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Charles Demuth at 23 Fifth Avenue and Alwyn Court Intellectual salons – staged for several centuries by wealthy patrons in support of young artists and writers – have a long history, but in American they rose suddenly in the first quarter of the twentieth century and fell just as quickly, depending on the interests of the party givers, or they went out of fashion with the Great Depression of the 1930’s. Charles Demuth, however, was fortunate to have been among the regular guests two remarkable twentieth century salons in New York. The interchange of ideas and opinions — in several fields as well as the arts — must invariably have contributed to his attitudes and to his growth as an artist, if only by a kind of social osmosis. No one is still alive to interview about these regular gatherings, but fortunately there are written accounts to offer first-hand knowledge about them. In his 1922 novel, Peter Whiffle, Charles Demuth’s friend, writer Carl Van Vechten, disguised the American heiress Mabel Dodge [later Luhan] as “Edith Dale” and offered this picture of her 1913-1914 salon at 23 Fifth Avenue: “In New York she found the top floor of an old mansion in Washington Square exactly what she wanted and installed green glass, lovely fabrics, and old Italian furniture against the ivory-white of the walls and the hangings. She accomplished the setting in a week; now she required the further decoration which the human element would afford.. . . . She surrounded herself with as many storm centres as possible. The crowds flocked to her place and she made them comfortable. Pinchbottles and Curtis Cigarettes, poured by the hundreds from their neat pine boxes into white bowls, trays of Virginia ham and white Gorgonzola sandwiches, pale Italian boys in aprons, and a Knabe piano were added to the decorations. Arthur Lee and Lee Simonson, Marsden Hartley, Andrew Dasburg, Max Weber, Charles Demuth, Bobby [Robert Edmond] Jones – just out of college and not yet a designer of scenery – Bobby Parker, all of the jeunes were confronted with dowagers from the upper East Side, old family friends, Hutchins Hapgood, Ridgely Torrence, Edwin Arlington Robinson, and pretty women. Arguments and discussions floated in the air, were caught and twisted and hauled and tied, until the white salon itself was no longer static. There were undercurrents of emotion and sex.” In addition to Van Vechten’s roster of artists and writers and theater designers, there was more than a smattering of Greenwich Village socialists and anarchists and feminists. Big Bill Haywood, Emma Goldman, Neith Boyce, Hippolyte Havel, Margaret Sanger, Edna Kenton, and Lincoln Steffens were frequently in attendance, along with a few intellectual hobos. This extraordinary mix of people, professions, and avocations made for heady and sometimes violent discussions. “Edith was the focus of the group,” Van Vechten continued, “grasping this faint idea or that frail theory, tossing it back a complete or wrecked formula, or she sat quietly with her hands folded, like a Madonna who had lived long enough to learn to listen. Sometimes she was not even at home, for the drawing-room was generally occupied from ten in the morning until midnight. Sometimes – very often, indeed — she left her guests without a sign and went to bed. Sometimes – and this happened still oftener – she remained in the room without being present. Andrew Dasburg commemorated this aspect in a painting which he called The Absence of Edith Dale. But always, and Dasburg suggested this in his flame-like portrait, her electric energy presided. She was the amalgam which held the incongruous group together; she was the alembic that turned the dross to gold.” |
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