Review: The Little Art Colony and US Modernism: Carmel, Provincetown, Taos, by Geneva M. Gano

Abstract

Geneva M. Gano’s The Little Art Colony and US Modernism: Carmel, Provincetown, Taos examines how the three titular sites both produced and were produced by modernism. It does more than simply point out that modernism arose beyond the iconic metropolitan zones of Greenwich Village, Bloomsbury, or the Left Bank. Instead, size matters. Modernism’s penchant for going small—the little art colony existed alongside little magazines, little theaters, and coterie salons—was on the one hand a rejoinder to the excesses of capitalism, which enabled art to seem unmoored from the demands of the marketplace. Yet on the other hand, as little art colonies exerted outsized influence on a modernism that surpassed their village boundaries, they were inextricable from the global capitalist networks within which they were unevenly situated.Going small also serves as a provocative methodology, one that allows Gano to unpack some of modernism’s more unwieldy concepts—aesthetics, primitivism, or the idea of the modern itself—in satisfyingly specific ways enabled by attention to the local. Going small means the book is able to go big in its interdisciplinary approach. Indeed, a focus on location allows for paired chapters on each site that skillfully interweave cultural history and literary analysis.For example, in Part I: Carmel, the first chapter provides a history of how the village was built via Chinese displacement after the Exclusion Act of 1882. In the wake of this anti-Asian violence, real estate developers successfully substituted the Chinese with a creative class that became a tourist draw—providing local color at the expense of people of color. This delivers the backdrop for Gano’s analysis of Jack London’s 1913 novel Valley of the Moon, which centers on the nexus of “native” and “neo-native” in the little art colony. In doing so, Gano illustrates the workings of modernist primitivism not as an abstraction, but in granular—and often financial—terms. Part II’s second chapter follows up by contextualizing and analyzing Robinson Jeffers’s 1925 long poem “Tamar,” arguing that its use of the primitive critiques the global forces of capitalism and colonialism upon which the little art colony was predicated.Part II: Provincetown and Part III: Taos do similar interdisciplinary work, historicizing the construction of these places as little art colonies and addressing key texts that both arose from them and aided in their creation. Gano describes Provincetown’s emergence through intimate stories of community formation before turning to Eugene O’Neill’s 1920 play The Emperor Jones, which takes place in the Caribbean but is convincingly linked to its place of production. She focuses on the relation between modernist artists and ceremonial Indigenous dance in Taos’s early twentieth-cenutry tourism industry before pivoting to D.H. Lawrence’s 1925 St. Mawr as an appraisal of the little art colony’s complicity with the economic world-system.Well researched, compellingly argued, and lucidly written, The Little Art Colony and US Modernism adeptly speaks to readers across U.S. history, American literature, and modernist art history to urge serious reflection on the imbrication of place, culture, capitalism, and creativity.