The Birth of the Beat Generation: Visionaries, Rebels, and Hipsters, 1944-1960

The second volume in the acclaimed series that brings to life the groups of avant-garde writers, artists, and patrons who were keystones of what has come to be called Modernism, this book sheds new light on the hard-living, maverick poets and novelists--William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and others--who coalesced into the Beats. Illustrations. From the Hardcover edition.

History

Watson, Steven

Americas

Pantheon

Perhaps the oddest and most influential collaboration in the history of American modernism was hatched in 1926, when a young Virgil Thomson knocked on Gertrude Stein's door in Paris. Eight years later, their opera Four Saints in Three Acts became a sensation--the longest-running opera in Broadway history to date and the most widely reported cultural event of its time. Prepare for Saints is Steven Watson's brilliant and absorbing account of how that revolutionary opera was born.

Prepare for Saints: Gertrude Stein, Virgil Thomson, and the Mainstreaming of American Modernism

Arts & Photography

Music

University of California Press

The first book in the Circles of the Twentieth Century series which focuses on writers, artists, poets, hostesses and patrons who played a role in moderism as we know it. Watson explores the lively and fascinating people who helped bring about what became known as the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s.

The Harlem Renaissance: Hub of African-American Culture, 1920-1930

The second volume in the acclaimed series that brings to life the groups of avant-garde writers, artists, and patrons who were keystones of what has come to be called Modernism, this book sheds new light on the hard-living, maverick poets and novelists--William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and others--who coalesced into the Beats. Illustrations.

Factory Made: Warhol and the Sixtiesis a fascinating look at the avant-garde group that came together—from 1964 to 1968—as Andy Warhol’s Silver Factory, a cast that included Lou Reed, Nico, Edie Sedgwick, Gerard Malanga, Paul Morrissey, Joe Dallesandro, Billy Name, Candy Darling, Baby Jane Holzer, Brigid Berlin, Ultra Violet, and Viva. Steven Watson follows their diverse lives from childhood through their Factory years. He shows how this ever-changing mix of artists and poets, musicians and filmmakers, drag queens, society figures, and fashion models, all interacted at the Factory to create more than 500 films, the Velvet Underground, paintings and sculpture, and thousands of photographs. Between 1961 and 1964 Warhol produced his most iconic art: the Flower paintings, the Marilyns, the Campbell’s Soup Can paintings, and the Brillo Boxes. But it was his films—Sleep, Kiss, Empire, The Chelsea Girls, and Vinyl—that constituted his most prolific output in the mid-1960s, and with this book Watson points up the important and little-known interaction of the Factory with the New York avant-garde film world. Watson sets his story in the context of the revolutionary milieu of 1960s New York: the opening of Paul Young’s Paraphernalia, Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball, Max’s Kansas City, and the Beautiful People Party at the Factory, among many other events. Interspersed throughout are Watson’s trademark sociogram, more than 130 black-and-white photographs—some never before seen—and many sidebars of quotes and slang that help define the Warholian world. With Factory Made, Watson has focused on a moment that transformed the art and style of a generation.

Factory Made: Warhol and the Sixties

Humor & Entertainment

Perhaps the oddest and most influential collaboration in the history of American modernism was hatched in 1926, when a young Virgil Thomson knocked on Gertrude Stein's door in Paris. Eight years later, their opera Four Saints in Three Acts became a sensation--the longest-running opera in Broadway history to date and the most widely reported cultural event of its time. Four Saints was proclaimed the birth of a new art form, a cellophane fantasy, "cubism on stage." It swept the public imagination, inspiring new art and new language, and defied every convention of what an opera should be. Everything about it was revolution-ary: Stein's abstract text and Thomson's homespun music, the all-black cast, the costumes, and the com-bustible sets. Moving from the Wadsworth Atheneum to Broadway, Four Saints was the first popular modernist production. It brought modernism, with all its flamboyant outrage against convention, into the mainstream. This is the story of how that opera came to be. It involves artists, writers, musicians, salon hostesses, and an underwear manufacturer with an appetite for publicity. The opera's success depended on a handful of Harvard-trained men who shaped America's first museums of modern art. The elaborately intertwined lives of the collaborators provide a window onto the pioneering generation that defined modern taste in America in the 1920s and 1930s. A brilliant cultural historian with a talent for bringing the past to life, Steven Watson spent ten years researching and writing this book, interviewing many of the collaborators and performers. Prepare for Saints is the first book to describe this pivotal moment in American cultural history. It does so with a spirit and irreverence worthy of its subject.

