Criminal ingenuity : Moore, Cornell, Ashbery, and the struggle between the arts
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Bibliographic Information
Criminal ingenuity : Moore, Cornell, Ashbery, and the struggle between the arts
（Modernist literature & culture / Kevin J.H. Dettmar & Masrk Wollaeger, series editors）
Oxford University Press, c2011
- : hardback
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. 243-251) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
"Poetry was declining/ Painting advancing/ we were complaining/ it was '50," recalled poet Frank O'Hara in 1957. Ellen Levy's Criminal Ingenuity traces a series of linked moments in the history of this crucial transfer of cultural power from the sphere of the word to that of the image. Levy explores the New York literary and art worlds in the years that bracket O'Hara's lament through close readings of the works and careers of poets Marianne Moore and John
Ashbery and assemblage artist Joseph Cornell. In the course of these readings Levy discusses such topics as the American debates around surrealism, the function of the "token woman" in artistic canons, and the role of the New York City Ballet in the development of mid-century modernism, and situates her
central figures in relation to such colleagues and contemporaries as O'Hara, T. S. Eliot, Clement Greenberg, Walter Benjamin, and Lincoln Kirstein.
Moore, Cornell, and Ashbery are connected by acquaintance and affinity-and above all, by the possession of what Moore calls "criminal ingenuity," a talent for situating themselves on the fault lines that fissure the realms of art, sexuality and politics. As we consider their lives and works, Levy shows, the seemingly specialized question of the source and meaning of the struggle for power between art forms inexorably opens out to broader questions about social and artistic institutions and
forces: the academy and the museum, professionalism and the market, and that institution of institutions, marriage.
Table of Contents
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
- ABBREVIATIONS
- INTRODUCTION
- Chapter
- I. BORROWING PAINTS FROM A GIRL: GREENBERG, ELIOT, MOORE
- AND THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN THE ARTS
- i. "Academic feeling" vs. "the museum"
- ii. Moore between poetry and painting
- iii. The professional, the academic, and "the real poetry lover"
- iv. What's in a name? Museum, market, art world
- v. The end of Modernism As We Know It: poetry in the age of Pollock
- vi. Self-critique and the struggle for dominance
- II. "NO POET HAS BEEN SO CHASTE": MOORE AND THE POETICS OF AMBIVALENCE
- i. "Institution" or "enterprise"?
- ii. The place of the token woman
- iii. "Unsheathed gesticulation": the attack of the token woman
- iv. Moore's mirror phase: "Those Various Scalpels"
- v. The poetics of ambivalence
- vi. The case for Moore's late "love" lyrics
- vii. Moore's imperishable wish: "Armor's Undermining Modesty"
- III. AN INCONSEQUENTIAL PAST: JOSEPH CORNELL AFTER
- MARIANNE MOORE
- i. Elephants and divas: Cornell's position, modernism's impasse
- ii. The materialist and the monster: history according to Moore and
- Benjamin
- iii. Collage and class fractions
- iv. Amateurs and aristocrats
- v. The collector and the criminal: Cornell and Moore's imaginary economy
- IV. SURREALISM IN "THE SECOND, OPEN SENSE": THE POETS OF THE
- NEW YORK SCHOOL
- i. "A confusion of painting with literature": Greenberg vs. the surrealists
- ii. "Stupid paintings" and "old-fashioned literature": Ashbery's regressive
- avant-garde
- iii. Institutions of freedom: the coterie and the art world
- iv. "Dear New York City Ballet, you are quite like a wedding yourself!":
- institution as form in the poems of Frank O'Hara
- V. "A MEDIUM IN WHICH IT IS POSSIBLE TO RECOGNIZE ONESELF":
- ASHBERY BETWEEN POETRY AND PAINTING
- i. Breathing space: Ashbery in and out of the art world
- ii. The adventures of "the personality": "Definition of Blue"
- iii. The case of the fairy decorator: Robert Lowell and the New York School
- iv. Cornell/ Parmigianino
- v. Facing pages: The Vermont Notebook
- WORKS CITED
by "Nielsen BookData"
