Criminal Ingenuity Moore, Cornell, Ashbery, and the Struggle Between the Arts

by Levy, Ellen

• ISBN13: 9780199746354
• ISBN10: 0199746354
• eBook ISBN(s): 9780190454005
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-05-13
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

"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.

Author Biography

Ellen Levy is Visiting Associate Professor at Pratt Institute.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. ix
Credits	p. xiii
Series Editors' Foreword	p. xv
Introduction	p. xvii
Abbreviations	p. xxxi
Borrowing Paints from a Girl: Greenberg, Eliot, Moore, and the Struggle Between the Arts	p. 1
ôAcademic Feelingö vs. ôthe Museumö	p. 4
Moore Between Poetry and Painting	p. 13
The Professional, the Academic, and ôthe Real Poetry Loverö	p. 16
What's in a Name? Museum, Market, Art World	p. 20
The End of Modernism As We Know It: Poetry in the Age of Pollock	p. 25
Self-Critique and the Struggle for Dominance	p. 31
ôNo Poet has been so Chasteö: Moore and the Poetics of Ambivalence	p. 35
Institution or Enterprise?	p. 38
The Place of the Token Woman	p. 42
ôUnsheathed gesticulationö: The Attack of the Token Woman	p. 47
Moore's Mirror Phase: ôThose Various Scalpelsö	p. 51
The Poetics of Ambivalence	p. 59
The Case for Moore's Late ôLoveö Lyrics	p. 63
Moore's Imperishable Wish: ôArmors Undermining Modestyö	p. 68
An Inconsequential Past: Joseph Cornell after Marianne Moore	p. 77
Elephants and Divas: CornellÆs Position, Modernism's Impasse	p. 79
The Materialist and the Monster: History According to Moore and Benjamin	p. 96
Collage and Class Fractions	p. 103
Amateurs and Aristocrats	p. 110
The Collector and the Criminal: Cornell and Moore's Imaginary economy	p. 116
Surrealism in ôthe second, open senseö: The Poets of the New York School	p. 125
ôA confusion of painting with literatureö: Greenberg vs. the Surrealists	p. 129
ôStupid paintingsö and ôold-fashioned literatureö: Ashbery's Regressive Avant-Garde	p. 133
Institutions of Freedom: The Coterie and the Art World	p. 136
ôDear New York City Ballet, you are quite like a wedding yourself!ö: Institution as Form in the Poems of Frank O'Hara	p. 143
ôA medium in which it is possible to recognize Oneselfö: Ashbery between Poetry and Painting	p. 159
Breathing Space: Ashbery In and Out of the Art World	p. 162
The Adventures of ôthe personalityö: ôDefinition of Blueö	p. 171
The Case of the Fairy Decorator: Robert Lowell and the New York School	p. 177
Cornell/Parmigianino	p. 187
Facing Pages: The Vermont Notebook	p. 196
Notes	p. 213
Works Cited	p. 243
Index	p. 253
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