivations for
something like the World's Fair or the Haymarket riots,
and the labor problems in the city.
Yeah. Yes.
Are any of those World Fair buildings still standing today?
Yeah, who's been to Chicago in this room?
Probably a lot of you, it's not that far.
So maybe you've visited the Museum of Science and Industry, right?
Which is one of the remaining buildings down in Hyde Park,
right along the lakefront,
it's a massive museum.
So that's that, and the Art Institute,
so that the World's Fair was down on the south side along the midway,
so really close to what is now the University of Chicago.
So most of those buildings burned,
but on the north side,
the Art Institute that building was not the Art Institute then,
but it was used for the congresses,
like the various meetings of organizations that were there because of the fair,
so that Art Institute is actually one of the buildings that remains from the fair too.
So that and the Museum of Science and Industry,
and there are other markers,
Stony Island and the marsh wet area,
and around the University of Chicago was actually designed during the World's Fair,
and it maintains some of that landscape design from that moment, yeah.
So you can retrace it.
There's plenty of World's Fairs tours that one can take in Chicago as well.
Yeah. Yes.
Can you talk about how trains influenced Chicago's identity?
It's a really good question.
I mean, if you've read a lot of Chicago literature,
you read a lot about trains.
There's so many classic moments of coming into
Chicago on the train not just the F Scott Fitzgerald moment in The Great Gatsby,
but that's the opening of Sister Carrie.
You have a small-town girl coming into the city on the train,
and this is 1900.
The novel is published and she's chatted up by a stranger who later becomes her lover.
So she's already seduced by the city and corrupted by the city,
literally as she's coming into the city,
or in Black Boy,
American Hunger, Richard Wright's autobiography.
It was an incredible moment of him coming up literally,
it's part of the great migration arriving in Chicago on
the Illinois Central and getting off,
and it's the winter.
It's freezing cold.
It's not the South,
and feeling like he's in Dante's hell,
like literally stunned, blasted by the cold,
but also profoundly shocked
by the kind of industrial brutality of the city,
and dirt, and poverty, and filth that's visible immediately on arrival.
So there's the kind of whole mythos of
Chicago as the Promised Land for African Americans fleeing the Jim Crow South,
and he reverses that in this moment of arriving on the train.
So there's some really iconic literary moments that are all
about mobility and arrival into Chicago that are featured on the train,
but I guess partly what I also tried to think about in
the book a little bit is not just scenes of
train travel but what does it mean that
Chicago was the transportation hub of the United States,
and that more lines of train track?
Train track lines are visible everywhere.
You go to the Art Institute and you literally walk over
train tracks to get from one building to the next.
What does that mean?
What does mobility say about the culture there that people came through?
If you were an Easterner traveling to the West Coast,
you came to Chicago,
you literally had to switch trains,
which means crossing the city.
It wasn't like you stayed in Union Station,
you got out, usually have like a three or four hour layover.
You traveled to the other side of the city,
you took your other train to get all the way out to the West Coast.
So which is to say you couldn't fly over Chicago,
you actually had to spend time there and many, many, many,
many Americans did, they passed through and they actually
experienced the city for an afternoon.
So it's in some ways a kind of deep familiarity with the city,
because it was a transportation hub.
So I was thinking about that a little bit,
and thinking about what does it mean when you put Chicago on
the map of other really important cities,
global cities that were sites of
interesting artistic experiment during the first decades of the 20th century?
How does the map shift when Chicago is one of those cities,
against Paris, New York,
London, Vienna, Berlin, whatever it might be?
How's the map reconfigured in that way?
Since I see it as a city that is so deeply connected through transportation,
and through the ways in which it is a three-way, a nexus.
So it pushes you to think about Chicago as not at all a regional,
like not at all a city that is doing local regional stuff,
but is very much connected to things much further afield.
One example of that is Sherwood Anderson, who's Winesburg Ohio.
He wrote when he was living in a boarding house in Chicago.
He had just fled small-town Ohio,
left his wife and three young children in a fugue state.
He kind of had a nervous breakdown, fled to Chicago,
wrote the short stories that were based
upon people he met in a boarding house in Chicago,
but he's set them in small-town Ohio,
and I think that book has very much been looked at,
that collection of short stories, has very much been looked at
as a kind of expression of American regionalism.
When I was thinking about Sherwood Anderson,
I was thinking about his time at the Armory Show.
He went there every single day for 24 days.
I was thinking about the influence of Gertrude Stein on his prose.
I was thinking about his connectedness to so many other literary figures,
not just in Chicago and beyond,
and really arguing for that book as a book of
radical stylistic experiment that is not just about American regionalism,
which I think is often a descriptor used to limit its resonances.
So pushing beyond just train tracks to get to
that point of thinking about how these writers are
connected to a larger network of influences.
Yeah, it's a good question, trains. Yes.
So now that Chicago,
at least in my mind, has established itself as an artistic center-
Yeah, right.
-New York, and LA, and all that,
how has that changed the [inaudible]
One of the big questions that I had,
I couldn't quite figure out for a while until I was really writing this book,
was where I was going to end and whether I was going to go
post-war and think about the Black Arts Movement in Chicago;
which obviously has even a much stronger emphasis
on the relationship between arts and activism,
which you see early on in the period that I'm looking at,
but there is a moment of
profound decline in Chicago that does
happen post-war economically and actually culturally too.
The Black Arts movement is something that actually keeps the scene very vibrant.
The city itself is back and another very exciting place in many ways,
but that some of the most interesting I think to my mind,
contemporary art and literature of the moment in Chicago,
is really coming out of
the African-American community and also coming out of the west side.
