Visionary American women stood at the forefront of many of the artistic and literary movements of the 20th century. Creative artists and writers such at Gertrude Stein, Mabel Dodge Luhan and Katherine Dunham fueled and promoted works by women in their efforts to make a new modern voice. This catalogue for the 2003 exhibition at Yale University’s Beinecke Library explores the salons and the triumphs of many of the most important female artists of the past century.

Intimate Circles: American Women in the Arts

Arts & Photography

Kuhl, Nancy

History & Criticism

Beinecke Rare Book Library

Extravagant Crowd: Carl Van Vechten's Portraits of Women, the catalog for a Beinecke Library exhibition of the same name, includes photographs of about 85 women of achievement photographed by Van Vechten between 1932-1964; each photograph is accompanied by a short biography of the subject. The women include some of the best known of Van Vechten's subjects--Gertrude Stein, Billie Holiday, Zora Neale Hurston, and Marianne Moore to name a few--and some now-forgotten women who made significant contributions to the Broadway theater community, the Harlem Renaissance, the early Hollywood film industry, and the 1920s and '30s expatriate communities in Paris and London. The group includes performers of all kinds, writers, journalists, salon hostesses, artists, photographers, social activists, etc. The catalog includes an introduction by Bruce Kellner, a leading Harlem Renaissance scholar and the executor of Van Vechten's estate.

Extravagant Crowd: Carl Van Vechten's Portraits of Women

Photography & Video

Beinecke Rare Book &

Intimate Circles: American Women in the Arts, and the Beinecke Library exhibition of the same name, will focus on several loosely defined groups of women, including communities in Taos, New Mexico and the American southwest (highlighting Georgia O'Keeffe and Mabel Dodge Luhan), Harlem and "outposts" of the Harlem Renaissance such as Chicago and Washington D.C. (including Zora Neale Hurston, A'Lelia Walker, and Georgia Douglas Johnson), New York City (considering Neith Boyce Hapgood, Eva Le Gallienne, Elinor Wylie, and Muriel Draper), the American Midwest (including Ruth Stephan, Katherine Kuh, Sara Teasdale), and expatriate communities abroad (highlighting Stein and Toklas, Romaine Brooks, H.D., Josephine Baker). The exhibition and catalog consider women who have made a variety of contributions to the arts: editors, patrons, curators, and partners as well as writers, artists, and performers.

ON HYSTERIA is a lyric engagement of voice, memory, longing, and the fraught ways we speak ourselves. In conversation--and sometimes conflict--with Sigmund Freud's foundational text of psychoanalysis Studies on Hysteria (1895), Kuhl reframes the discourse surrounding cases of so-called hysterical girls and women, expanding and shifting given narratives. 
ON HYSTERIA, Nancy Kuhl's fourth collection of poems, is a lyric engagement of voice, memory, longing, and the fraught ways we speak ourselves. In conversation--and sometimes conflict--with Sigmund Freud's foundational text of psychoanalysis Studies on Hysteria (1895), Kuhl reframes the discourse surrounding cases of so-called hysterical girls and women, expanding and shifting given narratives. With intensity and emotion, ON HYSTERIA examines how ideas may be converted into physical symptoms, thought collapsed into sensation, articulation fused with forceful action. Above all, Kuhl's poems consider ways suffering itself becomes unbounded expression: Her pain is a voice / pulled by handfuls / from the throat. 
The spare poems in Nancy Kuhl's ON HYSTERIA are--to use a term central to the collection--glossed with disquiet, shifting between direct speech and a kind of pressurized, violent speechlessness. 'This family, this suburban dead-end / family--they use silence like a rope.' The primary drive here is not to fix or resolve, not to tell; rather, it is to approximate the experience of piecing together 'broken, unknowable / things, ' to survive and make some meaning out of 'spectacular panic, ' the precise cause of which is never directly named but pulses throughout. The quiet haunted authority of these lines derives from 'the memory of events witnessed while sleepwalking.' With guarded intimacy, the poems convey--'in a language / half-heard, // half-hearted'--an 'ephemeral revelation' where 'confusion can also be a certainty.' Reading this collection is like watching half-salvaged clips of a family's home movie interspersed with time-lapse photos capturing the formation and dissolution of rocks: the spliced film is riveting, a 'horizon set down between / limit and limitlessness'--Catherine Barnett, author of Human Hours 
From the movement of rivers and tides to rooms flooded 'with unremarkable light, ' something profound, elusive, and shattering haunts these poems. In this work, a kind of 'field guide' to the soul, an extraordinary sensibility moves delicately yet searchingly through the holdfasts of mind, memory, and touch. One encounters in these simultaneously lush and spare poems an enormously pressurized linguistic intelligence moving into moving through experience.' Brilliantly and complicatedly engaged with psychoanalytic discourse on hysteria, Kuhl's poems unforgettably and unparaphrasably conjure the atmosphere of a corroded family complex--let us not say romance. Kuhl's poems emerge out of liminal zones and track 'what comes up through layers. And everywhere too we encounter a poet alive to rocks, stones, trees, lichens, mosses, to the texture of fabrics and the structures of art, to the 'sky open to the hinge, ' to 'the brink, the joint, the skim, the skin.' This is vital, unsettling, transformative work.--Maureen N. McLane, author of More Anon: Selected Poems 
Making poetry and psychoanalysis seem of a piece, Kuhl manages in this remarkable and unusual book to write poems at once poignant, incisive and lyrical about experiences that are uncanny in their ordinariness.--Adam Phillips, author of Becoming Freud 
Poetry. Women's Studies.

On Hysteria

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

Shearsman Books

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Books by Kuhl, Nancy

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Kuhl, Nancy. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Intimate Circles: American Women in the Arts

Extravagant Crowd: Carl Van Vechten's Portraits of Women

Intimate Circles: American Women in the Arts

On Hysteria