Other Points The art journal View, edited by Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler from 1940 to 1947, highlighted vibrant cultural enterprises that escape notice in formalist taxonomies of modern art. For the first half of the twentieth century, the so-called American Century, when distilling the unique characteristics of American modernism preoccupied influential art-world figures from Alfred Stieglitz and his circle to the critic Clement Greenberg, View examined cultural life in the Americas from divergent perspectives.1 Bringing together surrealists, magic realists, neo-romantics, and self-taught artists from Europe and the Americas, View cultivated alternative understandings of both the qualifier “American” and the term “modernism.”
Text by Tirza True Latimer
Henry Luce, creator of the Time-Life publishing empire, in his editorial for Life, February 17, 1941, declared that the twentieth-century must be, “to a significant degree, an American Century.”
1
View contributors bucked prevailing professional trends by working collaboratively in such arenas as opera, ballet, and theater. Instead of making claims about art’s “autonomy” (its absolute independence from the social contexts of its production) they explored art’s implication in modern social and sexual relations. Rather than espousing notions of medium-specific purity, they privileged interdisciplinary and hybrid genres. And, at a time of heightened nationalism, they devoted much of their creative energy to sustaining affiliations across territorial boundaries. The exhibition looks the mid-twentieth-century artistic scene in America through the lens of View magazine, re-introducing queer artists and critics—foremost Charles Henri Ford (1908-2012), Parker Tyler (1904-1974), and Pavel Tchelitchew (1898-1957)—who had a significant impact on modern art in America between the two World Wars, but then disappeared from its history. At the same time, the exhibition recontextualizes (and reawakens the strangeness of) certain modernists now considered canonical. These modernists include Joseph
4
of View
Cornell (1903-1972), who created a wrap-around cover for the January 1943 issue of View; Alexander Calder (1898-1976), whose work appears on the cover in Spring 1944; Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986), whose painting was reproduced on the cover of the Summer 1944 issue; and Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988) whose sketch for the cover of the October 1946 issue is displayed in the exhibition. The exhibition is distinctive in that it places emphasis on ephemeral objects and events, alongside fine art objects, to show modernism from unaccustomed angles. While restoring View magazine to a place of prominence among mid-century journals of art and criticism, Other Points of View also spotlights some of the theatrical initiatives that gave the magazine’s contributors their first opportunities for creative collaboration in the United States. The opera Four Saints in Three Acts, with libretto by Gertrude Stein, score by Virgil Thomson, choreography by Frederick Ashton, décor by Florine Stettheimer, and an all African American chorus directed by Eva Jessye, set the stage for subsequent group endeavors. The opera premiered at the Wadsworth