Random House]

It was W.E.B. DuBois who paved the way with his essays and his magazine The Crisis, but the Harlem Renaissance was mostly a literary and intellectual movement whose best known figures include Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, and Jean Toomer. Their work ranged from sonnets to modernist verse to jazz aesthetics and folklore, and their mission was race propaganda and pure art. Adding to their visibility were famous jazz musicians, producers of all-black revues, and bootleggers. Now available in paperback, this richly-illustrated book contains more than 70 black-and-white photographs and drawings. Steven Watson clearly traces the rise and flowering of this movement, evoking its main figures as well as setting the scene--describing Harlem from the Cotton Club to its literary salons, from its white patrons like Carl van Vechten to its most famous entertainers such as Duke Ellington, Josephine Baker, Ethel Waters, Alberta Hunter, Fats Waller, Bessie Smith, and Louis Armstrong among many others. He depicts the social life of working-class speakeasies, rent parties, gay and lesbian nightlife, as well as the celebrated parties at the twin limestone houses owned by hostess A'Lelia Walker. This is an important history of one of America's most influential cultural phenomenons.

History & Criticism

Making Mischief: Dada Invades New York, the catalogue for the landmark exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1996, proposes that Dada was not only important to the growth of American modernism, but that the ferment of New York played a critical role in the continuing photographs, and related documentary material records the achievements of the French emigres Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia, the American expatriate Man Ray, as well as American artists Charles Demuth, Katherine Dreier, Charles Sheeler, Joseph Stella, Florine Stettheimer, Clara Tice, and Beatrice Wood.

Making Mischief: Dada Invades New York

Krauss, Rosalind E.

Jones, Amelia

Whitney Museum of American Art

Tashjian, Dickran

Antliff, Allan

Venn, Beth

Nesbit, Molly

Rosenblum, Robert

Zabel, Barbara

Henderson, Linda Dalrymple

Alden, Todd

Naumann, Francis M.

Bochner, Jay

Davidson, Abraham

WHITNEY MUSEUM OF ART.

This book tells the story of the first American avant-garde in art, poetry and the theatre. The people discussed in this book include Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Marcel Duchamp and the Stettheimer sisters. The author suggests that this exchange of ideas transformed modern culture. Quotations from letters, diaries and interviews enliven this history. The development of the avant-garde depended as much on social intercourse, whether sexual, suppressed or platonic, as on aesthetics. By the time of the 1913 Armory Show, bohemia had made a home for itself in New York's Greenwich Village.

Strange Bedfellows: The First American Avant-Garde (Penn State Series in German)

Abbeville Press

A new series of bespoke, full-coverage resources developed for the 2015 GCSE Mathematics qualifications. Created specifically for the Edexcel GCSE Mathematics Higher tier specification for first teaching from 2015, this Problem-solving Book contains a variety of questions for students to develop their problem-solving and reasoning skills within the context of the new GCSE curriculum. Suitable for all Higher tier students, this resource will stretch the more able and provide support to those who need it. Questions with worked solutions will help students develop the reasoning, interpreting, estimating and communication skills required to help them effectively solve problems. Encouraging progression by promoting higher-level thinking, our Problem-solving Books will help prepare students for further study.

GCSE Mathematics for Edexcel Higher Problem-solving Book (GCSE Mathematics Edexcel)

Teen & Young Adult

Dawes, Mark

Steel, Tabitha

Thomas, Coral

Education & Reference

Cambridge University Press

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Books by Watson, Steven