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

Toward the end of "Tom Outland's Story," the second book in Willa Cather's The Professor's House (1925), Outland and Roddy Blake argue over Blake's sale, to a German collector, of the Native American "relics" they had together discovered on the Blue Mesa. Blake made the sale without Outland's knowledge, while the latter was away in Washington trying, unsuccessfully, to interest officials at the Smithsonian in them. They argue, Blake leaves Outland alone on the mesa, and he is never seen again despite Tom's persistent search efforts. Before he goes, Blake says that he assumed that Outland "meant to 'realize'" on the relics "and that it would all come to money in the end. 'Everything does,' he added" (243). Just as she was reading proofs of that novel during the summer of 1925, Cather, along with her creative life partner, Edith Lewis, visited Mabel Dodge Luhan, the driving force behind the little art colony at Taos at her ranch there; they stayed for two weeks, working and also visiting their friends D. H. Lawrence and his wife, Frieda, who were living at a nearby ranch through Luhan's auspices. Among the long list of modernist artists Luhan—whom Cather knew from Greenwich Village—attracted to the Taos colony, Lawrence and Cather were among the most prominent. The wealthy Luhan used her money to make the colony happen and so in large measure made Taos. Money and little art colonies.

Arguing that the little art colony "has been largely overlooked as an important geosocial formation" (9) within modernist studies, Geneva M. Gano here offers a sustained recompense for this absence with this excellent book. In numerous grounded, deeply contextualized, and theoretically informed ways, she emphasizes "the historical contingency and geographical specificity of modernist praxis as it emerged in place" (21). Setting her three little art colonies in context, Gano ever keeps in mind the overweening presences of what she calls "the world-system's metropolitan cores": places such as Berlin, Paris, London, New York City, and others that have "long attracted the lion's share of scholarly attention" in modernist studies and "have sometimes been deployed synecdochally as representative of putatively national modernisms" (19). Instead, Gano sets out to treat the little art colony "as a semiperipheral space within the nation" (20). She succeeds admirably.

Treating each of the little art colonies in succession, Gano begins with Carmel-by-the-Sea, where early in the twentieth century such figures as Mary Austin, Langston Hughes, Robinson Jeffers, and Jack London were drawn. She pays especial attention to London, and to his novel The Valley of the Moon (1913) because in it "the village clearly is a playground for bohemian leisure, not a site for settling down and making good"—a view of Carmel already found "in promotional materials for the region—but [London's] work was seminal in transmitting the 'Carmel idea' to a broader public" (45). Gano cites the painter Ferdinand Burgdorff saying, "'It was not the waves, the rocks or the trees that attracted tourists to Carmel,' it was the artists" (47). For his part, Jeffers's "long and productive career would be grounded in his close, personal identification with the Monterey Bay Peninsula and his characteristic representation of it in his poetry" (58). With only a few exceptions, his poems "were set in the recognisable landscape of Big Sur and contributed to the art colony's collective work of placemaking" (83). "His poems shattered the carefully crafted image of Carmel as a site of exclusive leisure, pleasure and unmarred natural beauty, a move that jeopardised the livelihood of all of the art colonists who depended on it" (84).

Gano treats each colony as a singularity; understood now, each contributes to a larger modernist sense. After Carmel she heads east to Provincetown and, with great detail and persuasive force, accounts for the colony's key role both in the career...