Olga's writing about [inaudible] in the 1970s,
and what's happening really in neighborhoods like Little Village and Pilsen.
Post-war that really, really takes off and one of
the things I wish I could have done better in my book,
is think more about,
not just the white and black connections,
but Latino culture in Chicago.
I think in some ways it's
a much more robust artistic community that's coming out
of the Latino community in Chicago really post-war.
If I had wanted to address it more fully,
I probably would have done that through
the visual art scene and also through some of the work
that's coming out of Whole House which had a very strong arts program as well.
But it's not in the book as much as I want it to be,
so I think that there's so much going on in Chicago.
I don't know if there's like any really big,
vibrant city, like a city you live in if it's supporting artists and writers.
If it's a good place for artists and writers,
that usually means there's heterogeneity to the stuff that's happening here,
that can't be defined in any simple way like;
"Oh, the artists here are interested in this or doing that,
" like we do in all kinds of things, right?.
That's also the trickiness about landing hard on defining what
constitutes a Chicago style because it's not just one thing.
Of course, it's not just one thing and no one would ever say,
"What's a New York style?"
I mean it's everything,
but I would get that question from people from outside the Midwest frankly,
How would you describe a Chicago style?"
So I decided to address it head-on by exploring
heterogeneity and also exploring this kind of
mix of social realism and stylistic experiment.
It's a big enough umbrella under which a lot of things can be contained.
Yeah, Olga.
I just have a quick comment and it really has a question too.
Those pictures that you were showing of
workshops are there at least two in one where I think it's [inaudible]
[inaudible]. Yeah, he's doing a painting workshop. That one?
Yeah, so I'm reminded of photographs from Hull-House where they're teaching [inaudible]
Yeah. Yeah. Totally with Haze Torres. Yeah.
I think it's a school or an institute,
I think the teachers there who had gone,
so I'm just thinking about the institute
Yeah, totally. Training grounds.
Yeah for all these different smaller community organizations. Definitely.
[inaudible].
I don't know how many people know Hull-House,
but it's the settlement house set up by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr in 1890s.
A place to really support the influx of immigrants,
especially on the west side and to help assimilate them into Chicago,
but massive both place for daycare,
place to learn different trades and then also a theater,
a dance and an arts program
for both young children and adults.
It was just a really, really vital massive compound on the west side
and Hull-House was incredible
too for the kind of interracial communities that it developed there.
You had Mexican artists trading
with really well-known Polish or Ukrainian,
or Chicago born artists,
less so with the African-American community.
They had Hull-House Kilns which were
a really interesting place for ceramics and pottery as well.
We looked at some of that during the [inaudible] Institute. Cool stuff.
Very arts and crafts oriented.
There was one other question. Yeah?
[inaudible]
Yeah. Well, that's another resonance of the word too definitely. Yeah.
[inaudible] with the recent Met Gala [inaudible] culture
involved in art association [inaudible].
Yeah. Totally.
[inaudible]
Yeah, right. I get that question.
Where are the sites of interesting,
creative energy now in Chicago,
where is it or is there a Renaissance.
There are plenty of really amazing artists in Chicago right now.
Poets like Eve Ewing,
who Ollie and I were talking about a little bit earlier, Nate Marshall,
really interesting novelists, Rebecca Makai,
who just wrote a book called The Great believers,
but in the visual arts the Aster gates or Nick Cave.
There's incredible energy there I think.
I don't know how long you can extend this idea of Renaissance,
when the word itself means rebirth,
but what all of which is to say,
there's so much to be said for what's happening in Chicago now.
To your earlier point about the Harlem Renaissance,
a lot of those writers and intellectuals and
artists actually decamped to Chicago in the thirties.
They left Harlem and they came.
Langston Hughes being one of them who worked on the WPA in Chicago,
ran a theater group in Chicago called Skyloft players,
lived with [inaudible] , a Chicago sociologists,
for a long period of time while he had no place to live.
He wrote for the Chicago Defender,
the largest African-American weekly newspaper in the country.
Langston Hughes was a weekly columnist.
They're deeply embedded in the literary community in Chicago,
Arna Bontemps who was part of the Harlem Renaissance another African-American writer.
Was head of the WPA Writers Project in Chicago for
many years and worked as a librarian in Chicago and many others.
Some of the sociologists in New York actually came to Chicago because
it has such a strong sociology program
and really impacted the work that was being done there.
In the 1930s as Arna Bontemps said in
a very funny piece about what happened to the Harlem Renaissance,
he's like "A move to Chicago,
it was a Renaissance without finger bowls" is his phrase.
Which was less elite,
it was much more working class.
In the one manifesto that Richard Wright ever wrote,
which came out of the Southside writers group that ran in the late thirties,
he writes about it's an attack on the Harlem Renaissance.
Its attack on the white patronage that
funded the Harlem Renaissance and it's also an attack on
the elitism of the Harlem Renaissance and a sense
that African-American writers weren't writing for their community, right?
If Chicago has a Renaissance it's going to be for the people,
at that point he's a card-carrying communist,
he's involved in the John Reed club and he's very much committed to art for everybody.
One lineage that you could trace is really Harlem Renaissance shifts to Chicago.
I mean, certainly, people have made that argument.
Yeah. So question.
Really good questions.
Yeah, I don't know how much time we have for out.
Well, we can wrap up this [inaudible].
In their books. Yeah, right.
[inaudible]
We've got books for sale in the back of the Chicago Renaissance
and thank you so much for coming.
Thanks so much and thanks for your questions. Yeah.
